Three weeks of civic tech research includes findings on NGOs digital vulnerabilities, why civic tech tools fail in the field and questions about whether there's any point to democracy. Plus, my skeptic's take on the Skeptic's Guide to Open Government.
I’m going to start prioritizing brevity, leaving out some of the absurdity and academic opps, let me know if you miss anything. Findings How to improve the quality of crowdsourced citizen science data? Technical measures help, but only when accompanied by instructions, according to an empirical study of four cases. Meanwhile, open data on public safety and transportation are the most...
Findings The University of Vienna has a new report on far-right attacks on the press, a concept they sketch to include legal action, abuse of power and online abuse. The report describes a delicate relationship between the rise of far-right nationalism/populism and declines in the quality of European democracy. Meanwhile @datasociety‘s new report on Media Manipulation only describes the...
Findings Do international norms and evaluations influence country performance? New evidence on the Aid transparency Index suggests they do. Combination of original panel data and interviews gives some pretty fascinating insights into institutional processes in government. Community & Resources A couple of new (and arguably redundant) efforts to open data in the US this week: The US State...
Papers / Findings A special issue of the Journal of Communication Law and Policy offers five articles on the US Freedom of Information Act. The Editor’s conclusion: “The case made by all these articles is that FOIA is not doing the job that was intended, and that a major overhaul of the act is needed to ensure requisite access to government documents and activities. Access is key to a...
I keep a fairly close eye on Pindrop’s On the Wire and the Hacker News, which means I’m bombarded by a constant stream of news about hacks and exploits and data leaks. I’m also lucky enough to get notified whenever one of them affects me, thanks to the Have I been pwned?, which crosschecks your email against the lists of any hacked credentials made public, then sends you a...