Archive: Year: 2018

This article is co-authored by Darshana Narayanan.Dear Civicist reader,It’s been quite a year and as this year draws to a close, we’d like to mull over, with you, the most significant developments around tech, politics and civic life in 2018. To do this we have created a virtual conversation space using Polis—a civic engagement tool that has been used to craft legislation in Taiwan, crowdsource youth concerns in Singapore, run a ‘Virtual Town Hall’ in Bowling Green Kentucky, gather collective input on the future of open data at IODC 2018, and create a ‘HiveMind’ around local issues by New Zealand media org Scoop. Our topic: What were the most significant developments in tech and politics in 2018?Together, let’s see what...

The world of tech and politics lost one of its giants Friday when Jim Gilliam, the founder of the organizing platform NationBuilder, passed away after a long illness and many battles with cancer.Jim was probably best known for a talk he gave in 2011 at Personal Democracy Forum, which he titled "The Internet is My Religion." In it, he described growing up as a born-again Christian, while also discovering the emerging world of the internet, and then attending Jerry Falwell University, where he found his niche as one of the college's computer geeks—even fixing Rev. Falwell's computer. Then, while just 18, Jim was struck with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and his mother was also diagnosed with cancer. Her death shattered his world,...