While Jihad Waged in Iraq and Syria, Counter Narratives Go Online

Poverty is a social problem, but can it benefit from a business solution? According to HandUp, a San Francisco startup that teams with service organizations to channel donations directly towards those in need, the answer is yes. Co-founder and CEO Rose Broome started thinking about the issue a year and a half ago, after coming across a woman sleeping in the streets of San Francisco on a cold evening. Read More

Two years ago, on the morning of the 2012 election in the United States, I got an email with an urgent subject line: "You should write the story of how Facebook blew an opportunity to turn out 300k voters." The sender, a veteran progressive online activist who would prefer to remain anonymous, was upset for good reason. The election was bound to be close, and as of 10am that morning he hadn't yet seen an "I'm Voting" button on his Facebook page, nor had another colleague of his. Nor was one on my own Facebook page. Given that when Facebook deployed a similar "I Voted" button in 2010, and added messages in users' News Feeds showing them the names and faces of friends who had said they voted, the cumulative effect boosted turnout then by at least 340,000 votes, these activists had good reason to be concerned. Facebook had announced that it was going to do the same thing in 2012, and this time around its American user base had grown enormously, from 61 million to more than 160 million. A social and visible nudge like an "I 'm Voting" button had the potential to measurably increase turnout, even more so as Facebook was including a useful tool to help people find their polling places. And yet on Election Day 2012 its deployment was far from universal. Facebook was conducting research on us. Read More

How Google is starting to implement the "right to be forgotten" decision in Europe; more Facebook research experiments on its users; Lawrence Lessig teams up with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff; and much, much more. Read More

More on the Facebook emotional contagion controversy; how local governments and law enforcement are embracing social media; how the Internet Archive is tracking Philadelphia's news ecosystem; and much, much more. Read More

Facebook's manipulation of its users' News Feeds makes news; the new NSA director shrugs at Snowden while protests grow; how the Supreme Court's Riley decision may affect government surveillance practices; and much, much more. Read More

FCC chairman Wheeler sounds out Silicon Valley on net neutrality; Chris Soghoian schools German parliamentarians on their own surveillance state; tech billionaire Nick Hanauer warns of class warfare; and much, much more. Read More

Brigade, the $9 million Silicon Valley civic engagement startup backed by billionaire Sean Parker that is promoting itself as restoring voters "to the center of our democracy," got a hard whack on Twitter today after it unveiled more details about its leadership team on its nascent website. Read More

The Supreme Court says "get a warrant"; how the Snowden Effect is leading to promised improvements in European privacy protections and a balkanized Internet; Sean Parker's Brigade attracts criticism for its male-heavy leadership team; and much, much more. Read More

The Knight Foundation gives $3.4 million to groups expanding the open Internet; Comcast and NBC hackathon winners promote entertainment apps; Rock the Vote relaunches its website; and much, much more. Read More

Booker-Rubio bill to expand Wi-Fi spectrum launches; House members cryptoparty on the Hill; Chicago's new sensor network has fans and detractors; and much, much more. Read More

The White House once boasted that 5.4 million people have created We The People accounts, resulting in 9.2 million signatures. But the statistic only shows that there are less than 2 signatures per person, which means that the average user is signing a single petition and then never returning again. David Karpf explains how and why the White House's e-petition site has failed to take off. Read More

Currently, it is not possible for New Yorkers to easily sign up to track updates on City Council meetings and legislative activities. But in fact, there could be an easy fix for the problem that could help transform how members of the public engage with their government. That is what emerged from a #PDF14 workshop that illustrated how the realization of visions for open government in New York often comes down to wonky nuts and bolts issues related to government web platforms, procurement and access to open data. Read More

A full transcript of the Personal Democracy Forum 2014 keynote, Surveillance and its Discontents: A Conversation Across Cyberspace, with Edward Snowden and John Perry Barlow Read More

Elon Musk goes open source with his cars; the Snowdenbot saves a life; the New York Times and "better underwear"; and much much more. Read More

Police have the ability to trace you from your cellphone, track you from your social media activity, and even collect or buy data on where you've been driving. But the degree of surveillance –knowledge of which police ... Read More

Brian Chesky on Airbnb and the economy; Anne-Marie Slaughter on five ways for a new America; Clay Shirky on why time is our weapon; and much much more. Read More

In a talk entitled “The Calculus of Civic Innovation,” Anthea Watson Strong discussed how tools for civic engagement might be made more effective. Read More

One year has passed since Edward Snowden revealed himself to the world as the whistleblower who leaked hundreds of National Security Agency documents and exposed the true scope and workings of its mass surveillance operations. What have we learned thanks to Snowden's revelations? What has the government done and has anything changed for the better? Read More

Edward Snowden's talk with EFF's John Perry Barlow; Reset the Net; surveillance burkas; and much much more from the first day of #PDF14. Read More

