Engines

This is civic tech: The head of the Washington, D.C., public library, Richard Reyes-Gavilan, is working on a renovation of its Martin Luther King Jr. central library that envisions a rooftop garden, two large performance areas, spaces for start-ups and students, an interactive children’s reading room, and a maker space called the Fab Lab. As Nevin Martell reports for the Washington Post, Reyes-Gavilan “wants to put the D.C. Public Library at the forefront of American libraries, to be a model for the nation by embracing a ‘hacker”’ culture that treats library patrons not as passive consumers of information, but as creators. His mantra is ‘libraries are not their buildings,’ but ‘engines of human capital.’” (h/t Alex Howard)

The AVINA Foundation-Omidyar Network Civic Innovation Accelerator Fund, which has been supporting projects across 14 Latin American countries, reports on lessons learned so far from three years of work mainly in the open government arena. One big takeaway: “offline strategies are not only necessary, but also crucial for civic technologies (online platforms) to catalyze citizen participation, influence public policy, and enhance people’s living standards.”

Crypto-wars, continued: Microsoft President and Chief Legal Officer explains why the company is suing the U.S. government to stop it from being gagged from telling its customers when their records are being accessed by law enforcement. He writes:

…we appreciate that there are times when secrecy around a government warrant is needed. This is the case, for example, when disclosure of the government’s warrant would create a real risk of harm to another individual or when disclosure would allow people to destroy evidence and thwart an investigation. But based on the many secrecy orders we have received, we question whether these orders are grounded in specific facts that truly demand secrecy. To the contrary, it appears that the issuance of secrecy orders has become too routine. …Over the past 18 months, the U.S. government has required that we maintain secrecy regarding 2,576 legal demands, effectively silencing Microsoft from speaking to customers about warrants or other legal process seeking their data. Notably and even surprisingly, 1,752 of these secrecy orders, or 68 percent of the total, contained no fixed end date at all. This means that we effectively are prohibited forever from telling our customers that the government has obtained their data.

The Intercept’s Lee Fang reports on the CIA’s ongoing investments in companies that specialize in social media mining and surveillance, listing 38 previously undisclosed relationships.

Tech and politics: Slack, the team networking platform, has hired its first D.C. lobbyists, Tony Romm reports for Politico.

ICYMI, the White House is now officially on Tumblr.

Brave new world: The idea of a universal basic income is about to get a big try-out in Kenya, where GiveDirectly has “decided to try to permanently end extreme poverty across dozens of villages and thousands of people in Kenya by guaranteeing them an ongoing income high enough to meet their basic needs,” as its founders Michael Faye and Paul Niehaus write for Slate. They are planning to provide at least 6,000 Kenyans with a basic income for 10 to 15 years.

Help wanted: The Participatory Budgeting Project is looking to hire an engagement technology manager.

Crisis Text Line is looking to hire a data scientists to work on its open data collaborations.

SumOfUs is looking to hire a senior software developer and not-senior software developer.

Your moments of zen: @DeepLearnTheBern, a neural network trained on Bernie Sanders transcripts. (Brought to you by Brad Hayes, an MIT postdoc who also calls himself @DeepDrumpf’s acting campaign manager. And this site from Purpose Labs will give you your FreeTrumpScore. Learn how you rate with the Donald.