Matt Stempeck

Matt Stempeck

  • 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. (more…)

  • Yahoo!’s employee diversity

    Yahoo! has responded to Google’s release of employee diversity statistics with its own numbers. Also like Google’s report, Yahoo! has broken out tech and leadership categories versus the overall employee population. The numbers still aren’t great for African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans, but the regular release of these statistics will allow us to hold these companies accountable — from within and from outside — for improving diversity. So, without further blog post, here are Yahoo!’s employee diversity visualized on their new logo:

    62% male, 37% female

    Race at Yahoo!: 50% white, 39% Asian

    50% White, 39% Asian, 4% Hispanic ethnicity, 2% Black, 2% Two + races, 2% Other / not disclosed (more…)

  • Tally Your Next Panel

    I just built a quick app with friends old and new. It’s called Tally, and it lets event attendees and media consumers call out the all-too-frequently terrible gender ratios on panels and in Who’s Who lists. We took an existing social practice, where feminists take and share photos of panels with awful gender ratios, and built software to support it.

    Tally’s a very simple app: You just enter where you are (or what you’re reading), and the number of men and women represented in this particular slice of the public dialog. The tool generates a representative pie chart graphic for you to share with others, send to the organizers, or just document. Positive ratios are adorned with a happy star, and negative ratios earn a storm cloud.

    A recent Tally chart of #FortuneTech's gender ratio
    A recent Tally chart of #FortuneTech’s gender ratio

    (more…)

  • 2 Google Doodles Visualizing Employee Diversity

    Disclaimer: I’ve been a contractor with Google’s civic research team this year. I also bought two shares of Google stock a few years ago. This post has nothing to do with either of those two things.

    In a surprising gesture of transparency, Google has released their internal figures on employee diversity. The very first sentence gets to the point: “We’re not where we want to be when it comes to diversity.” The numbers aren’t great, but then again, it’s hard to compare Google to other tech companies of their size and stature because they’re the first to release this information.

    I’ve created two Google Doodles of my own to graph these statistics:

    Google logo visualizing gender diversity Google logo visualizing racial and ethnic diversity (more…)

  • 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: (more…)

  • Fair Use & Creative Remixing on YouTube

    A liveblog of a Berkman Center lunch.

    Elisa Kreisinger (@popcultpirate) is a content creator and remixer who has used YouTube to host her artistic work. She uses pop culture to sugarcoat social political critiques. She finds that her work helps her navigate the tension between being a fan of pop culture and a critic of it. She phrases this creative work as a way to “work off her consumption” of pop culture. (more…)

  • Voto Latino’s 2014 Power Summits

    Voto Latino’s 2014 Power Summits

    I’m heading to New York this weekend to help launch Voto Latino‘s Power Summit (#VLPowerSummit). Hundreds of young Latinos will further develop their leadership, advocacy, and media & technology skills this Saturday. There will be three additional Power Summits over the course of 2014, in San Jose, San Antonio, and Miami. And in addition to the impressive speaker lineup and training schedule, the Summit includes a couple of other interactive components I’m excited to follow. (more…)

  • Questioning the Quantified Self as it Marches Towards Mainstream

    I’m back at the Media Lab today and got to attend a talk by cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, of MIT’s Science, Technology, and Society program, who’s speaking at Pattie Maes’s Tools for Well-Being series.

    addictionbydesign

    Digital technologies can have negative impacts on our well-being. Natasha grew interested in the topic over the course of writing Addiction by Design, on the game elements throughout machine gambling in Las Vegas. Speed, repetition, continuity, and designer chairs lure players into a zen flow and open wallet. The casino industry seeks to produce this bubble state, and closely tracks players’ behavior to further refine its profit engines. Loyalty cards are a key mechanism for these studies, recording the games we prefer, the denominations we default to. As “Dividuals“, we are treated as a collection of habits and preferences that can be marketed upon, often in real-time. (more…)

  • #HackATTN @ SXSWi 2014

    attn hack

    The plane tickets are purchased and I’m getting closer to a place to sleep, so I can now announce that I’m going to SXSW for the first time since 2008 (that time I met Mark Zuckerberg at a Facebook nightclub event). I’ll speaking in a session with Josh Stearns of Free Press, Madeleine Bair of WITNESS, and Adaora Udoji of Syria Deeply. We’ll be sharing our experiences hacking global attention for the purposes of disasters and revolutions.

    If you’re going to be in town, I’d love to see your face at the session (or over some incarnation of a taco).
    (more…)

  • 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

  • On feeling comfortable in new places

    It can take some time (2.5 years?) before you really feel comfortable living in a new city. Some people jump right in, others need time. Even though I’m pretty nomadic and love things like bikeshares and coworking spots and Amazon Prime for purposes of pretending I live in places I don’t, I’m emotionally more in the latter camp.

    I moved to San Francisco yesterday to try it out for a bit, and even though I’ve been all over the area on previous trips I haven’t been a good explorer these past 24 hours. For example, today I made the conscious decision to take a right hand turn for the sole purpose of breaking my one-street life thus far. It’s Catherine D’Ignazio’s thesis in real-time — she’s working to create a Fog of War for real life to encourage geographic serendipity.

    I’m chatting with a friend in a new city going through the same thing. Her city is colder and darker. But I told her I’d write up my list of shortcuts to feeling like you belong somewhere. Here’s what I’ve got: (more…)

  • 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