With Angel Quicksey
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Sarah Lai Stirland reports for Civicist on how “The Resistance Will be Incubated,” taking a deep dive into the work of New Media Ventures, the network of angel investors that is pumping $1 million into supporting a handpicked group of organizations and tech projects.
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Related: With the support of the Craig Newmark Foundation, Civic Hall is launching an “Organizers-in-Residence” program, offering six-month residencies to people working to defend democracy and civil rights during the Trump era. The program includes a master class in leadership development guided by Seth Godin. The program begins August 1; details here.
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Also related: Civic Hall member organization Rhize, which specializes in training and coaching movement organizers world-wide, is launching free “Resistance 101” trainings here in the United States.
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The speed of internet organizing, via an old family friend, the doctor and author Danielle Ofri: “Writers never get to choose the titles for their articles; that’s what editors do. So I was just as surprised as anyone when I opened my newspaper on Friday and saw that the title of my op-ed was ‘Time for a Doctors March on Washington.’ I was even more flustered when a flood of emails arrived asking, ‘So when’s the march?’ Thanks to a crew of volunteers who materialized—and especially to the incomparable folks at the Resistance Media Collective—the HouseCallsCampaign is officially launched today.”
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Trump watch: Here’s what the President told an Iowa campaign rally yesterday about his cabinet picks: “I love all people. Rich or poor. But in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense? If you insist, I’ll do it, but I like it better this way.”
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Since Trump’s election, the proportion of people aged 18-24 who say they are paying for online news has risen from 4 percent to 18 percent. That’s one very intriguing finding in the Reuters Institute’s annual report on digital news, as digested by Laura Hazard Owen for NiemanLab.
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This is civic tech: Steve Andriole argues in Forbes that politicians should be required to learn digital technology, digital infrastructure, digital-enabled business models, digital communications and the processes and transactions that digital technology enables. Ignorance is unacceptable when “technology is literally everywhere, all the time.”
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Minnie Ingersoll will be joining Code for America as its new COO. Ingersoll was an early product manager at Google where she created and scaled Google Fiber, building partnerships with city governments across the country.
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The City of Chicago is planning to modernize the technology powering procurement in the city, reports Eyragon Eidam in Government Technology magazine. Procurement dictates what technology the city buys and implements. Everything comes full circle.
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Speaking of procurement in Chicago, Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that the city gave a ten-year deal to a nonprofit led by Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s former campaign manager to merge two public golf courses into a new PGA-level course to be designed by Tiger Woods. (The new course just happens to abut the location of the to-be-built Obama Presidential Center.) The two courses are supposed to be upgraded with $25 million in private donations that the nonprofit is nowhere close to raising. Meanwhile, a local watchdog group reports that the cost to city taxpayers of shoreline improvements and underpasses to be built to connect the courses will approach or exceed $30 million.
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What sharing economy? Recode’s Kara Swisher reflects on the uber-fall of Travis Kalanick, writing: “…the way things too often are in Silicon Valley, a place that regards itself as a lot better than it really is. You know the drill: Its denizens say they are changing the world, but the world is actually changing them, and not often for the better. Is it the wealth? The acclaim? The way the critical need to push past the doubt that mutates into a delusional intractableness that only reinforces itself and almost always turns ugly? That is what worries me about the current kudos being given to the investors who finally turned on Kalanick and demanded that he step down. Good for them, the cry goes up! But it utterly ignores the fact that every single one of them had been utterly complicit in what came before.”
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Day Two of Personal Democracy Forum’s keynote talks, as visualized and annotated by artist Jonny Goldstein.
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Apply: The Engagement Lab at Emerson College is looking to hire a lead designer.
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Just launched: The Narrative Initiative, led by Jee Kim and a crack team of cultural organizers, funded by the Ford Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies.
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