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Leave it to Microsoft director of tech and civic innovation John Paul Farmer (and longtime pal of Civic Hall) to point out the civic tech angle on the shocking report of a middle-aged man who was forcibly removed from a United plane in Chicago because the company had overbooked the flight and couldn’t find enough volunteers to make room for some employees that needed the seat. He tweeted a link to the video, adding: “Ubiquitous mobile video recording may be the 21st century’s most under-appreciated #civictech advancement.”
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The hashtag #UnitedForcesPassengerOffPlane has been viewed more than 150 million times on China’s Weibo network, Javier Hernandez and Cao Li report for The New York Times. The man is apparently of Chinese descent.
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Tech and politics: Want to get a boost in engagement on Facebook? Post about politics. That’s what a new study from NewsWhip shows. Partisan pages, especially those that “are left-leaning or affiliated with Trump resistance movements” are “outperforming some of the most trafficked news competitors in overall engagement,” Sara Fischer reports for Axios.
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More than 7,000 groups around the country have signed up to attend “Resistance School,” a four-part online training program created by a group of graduate students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, reports Ryan Brooks for USA Today.
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Nextdoor.com, which bills itself as the social network for neighborhoods, is starting to position itself as a platform for politics too, as Carla Marinucci reports for Politico. In San Jose, where Nextdoor is widely used, city officials marvel at its impact mobilizing people to attend local meetings and planning sessions.
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Not a Resistbot: Veteran digital campaigner Holmes Wilson of Fight for the Future writes on Medium with three suggestions for the kind of tech organizers actually need. All three are terrific, and none have anything to do with helping people make calls to Congress or find out where their legislator stands on an issue. Phew.
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With Congress back in recess, Republican House members are avoiding holding traditional town hall meetings, Heidi Przbyla reports for USA Today.
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Bloomberg’s Polly Mosendz took a close look at the different kinds of people (and bots) that tweet most frequently in response to President Donald Trump’s tweets.
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This is civic tech: Vision Zero planners in Denver and Philadelphia are turning to crowdsourcing to learn from residents about streets and intersections that their traditional data sources might not provide, Josh Cohen reports for Next City.
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The New York City council is considering a bill that would require residential landlords to install digital temperature sensors in tenants’ apartments, building on the pioneering work of Heatseek (a Civic Hall graduate and past winner of NYC’s Big Apps competition) as Zack Quaintance reports for GovTech.
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Seventy percent of Americans believe cities should be able to start municipal broadband networks if private services are too slow or costly, a new study from the Pew Research Center finds, Jason Shueh reports for StateScoop.
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Someone hacked into Dallas’ public warning system last Friday night, setting off the city’s 156 emergency sirens for hours into the night, Eli Rosenberg and Maya Salam report for The New York Times.
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Fast Company’s Adele Peters reports on Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s ambitious effort to cut the city’s air pollution and drastically reduce private car usage.
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What sharing economy? At Twitter’s upcoming shareholder meeting in May, there will be a vote on a proposal to turn the company into a cooperative owned by its users, Maira Sutton reports for Shareable. The idea first took wing last fall with an op-ed in the Guardian by Nathan Schneider, a platform cooperative advocate.
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Long-read to savor: Tamsin Shaw’s in-depth review of Michael Lewis’ latest book The Undoing Project takes a considered look at the state of behavioral science and how it may be used to manipulate consumers and, in the case of Cambridge Analytica, how to get past the conspiracy-mongering about its role in the 2016 election.
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