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This is civic tech: Tom Simonite of MIT’s Technology Review reports on how U.S. startup Pol.is is not only changing how Taiwan’s legislature develops policy, but is also being used by the Alternativet party in Denmark to give its members a larger role in formulating policy. (Pol.is co-founder Colin Megill and Taiwan Digital Minister Audrey Tang will both be giving keynote talks at Personal Democracy Forum this Friday morning.)
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Designers, developers and community members got together Saturday in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the first inaugural Civic Innovation Day, Josh Mandell reports for Charlottesville Tomorrow. The day was organized by SmartCville, “a nonprofit organization that promotes the use of technology to drive innovation in local government and improve quality of life in cities.”
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Resistance watch: Researchers who have been interviewing random participants at the Women’s March, the March for Science and the People’s Climate March say that “similarities across these populations of protesters suggests that these discrete events are part of a bigger movement,” scholar Dana Fisher writes in The New Influencer. Between a quarter and a third of the participants said they had not been to a protest before. She also reports that “Our data show these newcomers have become repeat protesters: 45 percent of the participants at the March for Science and 70 percent of participants of the People’s Climate March had also participated in the Women’s March. Thirty-four percent of the participants at the People’s Climate March had participated in the March for Science the previous weekend.”
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Fisher also reports that “Seventy percent of Women’s March participants said they heard of the march from Facebook and 40 percent said it was the most important channel through which they heard about it. Facebook played a less dominant role in mobilizing participants for the March for Science (49 percent) and the People’s Climate March (31 percent), but it continued to be a main channel for information about the events.”
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Trump watch: White House lawyers are telling federal agencies to ignore information requests from Democratic lawmakers, Burgess Everett and Josh Dawsey report for Politico. A request from Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-NY) for information from the Office of Personnel Management asking how cybersecurity officials were hired was rejected with the response, “We only speak to the chair people of committees,” Ryan told Politico. All the committee chairs in Congress are Republicans.
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Writing for the Washington Post, Philip Bump says this latest development is part of a pattern of Trump chafing at checks on his power.
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The supposedly “grown-up” side of the Trump administration, national security adviser H.R. McMaster, Defense Secretary James Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, all pushed to make sure the president would include an explicit affirmation of America’s commitment to NATO’s collective defense on his recent visit to Europe. But as Politico’s Susan Glasser reports, they were all dismayed when a direct reference to Article 5 of the NATO treaty was dropped from his speech at the last minute.
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In the Atlantic, former Bush speechwriter David Frum explains why an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by McMaster and Gary Cohn that tried to put lipstick on Trump’s piggish behavior actually spells the end of America’s ability to inspire global support.
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Signs of pro-Trump militia keep surfacing, the latest being the “Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights,” a group mainly made up of young white men who have organized themselves to look for opportunities to beat up anti-Trump protesters, as Alan Feuer and Jeremy Peters report for The New York Times.
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On the same topic but a bit more heartening: Lois Beckett reports for The Guardian on how neo-Nazis are trying to take advantage of Trump’s popularity in rural places, and how the people of Pikeville, Kentucky, were having little of it when white nationalists came to their town for a recent summit.
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The Hotmail account of the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States was hacked, and as Zaid Jilani and Ryan Grim report for The Intercept, the ones that have been released so far show a fascinating level of cooperation between the Gulf monarchy and a neoconservative American think tank funded by billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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Tech and politics: Former DNC technology director Josh Hendler pushes back against Hillary Clinton’s claim that bad data from the committee hurt her 2016 campaign, and presents six problems that he thinks deserves more attention going forward.
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