news

Medium

Delivering Government Services in the Digital Age, with support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative

Did you know that our government safety net keeps more than 50 million Americans above the poverty line each year? In this holiday season…

journalism.co.uk

Publish.org, now in public beta, champions open, peer-reviewed journalism

The platform aims to help fuel a healthy news ecosystem and become a home for independent journalists

The Citizen Lab

Still Safer Without: Another look at Korean Child Monitoring and Filtering Apps - The Citizen Lab

South Korea requires minors to have content filtering apps installed on their phones. A security audit of two child monitoring apps published by major Korean telecoms —KT Olleh Kidsafe and Clean Mobile Plus—finds serious security and privacy issues that put children at risk.

TechNews 科技新報

路怎麼不見了！Pokémon GO 全面採用 OpenStreetMap 圖資

對於今天開啟 Pokémon GO 抓寶或是打怪的人來說，可能覺得看到的地圖有點不一樣，甚至比較鄉下的地還缺了不少道路。國內外網友指出 Niantic 不只拿 OpenStreetMap 來算不同棲地屬性出怪種類和機率，乾脆全面切換用 OpenStreetMap 資料替換原先的地圖 有...

Wikitribune

Hello, world: this is WikiTribune

An introductory letter from WikiTribune founder Jimmy Wales

Open Knowledge International Blog

OKFestival 2018 becomes Open Knowledge Summit May 2018 in Thessaloniki

It is with regret that due to recent circumstances within Open Knowledge International, we have come to the conclusion that it is necessary to cancel the planned Open Knowledge Festival 2018. This …

Socrata, Inc.

Five Communication Tips for Talking with Data Newbies - Socrata, Inc.

People in every discipline can benefit from a better understanding of quantitative analysis. There is an urgent need for government organizations to not on

Ars Technica

Net neutrality activists just took over Reddit with protest posts

"This is my Senator. He sold me out to telecom lobbyists."

OuiShare EN - Connecting the Collaborative Economy

Blockchain, degeneration of an ideal...

Why hasn't blockchain overcome our financial institutions? It suffers from an internal governing crisis, it consumes too much energy and is a bubble.

Nieman Lab

After a rocky reception, Le Monde’s Décodex is almost a year into fighting intox (fake news) in France

It's preparing to partner with other international newsrooms.

mic.com

The South Korean government experiences 1.5 million cyberattacks a day, security experts say

“Nuclear missiles threaten a certain handful of countries, but hacking is a threat against an entire civilization.”

Hacker Noon

The convergence of AI and Blockchain: what’s the deal?

Why a decentralized intelligence may affect our future

democracyclub.org.uk

We've got a board!

It’s a Fridayblog exclusive! Democracy Club has a new board of directors!

Medium

What Happens When a Billion People Meetup – Meetup – Medium

In 2027, the ritual of real community is the norm — and it uplifts society.

voice.mozilla.org

Common Voice by Mozilla

Common Voice is a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice database that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web.

Forbes

What The Net Neutrality Comments Bot Army Teaches Us About The Future O

In a world in which bots increasingly act on our behalves, we should be focusing on digital signatures and authenticating public comments, rather than trying to weed out automated submissions.

Global Voices Summit 2017

Threatened Voices: A Database for Documenting Threats to Online Speech

"All of these people were working to tell stories, defend human rights, and hold power to account."

cpj.org

Vietnamese blogger sentenced to 7 years for anti-state

Bangkok, November 28, 2017--Vietnamese authorities should immediately release the blogger Nguyen Van Hoa who was sentenced on Monday to seven years in prison on charges of disseminating “propaganda against the state,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said today....

The Verge

Code.org gets $12 million in funding from the Gates Foundation and others

<http://Code.org|Code.org> is getting $12 million in philanthropic funding from the Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation and other donors like auditor PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers), as first reported by the Seattle Times....

The Splice Newsroom

As transformation sweeps Malaysia's newsrooms, millennial-focussed R.AGE finds a finds a surprising niche in investigative journalism.

The Star newspaper's scrappy reporting team shows how a new product can build a new audience for old media.

