Romps

This is civic tech: Crisis Text Line has raised $23.8 million in new grants from the likes of Melinda Gates, Steve Ballmer, Reid Hoffman, the Omidyar Network, the Knight Foundation, Craig Newmark, Mark and Ali Pincus, and the Ballmer Group, as Leena Rao reports for Fortune. Crisis Text Line’s 1500 volunteer counselors have processed more than 18.5 million messages from teens in need of help since its founding in 2013. The new funding will be used to expand and develop more tools for reaching teens. Facebook’s newly announced suicide prevention service will also be working with CTL’s counselors. Congrats to Crisis Text Line founder Nancy Lublin (a longtime Civic Hall friend and member)!

Here’s a new and nifty 3-minute video introduction to the wonders of Chi Hack Night, the hub for civic tech in the Windy City.

Microsoft Chicago’s Adam Hecktman offers this comprehensive write-up of this year’s PDF conference, stating “At a time when the civic tech movement is trying to define itself and its role in creating better, more inclusive, and more productive democracies, the conversations could not have been more on point.”

CivicMakers founder Lawrence Grodeska writes that “PDF16 did not disappoint. All told, this year’s gathering was a well-curated romp through the wilds of humanity fighting against a techno-fascist future.”

Covering the conference for Stanford Social Innovation Review, Marcia Stepanek focuses on “the algorithms of fear,” zeroing in on the contributions of speakers like Wael Ghonim and danah boyd.

Here’s the text and video of Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza’s speech before Personal Democracy Forum 2016 last Friday.

Tech and politics: Here’s a visualization of how the news of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) filibuster for gun control spread across the country yesterday on Twitter.

Trump watch: A hacker using the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0 has claimed responsibility for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s servers and says that reports attributing the break-in to Russian hackers are false, Jason Koebler reports for Motherboard.

Donald Trump has accused the DNC of hacking itself in order to leak its opposition research file on him, Politico’s Louis Nelson reports. The file was posted by The Smoking Gun, and contains no surprises.

Open government: The Internal Revenue Service is making information filed by nonprofits, the Form 990s, available in bulk and a machine-readable format, Peter Olsen-Phillips reports for The Chronicle of Philanthropy. The news marks a victory for longtime open government advocate Carl Malamud and a coalition of organizations that supported his lawsuit pressing the IRS to release the filings in a more accessible format.

Speaking of opening data, MuckRock has announced that it is going nonprofit.

Crypto-warriors: Two more people have identified themselves as victims of sexual misconduct by former Tor Project developer Jacob Applebaum, Dell Cameron and Selena Larson report for The Daily Dot. As the allegations have deepened, some organizations have cut ties with Applebaum, they note, including the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which has removed him from its technical advisory board.

Your moment of zen: This Japanese commercial for Donald Trump 2016 is nuts. (h/t David Cohn)