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Slate Partners With Anonymous Tweeter @GunDeaths To Map Ongoing Reports of Gun Incidents

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, December 21 2012

There's a ton of statistics out there on gun-related violence in the United States, but as two of Slate's editors pointed out this morning, there's not much out there that tracks statistics in real time. So the duo, Chris Kirk, Slate's interactives editor, and Dan Krois, a senior editor there, decided to try and change that by partnering with the anonymous Tweeter at @gundeaths to map every reported death that @gundeaths finds through news alerts and tips. @gundeaths began the Twitter reporting this July. Read More

A Digital Map Reveals America's Deadly History of School Shootings

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, December 20 2012

A new map created by a Seattle entrepreneur hopes to show the world that school shootings in the United States are far from rare. In fact, such shootings have happened with disturbing frequency. In 2012, there were at least 12 gun-related incidents at schools across the country, according to data Whitepages.com CEO Alex Algard has mapped out at Stoptheshootings.org. Read More

Thousands Across Web Pledge Moment of Silence To Honor Sandy Hook Elementary Victims

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Thursday, December 20 2012

Causes.com, and some of the crew who put together the anti-SOPA/PIPA protests early this year, have organized an online 'moment of silence' Friday morning to honor the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting ... Read More

Familiar Names From Anti-SOPA Coalition Appear in Support of Gun-Control Push

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, December 19 2012

Dozens of big-name doers unveiled their support Wednesday for additional federal gun control legislation and stepped up enforcement of existing laws in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Mass. The list of supporters behind this advocacy effort includes many of the celebrity activists — such as Conway, Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson and MC Hammer — who got involved in the protests earlier this year against the copyright-related SOPA/PIPA bills. Read More

How One Women's Rights Group Is Betting On Facebook in 2013

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, December 19 2012

Unless you’re a woman who’s experienced reproductive health issues, you’d probably never heard of the term “transvaginal ultrasound” until last February, when Virginia’s lawmakers considered enacting a rule that would have made them mandatory for women who had decided to terminate their pregnancies. The National Women's Law Center hopes to change that. Using a social media-centric strategy, the 40-year-old advocacy organization plans to build a network of state-level activists by reaching out to young women who might not be aware of what they call a nationwide effort to chip away at support for women's health and reproductive rights. Read More

After Shooting in Newtown, An Immediate Outcry Online: "Today is the Day"

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, December 14 2012

Photo: Flickr/Architect of the US Capitol

As people all over the United States struggle to understand the aftermath of a horrific shooting Friday that left 27 dead, including 20 children, calls emerged online for more gun control and new attention to mental health programs.
A lone gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Friday morning and opened fire, becoming responsible for the death of 27 people, 20 of them children, according to reports. The gunman is also dead, officials say. Read More

White House Deputy CTO Joins World Bank To Implement Bank's New Tech Strategy

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Wednesday, December 12 2012

The U.S.' former Deputy CTO Chris Vein has joined the World Bank. Photo: Flickr/Code for America

Chris Vein is someone who's built a career on bringing innovation to government bureaucracies, first for the city of San Francisco under Mayor Gavin Newsom, and then at the Obama Administration's White House as a deputy chief technology officer. He is now moving on to help the governments of the rest of the world. Read More

Award Project Hopes To Enable Facebook Users To Become Online Freedom Fighters

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, December 11 2012

Brian Duggan, a technologist at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., wants to use Facebook, the network under fire in some quarters for its refusal to allow anonymous users or even to permit people to use a pseudonym, to enable anonymous speech for anyone in the world. Read More

'Facebookistan''s Experiment With 'Democracy' Ends With A Whimper

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Monday, December 10 2012

Facebook's brief dalliance with the idea of a user-driven community establishing its own rules of self-governance ended Monday when voting over a proposed set of changes to the service's terms of service ended without ... Read More

ICYMI: Jim DeMint's Move To Heritage Forecast A Year Ahead On Twitter

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Friday, December 7 2012

Republican tech and political operative Jon Henke, who's been keeping a relatively low profile in the political world of late, has been receiving a lot of offers from strangers to manage their stock portfolios of late. ... Read More

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Cory Booker Hires Democratic Organizing Veteran Addisu Demissie To Manage Senate Run

Newark Mayor Cory Booker has hired a veteran of the Democratic organizing world Addisu Demissie to manage his run to succeed the late New Jersey Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. GO

ShareProgress Debuts Social Sharing Optimization Tools

ShareProgress, a left-leaning tech startup in downtown San Francisco, launched its social sharing optimization platform Tuesday after several months of testing with the progressive advocacy group CREDO Action. GO

