Jamming

  • This is civic tech: This past Saturday, BetaNYC’s School of Data packed Civic Hall with a diverse mix of keynotes, trainings, data jams, and news-making announcements from the likes of City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, NYC CTO Minerva Tantoco and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, as recapped here by Noel Hidalgo, its co-founder and executive director.

  • Related: the NYU Rudin Center, TransitCenter, and the MTA held a “Staten Island Bus Hackathon” on Saturday attended by about 150 participants.

  • ProPublica is looking for two Civic News Fellows for a ten-week program this summer “to help develop and test tools and features that make it easier for communities to collaborate in the creation of public interest journalism.”

  • Tech and politics: Here’s one thing Mike Bloomberg’s decision not to run for President has spared us: VC Chamath Palihapitiya won’t be taking a leave of absence from his firm Social Capital to join Bloomberg’s team. That’s one aspect of the aftermath of Bloomberg’s non-run, as Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired. (Palihapitiya, you might recall, once declared that “the functional value of the government is effectively discounted to zero [and]….If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us.”

  • Had Bloomberg run, his political adviser Bradley Tusk says his campaign would have taken a very tech-centric approach, including paying sharing economy drivers and delivery people “to be their field staff, campaigning for Bloomberg as they went about their routes,” Lapowsky reports. Tusk told her, “Rather than advertising on Craigslist, which is what normally happens, we said: These people are already organized. They already exist. There’s a rating in terms of their ability to do well with other people. It would have been really interesting.” Several sharing economy companies had bought into the idea, supposedly.

  • The first serious Jewish candidate for president appears to have won the Muslim vote—at least in Dearborn, Michigan, where last night Bernie Sanders was ahead 2-1. To add some additional poetry: we’re talking about anti-Semite Henry Ford’s old stomping grounds, as @JewsforBernie points out.

  • The FCC is getting closer to proposing a $9.25/month subsidy for broadband for low-income households as part of its revamping of its Lifeline phone subsidy program, Cecelia Kang reports for the New York Times.

  • What sharing economy? The folks at Thumbtack.com are out this morning with a new report called “Beyond the Gig Economy: How New Technologies are Reshaping the Future of Work.”



From the Civicist, First Post archive