Archive: Author: The Management

Yesterday, New Media Ventures announced the 13 organizations that it has selected to share $1.2 million in seed funding for the seventh round of its Innovation Fund. These thirteen startups made it through a very competitive pool of nearly 740 applicants—a 50% jump over the number who applied in 2017--and the results have been much anticipated.In its seven years of operation, NMV has grown substantially and now plays a very important role in the civic tech and political tech ecosystem. It backs innovative tools, media, advocacy, digital organizing, civic engagement and efforts centered on voting and elections. It raises money to give away to promising start-ups focused on those areas, ranging from nonprofits to mission-driven for-profits. Money from NMV usually...

Last week, I spent a good part of Monday and Tuesday at a training workshop on the vTaiwan public engagement process and Taiwan’s Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS), the innovation lab inside the central Taiwanese government. It was organized by the New York City node of the g0v (pronounced “gov zero”) community of civic hackers that started in Taiwan. It was the first time that members of g0v and PDIS had done a training in English on this innovative approach to digital democracy, but hopefully there will be more opportunities to attend one soon. That's because this scrappy open source community of coders, organizers and govies has figured out something really exciting: it's possible to radically transform how government listens...