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This is civic tech: In less than two years, the idea of platform cooperativism has spread from an article in Medium to active efforts in many countries. In an exclusive interview with Civicist, Trebor Scholz reflects on what inspired him to launch this challenge to the sharing economy paradigm.
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Rashad Robinson and Color of Change, the online civic rights organization he leads, gets the full Wired profile treatment from Gideon Lewis-Kraus. One nugget from the story: after Color of Change took a strong position in favor of net neutrality (breaking from older civil rights groups that had taken money from telcos and toed their line), MSNBC, which is majority owned by Comcast, canceled all of Robinson’s bookings on the topic.
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Miguel Gamino, the current CIO of San Francisco, is moving east to become New York City’s new chief technology officer, Jessica Mulholland and Eyragon Eidam report for GovTech.
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A new study by OpenCities, which develops websites for cities, looked at more than 3,000 city sites and found lots of problems, reports David Raths for GovTech. “32 percent have poor optimization for mobile or tablet devices; 87 percent received a failing grade for encryption; 40 percent failed accessibility tests, and fewer than 9 percent are written at a reading level that average Americans can comfortably grasp.”
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Granicus and GovDelivery, two major providers of software and communications services to government, are merging, Bailey McCann reports for CivSource.
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Tech and politics: According to a new study by the Pew Internet Center, “More than one-third of social media users are worn out by the amount of political content they encounter, and more than half describe their online interactions with those they disagree with politically as stressful and frustrating.” This is equally true for Democrats and Republicans, by the way.
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Writing for the New York Times Magazine, columnist Jenna Wortham argues that President Obama has been our first “truly digital president,” but that in bringing tech to the White House he also imported “the values and biases of the people who create it.”
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Civic Hall member Zephyr Teachout is running for Congress in New York’s 19th District, and this profile of her by Sarah Jaffe in The Nation tries to answer the question raised by her campaign: “Does Bernie Sanders’ political revolution have legs?”
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Using gun tracing data, the New York state Attorney General’s office has released a new report and interactive website that makes it clear how guns from states with less restrictive laws flow into New York neighborhoods.
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