The Disappearance of Greece's Fourth Estate

Austin is one of a number of cities coming to grips with how to regulate the growing online market for short-term rentals through sites like Airbnb and HomeAway. While creating these regulations gives cities the opportunity to raise revenue through licensing, it also creates a Gordian knot of competing interests. Here's the path some cities are paving through the obstacles towards a new legal framework for the sharing economy. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Congressional hearings continue on National Security Agency surveillance; federal officials consider Bitcoin; and more in today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

Sometimes sharing is caring, other times it’s grounds for a lawsuit. Peer-to-peer car sharing company FlightCar is the target of a lawsuit filed last week by the City of San Francisco filed a alleging the service engages in “unfair and unlawful operation of a rental car company and parking lot” targeted to patrons of San Francisco International Airport. Read More

"In a highly connected, networked world, where the network's evolving all the time, the power comes from being able to connect the dots," OpenCorporates founder Chris Taggart told me. "And at the moment ... citizens, people, other companies even don't have the ability to connect those dots." That's where OpenCorporates comes in — a vast, freely available database of information about the world's corporate world. Read More

Did we "Think Bigger?" Yes! Beyond the many great individual talks and panels, I was struck to see several cross-cutting themes emerge over Personal Democracy Forum 2013's two days. Read More

Nancy Lublin devoted her PDF talk to opening a conversation about what she sees as serious problems with the way foundations approach funding technology projects that address public policy or social services.

Computer-related jobs are being created at such a rapid clip in the United States that its workforce can't keep up, so one woman is using that opportunity to create change in a community that she says is suffering from a disparity in education and income. Read More

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) announced today a relaunch of the Citizen Cosponsor project, which allows members of the public to express support for House legislation online. The new version includes all legislation introduced in the House by both Republicans and Democrats and exists on its own domain. Read More

If justice is blind, it won't stay that way in San Francisco for long. Right now, all city district attorney George Gascón knows about the defendants his office prosecutes is that each of his prosecutors handles, on average, 185 felony cases and 700 misdemeanor cases per year. He wants to know far more, and says his office is now building a database to profile defendants by attributes such as age, ethnicity, gender, education, work history, mental health and substance abuse issues. The system will also track "stabilizing forces" in their lives, such as whether they have housing. This information will help prosecutors decide how to handle their cases, he says. "We're trying to move this process away from being an art to being a science," Gascón said in an interview. Read More