Backfiring

This is civic tech: Writing for the Ash Center’s Data-Smart City Solutions blog, Sean Thornton reports on how a group of civic tech volunteers connected with Chi Hack Night have been helping Chicago’s Park District use city data to better predict which city beaches will need to be closed this summer due to E. Coli. contamination.

Henry Farrell interviews GovLab founder Beth Noveck (and longtime friend of Civic Hall) in the Washington Post about her new book, “Smart Citizens, Smarter State.”

Code for Africa developer advocate Serah Njambi Rono writes on Medium about how “A group of Sierra Leonean hacktivists (many of them women) banded together to claim ownership of the local #OpenData and #CivicTech movements from ‘Northern’ consultants and international NGOs.”

The 100 Resilient Cities program of the Rockefeller Foundation is looking to hire an associate director for technology, data and smart cities solutions and partnerships.

Media wars: Here’s the smartest piece I’ve seen yet on why Peter Thiel’s secret funding of the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker is such a stupid and counterproductive way for a tech zillionaire to deal with the free press, by Cody Brown on Medium. Brown argues that Thiel’s victory will prove hollow because it will force the next generation of critical media underground, like WikiLeaks, and above the law. (Like how suing Napster didn’t end file-sharing.)

Shareholders at Facebook’s annual meeting, where Thiel is a board member, cheered his reelection to the company’s board, Alex Kantrowitz reports for BuzzFeed.

Trump watch: From this GQ profile of Donald Trump’s press secretary Hope Hicks by Olivia Nuzzi, we learn that the great man definitely does not browse the web. Instead, she reports, “Every morning, staffers print out 30 to 50 Google News results for ‘Donald J. Trump.’ He then goes at the sheaf with a marker, making circles and arrows and annotating things he likes or doesn’t like. The defaced article gets scanned and e-mailed to the journalist or the person quoted who has drawn Trump’s attention, under the subject line ‘From the office of Donald J. Trump.’”

Donald Trump spent only $48,000 on data management and $115,000 on online advertising in the month of May, Isaac Arnsdorf and Kenneth Vogel report for Politico, citing his latest FEC filing. He spent $208,000 on hats.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has launched a new anti-Trump website: ArtOfTheSteal.biz.

Big thinks: Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch blames the current “insanity” of American politics on anti-establishment reforms that have made the middlemen that used to grease the political wheels too weak. There’s a lot of provocative ideas in his essay to chew on, but consider this—there’s not a word in it about the Great Recession’s impact on politics.

Thinking about a summer trip? Try Estonia, which Jake Horowitz reports for Mic.com, is the most technologically-advanced country in Europe.