Jules of Nature
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
todays bird
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Not today Justin
cherry valley forever
pixel skylines
macklin celebrini has autism
ojovivo
izzy's playlists!
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occasionally subtle
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Three Goblin Art
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#extradirty
tannertan36
shark vs the universe
almost home
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@civinomics-blog
Networked: The New Social Operating System
We’re thrilled to announce that our director, Lee Rainie, has just released a new book with co-author Barry Wellman. Networked shows how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making and personal interaction.
Social relationships are changing and technology is at the center of the story.
People are not hooked on gadgets—they are hooked on each other.
The Changing Workplace (And Why I Love It!)
By Noelle Daley
It goes without saying that the workplace is changing. This is partially due to mobile technology and the Internet, which free us from the constraints of a typical nine-to-five. Instead of commuting to an office, some of us have the option of working from home, or in a plane, or anywhere else with Internet access. Terms like “laptop entrepreneur” are emerging to describe the growing number of entrepreneurs who work almost entirely online. This phenomenon is by no means destroying the traditional workspace, although it is is certainly transforming it into something more flexible and creative.
I’ve been in environments like this for about six years now. It started during my years at High Tech High International, a public charter school focused on project-based, interdisciplinary learning over traditional “textbook” methods. We did much of our school work online, which is how I first discovered the luxury of working at WiFi enabled coffee shops. Then, about a year ago I started working for a software company in San Francisco. Their office looked anything but traditional; they had couches, free coffee, exercise balls, and a whiskey bar. When I returned to school, I began working from home, which I’ve since been doing for nine months. Now that I’m also working with Civinomics, I spend a great deal of time in the Cruzio building, which has given me some valuable insight into the world of coworking.
This changing, mobile environment certainly isn’t for everyone, but I’ve found it works wonderfully for me. Here’s why:
1. It's convenient
This aspect seems like a no-brainer. I’d pick the 5 second commute from my bed to my desk over an hour long trip on crowded buses and trains any day. Don’t get me wrong, I love public transportation, but it’s just not as cozy as being able to work in my pajamas in the comfort of my own home. Furthermore, coworking spaces (like Cruzio, for instance) provide an affordable office space to use by the day, month, or year. This is especially useful for traveling entrepreneurs, who might need a business space in San Francisco for a few days, and one in Chicago a few days later. Essentially, the lack of spacial limitations allows your work environment to match your lifestyle.
2. It's collaborative
Coworking especially is social by nature. You’ve got a bunch of different people, each working on a variety of projects, sharing a common space. Conversations spark up as people are curious about others’ work. Not only is this great for networking, but also for collaborating. By bringing together thinkers, designers, writers, engineers, and freelancers, coworking creates an excellent arena for producing innovative ideas.
3. It's fun
I love being able to work where I want. Some days I prefer loud, lively coffee shops where the constant chatter keeps me alert and energized, while other days I prefer to work alone in the library. For the most part though, I thrive in the open, inventive, and often playful atmosphere of coworking. Either way, having the option of working where I choose recognizes that I know the environment where I work in best.
Another Santa Cruz Startup Changing the Game on Online Privacy!
This is a blog post by our very own Nora Lewis. Privacy Choice is a local startup here in Santa Cruz and they’re changing the way we think about privacy. Here at Civinomics, we have an inherent interest in promoting new, innovative, and especially disruptive ideas. We think Privacy Choice is awesome, and you probably will too.
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Ever wonder why all of the online advertisements show you all the items you clicked while shopping on the web?
With privacy becoming an increasingly hot topic amongst many internet users, the answer to this question may not be what you expected, or wanted, for that matter.
“Unfortunately, consumers are often unable to protect their privacy in a digital environment in which their personal information is increasingly collected and monetized for commercial purposes.” – Rockefeller
Having access to your information is a lucrative tool for online advertisers. Not only are they capable of tracking your online movements, but they are also finding ways to market specifically to you through your patterns and behaviors.
These trackers and online gaps in the privacy of personal information are little-known sub-facets of the inner web. In this case, ignorance is not bliss. Some have suggested that the government step in, but regulation can often create barriers to expression that may fail to address the problem with the appropriate scope and sensitivity that it requires. Enter Privacy Choice, a Santa Cruz startup whose mission is to protect consumers by providing them with the information they need to make informed decisions about privacy online.
“Privacyscore.com helps not only empower the consumer to more easily understand the policies, but also to better see the risks associated with the companies that each web site is working with” says CTO and co-founder Jason Beatty.
Simply put, Privacy Choice is an online platform with two methods of supplying users and companies with more information about the intricacies of online privacy. Part one consists of privacychoice.org where users can go to find out more information about who is tracking their information and digital footprints. Part two is privacyscore.com, where Privacy Choice publishes “grades” of privacy policies for companies all over the internet. Furthermore, Privacy Score offers companies the option to purchase their analytics package so that the company itself can have the ability to calibrate its own policy and find out what other advertising companies are piggy-backing on their site.
The debate about online privacy and personal information is not a new one by any means, but one that has received a lot of attention as of recently. In fact, there was quite a bit ofexcitement initiated by the Obama administration with their endorsement of a piece of legislation called “The Privacy Bill of Rights”, a law intended to be a way of regulating online companies’ through allowing consumers to choose what data is collected on them, while requiring businesses to draft easier to understand privacy policies.
Privacy Choice believes their platform to be a healthier alternative. Unlike the government, Privacy Choice feels they have a better understanding of what online companies need and how to address the concerns of users. Rather than limit either party, Privacy Choice’s mission is to simply empower users with awareness. This awareness comes in the form of basic, easy-to-understand breakdowns of privacy policies and how they are directly going to affect you as an individual.
