Civic Media

About the MIT Media Lab

When you’re getting a tour of the MIT Media Lab, a common reaction is, “Wow, I’m at the high-tech Hogwarts.” It’s easy to feel this way, with something akin to the Marauder’s map following you around the building and the robots and the whimsical, interactive, half-living prototypes scattered around.

But it’s not Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry that the director of the Lab aspires to be. Instead, Joi Ito tells graduating classes at the Media Lab that they are more like the X-Men. This framing suggests we’re all a bit weird, we have never quite fit into mainstream society, but we wield great powers that the Media Lab can help us hone, and responsibly channel. That the Lab can be our home for that, the place where we finally belong.

But when Joi welcomed the then-already-convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein to invest in the Lab, its students, and his investment funds, it was as if Professor Xavier had courted the same military contractors who violently infused an adamantium skeleton onto Logan.

How does something like this happen? In all my time at the Lab, Joi was clearly a good person, fighting good fights that others had avoided. If I had to guess, and this is a guess, it comes down to two forces: inertia, and fundraising. Evgeny Morozov has unearthed documents showing that Joi’s acceptance of Epstein’s money in 2013 may be predated by Epstein’s donations to MIT in the 2000s. It’s entirely possible that Nicholas Negroponte (and yes, Marvin Minsky) initiated this relationship before Joi even came to MIT.

And then there’s money. I learned a lot early in my career when I was working on campaign finance reform in Washington, DC. The sheer amount of money people need to raise practically predicts, over a long enough time horizon, an eventual bad decision, even from otherwise good people. Joi raises a lot of money.

One discussion trying to emerge from the messy, painful fall-out of these revelations is the sickening embrace between elite academia and Epstein’s coordinated rebranding as a science philanthropist. Why did this happen? “Money corrupts” is too pat an answer. What about the harder questions? How do MIT, Harvard, and other universities get away with taking a 60% administrative cut of funding (including philanthropic grants)? Why does the MIT Media Lab need an $80 million annual budget, when its researchers are paid roughly $30,000 a year? Why do star researchers have to perform for private philanthropists to begin with?

MIT is a corporation. It is also one of the foremost research universities in the world. It has become only more relevant as information technology itself becomes more central to our lives. The unfortunate relationship between Epstein and MIT begs a conversation about the values driving our research universities. How much annual budget would be enough to meaningfully achieve the mission? Which ideals and values tend to be jettisoned in pursuit of additional fundraising that collects well past that point?

Along with Nathan J. Matias, I was one of Ethan Zuckerman’s first two students at the Media Lab after he came over from the Berkman Center to take over the MIT Center for Civic Media (along with two students in the Comparative Media Studies program). I woke up this morning to news, leaked to the Boston Globe, that Ethan has decided to leave the Lab as soon as responsibly possible. Nate has also decided to disaffiliate his CivilServant project from the Lab as soon as responsibly possible.

Reading about Ethan’s decision, I’m thankful, as I’ve always been, to have the fortune (and it was primarily luck, on my end) that my research adviser was one of the most ethical, and maybe more important, caring, of everyone I met while working at the Lab (and in life).

Ethan’s resignation is a major loss for the Lab. Practically, it will lose his stewardship and active research projects interrogating vital topics like the ethical use of technology, and how power and influence flow on the internet. These areas of research have only become more central to our lives in the years since Ethan took the helm at the Center for Civic Media.

Ethan’s departure also feeds the brewing media story around this scandal, turning up the intensity of the shame spotlight on MIT (while Harvard remains deafeningly silent). Most importantly, Ethan leaving is a loss for the Media Lab internally. The earnest students who get to the Lab and discover their research group has an ugly underbelly may not have someone who will take them under their wing instead. Well-meaning but still-learning undergraduates may not have an esteemed thoughtleader who routinely bends the realities of time itself to take one-on-one meetings and provide meaningful email feedback. Everyone at the Lab will miss one of the key voices willing to irritate the established crust layer of the Institute in asking that we all try to be better.

It’s strange to watch what you thought was a mainstream news story evolve and permeate over the course of days, until it’s at your front step and shaking up your own little world. I believe there’s important strategic value in fighting to create change within imperfect institutions, although everyone has their own ethical line at which that’s no longer an acceptable strategy.