TechCrunch

Proof Work aims to decentralize medical data by using the blockchain

Tel Aviv-based Proof Work is envisioning a future where patients own and control their own medical data in a decentralized system, where data is secured by the blockchain. The system, if successful, would be a big disruption to how health care data is handled today &ndash; where it&rsquo;s often accessible only by the doctors and hospitals themselves, and where patients have to make special requests to have a copy of their own medical records. In addition, today&rsquo;s data isn&rsquo;t easily shared between doctors. That means patients visiting a new doctor will often have to repeat their medical history all over again, or explain their current ailments. Proof Work, which presented today onstage as the wildcard company at Disrupt Berlin Startup Battlefield, believes the system should be simpler. The company is building tools that will allow healthcare companies to put their apps and services on the blockchain, as well as a tool &ndash; likely in the form of a mobile app first &ndash; that will allow patients to upload their own medical data to this blockchain-powered system. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a big try,&rdquo; admits co-founder&nbsp;David Suter. &ldquo;But we want to go patient-first.&rdquo; &ldquo;As somebody who walks into a doctor or a hospital, there are many moving parts that are put into place behind the scenes in order to make sure we get the right level of care, the right treatment. All those moving parts are siloed,&rdquo; Suter says. &ldquo;What blockchain allows through smart contracts is to put all those moving parts on a longitudinal line in order to talk to each other.&rdquo; In the future, the goal is to allow patients to walk into a doctor&rsquo;s office with all their medical records already on their phone. &ldquo;It&rsquo;s a big undertaking; It&rsquo;s not going to happen overnight,&rdquo; he adds. tc_disrupt_berlin-proof-work-3159 tc_disrupt_berlin-proof-work-3161 ProofWork-0243 ProofWork-0245 tc_disrupt_berlin-proof-work-3162 ProofWork-0246 &nbsp;View Slideshow Previous Next Exit In addition, patients &ndash; not doctors &ndash; should get to decide what happens to those records, says Suter. Today,&nbsp;doctors will have patients sign agreements to allow them to share their medical data. In some cases, that includes allowing healthcare companies to sell anonymized medical data to pharmaceutical companies. With Proof Work, patients could choose to contribute their data or sell it, and the transactions would be transparent. The company&rsquo;s starting point for this larger idea of medical records powered by the blockchain is&nbsp; a mobile app focused on non-adherence &ndash; meaning, the app will remind users to take their current medications through push notifications. This isn&rsquo;t the first attempt to use technology to fix the problem with medical records; others have tried to centralize records for easier access, including Microsoft HealthVault, for example. One of the challenges getting prior systems to work was that healthcare companies aren&rsquo;t necessarily interested in making it easier for patients to have access to their own medical records, says Suter. After all, the patients could go to another provider. Suter believes the companies would be more willing to participate in a system like Proof Work, because they&rsquo;ll have access to more data, because Proof Work users can choose to sell and share their data with them &ndash; where they&rsquo;re paid for those transfers in Proof Work&rsquo;s coin. Proof Work is planning an ICO in six months to create its own coin that will allow the data to be traded. Insurance companies could then incentivize patients to take their medications by offering to pay them with the coin. The longer-term monetization plan is to take a small percentage of the transactions on its platform, including these data transfers or incentives. The company, co-founded by Guy Aharonovsky, whose background is in cyber security, hopes to have its first application for consumers out in six months.

Open Data Institute

The EU General Data Protection Regulation: opportunities for grocery retail | News | Open Data Institute

TechNode

Video: For LGBT community in China, live streaming is the future of advocacy and education - TechNode

Watch how Chinese LGBT non-profit workers go live online to advise confused parents and children

VentureBeat

Blockstack raises $52 million to build a parallel internet where you own all your data

Blockchain startup Blockstack says it raised $52.8 million in its ICO, finalized Friday. The company is building a sort of parallel to the internet that users access via the Blockstack browser and that features a wide variety of apps. The Blockstack ecosystem promises to benefit both users and app makers. It gives users control over their own data via a personal API. Meanwhile, it allows developers to launch apps without having to host user data or worry about related storage costs and data privacy.

openDemocracy

Moving Backwards: What Happened to Citizen Participation in Brazil?

Where participation depends on governments, civil society can’t do much to redeem democracy from the flaws of elections and the bias of parties. Español&amp;nbsp;Português

How can we harness technology to promote civic engagement and more responsive government?

