First POST: Company
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, December 16 2014
The global "Snowden effect" is huge; how many consumer-facing online services fail the user privacy test; the Dems' 2016 digital to-do list; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Listicalization
BY Micah L. Sifry | Wednesday, December 10 2014
The FCC warns police agencies that jamming cell phones is illegal; Emily Bell chides the journalistic elite for piling on Chris Hughes; Change.org pulls in funding from some of Silicon Valley's richest; and much, much more. Read More
A Behind the Scenes Look at Expunge.Maryland, Your Automated Expungement Paralegal
BY Jason Tashea | Tuesday, December 9 2014
The Expunge Maryland app (Jason Tashea)
This past summer my colleague Jon Tippens and I forked Smart Chicago’s Expunge.io to create ExpungeMaryland.org. Since ExpungeMaryland’s launch in July, there has been interest in how we created the app. This post provides background to other jurisdictions looking to replicate the expungement app model. Read More
Jersey Shore Hurricane News: Using Facebook and Crowdsourcing to Build a News Network
BY Jessica McKenzie | Wednesday, November 19 2014
Jersey Shore Hurricane News has grown into a news outlet for much more than just severe weather updates (credit: Robert Siliato)
When Hurricane Irene barreled down on the East Coast in 2011, one news source had some irregular advice from one New Jerseyan to another: "Fill up some Ziploc bags with water NOW and freeze....keep them on hand for when we lose power and you need that ice to keep the beer cold." The tip was punctuated not with a period but with a smiley face, and it was first posted to Facebook, the home of a new citizen journalism outlet: Jersey Shore Hurricane News.
Read MoreFirst POST: Patient Zero
BY Micah L. Sifry | Tuesday, October 21 2014
Monica Lewinsky emerges with a mission to fight cyber-bullying; Marc Andreessen explains his political philosophy; tech donors to MayDay PAC get pushback from Congressional incumbents; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Data Dumps
BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, September 12 2014
The Internet Slowdown's impact on the FCC; Uber drivers try to go on strike; four kinds of civic tech; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Precrime
BY Micah L. Sifry | Thursday, July 24 2014
How the US government determines who to put on its "known or suspected terrorist" list, no-fly list and selectee list; Israelis sharing Gaza casualty news over social media; Twitter's diversity report; and much, much more. Read More
First POST: Signals
BY Micah L. Sifry | Friday, July 18 2014
FCC in the cross-hairs on net neutrality and local broadband pre-emption; the political mood at Netroots Nation; how an Israeli rocket-alert app affects perceptions of the conflict with Gaza; and much, much more. Read More
#FlashHacks: Crowdscraping Corporate Data to Understand "The Man"
BY Jessica McKenzie | Tuesday, July 8 2014
(Photo: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay)
You probably work for “The Man.” If not you, then someone close to you does, and even if you have no friends or family, your government is almost certainly doing business with him. Wouldn't it be nice to know a bit more about the so-called “Man”? Thanks to the massive open data project OpenCorporates, you now can, and they are intensifying their data opening efforts with #FlashHacks, a crowdscraping campaign launched today. The campaign goal is to release 10 million data points on the companies you work for, work with, buy from, sell to, and deal with in tangible and intangible ways every day, and all in just 10 days.
Read MoreThat's So Meta: To Test Digital Democracy, Crowdsourcing Comments on Digital Democracy
BY Jessica McKenzie | Monday, July 7 2014
Balanced facts on sensitive subjects, but could a community like Wikipedia come to a consensus on fraught policy decisions?
For more than a month now, Wikimedia Meta-Wiki, the global Wikimedia community site, has hosted a little experiment in digital democracy. Carl Miller, co-founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think tank Demos-UK, and Wikimedia UK's Stevie Benton wanted to see whether the mechanisms that govern Wikipedia could be applied to political policy. The opportunity to do so arose when the House of Commons Speaker John Bercow announced the Commission on Digital Democracy, an investigation into how digital technology can be used to improve democratic processes, and solicited comments from the public.
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