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Civic Hackers in the U.S. and Russia Asked to 'Code4Country'

BY Nick Judd | Friday, September 9 2011

In the past few years, groups of civic-minded programmers have shown that when they get together to write code, they can build things that change anything from the way people respond to natural disasters to how they ... Read More

Departures Continue Among White House Tech Staff

BY Nick Judd | Friday, July 8 2011

Politico notes the rising unease about the recent string of departures among the White House's tech staff. White House Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra will leave in August. Deputy chief technology officer Beth ... Read More

Civic Commons Gets Funding, Andrew McLaughlin

BY Nick Judd | Wednesday, June 1 2011

Andrew McLaughlin, Civic Commons' new executive director, in 2008. Photo: Joi Ito/Flickr The fledgling open-source-for-governments project Civic Commons will launch as a nonprofit with the help of a $250,000 grant from ... Read More

Lessig, Zittrain, McLaughlin, and Solomon Talk Internet Off Buttons

BY Nancy Scola | Friday, April 1 2011

Over on Al Jazeera, Larry Lessig, Jon Zittrain, Andrew McLaughlin, and Access's Brett Solomon discuss "the politics of the 'Internet Kill Switch,'" as in the idea that a society could have one or a few ... Read More

Deputy U.S. CTO McLaughlin Leaves White House Post

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, December 23 2010

Photo credit: Elon University Read More

Consumer Watchdog Reacts to McLaughlin Reprimand

BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, May 20 2010

Consumer Watchdog's reaction to Deputy U.S. CTO Andrew McLaughlin's limited, though inappropriate, contact with his former colleagues at Google is to say that the McLaughlin's Google ties alone were never the problem. Read More

Google All the Way Down

BY Nancy Scola | Tuesday, May 18 2010

Ben Smith, as per usual, applies a refreshing, clarifying lens to the news of the day. It's the irony that I left out of yesterday's look at Deputy U.S. CTO Andrew McLaughlin's reprimand: that it involved a former Google ... Read More

White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin Slapped for Gmailing with Googlers

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, May 17 2010

A 2008 photo of Andrew McLaughlin taken by Joi Ito, used under a Creative Commons license. Read More

Deputy CTO's Buzz Contacts Set Off FOIA Request

BY Nancy Scola | Monday, April 12 2010

Today is "Better Know Your Social Media Settings" on the blog, it seems. Read More

White House Deputy CTO Challenges Republicans, Tea Party to Openness Competition

BY Micah L. Sifry | Monday, February 22 2010

A fast tip of the hat to White House deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin, who had this to say Friday at a forum on open government: “I would be thrilled to make this a type of political competition ... to see who can be more ... Read More

News Briefs

RSS Feed wednesday >

Now You Can See Who Really Pays NYC Property Taxes

Property tax revenue makes up around a quarter of New York City's budget, but until now broader information about it has not been easily accessible. Users could only look up individual properties by entering lot and block information into a basic online form on a city website, and would have had to cross-reference that information with a building's address and other sources, explained Chris Whong, co-organizer of New York City's Code for America brigade betaNYC. "This data is much more powerful in the aggregate," he said. That's why, as part of last week's Code Across NYC hackathon, he along with several collaborators worked to develop an online platform "born out of curiosity" that maps New York City property data. GO

Facebook's Got A Finger in India's Political Pie

Facebook is an increasingly active political force in India. The company launched their Indian election tracker Tuesday to coincide with the first Facebook Talks Live digital broadcast, “Town Hall” style conversations in which 2014 candidates field questions submitted by Facebook users. These projects build on the get-out-the-vote collaboration between the Times of India and Facebook, which was announced in September.

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Civic Crowdfunding Looks to Bigger Projects with Phased Campaigns

Civic crowdfunding dreamed big but started small. The platform Neighbor.ly grabbed attention for a 2012 campaign to help fund a multi-million dollar rail car in Kansas City, but only raised $3,775 of its $10 million goal. The early campaigns of both Neighbor.ly and Citizinvestor that were actually successful reached for modest goals, usually less than $15,000. A look at the campaign pages of either platform today shows larger projects, in the tens or hundreds of thousands, creeping in as well. Civic crowdfunding is growing. To facilitate and attract more large projects Citizinvestor this week announced a plan to crowdfund projects in phases. GO

YanukovychLeaks.org Exposes a Corrupt and Violent Regime

Thousands of documents float and sink in a remote reservoir not far from a grand 345-acre estate contained within a sprawling wrought iron fence. As evocative as it may seem, this not the beginning of a spy thriller, but of Yanukovych Leaks, an online portal where the leaks have been uploaded by investigative journalists who say the extravagance detailed in those papers may prove ousted President Viktor Yanukovych's depth of corruption. GO

tuesday >

Surveillance in the Overlooked Corners of Africa

In the video below, filmed during the Oslo Freedom Forum in May 2013, Jacob Appelbaum breaks it to Rafael Marques, an Angolan investigative journalist and anti-corruption activist, that his laptop is being surveilled through a crude backdoor in spite of the fact that he is using Tor. He opens up a file where they can see all the images that have been stored and are waiting to be collected by the hackers. Appelbaum tells an understandably concerned Marques: “Every computer that's targeted is compromisable,”

GO

monday >

How To Follow… The Crisis in Ukraine (Updated)

The EuroMaidan Revolution has passed the 100 day mark and Russian forces have taken control of parts of Crimea. The New York Times described the escalating conflict between Russia and the West as “reminiscent of low points in the Cold War.” The Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk has said that “we are on the brink of disaster.”

GO

friday >

Enthusiasm and Challenges for Making NYC Local Government More Tech-Friendly

Last weekend, around one hundred members of New York City's civic hacker community came together to help develop tools that would be useful for City Council and local Community Board members as part of Code Across NYC, organized by Code for America brigade betaNYC. As part of the event, open government advocates Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer and City Council member Ben Kallos discussed their transparency advocacy. With input from five Community Board members and New York City officials, the weekend program resulted in the creation of 20 projects, of which 12 were submitted for five awards. But even with all the enthusiasm, many challenges remain to making technology more accessible to local government, as participants and subsequent City Council hearings this week indicated. GO

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