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  • “Great leaders tweet.” That’s the kindest thing Jon Stewart had to say about Donald Trump, speaking at the Chicago Institute of Politics with David Axelrod. He also compares the heads of network news to “crack dealers” who are praising Trump as “great for business.”

  • Wait, there’s more, very much on the topic of civic tech: At minute 37 in the Stewart video, he asks why, if the President can issue an order to kill an American citizen by drone missile, he can’t issue an executive order to force the VA and DOD to reevaluate their computer systems “so that you don’t spend a billion dollars trying to get two computer programs to talk to each other, when probably three of these idiots [he points to the students in the audience] can do it for $500.” He adds, that the failure to fix government opened the door for “assholes like Trump.” “Democrats haven’t done enough to show that government can be effective for people and be efficient for people—and if you can’t do that, you’ve lost the right to make that change and someone is going to come in and demagogue you.” Axelrod, who was a senior advisor to President Obama upon his entering office, blames “bureaucracy piled on bureaucracy” for the problem. “If people can see your re-election effort be incredibly agile,” Stewart responds, “why are we so good at campaigns and so bad at governance?”

  • This is civic tech: Our Jessica McKenzie talks to Eddie Tejeda and Steven Spiker, the co-founders of OpenOakland, about why they both recently decided to step down from leading the organization and the ongoing challenges of making a local civic tech group sustainable. Under their leadership, Open Oakland spearheaded projects like OpenDisclosure, which turns campaign finance filings into easy-to-read and easy-to-search charts and maps, Parklandish, a (currently inactive) tool that helps people find public parking and public restrooms in Oakland, and Open Budget: Oakland, a web app for visualizing the city budget. Making OpenOakland a more formal, established organization would require, Tejeda said, “very patient capital.” Spiker added, “We found it very difficult to find money that fit where we wanted to go and what we wanted to be.”

  • The New York Times’ David Bornstein profiles Organize, which is using tech, open data, and insights from behavioral science to simplify the organ donor system. “If you post or tweet about organ donation, or include a hashtag like #iwanttobeanorgandonor, #organdonor, #donatemypart, or any of a number of other relevant terms, Organize captures the information and logs it in a registry. In a year, it has gathered the names of nearly 600,000 people who declare support for organ donation,” he reports.

  • Capital New York’s Miranda Neubauer reports on the launch of New York City’s digital Playbook.

  • The Panama Papers database is now searchable, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists announced yesterday.

  • Tech and politics: Correct the Record, a pro-Hillary Clinton SuperPAC run by David Brock, is spending $1 million on the “Barrier Breakers,” a “paid army of ‘former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers’ and others to produce online counterattacks” supporting her candidacy, the Los Angeles Times Evan Halper reports.

  • A mystery or a non-story? No emails appear to exist from Brian Magliano, the State Department staffer who set up Hillary Clinton’s private email server, to Secretary Clinton, Shane Harris reports for The Daily Beast.

  • Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, chairman of Palantir, Facebook board member, and a funder of Ron Paul’s presidential campaigns, is now a Donald Trump delegate in California, Ryan Mac reports for Forbes.

  • Life in Facebookistan: The head of Facebook’s “Trending Topics” team, Tom Stocky, responds to the controversy over the site’s alleged suppression of conservative news sites, saying: “We have in place strict guidelines for our trending topic reviewers as they audit topics surfaced algorithmically: reviewers are required to accept topics that reflect real world events, and are instructed to disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources. Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we’ve designed our tools to make that technically not feasible. At the same time, our reviewers’ actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense.”

  • The New York Times’ John Herrman and Mike Isaac catch up on the Facebook story.

  • Here’s a not-so-crazy-idea from Kelly McBride of Pointer: Maybe Facebook should have a public editor, to help answer questions about the company’s practices.



From the Civicist, First Post archive