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Readout of the Environmental Permitting Technology and Data Summit This week, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (Permitting Council) convened agency officials and professionals from the environmental and information technology sectors to discuss how software and other tools can deliver more effective and efficient environmental reviews. The first-ever Environmental Permitting Technology and Data Summit was held on Tuesday at the White House and the headquarters of the General Services Administration. To meet President Biden’s historic clean energy and infrastructure goals, a core component of Bidenomics, the Biden-Harris Administration is undertaking an all-of-government effort to accelerate federal permitting while ensuring strong environmental protections and robust community engagement. The summit brought together federal and state agency staff, non-profits, academia, and industry leaders to inform CEQ’s E-NEPA study called for in the Fiscal Responsibility Act. Summit participants also discussed innovative, successful software deployment for permitting processes within government agencies, the need for improved software to enable more effective and efficient environmental reviews, and next steps for the Biden-Harris Administration’s effort to modernize the technology agencies use to conduct environmental reviews and other permitting processes. As part of the summit, the Permitting Council announced it will make $25 million available from the Inflation Reduction Act to modernize permitting-related software and technology and spur innovation to advance the Biden-Harris Administration’s permitting strategy. This funding announcement reflects the Administration’s commitment to ensuring that federal environmental reviews and permitting processes are effective, efficient, and transparent, guided by the best available science to promote positive environmental and community outcomes, and shaped by early and meaningful public engagement and input. An opening plenary session laid out a vision for using technology and data to improve environmental reviews, and, in particular, highlighted two stories of the successful development of digital tools at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Participants attended breakout sessions on cybersecurity, implementation of shared services across federal agencies, funding and staffing of permitting software delivery initiatives, and technology’s role in more effective and efficient environmental reviews. Participants were also able to see demonstrations and learn more about the development and use of the following tools: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Information for Planning and Consultation The Bureau of Land Management’s E-Planning The Federal Railroad Administration and Federal Highway Administration’s Permitting Dashboard Application Programming Interface The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Regulatory and Permitting Information Desktop (RAPID) Toolkit Virginia’s Permitting Enhancement & Evaluation Platform (PEEP) Florida Department of Transportation’s Efficient Transportation Decision Making System The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Grant Environmental Assessment App The U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s Regulatory Request System and Regulatory In-lieu fee and Bank Information Tracking System Washington State’s : Washington Information System for Architectural and Archeological Records Data WISAARD The University of Arizona’s project NEPAccess The White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool Wildfires.org TurboPlan In the afternoon, Federal environmental officers and Chief Information Officers joined a roundtable conversation to discuss common challenges and explore solutions and opportunities to use digital tools to achieve effective and efficient environmental reviews and permitting. Key participants in the Summit included: White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory White House Senior Advisor for Clean Energy Innovation and Implementation John Podesta White House Senior Advisor and Infrastructure Implementation Coordinator Mitch Landrieu General Services Administration Administrator Robin Carnahan Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council Executive Director Eric Beightel Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director for Management Jason Miller Founder of Code for America and former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Jennifer Pahlka Danish Environmental Protection Agency’s Deputy Director Lars Møller This was originally published on October 27, 2023 in whitehouse.gov.

