Classifications

This is civic tech: If you are an open data geek or just someone who wants to understand the intricacies of making open data more relevant and useful in the context of a big city like New York, don’t miss Kaela Sanborn-Hum’s detailed report in the Gotham Gazette on the state of the city’s open data portal and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “Open Data for All” plan.

Civicist senior editor Tom Steinberg writes that “it’s time to be honest about civic tech projects that can pay their own way, and those that can’t.” Not every civic tech project can be a Change.org or a NationBuilder with a clear business model; some simply won’t be paid for by the marketplace. He gives two very important reasons: “it will stop impactful-but-not-profitable ideas being distorted into impactless-but-possibly-profitable ideas” and “governments and funders must not be allowed to live with the illusion that there’s something magical about civic tech, some voodoo that will allow us to have amazing public goods for zero ongoing public or philanthropic costs.”

Joshua Tauberer, the longtime founder and proprietor of GovTrack.us, responds that he agrees with Steinberg, but that it was always his impression that civic techies valued nonprofits over projects (like his) that manage to be self-sustaining by charging fees.

BetaNYC is looking to hire a short-term hackathon manager.

Tech and politics: Hillary Clinton’s campaign is looking to add more muscle to its social media efforts, shifting longtime Clinton aide Katie Dowd from her position as digital director into a new senior adviser role focused on building Hillary, Bill and Chelsea Clinton’s online presence, Evan McMorris-Santoro reports for BuzzFeed. Jenna Lowenstein will move from being Dowd’s deputy to being full-time digital director.

While Donald Trump has a fan base on Reddit, his campaign isn’t doing much with it beyond occasionally picking up a social media meme or viral video generated there, John Herrman of the New York Times reports. Some guy named Sifry adds context.

Crypto-wars, continued: “There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” President Obama told Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday in explaining why he didn’t believe former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did any damage to U.S. national security in running work emails through her private email server. “”There’s stuff that is really top-secret, top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state, that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source,” the President said.

On reading Obama’s remarks, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden responded, “If only I had known.”

TechDirt’s Mike Masnick eviscerates Senator Richard Burr and Senator Dianne Feinstein’s “discussion draft” of their anti-encryption bill.

Life in Facebookistan: Responding to the Economist magazine’s cover story depicting Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as a Roman emperor, Dan Gillmor argues that it’s time for journalists to stop complaining about the company’s growing power and do something about it, offering several steps they can take.

Age of Transparency: There’s a delicious bit of poetic justice buried at the end of Jim Rutenberg’s New York Times media column today, which discusses the Panama Papers leak in the context of WikiLeaks and ongoing efforts to shine more light on the secrets of the world’s powerful.