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

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

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

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

Photo credit: Elon University Read More

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

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

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

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