White House Summit Explores Tech Solutions for Efficient Environmental Reviews 

Originally published on the Sentry Blog . Written by Eva Sasson . Errors are expensive; they steal resources allocated for other things and potentially negatively impact revenue and user sentiment. And, for teams comprised of volunteers working in their spare time, errors can take weeks to triage and resolve. So, despite what Google might tell you, is not merely a solution to your pet’s pesky pheromone problems (although it is clearly also that, if PetSmart’s Google results are any indication). Our new Sentry for Good program amplifies the voices of non-profits, open-source tools, and educational institutions in a variety ways, like sponsoring Sentry accounts and providing space for that organization’s authentic representation (a fancy way to say that we might write a blog post about the orgs and how they use Sentry). Sentry for Good As an open-source product ourselves, we understand that a little help can go a long way. With Sentry for Good, we’re dedicated to supporting the progress of a safe, open, and bug-free internet. Sponsored account criteria As part of Sentry for Good, sponsored accounts receive 500k events per month as well as support from our fantastic support team. Getting started with a sponsored account is as simple as getting started with any other Sentry account. However, you’ll first need to meet the following sponsored account criteria: Have an open-source license or Use Sentry for educational purposes via an accredited institution or Possess a 501c3 incorporation You must : not Violate Sentry’s Terms of Service Note that meeting these requirements does not necessarily mean acceptance into the Sentry for Good program. You’ll probably be all set, but whether or not an organization violates our Terms of Service is something we determine on a case-by-case basis. If Thanos founded a non-profit org that was dedicated to the eradication of half the life in the universe, for example, we’d turn him down regardless of his 501c3 status. The same is true of other groups focused on increasing hate or pushing a personal agenda. If you meet the criteria, log in or sign up with your .org or .edu address and fill out the form on the for approval. This is also where you’ll submit your open source license, should you be an open source developer. Sentry for Good page Making a difference Sponsored Sentry accounts are already making an impact: monitors applications to the state of California’s food stamp program using Sentry to ensure that food stamp applications are successfully processed. Code for America GetCalFresh Via their mobile app, , offers support for cardiovascular health in rural clinics, using the Sentry mobile app to sync their events offline (they’re also MIT open-source licensed). Simple Resolve to Save Lives Non-profit search engine plants trees per search to combat deforestation — more bug-free searches means more trees! Ecosia We also support other organizations and many fantastic open-source tools. Check out a bunch of examples in this . list of examples The larger ecosystem Alongside other developer tools and our integration partners, like , , , , and , Sentry is proud to add to the commitment of software companies who support developers across industries and functions. When the larger ecosystem of tools, especially those that integrate into the developer workflow, support developers who work on globally-impactful projects, we play our part in leveraging technology to advance some of society’s biggest problems. Twilio PagerDuty GitHub Slack Jira Stay tuned for more information on this program, including technical stories on how Sentry supports developers helping people all around the globe.

