Smarts

This is civic tech: When you Google a presidential candidate, campaign finance data from the Center for Responsive Politics comes up automatically. As Google product managers Jacob Schoenberg and Payal Patel explain, “Finding information on campaign funding can be difficult, if not seemingly impossible. Today, working with one of the most respected data sources in the industry, the Center for Responsive Politics, we’re making presidential campaign finance information easy to access and understand, right from Google Search. So when you search for donald trump or clinton campaign finance, you’ll see a snapshot of their campaigns’ finance breakdown and be able to dig into interesting insights, like the percentage of funds coming from SuperPACs versus individual donations, or which industries have donated the most to a given candidate.” Kudos to CRP!

Here’s the transcript of President Obama’s appearance at SXSW this past Friday. While Obama’s remarks on the topic of encryption dominated the news, he also made a strong pitch for the U.S. Digital Service’s efforts to modernize how the federal government uses technology. “Part of my job is to try to institutionalize that over the next several years,” he said, adding, “And I want to make sure that the next President and the federal government from here on out is in constant improvement mode and we’re constantly bringing in new talent and new ideas to solve some of these big problems.”

Speaking of SXSW, kudos to Civic Hall member and longtime friend Baratunde Thurston, who was inducted in the SXSW Hall of Fame yesterday. Here’s his acceptance speech. And here’s to more FaceTalk.

Brian Purchia of Civicmakers writes that a new report from San Francisco’s budget and legislative analyst on the need to bring low-cost high-speed Internet to everyone is San Francisco shows that the city is “falling behind nationally and globally” and that it “cannot … rely on the incumbent telecoms to provide access to our underserved communities.”

Remember how after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, a bunch of Silicon Valley leaders said they were mobilizing the tech community to address gun violence? Scott Rosenberg writes for Medium’s Backchannel about why that hasn’t happened: “Guns turn out to be just the kind of problem—controversial, person-to-person, sprawling across social and cultural boundaries — that Silicon Valley as an institution instinctively runs from solving.” He also notes that the SV types who have put (a little of) their own money behind developing “smart guns” are allergic to organizing, quoting the Smart Gun Challenges Foundation’s main funder Ron Conway saying ““I think for technology and innovation we have to ignore politics.”

Heather Leson of the Qatar Computing Research Group writes that many aspects of Bernie Sanders’ “Big Organizing” model resonate with her experiences in the digital humanitarian/digital responder networks that have arisen in the wake of natural disasters.

Trump watch: MoveOn.org and a wide array of progressive organization leaders have issued an open letter calling for a “voting renaissance and mass nonviolent mobilization” against Donald Trump’s candidacy, saying it represents a “five-alarm fire for our democracy.”

Anonymous says it is declaring “total war” on Donald Trump, promising to dismantle his online presence and expose dirt on his record, Liz Rowley reports for Mic.com.

Jobs! Free Press is looking to hire a digital strategist.