Democracy.com announced Thursday that it has unveiled what it calls the most comprehensive searchable database of American elected officials, candidates, appointees and political organizations at all levels of government. As techPresident previously reported, the non-partisan Democracy.com platform launched last fall with the aim of establishing a social network for politics with a focus on helping local candidates have access to a professional web presence and fundraising tools. With the rollout of the expanded search function, Democracy.com hopes to take another step towards making the political process more accessible in spite of a fractured American political landscape, explained Talmage Cooley, founder and CEO of Democracy.com. Read More

A storify of Edward #Snowden's talk at #PDF14 Read More

Richard Nixon had the tape recorder. The next Nixon will have the NSA's entire Utah data center said Holmes Wilson and Tiffiniy Cheng during this morning's session explaining "Reset the Net," an anti-surveillance ... Read More

Friday's conference on the Collaborative, Peer and Sharing Economy (let's say CPSE for short, though CollaPSE is a tempting acronym) at NYU's Stern School of Business was an attempt to reckon with the so-called sharing economy, its potential and its contradictions. Everyone agreed that peer-to-peer networks are changing markets for lodging (Airbnb), transportation (Lyft and Uber), commerce (Etsy, Ebay), and potentially other parts of the economy like finance, and healthcare. Views over the extent of this change differed as panelists explored the new economy's potential as a business, its fraught relationship with regulators, and its capacity to transform society. Largely moderated by NYU Stern professor and sharing economy booster Arun Sundararajan, the conference provided an opportunity to see what those working within, or at least dealing with (as in the case of regulators) the CPSE thought of their own work. Although many speakers took the transformative potential of the CPSE as more of an article of faith than evidence, on the whole, the conference provided insights into how the economy might work, and the impact it might have. Here are a few highlights: Read More

About 9 months ago, Daniel Ajema, a 33-year-old law student moonlighting as a driver for Uber, ran into a fellow driver in a gas station parking lot. The man had just been fired for getting poor ratings from passengers. But as a private contractor, like every other driver for the app based transportation network, he had no recourse to the company. What could he do? Two Sundays ago, a couple hundred Uber drivers provided an answer, by forming a labor group with the help of the local Teamsters union, called the App-Based Drivers Association. The group won’t have the full powers of a union, for instance leadership can’t vote to make its entire membership strike. But with about a third of Seattle drivers signed on, the group hopes to use its leverage to advocate for greater transparency and responsiveness from the $12 billion company. Read More

The debate over net neutrality reached a peak Thursday, as the FCC voted in favor of a proposal that would allow Internet service providers to charge websites and content providers for higher quality and faster delivery, and activists expressed their opposition online and offline, as GigaOm explains in more detail.But especially online, the focus of the opponents of the proposals is already shifting rapidly now to the 120 day comment period and the potential to significantly reshape the final proposals at the end of the year. Read More

For the past seven years Sascha Meinrath and his team at the New America Foundation have made the Open Technology Institute a force for promoting a more open, accessible internet. He has informed internet policy, and built innovative tools, like the Commotion mesh network. He has also found that much of the work of being a tech policy guru comes in reacting to crises–from Snowden’s leaks to the potential death of net neutrality. “Bad things happen and then we leap into action and do the best we can,” he says. “Then all of the sudden everyone is like ‘Oh my god. This is so horrendously bad.’ And then we’re trying to fix what’s clearly broken.” To set the tech policy agenda rather than react to it, Meinrath is starting up a new program under the New America foundation called X-Lab. Read More

How and why did the Nigerian movement #BringBackOurGirls end up being credited to an American mother of two in Los Angeles? Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who studies how activists and politicians use technology, weighs in. Read More

When it comes to online activist movements, such as the now infamous KONY 2012 effort, the question under discussion often ends up being to what degree online action can motivate offline action. But a close look at a new online call that has taken hold over the past weeks, #BringBackOurGirls, shows that the power of a hashtag can be in the much more complex interplay between online and offline actions that reinforce and intensify each other. Read More

The New York Police Department has published long-sought motor vehicle collision data in a machine-readable format in connection with the launch of BigApps 2014, the city's annual application development competition that will place a focus on Mayor Bill de Blasio's Vision Zero initiative to eliminate traffic fatalities, setting an example for other cities, according to open data advocates. Read More

The White House released its report on big data Friday to general approval from civil rights advocates for its acknowledgement of the dangers of discrimination through new ways of manipulating, combining and analyzing personal data. However, a number of concerns remain: that the report was too starry-eyed about big data; that the report gave preference to industry stakeholders rather than citizen consumers; and that its policy recommendations were not forceful enough.

The latest entry into the “It’s like Facebook, but with less functionality and far fewer people” sweepstakes is Galt.io. The site, which just beta-launched this week, says it will be a location-based social network for libertarians, and invites its visitors to “Go Galt’ Without Leaving Home.” We asked Internet politics expert David Karpf to take a closer look, and he writes, "Of all the technology-revolutionizing-politics websites I’ve encountered, this is by far the silliest. Their one success thus far has been claiming to raise nearly $700,000 in crowdfunding membership pledges from 6,475 supporters. Converting those donations into meaningful political action is going to prove a lot harder for them." Read More