Sentry for Good: Preventing Bad Code from happening to Good People

Through the grapevine which is social media, I heard about an amazing event in Denton, TX called . I had to ask some questions to learn about what was hacked. HackNTX I had visited Denton over 4 years ago to connect with the community on their fracking success and I’m always humbled to go to smaller communities who pack punch and boldly take ownership of their home. I caught up with who is the Director of Community Engagement at who shared his story with me about the event. Kyle Taylor Techmill And for those who don’t want to scroll to the bottom, Wang Shuyi, PhD, was the first place winner who used a RNN deep learning model to find patterns from Waze Traffic Open Data of Incidents Report, his goes over his experience and learnings from the event. tutorial The model was built to identify a pattern of events that led up to a heavy traffic jam 30 minutes before it happened. After training the model with 29 days worth of Waze traffic data in Dallas Fort Worth, the results were fascinating. They were able to predict, up to 70% probability, when an accident or traffic would occur based on a pattern. Congrats Wang! How did you and your team learn about civic hacking? Here in Denton, we have a number of community members who have been involved with or interested in civic tech and open data over the years. We had some people from local university staff and city council people going to Code for America conferences and learning about new ways to support open government and data initiatives. Then there are people like myself who are developers by trade and were introduced to open data — for me, it was another open data hackathon in Dallas. Credit: HackNTX After volunteering to organize that hackathon and learning so much about the organizations involved in utilizing open data from a city to benefit their own communities around Dallas, I wanted to bring that back to Denton. I met up with my city councilman, Kevin Roden, for a drink (the same one who went to the Code for America conference) to talk about what we’re doing now and what is a good place to start building a community in Denton around this initiative. So what do you do to get like minded individuals together? You throw a hackathon, at the council person’s house, and build a tool that helps people vote. . And that’s what we did in 2013 Kevin liked to bring the community together to pitch ideas for the city in the form of a mixer. Being in a college town with two major universities and a community college, there was never a shortage of young, bright individuals with unique perspectives to community challenges. I had just graduated in 2012 from the University of North Texas, so in late 2013 at Kevin’s mixer, I pitched an idea for a community working group called Open Denton whose mission was to advocate for and utilize open data for good in the city of Denton. Turns out, there’s a lot of smart, tech individuals in our community who have been chatting for a while, so in 2014 we formed a nonprofit called TechMill. Every board member had a unique initiative they wanted to focus on, and mine was student engagement and open data. Remember those university staff I mentioned? Two of them, Jesse and Patrick, wanted to start by . While that first event was more over educating the public about open data, we’ve been running that event every year since then — growing it a little each time we host it. OpenGov was gracious enough to on our series over the years. Jesse Hamner and Abdulrahman Habib (Habib for short) have been leading the charge on Open Data Day for the past couple years. running an Open Data Day event of our own at UNT write up a small blog post I had no idea how much publicly available data is out there, waiting for someone to come along and make sense of it. The fact that we can turn raw numbers into knowledge is kind of like magic. I learned a ton just seeing what the other teams came up with and am excited to do more. - Dan Minshew, HackNTX participant Since then, part of our work in supporting the city of Denton in open data has resulted in Denton becoming a What Works City, a program run by Bloomberg Philanthropies and GovEx. We helped gather community on data types, exports, and accessibility in the system, and TechMill was were graciously presented with an for our support. We also have a podcast series and recorded with some of these individuals I’ve mentioned to talk about . award from Denton’s Technology Services department Open Denton and Building Smart Cities on Open Data I really enjoyed the hackathon because it gave me the opportunity to learn from experienced people, and it showed me the numerous possibilities in the world of hacking . - Saif, HackNTX participant, who was 13 years old! When did you get the idea to host a civic hackathon? So while we’re no strangers of open data or civic tech, Open Data Day is more of a mission driven event, so the next step for us was to apply a competitive edge to it and turn it into a hackathon. How can we work with cities who a) have challenges that could be addressed through software and b) can be addressed using their own open data sets? Originally we were going to limit the scope to Denton, but wanted to expand it out for more of the region to be involved, and that’s where the idea of HackNTX came out. What’s the next step for the future? Well, the next immediate event for us is Open Data Day 2019, which is happening on March 2nd. Since 2015, we’ve hosted this event in Denton, but next year we want to expand out that event as well. Last year in Texas, we were one of two ODD events and the other one was in Austin (3 hours away). If we can take our experience of organizing this event for the past few years, and apply that towards a larger event with the end results benefitting our entire region — I’d call that a success. As an information science student, attending hackathons helped me solve class projects. In some cases, I updated the hackathon solution I built and submit it for my classes project. In every event, I learned new tools and met people who helped me a lot to understand the problem and participate in making a useful practical solution using what I learned at school. Furthermore, hackathons helped guide my research interest and I published my first peered reviewed journal article based on work I started at a hackathon event.- Abdulrahman Habib, HackNTX organizer, UNT ASIS&T Who were the other winners? At 3rd place was a project called “Krakatoa.” A web developer and data enthusiast from Denton, Adam Krawiec, took a simplistic approach to analyzing the Waze traffic data. He imported the 937,482 records into MongoDB and made some quick statistics that could provide insight to any city official. To enrich the data, Adam implemented some simple calculations that gives a rough distance in a stretch of a corridor that shows the density of traffic incidents by type. For example, in an approximate 11 mile stretch, 237 minor traffic accidents occurred on I-35 W Southbound. At 2nd place was Team Default Open Gov(TDOG). When it comes to open data and open record requests, there can often be a lot of overhead that goes into responding to, fetching, and returning documents. By default, most government records are stored privately and not always released on time or at all until the request comes in. These requests could be reduced or eliminated by implementing a better workflow to begin with. TDOG looked to solve that issue by creating a platform on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) utilizing DynamoDB, S3, and other tools that creates an auto-release schedule with secure tokens for releasing public documents. The team also considered integrating this approach with blockchain technology to utilize smart contracts for releasing these documents as well. Credit: HackNTX Anything else you want to share? How do you feel? As a regular event organizer, it's always rewarding to see the outcomes of an event after spending the time to plan it. Being able to provide a space and opportunity to focus the experience of seasoned tech professionals (or academics in this case) into creating real solutions to real problems is just incredible. Residents want to improve their own communities and lives, we just need to give them the right tools and motivation to make some amazing!

