Infrastructure

This is civic tech: Our Jessica McKenzie reports on how New York City’s participatory budgeting process, which starts this Saturday in 28 council districts, is getting upgraded this year with digital voting options.

Christine Cupaiuolo reports for our Rethinking Debates project on the latest global developments in tech and debates around the world, that includes this interesting tidbit from Mike McCurry, co-chair of the U.S. Commission on President Debates: the commission is committed to curating questions from the public via social media for the town hall debate that will take place this fall. To get our Rethinking Debates biweekly newsletter free, subscribe here.

Coming to this late: Living Cities CEO Ben Hecht offers three cogent lessons in Fastcoexist for how to prevent the next Flint.

Tech and politics: Writing for the American Prospect, veteran political analyst Harold Meyerson tries to predict the future of Bernie Sanders’ movement, and argues that he hasn’t created a new American left as much as he as surfaced the one that has been developing over the last few years of movements like Occupy Wall Street. Meyerson traces the start of the Sanders movement to the efforts of two former Occupiers, Charles Lenchner (a Civic Hall member!) and Winnie Wong, who now run People for Bernie Sanders. Wong, Meyerson notes, came up with the hashtag #FeelTheBern.

On Facebook, Lenchner estimates that with about 200 volunteers, he and Wong have produced about “2 billion ‘impressions’ of pro-Bernie content” on Facebook alone, which he values at about $3 million in digital media value to the campaign.

Democratic grassroots fundraising platform ActBlue gets profiled by Evan Halper in the Los Angeles Times. “This is something that the Democrats have that the Republicans somehow still don’t,” comments David Karpf, of George Washington University (and Civic Hall member). “It is critical infrastructure.”

A whopping 110 million hours of candidate- and issue-related content has been watched on YouTube this election cycle, Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired.

A petition calling on the Republican National Committee to allow the open carry of firearms at the Quicken Loans Arena during the GOP convention has nearly 7,500 signatures on Change.org, Hamilton Nolan reports for Gawker. (The arena doesn’t allow guns on its property.)

According to the Center for American Women and Politics, Gender Avenger and the Women’s Media Center, last week’s cable and TV news shows overwhelmingly featured men, with only Anderson Cooper 360 achieving parity in the number of male and female analysts on his program.

Life in Facebookistan: With Facebook CEO continuing to press his charm offensive in China, Josh Horwitz writes for Quartz that “a censored, altered, government-friendly version of Facebook” is the only way the company will be allowed in by the country’s repressive government.

Brave new world: Lip reading technology is getting better, thanks to machine learning techniques, Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch. This could be quite useful in politics….read my lips?