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#civictech

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🧠 Heading to a protest? Protect yourself from gov surveillance before you get there.

🔐 Use Signal, not SMS.
📴 Airplane mode > just "silent."
📵 No face unlock.
🎭 Mask up. Both kinds help.
🕵️ Don’t post live from the scene if it includes others' faces or locations.

We stand for privacy, protection, and public action.

📚 Full guide via @Wired@msdtdn.social 👉🏽 wired.com/story/the-wired-guid

WIRED · The WIRED Guide to Protecting Yourself From Government SurveillanceBy Andy Greenberg

Two years ago Meta blocked Canadian news. I built a workaround.

ShareTheNews.ca lets you share Canadian news on Facebook, with proper headlines and previews — just like before the ban.

Annexation and U.S. threats to our sovereignty are real, but an even more pressing danger is our cultural absorption and loss of national cohesion.

For many Canadians, verified news has largely vanished from everyday life. But most don’t even know the ban exists.

One in five of us are aware that news is blocked in the places where so many continue to spend the bulk of their online lives.

Provincial election turnout is in decline. Some party leaders are doing more media with U.S. outlets than Canadian ones. And our recent federal election edged us closer to a two-party system than ever before.

We didn’t just lose news from our feeds two years ago — we are losing our sense of a shared story.

That's why I built ShareTheNews.

Try it. Use it. Spread the word, and share the news.

✨ sharethenews.ca

P.S. if any links don't work or images don't load, bug me and I'll fix 'em.

sharethenews.caStay informed. Share the newsRead and share Canadian news on Facebook.

We the Builders is a nonprofit civic tech project committed to fighting misinformation, defending public service, and exposing the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle the federal government, and they're raising funds for their work.

givebutter.org/wtb

wethebuilders.org

Good Trouble ProjectHelp us defend against government destruction and rebuild the futureWe the Builders Need You. Democracy Needs Us.

I just added a colorful feature to my free NYC buildings app: a kind of noiseometer! Each building has one of 10 colors, according to how many 311 Noise complaints were submitted in the last 12 months. There’s also a setting for Heat/Hot Water complaints.

My thought is that this might be useful for someone looking to move in the five boroughs. In any case, this update gives the app some much-needed color!
apps.apple.com/us/app/gotham-e
#IndieDev #iOSDev #NYC #CivicTech #OpenData #NYC311 #MapKit #UIKit

Hi folks! It’s time for me to find a new job. I’m excited about things like “making (or improving) your websites and web apps”, “collaborating on your developer relations strategy” and “building fun and engaging prototypes and demos”. I’m particularly interested in #civictech and #musictech. I live in rural NL, so remote is strongly preferred. I have about 10 YOE at some recognizable companies, and am excited about building strong positive teams #getfedihired

Accountability and the Challenge of Government Technology Reform

In his book “The Unaccountability Machine”, author Dan Davies introduces the idea of an “accountability sink” — a construct where responsibility is deliberately diluted or dispersed so that no single person can easily be blamed for a decision that gets made. This concept can be a useful lens for understanding some of the biggest challenges facing government reform efforts advocated for by those in civic tech – changes that will enable governments to adopt new technologies more quickly and more efficiently.

Intuitively, we understand that accountability is an essential concept for how governments works. But It’s also sometimes why governments can not work so well. A number of key government processes are deliberately engineered to distribute or insulate accountability, as an attempt to protect against bias, favoritism, or potential corruption. But in doing so, these same processes can also create barriers to speed, flexibility, and innovation.

Government procurement processes are often criticized for being labyrinthine, cumbersome, and poorly suited to selecting the best technology partners. And this is fair criticism—these processes often result in outcomes that seem arbitrary or unreasonable. But that’s largely by design. The procurement process is an accountability sink—intentionally so. Its structure is meant to minimize the role of individual discretion in awarding contracts, ensuring selection through formal evaluations of documented past performance, capabilities statements, and structured steps like coding challenges. People often rightly point out that government procurement processes are not set up well to identify talented vendor partners to support government agencies. But they often miss that they are intentionally set up in a way that is meant to be fair and even handed – a structure that reduces individual accountability, and also individual discretion.

Another favorite whipping boy of the civic tech community is the Authority to Operate (ATO) process. This process is structured the way it is for the exact opposite reason—not to dilute accountability, but to pinpoint it. ATO’s ensure that there is a clearly identified individual (the authorizing official) who formally accepts the risk of launching a new system into production. It’s precisely because the ATO process concentrates accountability so sharply that it tends to move so slowly. Authorizing officials have strong incentives to demand detailed documentation of new systems, thorough (sometimes lengthy) reviews, and careful assurances from system owners before signing off. They know that if something goes wrong, they are the ones that will be held accountable.

Both of these examples show how the idea of an accountability sink can help explain why some government processes often seem illogical (or broken, to use a common refrain from the world of civic tech) when viewed purely through the lens of efficiency or innovation. These processes weren’t designed to move fast. They were designed to manage risk, to try and ensure fairness, and provide clear lines of responsibility — critical values in delivering public services.

That’s why reforming these processes can be so hard. It’s not enough to simply make them faster or more streamlined. Any effort to reform these processes must grapple with the fact that these systems are designed intentionally to dilute or concentrate accountability. The difficult, often overlooked part of any reform effort isn’t just simplifying the process. It’s building new processes that maintain the balance of accountability that the old processes were designed with.

Government processes often move slowly, and this can often impact the way in which new digital solutions are adopted by government agencies. However, understanding why processes are structured the way they are is critical if we are going to reform them.  It isn’t accurate to view these processes as “broken,“ they were designed with intention and they work largely as designed.