Scaling Civic Tech

This report summarizes insights with the intention of advancing a more consistent, collaborative and rigorous fieldwide conversation about sustainability of the civic tech sector. We hope that the findings will be instructive for startups and funders, and that the report promotes a more sophisticated discussion about business models.

g0v.news

Civic Tech Weekly December 4 – g0v.news

Tanzania withdraws from the OGP, the US Senate introduces “honest ads” legislation, Taiwan moves to publish political donations online, and…

GovInsider

Exclusive: Inside South Korea’s massive new inclusion initiative | GovInsider

How hundreds of thousands of people have been given a chance to shape policy.

Hacker Noon

Why Funding Open Source is Hard – Hacker Noon

tl;dr: Either developers need to change, or GitHub needs to change

Open Knowledge International Blog

Czech Open Data Challenge: a showcase of amazing transparency apps

This blog post was written by the Czech Republic Open Knowledge team as part of our blog series of Open Knowledge Network updates.  In the fifth edition of Czech open data challenge, interested par…

govtech.com

What’s New in Civic Tech: Gilbert, Ariz., Launches Open Data Portal with Guiding Avatar

Plus, Philadelphia’s fire department looks to hire a senior lead GIS analyst to create an analytics team; Facebook civic hackathon participants share winning ideas with Seattle; Platteville, Colo., adopts use of nonprofit’s video archive software; and Minnesota IT launches new employee intranet.

Medium

Building Central and Eastern Europe’s Civic Tech Ecosystem

Why We Invested: 1991 Civic Tech Center, ePanstwo Foundation, and Seedstars CEE

Open Data Institute

The ODI launches three collaborative data innovation projects between the UK and France | News | Open Data Institute

Open Contracting Partnership

Government procurement should be electronic and open - Open Contracting Partnership

I really enjoyed participating in the Open Contracting 2017 global summit. It was clear from the conversations that we need to involve vendors of e-procurement more and explore how public procurement systems can be improved …

g0v.news

Civic Tech Weekly December 11 – g0v.news

South Korea's 'groundbreaking' citizen participation initiative, and Brazil's 'disappearing' citizen participation initiative! Plus much…

Generocity Philly

What does 'civic tech' really mean? Philly technologists weigh in - Generocity Philly

Who's in the tent, according to Azavea's Robert Cheetham, Fixlist's Stacey Mosley and Mjumbe Poe, and Protocol Labs' Michelle Lee in honor of Code for Philly's fifth anniversary.

GovInsider

How Open Government can cut corruption | GovInsider

Michael G. Aguinaldo, Chairman of the Commission on Audit, shares how the Philippines is introducing the Citizen Participatory Audit in this guest post.

Open Knowledge International Blog

Open Data Day – 3 March 2018: you are invited!

2018 is almost here, and that means that on Saturday 3 March, we’ll be celebrating Open Data Day (ODD). As always, this is a bottom-up initiative, where we expect to gain momentum and highlight the…

Open Knowledge International Blog

Requiem for an Internet Dream

The dream of the Internet is dying. Killed by its children. We have barely noticed its demise and done even less to save it. It was a dream of openness, of unprecedented technological and social fr…

The Data Blog

Is your country LGBTI inclusive? With better data, we’ll know

By the early 1990s, Dr. Mary Ellsberg had spent years working with women’s health in Nicaragua. Armed with anecdotes of violence against women, she joined a local women’s organization to advance a bill criminalizing domestic violence.

Mobilisation Lab

Four ways a new coalition is engaging youth in change

How JIACTIVATE, a new coalition created earlier this year is using SMS and culturally creative campaigning to bring Kenyan youth into politics and activism.

govtech.com

Visualizing NYC’s Bikeshare Patterns

Data is lending insights into how some of the 90,000 bicyclists traverse the city.