Using Neural Networks for Safer Roads | HackNTX Recap

Disclaimer: This post is not about dissing the civic tech community. On the contrary, it aims at starting a debate about what a real civic tech could mean for everyone and not just the few. I was young, reckless — after all it was still 2016 — and I believed in what some called , now tech for good (circa 2018). Anyway, I totally dug those dream-sellers who had me believe in their promises to “ ” or to “ ”… civic tech help turn passion into political change take action on behalf of the causes you care about How naïve of me! Despite their grand plans to help us as citizens get our voices heard while watching Netflix, civic tech companies haven’t had a major breakthrough in years. They haven’t brought more people to the voting booth, they haven’t gotten major pieces of legislation to pass, they haven’t prevented demagogues from reaching the White House, and the list goes on. Sure, and the likes are nice (I actually still love them) but what has been their impact in bringing… change? Right after the US presidential election, I was excited by the momentum in the Bay Area — I even pitched at the first and joined ’s SF Brigade— but oh boy, what have those times of yore brought us? Change.org Debug Politics hackathon Code for America I’m not too sure… On the one hand, no truly impactful change and civic tech companies. On the other, today those organizations have the ear of decision makers and the media. no sustainable business model for most As a recent example, (whose stated goal is to “help startups transform the public sector”) held the in Paris where even f made an appearance. It was… interesting. Panelists kept arguing about the need to reach the youth, bring more legitimacy to the field, while bringing few solutions to the table. Public Gov Tech Summit ancy socks-wearer Justin Trudeau As civic tech guru — and quasi rock star — Pia Mancini’s proudly states let’s “change the tool”, meaning: let’s remove all those old white dudes from Congress, replace the Congress by a more tech-oriented solution and give it another go. Why not ? After all, our democracies were born several centuries ago and surely are not adapted to our new way of life, our postmodern era, and our iPhone enthusiastic crowds methinks. However, one could not help but wonder: Cui bono? Who benefits from those civic tech’s startups? Twitter header Certainly not the general public who still somehow turns out to vote but does not engage on civic tech platforms, and who doesn’t know which tech platform to use among the legion that exists in order to voice their concerns and somehow hope they be heard. Probably not the government for which those startups’ success could potentially mean its demise (because why go vote for someone when a tap is enough?). To be fair, a tech update in governments and governance in general is long overdue (and even under way sometimes). The Obama administration is rightly credited with a number of gov tech initiatives that have had a real impact such as the USDS, , , , etc. However, those changes remain minor rather than structural: voting machines used across the US are still , the Electoral College still exists (so long direct democracy), and open source is neither largely embraced by government nor the condition to join the ranks of the civic tech community. Code for America 18F PIF highly vulnerable sine qua non The main issue is twofold : a far from tech-savvy government and a tech community who sees common good as yet another market to conquer. But common good is not a market, its very essence demands everyone’s say in the balance if democracy is to prevail. It is extremely worrying to see so many proprietary civic tech platforms competing and trying to capture our votes while at the same time showing no hint of legitimacy : Who elected them ? Why is this platform better than that one ? What is the guarantee that they won’t use their power to sway the odds of — even minor — elections? So many questions that remain to be answered before civic tech can claim to have reached its end.

Is Civic Tech Dead?

