DATA Act, Promising to Increase Federal Spending Accountability, Rises Again

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: What does "civic technology" look like as a new subset of the software industry — a collection of startups that challenges existing heavyweights in government technology, or creates completely different tools? The Code for America Accelerator program invests seed money, time, and free food into a few new companies to find out. It's accepting applicants for its second year of operation. First-year participants tell Sam Roudman why they feel their year in Code for America's San Francisco headquarters was time well spent. Read More

Exclusively for Personal Democracy Plus subscribers: Organizing for Action's new stumbling block; "accelerating" a civic technology industry; and more in today's round-up of news about technology in politics from around the web. Read More

Education entrepreneurs like Udacity's Sebastian Thrun and San Jose State President Mohammed Qayoumi say that they can improve California's suffering higher education system with "massively online open courses," the much-hyped system that revolves around lectures delivered through online video. Advocates say the University of California and state universities need "disruption" — pitting them against faculty who say that cure would be worse than the disease. Read More

The White House on Thursday morning released an executive order from President Barack Obama that mandates any data in information systems created by government agencies going forward be available for anyone to access, download, and use. Read More

Against the backdrop of the German national election campaign, the Berlin Internet conference re:publica opened Monday with organizers calling on Chancellor Angela Merkel to oppose a controversial proposal by phone and Internet provider Deutsche Telekom to effectively eliminate its flat-rate broadband service. Read More

A New York-based non-profit will announce Thursday a new $1 million investment, part of a "sustainability round" its founders hope will raise the cash it needs to build a solution to America's voter registration problems. Thursday, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will announce that it is investing $1 million in TurboVote over three years. The money will go to help TurboVote develop a new line of business working with elections officials in counties across the country — and a platform to help officials manage the millions of data points they must track to make sure citizens can cast their vote. Read More

It's 2013, and while some big tech conferences like Social Media Week are rolling out commitments to move toward real gender balance in their speaker mix, others like TechCrunch Disrupt are still reproducing the male-dominated events that dominate the field. What does it take for things to change? Read More

As part of research for their new book, Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt met WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2011. The full conversation, according to a transcript and recording WikiLeaks has published online, ranged from the technical details of WikiLeaks' methods for avoiding censorship in China to Assange's political theories about control of, and access to, information. Their brief conceptual stop in Rwanda — which, Assange suggested, would have gone differently had WikiLeaks been around — was one of many. Read More

Emerging transportation services Uber and Sidecar are engaging in a public war of perceptions as the popularity of their services grow, and regulators ponder how to protect consumers under laws written decades before the dawn of the on-demand, app-driven economy. Read More

If people-powered, neighbor-to-neighbor campaigns are the future of political persuasion, as President Barack Obama's former campaign manager Jim Messina suggests it is, then the practice is in need of a serious upgrade. That's exactly what Ralph Garvin hopes to bring to the table with Organizer, a new political software suite that just landed two big, early clients, the labor-backed Working Families Party and Howard Dean's grassroots group, Democracy for America. Read More

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg marked the launch of his much-ballyhooed new Silicon Valley advocacy group on Thursday with a letter in the Washington Post, writing: "To lead the world in this new economy, we need the most talented and hardest-working people. We need to train and attract the best. We need those middle-school students to be tomorrow’s leaders." But this marriage of Silicon Valley pizazz and bipartisan spirit is hardly Silicon Valley's first crack at Capitol Hill. In fact, what's most notable about the group is that it was started at all. Read More

With PDF 2013 less than two months away, here's an advance look at the main hall talks, plus a whole new round of confirmed speakers. Read More