New Organizing Institute to Move from Collecting Election Data to Organizing Election Officials

The New Organizing Institute, a progressive nonprofit that trains campaigners and is no led by former Obama for America data director Ethan Roeder, is launching a new initiative next week aiming to "fix that" for local elections. NOI will announce a national network where local election administration officials can congregate to share solutions to common issues. It's a transition for a team at NOI that had previously been managing the Voting Information Project, which collects data on polling places, election districts and voter registration deadlines and prepares it for third parties in machine-readable format. In the 2012 election cycle, backed by the Pew Charitable Trusts and partnered with Google, VIP made information available in all 50 states. GO

Russian SOPA Passed First Reading

A first draft of a law nicknamed “Russian SOPA” was approved by the Russian parliament last Friday, June 14. Like the original Stop Online Piracy Act, the bill will establish penalties and procedures for online copyright violations.

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Czech Prime Minister Resigns Following Corruption and Surveillance Scandal

The prime minister of the Czech Republic resigned yesterday, irreparably damaged by a corruption scandal and the possibility of impropriety in his personal life. According to the Czech constitution, his entire government will also have to relinquish office.

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Mayors of New York City and San Francisco Announce "Digital Cities" Summit

The Mayors of New York City and San Francisco announced Friday that they're co-hosting meetings in the Fall and early next year to examine the "best practices" that lead to tech-enabled economic growth. The meetings are follow-ups to the initial Bloomberg Technology Summit held last year in New York City. This year's summit in New York ... GO

New York State Joins GitHub to Get Feedback on Open Data Policy

New York is the first state to publish an initial draft of its open data guidelines on GitHub to seek feedback from the public, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced in a press release Thursday. GO

Brazilians Protest Forced Evictions on YouTube and in Mock World Cup

Tomorrow Brazilians who have been forced out of their housing in advance of the 2014 World Cup will stage their own “People's Cup” in Rio de Janeiro to draw awareness to forced evictions.

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A “Fix-Rate” for Corruption: Integrity Action Wins the Google Global Impact Award

“From wanachi (“citizen”) to up there,” Emmanuel Dzombo explains with an upward sweep of his hand, is how Integrity Action has begun to reverse the bureaucratic top-down approach that has often blocked development work in Kenya. Dzombo is a local leader in Chengoni, Kenya, a country that ranks towards the very bottom of Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index – at 139. The organization believes it could do more, and Google.org seems to agree. The Google Impact Challenge will provide the charity with £500,000 that will allow it to develop a mobile application for tracking and collecting data from citizens. GO

Crowdsourced "Danger Maps" Track Air, Soil and Water Pollution in China

Chinese citizens are exposing sources of pollution and other environmental problems by contributing to the partially crowdsourced website 'Danger Maps'. So far, the Chinese government is letting them get away with it.

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U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board To Meet Next Wednesday

A long dormant independent agency that was at least nominally supposed to exercise a modicum of oversight over the booming intelligence-industrial complex is scrambling to meet up next Wednesday, but the public will still be none the wiser about what it plans to do, since it is a closed door meeting. The only indication that the toothless ... GO

Despite Software Problems, Civic Hackers are Pedaling Bike Share Data

Reporters are shoaling around the news that New York City's new bike sharing system, Citi Bike, is benighted with problems stemming from its high-tech software. But that's not putting the brakes on plans to explore what programmers might do with data generated by the system by hosting a Citi Bike Civic Hack Night later this month. GO

Grassroots Republicans Are Not Waiting for the RNC To Revamp Their Digital Strategy

Several members of the Republican Party rank and file aren't waiting around for the GOP to reinvent itself on the technological front. They're organizing events themselves to explore what a tech-enabled GOP might look like for the 2014 cycle. GO

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New Russian Law Makes Publication of Information on Gay Rights Illegal

On June 11 the Russian parliament passed a bill against “homosexual propaganda” that effectively outlaws gay rights rallies and bans informational or pro-gay rights material from publication in the media or on the Internet. Violators of the law will risk heavy fines and censorship and, in the case of a media outlet, risk being shut down. It had near unanimous support, passing in a 436-to-0 vote, with only one abstention.

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Macedonia Draft Law to Regulate and Restrict the "Last Arena for Freedom of Speech"

The draft of a media regulation law in Macedonia has journalists and press freedom watchdogs up in arms. The proposed Law on Media and Audiovisual Media Services was written by the government behind closed doors and without input from the media or NGOs. It has been interpreted as a decisive move on the part of the government to limit speech online in a country where press freedoms are already limited. Until now, Internet-based news sites were not regulated like print media.

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