MoveOn.org

Nobody is above the Law—Mueller Firing Rapid Response

Donald Trump is publicly considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller, the person leading the Department of Justice investigation of possible illegal actions by Donald Trump and members of his presidential campaign, and the efforts to conceal those activities. This would be a constitutional crisis for our country. It would demand an immediate and unequivocal response to show that we will not tolerate abuse of power from Donald Trump. Our response in the minutes and hours following a power grab will dictate what happens next, and whether Congress&amp;mdash;the only body with the constitutional power and obligation to rein Trump in from his rampage&amp;mdash;will do anything to stand up to him.&amp;nbsp; That's why we're preparing to hold&amp;nbsp;emergency "Nobody is Above the Law" rallies&amp;nbsp;around the country in the event they are needed.&amp;nbsp; Use the map or search below by ZIP code to find an event near you, or create one if none exists.&amp;nbsp; Rallies will begin hours after news breaks of a Mueller firing:&amp;nbsp; If Mueller is fired BEFORE 2 P.M. local time&amp;nbsp;&amp;mdash;&gt; &amp;nbsp;events will begin @ 5 P.M. local time If Mueller is fired&amp;nbsp;AFTER 2 P.M. local time&amp;nbsp;&amp;mdash;&gt;&amp;nbsp;events will begin @ noon local time the following day This is the general plan&amp;mdash;please confirm details on your event page, as individual hosts may tailor their events to their local plan. This is our moment to stand up to protect our democracy. Let's mobilize&amp;nbsp;to show that we won't let Donald Trump become the authoritarian that he aspires to be.&amp;nbsp;The law applies to all of us, and it's essential that it also applies to the most powerful people in our country.&amp;nbsp; Use the search tool to find an event near you, or create one if none exists.&amp;nbsp; If you choose to attend an event, you agree to engage in nonviolent, peaceful action, to act lawfully, and to strive to de-escalate any potential confrontations with those who may disagree with our values. &amp;nbsp;

Medium

Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains

(This essay is long. If it would be easier for you to read a pdf — though one without images and video links for now — please drop me a…

Medium

Intentional Government Technology, Not Catch-up – Bianca Wylie – Medium

Public policy options are never right or wrong, they’re informed by values and are political decisions.

StateScoop

Open data dashboards hoist youth issues in Illinois

Key performance indicators in areas like education and health are hoped to inspire more data-driven policymaking in the state.

Sunlight Foundation

New York City’s open data audit is a promising model for accountability

Eight years since Portland, Oregon passed the nation’s first open data policy, open data advocates are now beginning to shift their focus from getting policies passed to how—and how well—these policies are being enforced. New York City is at the forefront of experimenting with new mechanisms for

Medium

Building Central and Eastern Europe’s Civic Tech Ecosystem

Why We Invested: 1991 Civic Tech Center, ePanstwo Foundation, and Seedstars CEE

The Citizen Lab

Citizen Lab Launches Security Planner

With just a few clicks, Security Planner tailors straightforward recommendations based on someone’s digital habits and the technology they use.

mySociety

Introducing OPRAmachine: tackling political corruption in New Jersey

The latest installation of our Alaveteli software, OPRAmachine, is an interesting new use of the platform. Rather than covering a whole country, as most of the other Alaveteli installations around the world do, it services just a single US state. OPRAmachine, which launched in October, allows cit

mySociety

Talking about the mySociety design process

Last month, I gave a talk at DotYork—a digital conference in the North of England—about the way mySociety designs and builds websites for different countries and cultures all around the world. If you’re into web technologies, or user research, or just generally the sort of work mySociety does, th

democracyclub.org.uk

The One Where One Can't Be Too Careful

<http://ElectionLeaflets.org|ElectionLeaflets.org> gets the academic treatment, a sketch of a plan for a general election, getting information on by-election candidates and some other stuff!

Shareable

How the European Social Enterprise SMart is Creating a Safety Net for Freelancers

SMart is a social enterprise founded in 1998 in Belgium. The project's aim is to simplify the careers of freelancers in cities across Europe where SMart operates. These days, there are many freelancer services — cooperatives, coworking spaces, unions — but at the time of its inception, SMart officials were focused on one subsection of this workforce: artists.

Hacker Noon

Large-scale appropriation of Americans’ IDs suggested by Fake Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Commenters…

We started by following up on a hunch, but the survey results we are collecting are starting to feel much more sinister.¹

Japan Today

Anonymous instant messenger e-Chat rapidly gaining attention

Lately an application named e-Chat has been attracting the attention of users from different corners of the world as well as reputable publishers and those who are interested in digital technologies. e-Chat is a decentralized anonymous instant messenger with built-in multicurrency cryptowallet, high-quality content that offers many opportunities for earning…

openDemocracy

Finding new civic space in Central Asia

Partnerships with NGOs offer the state and private sector with expertise and opportunities for innovation that can open up new civic space throughout Central Asia.

MIT Technology Review

Victims of Sexual Harassment Have a New Resource: AI

If you have ever dealt with sexual harassment in the workplace, there is now a private online place for you to go for help.

CBC News

Canadian Digital Service takes startup approach to building better IT for government

The Canadian Digital Service is recruiting tech brains from across the country and around the world in an effort to do IT differently inside the federal government.

