Author Archives: Matt Stempeck

In praise of echo chambers, and Nuzzel

I once spent an afternoon during my time at the MIT Media Lab with a marker board and Kshitij Marwah. We drew out the various news products we could make using link-sharing data from once-removed contacts in users’ networks. We thought we might help people discover content they were likely to like sooner, by surfacing trending links before even their own network had discovered and shared them.

A version of this idea has successfully been productized by the team at Nuzzel. Once a critical mass of your contacts share a link (8 seems to be the magic number in my network), the app sends you a push notification with the story. The app primarily looks at shares within your immediate network, but also has an extended network view. With its timely but manageable updates, it fits squarely within a new generation of apps designed to live in your phone’s notifications shade.

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Screenshot by @nmonroe
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Tech in Cuba in 2015

Tech in Cuba 2015

Illustration by J. Longo

Last month, I had the incredible opportunity to visit Cuba with my global travel companion Marco Bani. It’s a dynamic place facing rapid changes. I talked to everyone I met – regular people, but for their exposure to the lucrative tourism sector – about technology. The result is this primer in Kernel, the Daily Dot‘s Sunday magazine, for their travel issue. Thanks to Jesse Hicks for his editing. More photos, below.

https://plus.google.com/+MattStempeck/posts/cffdZdLBekk

What is civic tech?

Civic tech is when we apply technology toward shared problems and opportunities. Technology’s daily advance continuously expands the collection of potential ways to improve our society. Civic tech is when we consciously apply technology’s new potentials toward societal needs.

civic tech

And happy birthday to Civicist, the re-launch of TechPresident, which has provided more coverage of civic tech than any other media outlet.

Full post published May 1, 2015:

A MADDENINGLY BROAD TERM

Saying that civic tech is “tech for good” sounds pretty vague, and a little self-important. So our emergent field must be a little more specific.

To kick off our coverage here at Civicist, we asked our contributing editors to share their thoughts on “What is civic tech?” We’ll publish their answers as they trickle in, and look forward to continuing the conversation in the weeks and months to come.

For the last few years, conversations with strangers, family, and friends have gone a little like this:

“What do you do?”

“I work in civic tech.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s like tech for good.”

“Oh, ok.”

That’s usually enough to get into an example, like using tech to make cities more efficient with sensors, and shift the conversation. But on stage at a Media Lab alumni panel recently, I realized that saying that civic tech is “tech for good” sounds pretty vague, and a little self-important. Everyone else on that panel was doing the work they were doing to help others, too: like developing learning software for kids, or designing robotic ankles and exoskeletons for injured veterans and others in need of prosthetics. Besides, judging what gets to qualify as “for good” is clearly too subjectively influenced by personal political identities and culturally driven ideologies.

Regular tech produces all sorts of civic externalities. The ability to easily, cheaply, and globally communicate with others, even in other languages, is just one example that has created endlessly rippling civic effects, to the extent that the freedom to connect is now a key aspect of the U.S. State Department’s international agenda. It doesn’t matter if the many people who have spent their lives creating and improving these technologies consider themselves “civic actors.” They’ve dedicated their careers toward the betterment of humanity.

So our recently emergent field must be a little more specific. Civic tech is when we apply technology toward shared problems and opportunities. (I’m pilfering the “shared challenges” language directly from Aaron Strauss, the executive director of the Analyst Institute.) Technology’s daily advance continuously expands the collection of potential ways to improve our society. Civic tech is when we consciously apply technology’s new potentials toward societal needs.

civic tech

As you’ve probably noticed by now, civic tech is not only a maddeningly broad term, but also a broad field. It encompasses the application of tech in previously distinct fields like government, development, democratic elections, journalism, policy, urban planning, education, youth engagement, humanitarian response, healthy communities, social services, the nonprofit sector, and political campaigns, to name more than a few. Civic tech will remain a maddeningly broad term, but at least we now have a descriptor of what it is we do. The more terms like “govtech” (a timely rebranding of the decidedly less-sexy “government IT”) emerge to describe subfields of this space, the clearer our conversations will be.

Digital technology has driven the convergence of these fields just as it has driven convergence of content. Perhaps they’ll branch back out again as the digital efforts in each space mature and the sectors adopt better technology, but as of right now, many of the same leaders, funders, and coders are spanning these disparate sectors. For example, actors who would like to remain nonpartisan will downplay the extent to which political campaign tech is part of civic tech, but you need only look at the resumes of many of the key people in this space to find significant back-and-forth between the two. If you look at the history of civic tech, it undeniably involves many of the same people, technologies, and ideas of partisan campaigns. The Howard Dean campaign, for example, was far more successful in jumpstarting Washington, D.C.’s tech offerings and inspiring the formation of groups like the New Organizing Institute than it was at convincing primary voters to select Howard Dean.

