Summer Breaks

This is civic tech: Don’t miss Liz Barry‘s tour-de-force report for Civicist on vTaiwan, a new public participation process that grew out of that country’s 2014 Sunflower Movement protests. Nurtured into existence by members of Taiwan’s g0v open source community as well as a number of pioneering politicians, the vTaiwan process combines innovative facilitation methods and a digital consensus-making tool called Pol.is, and “now routinely leads to passage of laws by Taiwan’s parliament,” she writes. the country’s new premier recently declared that “all substantial issues” should go through a vTaiwan-like process. “In the midst of the signal failure known as the US electoral season, here’s something to be inspired about: a true story about rational deliberation on a national scale,” Barry writes.

Also in the must-read department: Charlie Warzel’s comprehensive report on Twitter’s “ten-year failure to stop harassment.” As Warzel writes, “Fenced in by an abiding commitment to free speech above all else and a unique product that makes moderation difficult and trolling almost effortless, Twitter has, over a chaotic first decade marked by shifting business priorities and institutional confusion, allowed abuse and harassment to continue to grow as a chronic problem and perpetual secondary internal priority. On Twitter, abuse is not just a bug, but—to use the Silicon Valley term of art—a fundamental feature.” He adds, “The original sin is a homogenous leadership.”

“Here in the world’s information capital, New Yorkers are still scrounging for a few bars of web access, dropped like crumbs from a table.” That’s New York Public Library President Anthony Marx (a longtime friend of Civic Hall), writing on the New York Times op-ed page about the need to make broadband available to the poor. He reports on the library’s hot-spot lending program, which was inspired and aided by our own Andrew Rasiej, and calls on municipal leaders to consider projecting free Wi-Fi from every public building.

Congrats to BetaNYC’s Noel Hidalgo and New America’s Hollie Russon-Gilman (both longtime Civic Hall friends) who will be a Technology and Democracy Fellows at Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation starting this fall.

Seattle’s first civic tech advocate, Candace Fabe, talks to GeekWire’s Lisa Stiffler on how she hopes to make the city a center of “tech for change.”

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchieri reports for Motherboard on the efforts of two independent researchers who have been tracking Iranian hackers for three years, exposing how they have targeted and spied on human rights activists online.

What sharing economy? Writing for The Ride Share Guy blog, Alex Rosenblat of the Data & Society Institute details some of the ways that “app-mediated” work can result in wage theft. In the case of Uber, she identifies several grey areas, including how the company handles ride cancellation fees (the $5 charge is often not collected and the onus is put on the driver to complain; Lyft at least gives drivers a countdown clock to know how long to wait; Uber doesn’t), how the app calculates the distance traveled by a driver (a GPS failure can cause the app to record a straight line, paying the driver for a shorter distance than they actually travel), promising some drivers a guaranteed minimum hourly income and then not following through, and so on. 

Whither the Bern? The Nation’s D.D. Guttenplan reports on the efforts of Zack Exley and Corbin Trent, two key organizers from Sander’s 2016 distributed organizing team, to mobilize a new wave to clean out Congress in 2018.

Your moment of civic zen: Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that African-Americans were barred from public swimming pools. Now, Simone Manuel, the first African-American woman to win an individual gold medal in swimming.

With the summer heat at a peak, we’re going to give our servers (and your inboxes) a break, and catch up on some analog activities like reading a few books and staring at clouds as they skid across the sky. Here’s to a good rest of the summer to First Post’s readers; see you at the end of the month!