GovInsider

Audrey Tang, Digital Minister, Taiwan | GovInsider

Women in GovTech Special Report 2017.

Open Knowledge International Blog

Requiem for an Internet Dream

The dream of the Internet is dying. Killed by its children. We have barely noticed its demise and done even less to save it. It was a dream of openness, of unprecedented technological and social fr…

OuiShare EN - Connecting the Collaborative Economy

Concrete examples for utopian ideals: how the Sharing Cities movement is paving the way

Interview with Tom Llewellyn from Shareable on how communities, governments and companies can work together to activate the urban commons.

govtech.com

What's New in Civic Tech: Open Data Saves Connecticut $500,000

Plus, Atlanta throws a smart city coming-of-age party; Palo Alto, Calif., explores using drones to bring blood samples to hospitals; and a new project builds on Cincinnati’s opioid data work to predict heroin overdose risk.

govtech.com

Software for the Social Good: The Struggle to Make Informed Decisions

In part of our Digital Communities Special Report, we look at how technology can help local governments tackle social issues, but bringing together data from multiple sources and using it wisely remains a significant challenge.

Civic Hall

In Search of 21st Century Democracy: Two Weeks in Taipei | Civicist

It matters what ideas we use to think ideas. It matters what thoughts think thoughts. It matters what knowledges know knowledges. It matters what relations relate relations. It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories. —Donna Haraway It matters what experiments we use to experiment. Society and technology have undergone significant …

Open Data Institute

Building resilient cities in Africa: lessons learned from ODI’s mini-grant projects | News | Open Data Institute

The Open Data Institute (ODI) equip, connect and inspire people around the world to innovate with data. Co-founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt, the ODI provides events, training, membership and consultancy around open data.

pastemagazine.com

A New Site Called "Rotten Apples" Tells You How Many Alleged Abusers Are Connected to any Film

This new website is designed to illustrate how many alleged Hollywood abusers are connected to any given film.

TechCrunch

New York City moves to establish algorithm-monitoring task force

New York City may soon gain a task force dedicated to monitoring the fairness of algorithms used by municipal agencies. Formed from experts in automated systems and representatives of groups affect…

Open Knowledge International Blog

Validation for Open Data Portals: a Frictionless Data Case Study

The Frictionless Data project is about making it effortless to transport high quality data among different tools and platforms for further analysis. We are doing this by developing a set of softwar…

CitizenLab

"Citizens have one expertise: the one of their needs" - Interview with Stephen Boucher - CitizenLab

We met up with Stephen Boucher to talk about participatory democracy, civic techs and how to involve citizens in co-creating politics.

mySociety

mySociety year in review 2017

And here’s how 2017 went for us

The New Yorker

Estonia, the Digital Republic

Its government is virtual, borderless, blockchained, and secure. Has this tiny post-Soviet nation found the way of the future?

Medium

How Anyone Can Audit Facebook’s NewsFeed – J. Nathan Matias – Medium

All you need for citizen behavioral science is a spreadsheet, patience, and longsuffering friends

Open Data Institute

Friday lunchtime lecture: How open data revolutionised London transport | Events | Open Data Institute

Friday lunchtime lectures are for everyone and are free to attend. You bring your lunch, we provide tea and coffee, an interesting talk, and enough time to get back to your desk.

Hacker Noon

Now that the FCC has repealed net neutrality, let’s adopt it in California

Today the Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality — a terrible step for the future of a free and open internet and for…

Hacker Noon

Bitcoin is not trustless – Hacker Noon

Cryptocurrencies have a trust problem.

g0v.news

Civic Tech Weekly December 18 – g0v.news

In this week’s edition: The end of net neutrality, the difficulties of funding open source, and a big day for digital anti-corruption tools…

Austaxpolicy: The Tax and Transfer Policy Blog

Participatory Budgeting: The Next ‘Big Thing’ in Australian Local Government? - Austaxpolicy: The Tax and Transfer Policy Blog

Australian governments of all levels are increasingly familiar with two trends in public budgeting. Firstly, the pressure to deliver ‘more with less’ in public budgets;… Read More ›

storm.mg

柯P「開放政府」大檢驗 學界：多數資料品質低端、更新不定期-風傳媒

台北市長柯文哲2014年以「開放政府，全民參與」作競選主軸，執政後多次提到「資料開放是原則，不開放是例外」引起好評。然而，...