Playhouses

This is civic tech: The White House has launched The Opportunity Project, with a focus on making “local and federal datasets easily sortable and available online, so developers can combine them to build new civic tech tools to improve the relationship between cities and their citizens,” as Issie Lapowsky reports for Wired. According to U.S. chief data scientist DJ Patil, the idea for the effort came from President Obama, who will talk more on the topic of tech and government at SXSW this weekend.

The project’s website is a civic tech playhouse, with several new projects showcased that make innovative use of open government data to help people navigate their communities more effectively, including a tool from Redfin showing users nearby jobs they can get to without a car and a tool from Azalea showing transit access to community resources like day care, health care, Head Start, playgrounds and recreation centers. (This veritable flood of new platforms bears watching—will these shiny new sites get traction?)

Perhaps most interesting to hard-core open data and civic tech nerds: The Opportunity Project comes with an open-to-the-public Slack channel. Ross Dakin, one of the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows working on the project says, “You have to go where your users are—you have to use tools that people are already using.” (This is not a government-first, by the way: 18F has a public Slack here.)

Related: Writing for City and State, New York City’s CTO Minerva Tantoco (a Civic Hall member) says that the “future of cities” should focus on “building a Smart + Equitable City—a place where everyone has access to the benefits tech provides.”

Life in Facebookistan: Columbia University’s Emily Bell takes to the Columbia Journalism Review to sum up a message she’s been honing for the last few years: Facebook (and the social media ecosystem) have swallowed journalism, causing news publishers to lose control over distribution and radically undermining the power of what used to be known as the Fourth Estate. The result is a situation where independent publishing either dies or turns to “advertorialism” to make money. She writes:

There are huge benefits to having a new class of technically able, socially aware, financially successful, and highly energetic people like Mark Zuckerberg taking over functions and economic power from some of the staid, politically entrenched, and occasionally corrupt gatekeepers we have had in the past. But we ought to be aware, too, that this cultural, economic, and political shift is profound. We are handing the controls of important parts of our public and private lives to a very small number of people, who are unelected and unaccountable.

Tech and politics: The autocratic billionaire haunting the 2016 presidential election has decided not to run. And as Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns report for the New York Times, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg had spent months and untold millions getting ready to jump in. His aides ‘covertly assembled several dozen strategists and staff members, conducted polling in 22 states, drafted a website, produced television ads and set up campaign offices in Texas and North Carolina, where the process of gathering petitions to put Mr. Bloomberg’s name on the ballot would have begun in days.”

Here’s Clay Shirky’s latest Twitter storm—on why Bernie Sanders is failing to connect with black voters.

Here’s a look at how the presidential candidates come down on the issues of internet freedom and net neutrality, written by Matthew Rozsa for The Daily Dot.

Crypto-wars, continued: Apple CEO Tim Cook’s strong stand in favor of privacy has its roots in his upbringing in rural Alabama, Todd Frankel reports for the Washington Post.