Selling the "digital gap"

• Steve Friess rounds up another look at the state of Republican political technology:

  The DNC’s system, known as the Voter Activation Network is a mammoth, ongoing database that has been tracking the interests, voting histories, family circumstances and much more on more than 150 million voters since 2006. That’s when then-DNC Chairman Howard Dean mandated that every state-level Democratic unit contribute to and have access to the same system, developing a powerful weapon that the GOP simply won’t match in the near term.

  “Republicans have historically been a lot more selfish about their sharing of data and sharing of information,” said Vincent Harris, the 24-year-old GOP digital strategist who leveraged social media to put little-known Ted Cruz on his path to the Senate. “There’s no central hub. That integration is priceless, and that’s what [Priebus] needs to lead us on.”

Politics versus civics

• Anthea Watson Strong, who helped to organize Google's Political Innovation Summit on Friday, writes about a divide that emerged there between civic hackers whose focus is on greater political engagement writ large and politicos who would be perfectly happy to have the only voters be the ones they need in order to win:

  Attendees from the civic space worried about the effect campaign technology has on civic engagement, and at times seemed openly hostile to the methods campaigns have developed to win elections.

  However, as pointed out late in the day, campaigns are not tasked with increasing civic engagement— they are tasked with winning. Campaign operatives have an ethical duty to a candidate and must invest resources to win the race. It would be wrong for them to focus resources anywhere other than on winning an advantage over the opponent.

  Watson Strong's suggestion: Bring the political operatives into conversations around larger questions.

Around the web

• Ari Melber on Mark Zuckerberg's social network: "Facebook’s latest program, Graph Search, may be the company’s largest privacy infraction ever."

• Here's a defense of Washington, D.C.'s tech scene.

• Kansas City, Mo., is getting a chief innovation officer, the city's first. Ashley Z. Hand takes that portfolio as of Feb. 4.

• Secretary of State Hillary Clinton planned to announce on Monday that the State Department will be investing in open education online. Forget 21st-century statecraft, it's all about 21st-century MOOC-craft?

• Don't say NASA just does open government anymore, they're focused on "open innovation."

• Today, the Advisory Committee on Transparency hosts a panel presentation in DC called "Kick-starting the 113th Congress."

• Facebook staffer Corey Owens will become Uber's new head of global public policy, per The Hill.

• Cutest map ever? WNYC used New York City data on dog licensing to map New Yorkers' dog names, breeds, and neighborhoods.

International

• The Open Government Partnership is looking for researchers to evaluate transparency initiatives on the part of each of the original members of the global open-government initiative.

• When Brits need to log in to government websites, they may be able to do so with their PayPal credentials.

• Perhaps taking a cue from American defense contractors, supporters of the Iranian government are setting up fake blogs and websites to smear and intimidate journalists critical of their regime.