A redeeming aspect cryptoeconomics is its synthesis of a myriad disparate fields into one compelling narrative Some of the most fascinating experiments in the history of economics, psychology, physics, politics, mathematics, and software are unfolding before our eyes in the world of cryptocurrency. engineering Discussions about , , , etc. all serve to counterbalance elements of Humanities against the bleeding edge of Cryptocurrency. Austrian Economics Anthropology Governance technology Past the nightmares of hacks or scams, tribalism or Arthur Hayes driving a lambo, this tradition of confluence could be what redeems cryptocurrency’s emerging dream. By studying the world at large from as many lenses as possible to build a symbiotic place within it. Technological progress is too often periled with ulterior negative externalities. And economic booms draw investment fame and fortune- until the inevitable bust. So the most compelling path for long-term mitigation of such dangers requires a determined attempt at empathy and understanding of our place in the larger world. For example, a compelling champion of this thesis can be found behind a recent Ivy League abstract titled “Liberal Radicalism.” Named after a theory promoted by Glen Weyl, co-authored by Vitalik Buterin, Glen Weyl, & Zoë Hitzig, proposes a new method for crowdfunding and organizing communities. In order to help solve _“_one of the most fundamental problems in political economy.” the paper That’s quite a bold claim. Can the “Liberal Radical” method truly help solve ? Especially because their definition of the term is so ambitious. Glen defines it as the “tradition of not focusing on just the narrow purview of one contemporary field, but trying to take seriously the broad problems of society in all their dimensions.” ( ) one of the most fundamental problems in political economy political economy Epicenter Other than a small group of determined individuals (cryptoeconomists) carrying the torch of synthesis, the cryptocurrency community seems to have otherwise lost touch with this kind of ideal. By many metrics today, cryptocurrency is more oligarchic and unjust than the system it attempts to provide a solution for. It’s still very much a zero-sum game, with negligible current benefits for the rest of society, and overridden by speculators. So what is the exact solution that Vitalik, Weyl, and Hitzig propose? Via implementation in the ecosystem of cryptocurrency, could it potentially help solve some of the broad problems in society? Called Liberal Radical (LR) crowdfunding, it’s an equation to disburse contributions across an ecosystem in a programmatic way, proposed as follows: “Individuals make contributions to projects of value to them. The amount received by the project is proportional to the square of the sum of the square roots of contributions received.” Put simply, it’s a form of “democratic” donation matching across an ecosystem. Individuals’ smaller contributions to organizations would . receive proportionally more of the matching contribution Let’s say you have a charity crowdfunding platform with a variety of hundreds of organizations. If a big whale wants to sponsor “LR” donation matching for the platform, they could sponsor a Matching pool of 100 ETH. Unlike traditional donation matching however, the LR donation fund is not matched 1:1 in a direct monetary fashion. Instead, the proportion of funds received by each organization is dependent on the number of total donation amount as weighed by the LR equation. individual donors’ As an example, in a crowdfunding app governed by LR Matching, if Code for America receives donations in the amount of 100 ETH from only donor, but Rainforest Trust raises 10 ETH in small contributions from then Rainforest Trust will receive a much higher proportion of the total LR Matching Funds. one individual three hundred donors, The result is hopefully that small contributions and community outreach is encouraged. Applied to philanthropy, this could be useful. Applied to the world at large this could be, I dare say, revolutionary. Unfortunately, in order to fulfill the perfect theory of LR, we need a great identity solution. Which is possible via centralized services like Netki or Jumio, but is not yet viable in a “decentralized” way. Robust identity is the only way to strongly deter collusion or “fake” participants trying to game the system. For the purposes of philanthropy, I hope to experiment with lite versions of LR. Sure, people may try to game the system, but for the purposes of philanthropy this may be suitable for the time being (albeit not perfect). If the project achieves modest success, there are possibilities for expanding to a myriad of other possible applications (which will require higher tiers of identity verification), such as “Campaign finance”, “news media”, or “open source software.” As the world at large is facing immense problems of inequality, distrust in institutions, greed, and the erosion of democracy, LR is an important potential solution we should all pay attention to. In the hearts and minds of countless people, the ideal of 1person1vote seems to be crumbling. By promoting a new, innovative mechanism for fundraising, could humanity more skillfully tend to the global garden of democracy? It’s worth a shot. Cryptocurrency is still very much an experiment, and that’s what gives me extraordinary hope in its ultimate success, despite all its glaring *current* flaws. We have many more freedoms than the traditional corporate software model or bureaucratic academia. We can learn from trial by fire in this highly adversarial environment- to test crazy, and new ideas in real-time. This is an immense advantage. radical So in the end, I hope we can continue to empower a tradition of our own: of . To take seriously the broad problems of society in all their dimensions- and to experiment with real solutions. Political Cryptoeconomy

