Tag: Policy

Make America Great: The Answer is Us

By

We the People

By coincidence, not design, I spent the two weeks after the election in the Bay Area, Sacramento and Washington, D.C., engaging with over 100 groups and leaders about the future of our country— bipartisan leaders in media, foundations, think tanks, NGOs, businesses, labor, technology, the academy, public service and the faith community. What I discussed with them is what we do now to move the United States forward. Is the American Dream dead? As we move beyond shock (and for many of us grieving), is there a constructive path out? Can it be bi-partisan? I believe so — it is called Progressive Federalism (a term coined by Andrei Cherny in the Democracy Journal and Joel Rogers and Richard Freeman in an important book on inequality).

The Original Progressive
Read More

Facebook’s Choice: Mission or Market?

By

Konrad Foerstner | Flickr

Facebook has developed software tools to help governments suppress posts they don’t like, Mike Isaac reports in The New York Times. In the past the social network, like other U.S.-based internet services, has removed content in some countries to comply with local laws. But this new approach — aimed at helping Facebook re-enter the huge China market it left seven years ago — would allow third parties to preemptively ban stories and topics from users’ news feeds.

The censorship tools haven’t yet been deployed or offered to China, according to unnamed Facebook employees who confirmed their existence, and they might never be. That depends on how badly the company wants to operate in China, where rivals like Google and Twitter have also been locked out — and how satisfied the Chinese authorities are with Facebook’s ability to stifle dissent. But anyone working at Facebook must be wondering, as the Times story does: How can you square this project with the company’s mission to “make the world more open and connected”? Or does the mission just get tossed out the window in the face of a massive market opportunity?

Read More

The Gig Economy Will Not Abolish Working 9 to 5

By

Image source: Shutterstock

By Rory O’Farrell, OECD Economics Department.

There is little new about the ‘gig economy’. The word ‘gig’ originates from 1920s jazz musicians who played a small concert or ‘engagement’ at a venue. Dolly Parton may have sung about working 9 to 5, but her life was moving from one gig to another. We have always had plumbers, electricians, and lawyers who do temporary work, and are not paid by clients when they are idle. However, do new apps such as Uber or Deliveroo mean the end of the 9 to 5 job, and do these platforms need to be regulated?

Read More

Fake Reading Opened the Door for Fake News.

By


Here’s How to Fix It.

Headlines are a science now. If you’re sharing regular links, you’re part of the fake news problem.

Paste a link into Facebook or Twitter and voila, it automagically expands into a beautiful “card,” with hero image and headline. It looks good. It looks true. It looks like you’re sharing the story, but you’re not — you’re sharing a headline. You’re sharing the marketing.

Here are some other headlines we tested out for this piece:

Read More

More Plastic Than Fish In the Ocean? Time To Fix That.

By


The destructive deluge of plastic waste blighting our oceans is a huge environmental problem. 5 trillion pieces contaminate our seas and the accumulation is set to quadruple in the next 20 years. In fact, there is expected to be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050.

The large mass of fishing nets, plastic containers, bottles, packaging and other discarded items are killing and harming marine life and poisoning our fragile ecosystem.

Read More

Uncertain Future for Civic Tech

By

Brownpau | Flickr

Under Barack Obama, many idealistic tech-industry types — virtuosi of code, data wizards, interface gurus, and project pros — decamped to D.C. to put their skills to work for the government. What will happen to these efforts to improve the public sector’s use of information technology with the onset of the Trump administration?

“Massive IT failures do not have a party preference,” writes open-government activist David Eaves (NewCo Shift), in a plea to technologists on both sides of the partisan fence to work together and not “blow up” progress that’s already taken place.

Read More

The Future of USDS: Trump, Civic Tech and the Lesson of GDS

By


Across Washington, the country, and the world, the assumptions people have about various programs, policies and roles have been radically altered in the last 12 hours with the victory of President-Elect Trump. Many of my students and colleagues have asked me — what does this mean for the future of United States Digital Service and 18F? What should it mean?

This is not the most important question facing the administration. But for those of us in this space the question matters. Intensely. And we need a response. USDS and 18F improve how Americans interact with their government while saving significant amounts of money. Democrats and Republicans may disagree over the size of government, but there is often less disagreement over whether a service should be effectively and efficiently delivered. Few in either party believe a veteran should confront a maze of forms or confusing webpages to receive a service. And, the fact is, massive IT failures do not have a party preference. They have and will continue to burn any government without a clear approach of how to address them.

Read More

What I Discovered About Trump and Clinton From Analyzing 4 Million Facebook Posts

By

On Facebook, headlines are often more important than the articles themselves. Most headlines are browsed, not clicked — think about your own Facebook behavior; How often do you click on links? Because of this, the headlines frame our positions on topics without even having to read the content. It’s quick, simple, and we feel informed. But with respect to politics, this news feed browsing behavior creates an electorate that can become dangerously uninformed.

These same headlines also leave breadcrumbs of the 2016 political narrative, which we can analyze. For this study, we focused on four things:

  1. Exploring media coverage frequency and bias of “Trump” and “Clinton” across different media sources (Headlines)
  2. Comparing social media attention in 2016 to social media attention during the 2012 Obama vs. Romney campaign (Headlines)
  3. Describing other topics the mainstream media brought up when describing Trump and Clinton during the 2016 election (Headlines)
  4. Quantifying the differences in Facebook audience engagement for Clinton and Trump (Facebook Post Engagement)


Analysis Setup

Read More

Several Hundred Votes

By

Our Endorsement for Hillary

Al Gore acknowledges the crowd at Web 2 Summit, November 2008

One of the most indelible images of my career was backstage at the Web 2 Summit, the day after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. I was in the wings of the main stage at the Sheraton Palace hotel in San Francisco. Out in the ballroom, a thousand of technology’s elite stood roaring and jubilant, delivering a standing ovation to the man who had just walked on stage.

Al Gore strode to the podium, grasped it on both sides, looked out into the lights and the crowd, and suddenly — it hit him. Eight years before almost to the day, several hundred hanging chads fluttering in the Florida breeze had stolen his Presidency. The Supreme Court then delivered it to George Bush.

Read More

The Real Moonshot of Our Time

By

Illustration: Streetwise Media

Instead of “techsplaining” the future, we need radical humanism

As we adjust to living digital cheek by digital jowl in our hyper-connected world, we’re rapidly approaching a technological shift that will be even bigger than the Internet — the union of man and machine. Some would say that day has already come, as we go about our business tethered to Google Now and Snapchat.

But the coming wave of super-intelligent computers will accelerate and deepen our connection to technology like never before. In the near future, computers will possess increasingly sophisticated types of machine intelligence and “deep learning” algorithms. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will challenge us to rethink what it means to be human.

The Hybrids

Read More