Category Archives: Civicist

Civicist: Merced County Participatory Budgeting Process Hits Snag, Plows Ahead

At the end of the month, an elected official in Merced County, California, will lead her district in the first implementation of participatory budgeting at the county level—but unless her fellow supervisors can be persuaded to see the value of the process, it could very well be this county’s last, too. Read more…

Civicist: How Meetup Counters Algorithmic Sexism

Bias against women in the technology sector is still unfortunately pervasive. In a recent survey, only eight percent of female technologists said that they had never experienced gender bias in the workplace. The same study cited other problems in the sector with regards to women, including underrepresentation and a lack of networking opportunities and mentorship. These biases can make their way into the systems that increasingly shape our world, but the technology company Meetup has tried to design their recommendation system so that women are not pigeonholed or left out because of their gender. Read more…

Civicist: New Spill Tracker Enlists Crowd to Help Monitor Pollution After Hurricanes

After Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, a nonprofit organization that uses satellite imagery to monitor the environment launched a tool for citizens to report pollution caused by flooding. Built on the crowdmapping platform Ushahidi, the Harvey Spill Tracker maps reports of oil, chemical, or hazardous waste spills and other incidents based on satellite images, eyewitness accounts, and National Response Center alerts. Later today the organization will release an updated version that expands the region covered to parts of the country impacted by Hurricane Irma. Read more…

Civicist: How Scientist-Activists Persuaded Their Peers to March

The March for Science in April was a coup for organizers: 600 marches around the world; an estimated 1.3 million marchers; and more than 300 organizational partners, from the Paleontological Society to the Center for Biological Diversity to the Consortium of Social Science Associations. But for one of the organizers, the biggest coup was finding the right messaging to unite a group of people and organizations famously allergic to the appearance of partiality. Read more…