From the outside, I’m committed, as are many of my Lab alum, to pushing the Media Lab to do better, to be better. But in the meantime, I’m mostly focused on doing what I can to support those who have put their own futures aside to ensure their are consequences for this, and those who will suffer the follow-on consequences.

Most importantly, we must help the countless women and girls Epstein abused, and make the changes we need to make in our cultures, be they social, corporate, or academic, to prevent the ascent, continued indemnity, and celebration of abusers, no matter who they fund.

Presenting the Civic Tech Timeline

I’m happy to share that both the writeup and video of our civic tech timeline are now online. Leveraging the Civic Tech Field Guide, we compiled the launch date of over 2,000 civic tech projects over the past 25 years and plotted them chronologically by category. The result is the most comprehensive view of the field available to date, presented at The Impacts of Civic Tech Conference 2019 in Paris.

Read more about the timeline on Civicist or explore it on the Civic Tech Field Guide.

Thanks to my project collaborators, Sruti Modekurty, Aliya Bhatia, and Micah Sifry.

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.

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

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

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

Entrepreneurship in Civic Tech

Liveblog of a Code for America event in San Francisco.

The phrase “civic technology” has been claimed by those using technology to advance government, activism, political campaigns, neighborhood involvement, journalism, humanitarian relief, urban planning, and ever more realms. These fields overlap, in many cases. Broadly, we might define ‘civic tech’ as technology deployed on behalf of the common good.

Code for America’s definition is “technology that’s spurring civic engagement, enhancing citizen communications, improving government infrastructure, or generally making government more effective.”


Civic Entrepreneurship

Dharmishta Rood introduces the Code for America Accelerator program, which is open for another week. She points to the success of two Texan police officers who founded Street Cred in the previous cohort. She’s joined by a roster of panelists to discuss the tactical strategies and steps of civic entrepreneurship: Continue reading

Companies Mobilizing Customers

Because I don’t have enough Tumblrs, I’ve started Companies Mobilizing Customers to collect examples of web-native companies mobilizing their customers to advocate on behalf of the services the companies offer. It’s a brave new world of corporate advocacy, disruptive technological possibilities, and evolving regulatory landscapes. Help me add new examples and those I’ve missed?

Uber intervenes in Boston bus driver striker
Uber intervenes in Boston bus driver strike

Gift Idea: Puzzle States

Puzzle States gerrymandered jigsaws

I’ve combined political nerdery with fabrication nerdery to produce laser cut gerrymandered jigsaw puzzles. Each state’s political boundaries are laser cut into finished maple plywood to create a real wooden jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are the gnarly congressional districts designed every decade or so by politicians. States with lots of congressional districts (like California, Texas, and New York) make for pretty difficult puzzles. Even states with fewer districts get tricky to solve in the more populated areas.

The mere act of assembling a puzzle becomes a lesson in controversial computer-assisted gerrymandering, where politicians use Census results to carve their constituencies into districts that will keep them in power. I’m excited to say that for every puzzle purchased, we’ll be donating an additional puzzle to an innovative school civics education program. Students will learn about congressional representation and the decennial redistricting process. The puzzle pieces are also a great conversation starter for learning about The Great Compromise, whereby the far less populated states receive equal representation in the Senate.

Puzzle States are now for sale over at Etsy (you can always just go to puzzlestates.com). Get one today for the campaign geek in your life.

Laser cut jigsaw puzzle

Thinking ethically about our relationships with social robots

Liveblog of Kate Darling’s Berkman Center lunch, A discussion of near-term ethical, legal, and societal issues in robotics.

Kate begins with the observation that there aren’t nearly enough experts in robotic law. Those that are interested in the emergent field need to become more expert, and many more need to join them in the pursuit.

Here are some of the emerging issues:

  • Liability: the chain of causality of harm is going to get longer and more complex
  • Code is going to contain ethical decisions as autonomous units interact with their environments
  • People’s sensitivity to invasion of privacy is more strongly manifested when infractions are committed by robots (vs. NSA infrastructure-level scripts). Public aversion to such invasions may actually be an opportunity to push for stronger privacy rights.
  • Our tendency to project lifelike qualities on robotic objects. People bond with their cars, phones, stuffed animals, and virtual objects in video games. But this effect is stronger in robots.
  • Physicality: we react differently to objects in our physical space than things on a screen

duckling

Continue reading