Grecian Formula

A somewhat tongue-in-cheek effort on IndieGogo to crowdfund a bail-out for Greece, started by a 29-year-old Brit, has raised more than 820,000 euros from over 48,000 people in just two days.

On Medium, Emma Mulqueeny of Rewired State says we should take this challenge seriously—after all, “we owe Greece big time…for one of the greatest infrastructures upon which our societies have been formed: Democracy.” More importantly, she wants to help build a “Rewired Greece.”

The #AskBobby hashtag that the Jindal campaign hoped to use last night for a town hall meeting in Iowa with the Louisiana governor/presidential candidate got hijacked, Joan Shipps reports for Raw Story.

Likewise, the #TellingItLikeItIs hashtag used by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to herald the launch of his presidential campaign yesterday also went off the rails, Jordan Valinsky reports for Digiday.

Presidential candidate Ted Cruz reads all his Twitter mentions, reports McKay Coppins for BuzzFeed. It’s part of why he’s good at online communications.

Hillary Clinton is now on Pinterest with her favorite “granddaughter gift ideas, hairstyle inspiration, favorite moments and some other things.”

A new batch of 3,000 pages of Clinton’s emails were released by the State Department last night, and so far no one has found anything beyond a mix of mundane questions about meetings, efforts to spin the media (we are shocked, shocked!) and some backchannel lobbying that might lead to further questions about donations to the Clinton Foundation while she was in office.

As Blake Hounshell of Politico perceptively notes, the email release does show that as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to have had a fair amount of trouble operating a fax machine. But she can text!

GovLab’s Beth Noveck explains why the IRS’s announcement yesterday that it is close to being able to provide machine-readable versions of the 990 forms filed by nonprofit organizations is actually kind of a big deal.

Writing for Medium’s Backchannel, Susan Crawford explains how and why Verizon is succeeding in screwing New York City out of a promised deployment of broadband fiber, and what to do about it in order to get “cheap, competitive, unlimited data access over fiber with its complementary cloud of unlimited public wifi.”

One of my favorite civic tech companies, SeeClickFix, which makes city-level platforms for local problem-solving, announced a $1.6 million funding round led by Elm Street Ventures with participation from existing investors O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Omidyar Network, and new participation from Connecticut Innovations and LaunchCapital. Company CEO Ben Berkowitzsays they money will go to double the company’s headcount of 25 and fuel its overall growth.

Civic Resource Group announced the launch of a new mobile augmented reality product that will allow users to scan city assets like bus stops, subway stations, and signs and get additional digital information.

Jason Shueh reports in GovTech on the development of NextRequest, a startup launched by three Code for America fellows that uses the cloud to manage public records requests and includes a dashboard for managing them.

Veteran tech journalist Dan Gillmor (and Civic Hall member) is launching a MOOC called “MediaLIT: Overcoming Information Overload.” It’s free and open to all, under the auspices of Arizona State University, starting next week.