Shoutfests

Tech and politics: The Commission on Presidential Debates says it has “been working with the MIT Media Lab on ways to representatively cull audience input from platforms like Facebook, and to use social media as a way of determining what questions viewers feel have gone unanswered over the course of the four debates,” Daniel Libit reports for CNBC. A more detailed social media plan will be released in the coming weeks.

Donald Trump and the Republican National Committee jointly raised $64 million through a digital and direct mail push in July, the bulk in small donations, Nicholas Confessore reports for The New York Times. The fundraising surge shows that Bernie Sanders is not the only candidate capable of tapping the populist wave for funds, and may make Trump more financially competitive with Hillary Clinton< in the last three months of the campaign.

OK, we can’t help but want to give our longtime friend Liz Mair, former RNC online communications director, kudos for having the ovaries to say this about Trump last night live on CNN: “His message is being a loudmouthed dick, basically, and going out there and offending people and then engaging in an airing of grievances.”

Silicon Valley billionaire Sean Parker has spent a lot of his money trying to use tech to reinvent politics, funding the Brigade start-up (which is floundering), but as this story in the Los Angeles Times by Evan Halper shows, his biggest impact so far may be in playing the old game of money in politics.

Speaking with Natasha Lennard of The New York Times, NYU professor Nicholas Mirzoeff offers some deep thinking about new forms of protest that have emerged in the digital age.

Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic digs into Instagram’s decision to copy competitor Snapchat and start offering “Instagram Stories,” noting that the new feature exists because of “context collapse—one of the defining sicknesses of the social web today—it’s why parts of Twitter have decayed into a hyperpoliticized shoutfest, and … it plays into why Facebook recently started promoting content from friends over content from newspapers and other professional publishers.” (h/t An Xiao Mina)

This is civic tech: Writing for Civicist, Jed Miller recaps his Personal Democracy Forum 2016 panel that wrestled with the question of how civic tech can set expectations appropriately. As he writes, “the expectations surrounding civic tech are not aligned with the realities of how it takes hold—or doesn’t. We expect that new tools will transform organizations, but too often projects stall on non-tech challenges, or teams lack the person-power to make a new system thrive. We go big on big data, expecting citizens and governments to reboot their relationship, then go home disappointed when the realities of power relationships and bureaucracy slow down the new age….our community can change the civic tech story from one that assumes transformation to one that anticipates challenges.”

Engaging the ongoing conversation about the future of Code for America’s Brigade program, longtime civic tech organizer and entrepreneur Luke Fretwell writes on GovFresh that “it’s not clear to me why civic hacking needs a substantive financial model. In many ways, it appears to be an impediment to grassroots growth.”

Tim O’Reilly takes to the pixels of LinkedIn to write in defense of Britain’s Government Digital Service, the innovative program that inspired the US Digital Service and which is currently under assault by the entrenched bureaucrats that still run much of the UK’s IT efforts. As he writes, “There are plenty of reasons to break up and disempower the Government Digital Service – if you’re a vendor who benefits from a system where IT projects routinely cost hundreds of times what they ought, take years longer, and often fail completely. But if you’re a civil servant charged with maximizing the public good, this is a very, very poor idea.”

There’s a fledgling civic tech community in New Zealand, as Aimee Whitcroft, the national organizer for GovHack NZ, writes in Medium.

And here’s a timely update on the civic tech scene in Poland, posted by Krzysztof Garski, who works for the city of Gdansk.

The Louisville-Jefferson Country Metro Government has inked a $6 million partnership with civic tech provider Accela to use the company’s software platforms to upgrade county services.

IndieWebCamp NYC2 2016 is coming up August 27-28. Register now if you are interested in building the open and independent web.