What does nonprofit tech have to do with democracy? From our perspective, nonprofits and civil society play a critical role in holding open the space where inclusive democratic conversations can happen. Technology can help bring people into these vital conversations. This is not about partisan politics or get out to vote efforts. This is about a year-around effort to make sure that the nonprofit constituency is as involved as it can be in the conversations that are going to be setting their fate.
Whether it’s deploying decidedly low-tech solutions such as partnering with libraries to bring social services into the same physical space where these conversations are taking place, or using new technology applications that do multi-criteria decision-making, nonprofit leaders need to gather the opinions and realities of community members to fight for inclusion . This is an issue that needs to be taken on, head on. If we as a sector stay in our lane, our lane is just going to get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And, that’s exactly what we see happening around the world.
This book is heartbreaking. It’s the story of family and love and mythology told through the eyes of a teenage girl as she and her brothers and father get ready for the storm that will be Hurricane Katrina. That we know how bad Katrina will be adds urgency. The physicality of Ward’s writing gives this book a searing intimacy. We feel, through touch, what the narrator feels. It is the best of literature, giving us intimate access to a complete world.
Logistics: I checked the audio book out from the library and listened to while walking the dog on the Berkeley streets, while cooking dinner, and while driving short errands. Book 03 finished 8 January.
Also today, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called out the new election laws passed by Republican legislatures as “anti-democratic,” designed to “unwind the progress of our Union, restrict access to the ballot, silence the voices of millions of voters, and undermine free and fair elections.”
He insisted that Congress must take action to stop this anti-democratic march. In June, August, October, and November, Republican senators blocked discussion of “common-sense solutions to defend our democracy.” It is unacceptable for a minority of senators to be able to require that the majority command a supermajority in order to pass legislation, Schumer wrote: the Framers of the Constitution explicitly rejected such a requirement to pass laws.
“We must ask ourselves,” he wrote, “if the right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, then how can we in good conscience allow for a situation in which the Republican Party can debate and pass voter suppression laws at the State level with only a simple majority vote, but not allow the United States Senate to do the same?”
I can’t remember what prompted me to put Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Neighborhood on my reading list. An article, I think, about corruption and politics and human greed and bravery.
I just finished and it is all those things. I’m left curious about the translation (houses at the point of falling down, rather than the verge of falling down. why that choice?). And most in love with a minor character who is losing his memory, his orientation to the world. And also the sex. The casual and impersonal nature of it. A stand-in for power.
The Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill is the first book I finished this year. I started it on audio, a while back. Libby does a nice thing and holds your place, no matter it seems how long it takes to get back to it. And I did. This morning’s walk gave me time to finish it.
This is the second of Jenny Offill’s books I’ve read. I’ve liked both of them. And yet.
And yet I keep expecting something more from them. Like I keep waiting for something to happen. They are lives lived with ordinary heartbreak. Which somehow doesn’t feel enough. But I can’t work out why. Perhaps it is because they seem to be blind to the context in which the lives are led. As if the books have an insular and self-centered point of view. Even if hearts are breaking and people are loved. The world around does not ever seem to intrude.
Science is a catalyst for human progress. But a publishing monopoly and funding monopsony have inhibited research.
We intend to improve incentives in science by developing smart research contracts mediated by peer-to-peer review networks. These will collectively reward scientific contributions, including proposals, papers, replications, datasets, analyses, annotations, editorials, and more.
Long term, these smart contracts help accelerate research by minimizing science friction, ensuring science quality, and maximizing science variance.
And build the reviewers reputation through the work of their reviews. This proposal could be modified and applied to foundation grant proposals as well.
There’s an underlying trend to many of Automattic’s recent acquisitions, a reflex to try to build or buy open alternatives to increasingly closed systems. As social media falls increasingly under Facebook’s watch, Automattic buys Tumblr; as Spotify moves to control more of the audio and podcast ecosystem, Automattic buys Pocket Casts. Parse.ly promises to be analytics minus the gross data practices; Day One promises top-notch encryption to keep your important memories and journal entries private forever. Every Automattic product is both a bet on the future and a subtle rebuke of the present.
“I think it’s crucially important to have alternatives that are creator-focused, versus advertiser-focused,” Mullenweg said. “I guess part of this is wanting alternatives to advertising business models as well.” That means betting on subscriptions, like Tumblr’s new Post+ service. It means making it easy for creators to sell things directly through WooCommerce. It means lots of other things, too, eventually.
The political historian and commentator Anne Applebaum wrote in “Iron Curtain” (2012) about how the Stalinization of Eastern Europe depended not primarily on the gulag and the firing squads, but on the intimidation of people who felt compelled to spew the same idiocy they heard, pursuing a grotesque conformity.</> “Actual censors were not always needed,” Applebaum told me in a recent email. “Instead, a form of pervasive peer pressure convinced writers, journalists and everyone else to toe the party line; if they did not, they knew they risked being ejected from their jobs and shunned by their friends.”
In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.
I would love to see a partnership with libraries world wide as a part of this. They can support a civics educations and regular mis- and disinformation trainings. And they can be a connection to community, information, and engagement while someone is in the service and beyond. This has to happen intentionally with programming that creates connections and opportunities for people to benefit from participating in diverse groups who share information.