To help scope and define our field, we can devise a bit of a litmus test by comparing shared challenges and opportunities against selfish ones. Take one regularly debated example, Airbnb. It’s a social platform built atop the existing social-physical structures of our homes and cities. The intended use case of finding you a more unique lodging option than the hotel industry provides solves a selfish need (your vacation), rather than a shared need. But when we consider the economic impact of this additional income for hosts, or use scraped data from the platform to better inform the conversation about whether the company accelerates gentrification in our cities, we’re back in civic tech territory.

We can also think about civic tech from the perspective of resources. Few resources are as vital to cities as physical space. In the consumer technology sector, this has meant starting with the selfish problems we see in early smart home applications: thermostats with the production values of iPhones, fridges that order food for us, and entertainment centers that span all of our rooms. In civic tech, it means projects to repurpose ancient payphones to provide free public wifi, or deploy sensors to apartment buildings to help tenants ensure their landlords provide heat to their apartments.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with using tech to solve selfish challenges; that individualist approach has made us more productive and led to so much of this technological revolution. Advanced technologies are initially marketed to the very wealthy, but they do get cheaper in a historically small amount of time. It’s just that the rest of the world is getting a little fatigued with tech that merely helps the already-privileged level up.

Our field, to the extent we choose to define it, is focused on acting around shared, democratic issues. We’re working in ways that academics refer to as “prosocial.” In case you haven’t spent much time in grad school, prosocial was introduced as the antonym of antisocial. “Prosocial behavior covers the broad range of actions intended to benefit one or more people other than oneself—behaviors such as helping, comforting, sharing, and cooperation.” (C. Daniel Batson in The Handbook of Social Psychology.) Prosocial behavior need not be motivated by altruism; it is simply the action of aid.

Our efforts are aimed explicitly at helping people with the new possibilities afforded by information and communication technologies. In some cases, that’s a direct link: doing the hard work of updating complex healthcare systems to use digital health records will help people because digital records trump the efficiency and efficacy of paper records.

In other contexts, the clear need to upgrade antiquated technology has simply opened the door to reinventing government and civil processes that haven’t been updated in decades. The technology is our excuse to reinvent. As Code for America proclaimed at their Summit last year, “We’re not here to change government websites. We’re here to change government.” What we’ve found in recent years is that more and more traditional institutions, from the Red Cross to the Department of Treasury, are inviting us in: first to fix the printers, then to fix the websites, and eventually, in more and more cases, to refresh the institutions themselves.

TEDxAlbany: Activism Drives Attention Drives Aid

I was grateful to be able to share a chapter of my thesis on Participatory Aid at TEDxAlbany last month. The video’s online now. Thanks to Lisa Barone and the OverIt team for inviting me and doing such a great job producing the event. Thanks also to Ethan Zuckerman and everyone at MIT Center for Civic Media for connecting me to these ideas in the first place.

It’s been an extremely violent year. What makes a crisis worthy of our attention? It turns out that human suffering does not predict media coverage. How closely is disaster aid correlated to receiving public attention? And, if we’re newly able to use our networks creatively to drive attention, can our active participation improve these formulas?

Personal Data Geographies

Our phones track our personal geographies. This enables dystopian surveillance, but also provides an interesting layer of biographical data that we haven’t had access to previously. My personal perspective is that if other actors (cellphone companies, marketers, governments) are going to have access to this information, I should at least be able to view and analyze this data, too. That’s why I’m thankful that Google exposes this data to end-users through the Location History page, and also allows outputs of raw geodata.

I’m going to use this data as a personal reflection aid, sort of the way social media data helps power TimeHop‘s semi-automated moments of reflection. I’m also experimenting with artistic visualizations (as in, actual paint and paper). But to start, I’ve taken the data from the 5 or so months that I’ve lived in New York, imported it into Google Earth, and created a GIF of my geographic footprint:

year-nyc
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Unpacking open data: power, politics and the influence of infrastructures

Liveblog of a #Berkman lunch written with Erhardt Graeff.

Tim Davies (@timdavies) is a social researcher with interests in civic participation and civic technologies. He has spent the last five years focussing on the development of the open government data landscape around the world, from his MSc work at the Oxford Internet Institute on Data and Democracy, the first major study of data.gov.uk, through to leading a 12-country study on the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries for the World Wide Web Foundation.

A broad coalition of companies, governments, and other entities have come together to open data. This work is based on the belief that opening data creates myriad benefits to society, for transparency, for economic value, and other benefits.

Does open data reconfigure power relationships in the political space? The past, promise, and reality of open data reminds wide. Continue reading

Why Use Private Data for Public Good

I wrote a piece for Harvard Business Review about data philanthropy, where private corporations donate or otherwise share valuable data with public partners like local government and non-profits. This piece introduces the idea, makes the business case, and begins to explore how an internal champion might go about executing such a project.

