Blog

Are social computing and data science just tools for the powerful, or can they be used to question power and reshape the structures that influence us? It’s a question I’ve been wondering as I’ve watched civic tech & academic communities idolize the employees and “alums” of big corporations and governments– […]

Over the past year, our team at Civic has been developing and testing Promise Tracker, a citizen monitoring platform that allows communities to track local infrastructure projects and hold elected leaders accountable for political promises. Building on takeaways from collaborative workshops run in Brazil in January and August, we have […]

Last week, Yahoo! announced that Flickr would start selling prints of Creative Commons licensed photos, and that they would only pay some of the photographers. Some commentators, like Jeffrey Zeldman, see it as a breach of good will. Mike Masnick at Techdirt argues that this is a victory for open […]

This is a liveblog of Micah Sifry’s book talk hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. It is not a perfect transcript of the event. Livebloggers included Erhardt Graeff, David Weinberger, Nathan Matias, Sands Fish, Dalia Othman, Mayte Schomburg, and David Larochelle. Micah Sifry is […]

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 […]