On the Radar

This is civic tech: White House chief digital officer Jason Goldman previews President Obama’s appearance today at SXSW, where he is going to discuss tech and civic engagement. Calling for “more user-centered government,” Goldman says, “this might be President Obama’s most important accomplishment as the First Tech President: establishing a lasting legacy of service that will carry on long after he leaves office.” Obama’s keynote will stream live at 2:30pm CT.

Also, stay tuned for news of a “White House Summit on Civic Engagement,” coming later this spring.

The Office of Management and Budget is seeking public comment on its draft open source software policy. It “requires that, among other things: (1) new custom code whose development is paid for by the Federal Government be made available for reuse across Federal agencies; and (2) a portion of that new custom code be released to the public as Open Source Software.”

New York City has opened a unified open records portal, through which anyone can file a freedom of information request of every city agency.

Here’s a fun interactive from RentHop showing how donors from the zip codes of New York City metro area are voting with the dollars for the various presidential candidates. (h/t Sanjaya Punyasena)

Nairobi’s iHub is expanding, one of its co-founders, Erik Hersman, writes. He writes, that after six years of successful organic growth, “A group of people are investing in the iHub in order to help us grow, to tighten up our service offerings and make them more profitable, and to help us figure out how not to just find startups but to grow the ones that are getting traction.”

Crypto-wars, continued: NSA data on Americans may be used now by domestic law enforcement agencies, an official change that the Washington Post’s Radley Balko says “basically formalizes what was already happening under the radar.”

A new startup named Wire, led by the co-founder of Skype, says it is adding full encryption for video calling to its already robustly private messaging services, Eric Auchard reports for Reuters.

Culture hacking: Just as Bernie Sanders starts to gain momentum, Billionaires Against Bernie launches. Says its founder, Phil. T. Rich, “I have begun to Fear the Bern.”

GenderAvenger has started the “#WhoTalks?” project, tracking TV news show analysts by gender.

Trump watch: In Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government “kept down the riot,” Donald Trump said during last night’s Republican debate.

Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley is keeping a running tally of violent incidents at Trump rallies.

Brave new world: NPR did a story about Amazon’s voice-activated home assistant Alexa, and several listeners wrote in to say that while the story was airing, their own Alexas responded by resetting their thermostats, playing the news, etc.