Fortunately, the post went live the very same day that John and I attended UN Global Pulse’s excellent Responsible Data Forum on Private Sector Data Sharing (organized with the Data & Society Research Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation). The attendees represented an incredible range and depth of experience in this nascent field. Together we began drafting additional resources, like a road map showing how to commit data philanthropy, and a starter kit. I’ll share these as soon as they’re ready (or sooner, if you’re interested in helping to shape them). Continue reading

Racial Profiling and Bike Sharing: Urban Data Science at Microsoft Research

A liveblog of Microsoft Research’s Data Science Summer School. Errors likely mine.

The Data Science Summer School program recruits some of the most talented data students in the city to solve really difficult problems. Fortunately, they were able to choose the 8 extremely talented students from a city of 8 million people.

Data Science School students
Data Science Summer School students. Photo by Microsoft Research.

Microsoft Research’s instructors and directors pulled all the necessary strings to put this program together on an expedited timeline. Tonight are their final presentations: Continue reading

Life News

Cross-posted from MicrosoftNewYork.com:

I’m thrilled to let you know that I’ve joined Microsoft as Director of Civic Technology here in New York City.

My career decisions have been driven by a desire to maximize my social impact. This overarching goal is why I’ve spent the better part of the past decade using technology to accelerate change in organizing, movement building, campaign finance reform, and journalism and digital media.

Recently, I’ve become convinced of the unrealized potential for technology companies themselves to make substantial contributions to social change. In addition to their resources (human, financial, data, and tech), these companies are building the products used by an ever-growing portion of the human species. These products are increasingly the conduits through which we connect, learn, and act. They could reduce barriers to information and courses of action that improve our civic lives.

As we think about how technology can improve citizens’ lives in cities, in particular, it has become quite clear that the opportunities and rewards of the technology economy must be shared more equitably across the power faults of race, gender, class, and access. A big chunk of our work will be focused on inclusion, looking to make improvements in both the existing community and the long-term pipeline. Related to that, we’re excited to support and expand STEM education and employment programs in New York.

We’re lucky to be working in New York City, one of the bastions of civic tech. I’ve been collaborating with the civic tech community here for years, be it through conversations at Personal Democracy Forum (the pinnacle conference in the space), working with news outlets and media startups while getting my Master’s at the MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media, or interviewing for my thesis the many technologists and organizers who innovated in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, employed technology to power an unprecedented participatory aid response and in doing so, redefined the resilient community.

What I didn’t know before applying to this job is that Microsoft has assembled a Civic team of great talent, based right here in New York. I’m excited to work closely with John Paul Farmer, co-founder of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program. In addition, the team boasts three amazing Civic Tech Fellows: Jenny Shore from Harvard, and Ken Chan and Fatima Khalid, both from NYU.

A key moment for me in making the decision to join this team was attending Microsoft Executive Vice President and General Counsel Brad Smith’s eloquent, impassioned speech at Personal Democracy Forum, where he unequivocally established Microsoft’s support for net neutrality as well as citizens’ privacy rights in the face of NSA overreach. As you may have seen in the news lately, big changes are afoot at Microsoft, and I’m thrilled to join these efforts.

Please get in touch if you’re in New York and want to think through these challenges together. I’m @mstem on Twitter and [email protected].

Play into a Broader World View with Terra Incognita

My colleague Catherine D’Ignazio is one of those rare people who manages to create beautiful art and clever software while remaining incredibly down to earth. I’ve been helping out here and there on her Media Lab Master’s thesis, Terra Incognita. Here’s an overview of the project I wrote up for the Internews Center for Innovation & Learning.

We’re building a news game that helps you explore a wider swath of the globe than you may have before. Terra Incognita: 1000 Cities of the World is a game delivered by Chrome browser extension. When you open a new tab, you’ll be prompted to read a news story from one of the top 1,000 global cities. You’ll also get credit for news stories you read on a limited set of news sites. You can get early access to Terra Incognita today.

Terra Incognita screenshot

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Joi’s Guiding Principles for Innovation in the Network Era

I just got to hang out with my friends at MIT’s Center for Civic Media and the insanely relevant and great group of people that Civic and the Knight Foundation bring together for the annual conference. Here’s my liveblog of Joi Ito‘s 9 Principles for the Media Lab, some of which directly informed my thesis on participatory aid and crisis resilience. Check out the Civic blog for more coverage.

Liveblogged at #civicmedia with help from Ed Platt. Any errors are likely ours.

Joi Ito (@joi), Director of the MIT Media Lab, is here to share his nine principles.

Nearly thirty years ago when the Media Lab was founded, the internet was about connecting together supercomputers. The Media Lab was all about empowering the individual and making everything digital. The Lab’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte, wrote Being Digital.

What’s changed in these last thirty years is that we’ve made a lot of progress empowering the individual, and as a result, we now have a network. When you have a network, you need to think about systems rather than objects. ‘Media’ is plural for medium, and a medium is something in which you can express yourself. In the past, that was hardware: displays, robots. Today, a medium can also be society itself. Applied social science and journalism are newly relevant. Continue reading