Pursuing a Tradition of Political Cryptoeconomy

Are you interested in futurist tech trends and world changing businesses? Our Expert Panelists: is a futurist that has reshaped the computer industry, coined the terms “open source software”, “web 2.0” and “the Maker movement” and had a hand in framing each of those big ideas. He is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of O’Reilly Media, and a partner at early stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV). He is also on the boards of Maker Media (which was spun out from in 2012), Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox. He is well known for best selling book Tim O’Reilly O'Reilly Media WTF: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us. is currently Director of Strategy for and co-author of New York Times best-seller “ ”, which he wrote with best-selling author Clayton Christensen. He is former Fellow at the Forum for Growth and Innovation at Harvard Business School, a think tank devoted to developing the academic understanding of the innovation process and co-hosts the Exponent podcast with on all things tech. James Allworth Medallia How Will You Measure Your Life? Ben Thompson is currently the Director of Product Management for Revenue at , where he leads the top grossing app in the world in monetization and growth. He has also built one of the top syndicates on , all while working full time at Tinder and he focuses on his strong suits: subscriptions, advertising, and a la carte products. Jeff Morris Jr. Tinder AngelList ’s an ex-Microsoft guy with a passion for startups and growth. He runs Pioneer Square Labs, an innovative venture studio that after raising $12M, has cranked out half a dozen successful spin offs — think Rocket Internet without the copy/paste. Ben is also the co-host of the Acquired podcast where he and of Madrona Ventures discuss the most prolific acquisitions and IPOs in tech history. Ben Gilbert startup David Rosenthal We discuss Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and do deep dives on the monopolies of consumer tech, the upcoming trends like VR & AR, wearables & IOT, the future of startups and much much more. Do not miss out! Sign up today for our free live stream. Super excited about the event and would love to see you all there. Want more great round tables and investor interviews. Subscribe today to never miss a thing! If you got something actionable or valuable from this post or are excited about the round table, go ahead and “Clap” below .

[VIDEO] The State of Consumer Tech Roundtable with Tim O'Reilly, James Allworth, Ben Gilbert and…

Three were notably absent: Elon Musk of Tesla, who quit from the White House business advisory council after Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement on climate; Travis Kalanick of Uber, who earlier resigned as a business adviser to the president; and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook due to “scheduling conflicts,” as for the company. “Facebook execs have been critical of Trump on some fronts,” . CNBC pointed out In January, [Sheryl] criticized the administration’s travel ban on citizens from several Mideast nations, saying that they “defy the heart and values that define the best of our nation.” And Zuckerberg said in that Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord “is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children’s future at risk.” Sandberg a June 1 post on Facebook But similar concerns didn’t stop other tech leaders to participate, noticeably Bezos, who the travel ban, and Cook, who critized the president’s decision on the Paris accord to Apple employees saying it was “wrong for our planet.” came out against in an email The New York Times highlighted however that . only few technology specialists from the White House attended The administration several major science and technology positions,” the paper added. “But the business and economics team closest to the president attended, including Gary D. Cohn, director of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, senior counselor for economic initiatives. has not filled At the meeting, Trump explained that the goal of his administration “is to lead a sweeping transformation of the federal government’s technology that will deliver dramatically better services for citizens, stronger protection from cyberattacks.” Also on the agenda issues like cloud computing, analytics, big data, purchasing and contract reform, talent recruitment and retraining, government and private sector partnerships, H1-B Visas and future trends. We’re embracing big change, bold thinking, and outsider perspectives to transform government and make it the way it should be, and at far less cost. In addressing the tech crowd at the opening of the event Kushner said: “We have challenged ourselves to pursue change that will provide utility to Americans far beyond our tenure here. Together we have set ambitious goals and empowered interagency teams to tackle our objectives. It’s working and it’s very exciting.” “Together we will unleash the creativity of the private sector to provide citizen services in a way that has never happened before,” he added while asserting that his goal is to make “an effort to bring business sensibility to a government that for too long has relied on past practices as an automatic justification for their continuation.” Kushner was the organizer of the event — as head of the Office of American Innovation — together with Chris Liddell, the White House director of strategic initiatives and former chief financial officer of Microsoft. In a tweet, Trump’s daughter Ivanka echoed her father’s speech and stressed how “innovation has and will continue to transform the world — and the way the US government works on behalf of all Americans.” Liddell on Monday that the summit’s focus is on cloud and cybersecurity. The government has more than 6,000 data centers and spends $86 billion a year on technology, figures that are “orders of magnitude” higher than the private-market equivalents, Liddell said. told CNBC And cybersecurity and the fight agains terrorism were also one of the agenda priorities of the recent G7 Summit in Italy, attended by president Trump. “While being one of the most important technological achievements in the last decades, the Internet has also proven to be a powerful tool for terrorist purposes,” reads the G7 joint statement on the fight against terrorism and violent extremism that came out of the first day of the G7 Summit last month. _The G7 leaders gathered in Taormina, Italy on May 26–27 for the 2017 G7 Summit._hackernoon.com G7 calls for tech groups to fight terrorism online The G7 leaders — Justin Trudeau; of France; Angela Merkel of Germany; Paolo Gentiloni of Italy; Shinzo Abe of Japan; Theresa May of the United Kingdom; Donald Trump of the United States; and Jean-Claude Juncker of the and Donal Tusk of the Council of the European Union — called upon the technology groups and social media platforms “to substantially increase their efforts to address terrorist content.” CanadianPM Emmanuel Macron European Commission We encourage industry to act urgently in developing and sharing new technology and tools to improve the automatic detection of content promoting incitement to violence, and we commit to supporting industry efforts in this vein including the proposed industry-led forum for combatting online extremism. Yesterday’s White House meetings, however, seemed to have focus mostly on Trump’s job agenda and services for citizens. Microsoft’s leaders explained how they made the case “high-skilled immigration and investments in education.” Cook told Trump that “the government should be focused on its citizens” and he pushed for education, in particular, he said: “Coding should be in every school.” Bezos encouraged the president to use commercial technology whenever possible and emphasized the need to retrain workers and said it was “impossible to overstate” the importance of artificial intelligence, according to The New York Times. “State and local governments are meant to be a laboratory of democracy,” . “It’s important to not just hear from tech titans but from folks who are growing rapidly and in the trenches. It’s happening in Silicon Valley but also in all the Silicon Alleys and Beaches with small groups of engineers who are rethinking old processes and disrupting markets.” OpenGov’s Bookman told CNN At the meetings also , founder and executive director of Code for America, who explained in a her decision to participate. Jennifer Pahlka Medium post “This is not a decision I have made lightly,” she wrote. “I personally believe that, outside of the issues discussed at this meeting, the policies of the Trump administration are dangerous and harmful to the American public, and that the administration has shown a frightening disregard for the principles and values of government, public service, and the rule of law.”

