Tokenizing

This is civic tech: Ben Berkowitz, the founder of SeeClickFix, loves to say that “potholes are the gateway drug to civic engagement,” but in this post in his “Fixer Stories” channel, he describes how New Haven’s need for help getting recycling stickers plastered all over was met by more than thirty SeeClickFix users who volunteered their help simply because the city used his platform’s Notice feature to ask for help.

The Ballmer Group is investing $59 million over the next five years for a stake in Austin-based Social Solutions, which builds performance software for case management by small, medium and large nonprofits and government agencies that focus on education and other poverty-fighting strategies, Ade Adeniji reports for InsidePhilanthropy. Adeniji notes that past efforts in building software to track casework, like the Gates Foundation’s InBloom student data project—which cost $100 million and “crashed and burned” in 2014—haven’t borne fruit.

Just launched: SurfSafe, a browser plug-in that will instantly check any photo you hoveer over to see if it’s been flagged as a fake by fact-checking sites.

Also just launched: Pulse, a civic engagement platform that simplifies information about legislation, gives constituents a way to make their opinions known and gives elected a dashboard for processing that input, built by a group of Stanford undergrads, as Zack Quaintance reports for GovTech. With all due respect for the students’ enthusiasm, we have seen this kind of platform launch and fail so many times, it’s painful. (Check out the “graveyard” tab of our Civic Tech Field Guide for more.)

Join in! Our NYC councilwoman Carlina Rivera is joining the city’s participatory budgeting program and is inviting community members to join in deciding how to spend $1 million in District 2. More details here.

Apply: Civic Hall is looking to hire curriculum developers and instructors for the pilot program of our digital learning center, with a particular focus on people with expertise in cybersecurity, ethical data collection, and general digital literacy.

Information disorder: Microsoft has spotted and taken down spear-phishing websites spoofing the Hudson Institute and the International Republican Institute, two think tanks populated by conservatives highly critical of the Putin government in Russia, and as David Sanger and Sheera Frenkel report the New York Times, the company says the sites were created by hackers tied to Russian intelligence. “This is another demonstration of the fact that the Russians aren’t really pursuing partisan attacks, they are pursuing attacks that they perceive in their own national self-interest,” Eric Rosenbach, the director of the Defending Digital Democracy project at Harvard University, told the Times. “It’s about disrupting and diminishing any group that challenges how Putin’s Russia is operating at home and around the world.”

Microsoft President Brad Smith explains more about the company’s increasing focus on cybersecurity and announces a new initiative called AccountGuard, which it is offering free of charge to candidates, campaigns and related political institutions using Office 365. Here are more details on AccountGuard.

Our very own Danielle Tomson, Personal Democracy Forum’s director, has a smart op-ed (co-authored with David Morar) in The Wall Street Journal suggesting that it’s time to take a page from the internet’s own multi-stakeholder governance model to deal with social media moderation issues. They write: “Instead of making decisions in private isolation, companies would do better by engaging one another and their users to shape content-moderation policies in a more transparent and consistent way. We propose a deliberative body, a ‘content congress,’ where stakeholders—including companies, civil-society groups and even constituencies of end-users—could hash out best practices, air grievances, and offer rebuttals.” And here she is discussing the oped on CNBC’s Power Lunch.

Fifteen years of research by Joseph Turow of the University of Pennsylvania finds that the label “privacy policy” is deceptive and between 54% and 73% of Americans mistakenly think it means companies won’t share their information without permission. As he writes in an oped in The New York Times, it’s time to retire the phrase and instead switch to a more accurate label, like “how we use your information.” (Here at Civic Hall, we have a “data use policy” that explains what information we collect, how we use it and what we protect—see ThatsNotPrivacy.com for more information.)

Tech and politics: Our old friend Zephyr Teachout is running for New York State Attorney General, and in a crowded field just picked up the endorsement of The New York Times’ editorial board.

Related: New research published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization finds, that in a cross-country analysis of 125 countries, political corruption is lower when there are more women in elected office, Kiersten Marek reports for Philanthropy Women.

Santiago Siri, the co-founder of Democracy.earth, is working on blockchain-based voting, and as Andrew Leonard reports for Wired, he has a vision for “tokenizing the ‘like'” so it is used for electing politicians, passing referenda, enacting by-laws and agreeing on business plans: “democracy by click.” But, as Leonard notes, there are lots of questions about Democracy.earth’s plan, including “How does one simultaneously ensure transparency in the voting process while guaranteeing the anonymity of the voter? How can one enfranchise direct voting without running the risk of a feckless tyranny of the majority motivated by short-term passions making terrible decisions?” And also, given that the vote-token will have a value, does it make sense for votes to have dollar values? As Leonard notes, some researchers fear that blockchain-based voting will make vote-buying and -selling too easy.

Related: Five reasons why “secure blockchain voting” is a myth, by David Jefferson of VerifiedVoting. Start with the problem of determining who exactly is trying to vote remotely.

It’s not the Ice Bucket Challenge, but the cause is just. Check out Free Press’ #CallYourRep4theNet Karaoke Challenge. Free Press president Craig Aaron is might have a second career.

Life in Facebookistan: Sam Biddle reports for The Intercept that after shutting down the English-language version of Venezuela’s Telesur media network, Facebook gave three different explanations for the temporary suspension, “all contradicting one another, and not a single one making sense.”

So far, Facebook’s vaunted new collaboration with outside researchers seeking to better understand its impact on elections has an annoying roadblock confounding those researchers—it’s not releasing any data from earlier than the beginning of 2017, conveniently leaving out the year that its impact was most consequential and controversial, as David Ingram reports for NBC News.

Make time to read Nicholas Confessore‘s in-depth feature in Sunday’s New York Times magazine on the unlikely trio—a real estate developer, a finance guy and a public interest technologist—whose California data privacy initiative has turned the tables on the big tech platforms and forced the legislature into enacting a meaningful new consumer privacy law.

Then, make sure to read Kashmir Hill’s story in Jezebel on how Mary Stone Ross, a former CIA intelligence officer and congressional staff who was the president of Californians for Consumer Privacy, the sponsor of the ballot initiative that got the legislature to act, got left out of Confessore’s piece.