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...
When Sidewalk Labs hosted a public forum in Toronto last November to gather feedback on its plan to build a data-driven innovation hub on a mostly derelict stretch of industrial waterfront, several participants posed tough questions about how the company, a subsidiary of Alphabet/Google, would address privacy issues—questions that have...
Like other for-profit civic technology companies, Loveland sits at an uncomfortable intersection of priorities. Since its inception, Loveland has struggled to reconcile what its founders think the city needs with what community organizers and residents want and need and what nonprofits, government agencies, and companies are willing to buy.
When Uber says it will share anonymized trip data with government, researchers, and the public they promise user privacy will remain intact; but when NYC's Taxi & Limousine Commission requests anonymized trip data to monitor driver fatigue, Uber cries foul.
Facebook strengthens our filter bubbles. So does Twitter. So does cable news. This has serious civic consequences. All three of these organizations are civic technologies regardless of whether they put profit or public interest first. The algorithms and business priorities of private institutions have shaped our civic reality and will...
We need to find a language that allows us to differentiate honest, disinterested debate over policy options from special-interest lobbying and campaign-finance blackmail.
In a historic first, the candidates running to be the next secretary general of the United Nations debated publicly at an event co-hosted by New America and the Guardian at Civic Hall yesterday. The current secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, will step down at the end of the year, and in...
In the absence of open data standards, companies like Airbnb can define their own terms for behaving in an “open and transparent” way.
The money was supposed to buy bicycles for ten girls attending public school in Mahottari, Nepal. The head of the village government allocated 150,000 rupees—about $1,400—for the project, which he said would encourage girls from the marginalized Dalit (so-called “untouchable”) community to attend school. An auditor signed the paperwork and...
"There are thousands of potential front page of reddit stories hidden in 25 years of campaign finance data," and Solomon Kahn wants to help unearth them.