Tech and politics — and the politics of tech

Why civic hacking is the best form of community service Source: Can’t Code Won’t Code When we think of the technical ability, what usually comes to mind is some contract hacker rapidly typing at his keyboard or a massive data center containing all of our phone records, emails, and YouTube searches of cat videos. While this may be true for , other facets of the American government need some help when it comes to writing . government’s that one branch that relies on technical aptitude to spy on us all code Source: mytlcteam.com It’s a widely known problem that gets little attention in the tech industry. The public sector doesn’t have the same go-getter entrepreneurial spirit as the private sector; they can’t employ that “move fast and break things” doctrine that the tech industry revolves around. For that reason, they don’t move as fast as private companies or rapidly growing startups. The government relies on protocols (physical ones) to get things done and, sadly, it moves at a crawl when it comes to building something new. So, to keep up with the fast-paced technology of the 21st century, the government needs us, the citizens, to help it stay current. That’s where civic hacking comes in. Civic hacking is . It’s a stellar concept, and it’s on the rise. Many engineers and programmers across the country are coming together to write software for their cities. Coders are coming together and building useful applications for people around them to use daily. It’s a rather unique phenomenon, and you can imagine it being community service in the 21st century because well…that’s what it is. when people use their skills in technology to improve government Source: blog.jxee.me The civic hacking idea was made popular by . Founded by Jennifer Pahlka, Code for America is the organization that really wants to make a change by narrowing the gap between the technical infrastructure of the public and private sectors. Yes Silicon Valley fans, Code for America is literally making the world a better place. Code for America provides hackers with opportunities to build applications and services for the whole nation to use via submission through their website or build applications and services for their local governments by letting hackers connect with their local chapter. Code for America Source: Silicon Valley (HBO) So far, Code for America chapters have built that impact communities on a daily basis. From to , this movement, paired with individuals who code for their governments alone, further connects citizens with their municipalities for the strengthening of communities and modernization of government. incredible things mapping local 911 call locations making it easier to get food stamps Source: codeforamerica.org In a world where technology is disrupting every industry, it’s time for you to use your skills to help it disrupt government. Find your local Code for America chapter and get involved. Shoot an email to some members or check out their Github repositories. Maybe even come to a meeting or two, you may like it! In the end, all chapters are doing something that makes an impact on their communities. After all, it is the future of community service. As always, you’re awesome! Thank you so much for reading! If you liked this post, please recommend or share!

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CODE FOR AMERICA

EVERGREEN INDEX #3054

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CODE FOR AMERICA

codeforamerica.org

-- employees

Since n.d.

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CODE FOR AMERICA

EVERGREEN INDEX #3054

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