Breaking

“I wanted it to go viral,” Diamond Reynolds, Philando Castile’s girlfriend, says about her decision to livestream his fatal shooting by a Minnesota police officer.

Leaders of the Movement for Black Lives condemned the shootings of police officers in Dallas last night, as protests of police violence spilled across the country.

“Everyone should learn how to livestream from their phone in an emergency,” Nathan Freitas of The Guardian Project and Rhinobird.tv, posts on Facebook.

Charlie Warzel reports for BuzzFeed on the challenges Facebook is struggling to deal with as its Live video feature spreads faster than the company can devise protocols for managing it. Move fast and break things, indeed.

Dara Silverman of Showing Up for Racial Justice offers “Six ways white people can help end the War on Black People.”

Information on how to join Campaign Zero, which is working to end police violence in America, is here.

Tech and politics: Fred Kaplan of Slate says the Hillary Clinton email scandal has been totally overblown.

Alex Kane reports for The Intercept on how Facebook has become another front in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “with Palestinians using social media to spread news about arrests and deaths, and Israeli intelligence and law enforcement officers scouring the web for clues about the next stabbing or protest.” He notes, “Facebook has not changed the fundamental contours of the conflict, but it has accelerated it. A demonstration against the Israeli occupation can be organized in a matter of hours, while the monitoring of Palestinians is made easier by the large digital footprint they leave on their laptops and mobile phones.”

This is civic tech: Tony Abraham of Generocity previews American Experiments, a civic tech showcase that will be taking place in Philadelphia during the Democratic National Convention.

Brian Forde, the co-founder of the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, explains in TechCrunch why it’s a big deal that Hillary Clinton included support for “public service blockchain applications” in her policy statement on tech and innovation.

Phone2Action, a DC-based civic tech start-up, has raised $4.7 in Series A funding, Galen Moore of DCInno reports.

GovLab’s Stefaan Verhulst reviews the Omidyar Network’s “Engines of Change” report on the state of civic tech, and suggests some design principles for generating a stronger movement. He writes, “As it stands, the field of civic tech is rife with noise. Without new community-wide mechanisms and services for identifying the signal in that noise, policymakers, technologists and other decision-makers will struggle to make use of the platforms, methodologies and research findings that are currently active in the civic tech field. We need intermediaries that can move from delivering “facts” to exposing and amplifying patterns; and leverage those patterns to move from information to intelligence. By investing in curation (vetting and sharing the stuff one needs to know) and brokering evidence and tools for the field, a movement can be directed to focus on those things that matter and the gaps that exist (as has been done with other field creation).”

Mobile civic engagement app icitizen has just added a new feature enabling users to easily flag issues or proposals for attention by public officials.

The Providence, Rhode Island, city council stopped using cassette tape recorders to record city council meetings in 2013, thanks to the work of Shawn Selleck. Now he’s working with the state’s Office of Digital Excellence on a new e-permit website that is streamlining the work of two state agencies, Bill Krueger reports for Selleck’s alma mater magazine, NC State.

This is civic dreck (and a must-read): Writing for the Village Voice, Nick Pinto digs into the story behind New York City’s new “LinkNYC” free WiFi kiosks. As he notes, the new service, which is ultimately being underwritten by Google’s Sidewalk Labs, isn’t really free—unless you think having your personal data collected and sold to advertisers is something a government should do without asking its residents if they want that deal.

Commenting on the Link NYC service, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (a longtime Civic Hall friend), says, “”It’s a real-time, personalized propaganda engine, a multibillion-dollar manipulation apparatus, customized not to meet our consumer desires, but to overcome our psychic defense mechanisms. And now you want to unleash that on the entire city of New York as a public service? I’m sorry, that’s a deal with the devil we really don’t need.”