Exclamation Points

Today’s tech and politics must-read: Dani McClain writing in The Nation on the distinction between social media savvy figureheads and the actual Black Lives Matter movement:

Twitter feeds constantly updated with smart observations about the latest cause for outrage are a lot more visible than the painstaking meetings that precede a transit-system shutdown, a citywide protest, or a collaboratively written 40-page policy agenda. But understanding the distinction between organizers and amplifiers matters; otherwise, we’ll overrate those who excel at amplifying the passion of a movement and undervalue the organizers, who make concrete change happen.

This is civic tech: White House chief digital officer Jason Goldman rolls out the revamped “We the People” petition site, which he says will make it simpler for people to create and sign petitions from mobile devices, adds guidance to petition drafting, and streamlined the home page. He’s hosting a live Q&A on ProductHunt at noon ET today to answer questions about the new site.

Google Jigsaw is releasing its collaborative video analysis tool Montage as a free standalone web app and Chrome extension. As Andy Greenberg reports for Wired, human rights groups have already found Montage highly useful for analyzing and curating YouTube videos coming out of Syria. (Jigsaw is a new organizational member of Civic Hall, by the way!)

Barcelona has become a vibrant hub in the “commons collaborative economy,” as this report in Commons Transition describes. I’m heading there next week with other colleagues from Civic Hall for the TICTeC (“The Impacts of Civic Tech”) research conference.

Digital anthropologist Mark Pesce describes how CluckAR, a new mobile app, is enabling thousands of Australians to find out whether the eggs they are buying are free-range or not, something egg producers are trying to hide.

A new app, Access My Info, makes it easy for internet users in Hong Kong to find out exactly what their ISPs and mobile providers know about them and how they use their data, Kris Cheng reports for Global Voices. (h/t Ellen Miller)

Writing for Backchannel, Susan Crawford sums up the sad story of how a group of towns in Western Massachusetts formed a cooperative called WiredWest to get themselves connected to a low-cost fiber network built by the state, but then got shafted by bureaucrats at the state agency that was supposed to help them. As a co-op, WiredWest was promising prices for high-speed broadband significantly lower than those currently on offer.

New America is looking to hire a research director for its Ranking Digital Rights program.

Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), the House Democratic whip, explains in the San Jose Mercury News why he is introducing the Information Technology Modernization Act (H.R. 4897), aiming to investing $3 billion in upgrading government technology systems, service delivery, transparency and cybersecurity. The bill calls for money saved from these tech upgrades to be reinvested in supported more of the same. The bill, which Hoyer says was developed in partnership with Obama administration CIO Tony Scott, already has the support of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).

Your moment of zen: “Jeb! The Musical,” a pitch perfect parody based on the Hamilton musical. With lyrics like “Jeb Bush, exclamation point. My name is Jeb Bush, exclamation point. And there’s a million things I haven’t done. But please just clap, please just clap.” It was written by a group of strangers who met on a Facebook group dedicated to memes.