Weekend Musts

Did Labor Day already happen? Nope, but with the long weekend ahead, we thought we’d send you a nice pile of juicy clips (culled from the last two weeks that First Post has been on break) to help you prime your brain for the month ahead.

This is civic tech: A coalition of 17 civil rights and digital rights groups have issued a joint statement on predictive policing, demanding more transparency about the data and algorithms being used. An accompanying report by Upturn’s David Robinson and Logan Koepke found “pervasive, fundamental gaps” in what is known about such programs across the country.

Check out AskDeannaAboutRacismButOnlyIfYoureWhite.com, a new project from our good friend Deanna Zandt. She explains: “One of the things I’ve noticed in my own adventure being a racial justice ally is that it’s often hard to find a shallow part of the justice water to wade into if you’re white and have questions, or care, about race in America. Why the focus on white people? A couple of reasons. One, we’ve relied on people of color alone for way too long to solve these problems. It’s definitely way past time for white people to get involved. Two, folks have shared with me that it can feel burdensome, as a person of color, to always answer white folks’ questions. White people have an expectation that anyone should be happy to teach them, but sometimes that’s not true. Thus, I’m offering myself up as a starting point.”

“If you have ever wanted to tell a story that moves hearts and minds, generates billions of dollars, and creates fan communities that can change the world: make your story about a kid with dead parents and an empire trying to kill them.” That’s our civic imagination fellow Andrew Slack explaining the metatext behind so many powerful stories, and why activists and organizers need to make use of the hero’s journey.

President Obama will guest edit the November issue of Wired magazine, due out on newsstands two weeks before Election Day. The issue’s theme will be frontiers, including “personal frontiers, from precision medicine to human performance; local frontiers, including using data in urban planning and making sure renewable energy works for everyone; national frontiers, from civil rights to medical data; international frontiers, like climate change and cybersecurity; and final frontiers, including space travel and Artificial Intelligence.” It will come out in tandem with a White House Frontiers Conference hosted by Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.

Technical.ly Brooklyn’s April Joyner profiles Urban Tech Hub, a new partnership between New Lab and NYC’s Economic Development Corporation that is focused on hardware start-ups with a civic focus, run by Varun Adibhatla.

NextDoor, which bills itself as the social network for neighborhoods, has managed to reduce racist posts by 75 percent, Kashmir Hill reports for Fusion. The change came in response to an earlier piece in Fusion that reported on how NextDoor users were using the platform to report many people as “suspicious” simply because of their skin color, a story that company CEO Nirav Tolia said “floored” him.

Waldo Jacquith, part-time tech advisor to the Sunlight Foundation, has announced he is heading to 18F. Bon voyage!

Civic Hall Labs’ 2016 Healthy Public Challenge offers innovators the chance to win $10,000 and six months of advising to support them in using technology to create a healthy public. To find out more, you can sign up for a conference call on September 7 at 7pm EST, where interested entrepreneurs, healthcare professionals, academics, technologists, and the public at large can learn more about the Challenge, the application process, and the advisory phase for Challenge winners. Applications are due September 16.

Brave new world? This in-depth report by BuzzFeed’s Sarah Topol on the coming proliferation of killer robots, including tiny programmable quadcopter drones one-inch in diameter capable of carrying a lightweight explosive and delivering it remotely to generic targets, should keep you awake at night, hoping the world’s nations somehow outlaw them.

Assange agonistes: Does WikiLeaks and Julian Assange have an unholy alliance with the Kremlin? That’s the argument made, with lots of compelling but circumstantial detail, by Jo Becker, Steven Erlanger, and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times.

Here’s the AP’s Raphael Satter and Maggie Michael on many of the ways WikiLeaks has exposed the personal information of vulnerable people, including teenage rape victims and a Saudi man arrested because he is gay.

Tech and politics: Much of the putative staff at Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution PAC has quit, report Alan Rapport and Yamiche Alcindor for the New York Times, upset over plans that it would take dark money and use it to spend on TV ads rather than grassroots organizing. Don’t miss the comments of Claire Sandberg, Sanders digital organizing director, about why she quit and spoke out.

Trump watch: “Running for president is your last bid for the respect of Manhattan. If you were to win election, they couldn’t ridicule you anymore.” That’s Garrison Keillor on Donald Trump. Read the whole thing.

Writing in the New Republic, Astra Taylor explains why we need more democracy, not less. Watching elites repelled by the rise of Trump and the Brexit vote, she argues “The real problem facing democracy today is not an excess of popular power but a lack of it….The real challenge facing America today is the near-absence in civic life of democratic channels that run deeper than a sporadic visit to the voting booth, or the fleeting euphoria of a street protest.” Amen to that.

Life in Facebookistan: Facebook’s continued refusal to admit to itself that it’s a media platform with editorial power and responsibilities has now resulted in it choosing to put its Trending Topics section almost completely in the control of algorithms rather than human editors, Dave Gershgorn and Mike Murphy report for Quartz. The result, they show, is Facebook’s platform is frequently being hijacked by trolls and organized subgroups like the alt-right movement. Commenting on Twitter, technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci warned that this would be a “disaster” if Facebook implements it globally, especially because of how the platform is used to organize collective action.

Media tools: Here’s a great list of online reporting and sleuthing tools from Reported.ly editor-in-chief Andy Carvin.