Friday must-reads

• Personal Democracy Plus exclusive: The New Organizing Institute's new executive director, Obama for America alumni Ethan Roeder, tells Sarah Lai Stirland that the Democratic Party still doesn't have enough data-driven campaigners. That's where NOI comes in — an organization with an increasing number of connections throughout the party on a mission to train a new generation of candidates and campaign operatives.

• ICYMI: For ProPublica, Lois Beckett explores the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party's sophisticated, grandma-driven data operation. Grandma-driven, yes, that's right:

  Much of the data the Grandma Brigade collects is prosaic: records of campaign donations or voters who have recently died. But a few volunteers see free information everywhere. They browse the listings of names on Tea Party websites. They might add a record of what was said around the family Thanksgiving table — Uncle Mitch voted for Bachmann, cousin Alice supports gay marriage.

  One data volunteer even joked about holding "rat out your neighbor parties," where friends would be encouraged to add notes about the political views of other people on their block.

• Iowa Democrat Brad Anderson, who ran the Obama campaign's 2012 Iowa effort, has announced plans to run for secretary of state. Criticizing voter ID proposals pushed for by the current Republican incumbent, Anderson said an electronic verification system to check in voters made more sense, the Des Moines Register reported. He praised The Precinct Atlas Program developed by Republican Ken Kline, the auditor in auditor in Cerro Gordo County. "It’s essentially a digital poll book that replaces the binders of papers. The database flags convicted felons, people who have already requested a ballot by absentee, and those who are at the wrong precinct. And it doesn’t disenfranchise a single voter," he said.

• Software engineer Luigi Montanez writes about the rise of the activist engineer:

  The prospects for more activist engineers are bolstered by a failed promise of Silicon Valley. A long-time refrain has been that VC-backed Silicon Valley startups can indeed change the world. But the current crop of consumer web and mobile startups don’t live up to that ideal. SnapChat and Facebook Poke aren’t changing the world, they’re enabling people to be even more self-centered and insular. Airbnb and Uber, two terrific services that are profoundly disrupting their markets, don’t make that dent in the universe Steve Jobs once spoke of.

• In officially nominating Jack Lew as treasury secretary, Obama said, "I had never noticed Jack’s signature. When this was highlighted yesterday in the press I considered rescinding my offer to appoint him. Jack assures me that he will work to make at least one letter legible in order not to debase our currency should he be confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury." Yahoo News offered a Jack Lew Signature Generator. The NYC Public Schools Twitter feed posted yesterday, "Congrats to Jack Lew (Forest Hills HS '72) on his nomination as Secretary of the Treasury. We're proud of all of our students' penmanship!"

Around the web

• The Center for Responsive Politics unveiled a page tracking inauguration donors.

• Priorities USA Action has filed its first report.

• As the anniversary of the SOPA protests approaches, Ali Sternburg from the Computer and Communications Industry Association summarizes some of the previews of what to expect from the 113th Congress on copyright policy. Ars Technica wonders if the copyright reformers would "hit back" this year bus also suggests that copyright enforcement would not be a big priority for Congress thanks to shock from the SOPA protests.

• Philip Ashlock writes about building MyGov, one of the Presidential Innovation Fellows projects, as an open platform.

• Wired looked at how Github is increasingly allowing developers to "hack the government."

• The MIT Technology Review reported on how labs across the country are exploring ways to improve networks so they can handle the growing number of wireless devices robustly and efficiently.

• A.J. Daulerio is leaving his position as editor of Gawker and will be replaced by John Cook.

• Homicide Watch is expanding to Chicago.

• Poynter spoke with journalists about best practices in data journalism following the controversy over the Journal News.

• The city of Boston was set to robocall 45,000 residents about getting a flu shot, after it declared a state of emergency over its flu outbreak.

• The California Attorney General released mobile privacy recommendations.

• Developer Alex Barkan analyzed two years worth of New York City MTA service announcements and found that the G train, long held as the worst line in the city, actually is not the most frequently disrupted route.

• A man in Minnesota was charged for recording a video of sheriff's deputies. "If I end up on YouTube, I'm gonna be upset," the deputy told the man in an audio file of the exchange provided to the Pioneer Press.

• Mediashift recently recapped an event held in Brooklyn to bring scientists and technologists together to work on environmental projects.

• Ken Layne writes for the Awl that San Francisco "is the Brooklyn to Silicon Valley's unbuilt Manhattan."

• CNN recently took a look at start-ups in New Orleans.

• CBS has prevented its subsidiary Cnet from giving a Consumer Electronics Show award to Dish for its Hopper technology because of CBS' legal dispute with Dish over the device. Cnet also added an editorial note that it would no longer review any product subject to litigation from its parent company.

• The Open Government Partnership released statistics on its first 16 months as it held a regional meeting in Chile. OGP also recently held a European outreach meeting in Rome.

• Ann Mei Chang, Senior Advisor for Women and Technology in the Secretary of State's Office of Global Women's Issues, cites a new study from Intel:

  ... [T]he gender gap in women's access to the Internet is even greater than that of mobile phones, with women being 23 percent less likely to use the Internet in low-to-medium income countries. That gap soars to 43 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, where men are almost twice as likely to have access to the Internet as women.

• China will reportedly require that all new built residences located in counties and cities where a public fiber optic telecom network is available must be equipped with fiber network connections.

• Quartz looked at how expats in China circumvent Internet censorship.

• The International Herald Tribune has more details on one EU legislator's proposal to create an agency to enforce measures giving Internet users more control over use of their data.

• Chinese authorities are investigating allegations of bribery at Foxconn.