“Anyone can look at it and say that they ‘get it’…they don’t delete data/they do delete data; if there are online trackers that are attached to a website” states Beatty.
Understanding all of this is extremely important to users and their personal information because with a score and breakdown of the policy, given by Privacy Choice, a user may then choose whether the risks are worth the gains in any given situation.
Interestingly enough, Privacy Choice is a company grown right out of our own backyard, born and raised here at NextSpace Santa Cruz.
The company started two years ago when CEO Jim Brock met his match in Jason Beatty—his soon to be co-founder of Privacy Choice. Jason had extensive start-up savvy and knew how to sculpt the perfect team, while Jim had a plethora of research concerning online privacy. It was a match made in heaven…oh, wait…Santa Cruz.
“NextSpace creates a very positive ground zero for the Tech scene to grow” says Beatty, he has personally and professionally benefitted from being a part of the NextSpace community—the community helped to get the first 100 likes on their Facebook app.
Even better, all of this couldn’t have happened at a more perfect time. Given the ongoing boom in the tech industry just over the hill in Silicon Valley, the past five years have seen an overspill of great minds into Santa Cruz – where recently, tech startups have been flourishing.
Privacy Choice, like many disruptive startups, is changing the way online companies operate. Having a score about privacy practices readily available to users holds companies accountable for their unsavory behavior regarding user information. This impact has been measurable, mainly in the immediate feedback from companies which came under the scrutiny of Privacy Choice. In the past couple months they have already received calls from numerous companies unhappy about their publicized score and curious as to how they may revise it—Angry Birds being one such company. No doubt, they won’t be the first.
Pictures from Civinomics' booth at San Lorenzo Earth Day 2012!
Civinomics' CMO Robert talks about TechRaising as a hackathon based on collaboration, not competition.
UCSC Finishes Earth Week with the Earth Day Festival
This past Sunday, April 22nd, UCSC culminated its annual Earth Week Celebration with the Earth Day Festival. The event, which is a part of a much larger, global effort to encourage sustainability and environmentally conscious lifestyles, featured a rock climbing wall, free lunch, as well as community driven workshops on yoga, green consumption, and tai chi. Additionally, the Earth Day Festival included great performances by local musicians on a bio-powered stage.
The free, zero-waste event was sponsored by the Student Environmental Center and the Education for Sustainable Living Program (ESLP) and was hosted by College Eight. Samuel Moll, festival organizer and environmental programs coordinator, said he hoped that the Earth Day Festival would inspire students to promote a healthier planet by making simple lifestyle changes.
The Earth Day Festival reflects UCSC’s overall commitment to sustainability and civic responsibility.
Full details on Earth Week and the Earth Day Festival may be found on UCSCEarthWeek.com.
For more information on Earth Day’s history, check out EarthDay.org.
Code for America is bringing sexy back to bureaucracy! Jen Pahlka’s mission statement for the future of citizenship and Gov 2.0
“After the revolution, the police force just disappeared, there is no police; and there is no traffic control. But this drove more crowdsourced traffic control, crowdsourced police, crowdsourced services. And this has been happening in the last year alone. Crowdsourcing revolution. But not a revolution to overthrow a tyrant but a revolution to build a developed country. [...] People going to clean the streets, planting trees, repainting the streets. And they are feeling ownership of their campaign.”
Adel Youssef addresses the way Egyptians are using online activism to organize offline participation.
Source: iRevolution.net
By the end of 2012, there will be more people searching “Tumblr” than “blog,” according to Google’s data.
Source: Mashable
Despite reports that suggest the economy and employment are on an upswing, the situation remains dire for many American cities and those who live within them.Cities across the South and the Midwest whose economies were built on what are now long-dormant factories are beset by bankrupt or corrupt government institutions, while many of their residents live inextreme poverty. In the nation’s metropolitan centers for culture and commerce,a tech-savvy generation of precarious workers face uncertain employment prospects and mounting debt. Meanwhile, American citizens’ faith in municipal, state and federal government is dispiritingly low.
It’s a recipe for a systemic failure of civic institutions—or an opportunity to rebuild cities as more representative and peer-to-peer entities.
It’s an imposing task. With cities still weathering the effects of the recession, making the pitch for innovation and transparency to budget-conscious city officials can be difficult. Compounding the issue is that citizens embittered toward civic institutions may not see or understand the benefit of such initiatives.
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Among the many civic hackers I’ve met and chatted with over the past month—the policy wonks, data hackers, IT managers, civic-minded app developers, data journalists and civic-minded designers who populate theflourishing community—I’ve observed a recurring set of intertwined challenges, articulated in slightly different ways depending on the speaker’s background:
How can these efforts become more effective by increasing citizen engagement?
How do the privileged individuals who largely comprise the community connect with and empower those from different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds, and ensure that these efforts address social inequality rather than perpetuate it?
How do you energize, inspire, and include the many citizens who consider all government institutions to be ineffective, corrupt, and** **irrevocably broken?
As with all questions of governance, civic engagement, and social justice, there are no easy answers. But addressing them will require a more diverse representation of citizens, people who can hack at much more than just civic data and code. The hacker ethos must be applied to community outreach, grassroots organizing, public policy, and how we tell and understand the stories of our cities.
Shareable: Hacking As A Civic Duty
Wildly discursive piece on the topics that have been preoccupying me for the past month, in which I try to weave together the threads connecting open gov, civic hacking, Code for America, Data Without Borders, Chicago’s Read/Write Library, social justice, access, precarity, the digital divide, and god knows what else. This is all still pretty embryonic in my brain. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
This is a great look at how technology and legislation can work collectively. Cheers to Paul at Shareable!
The Importance of Collaboration and Dialogue, or: Why I Joined The Civinomics Team
Hello!
My name is Noelle, and I am currently an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While I am originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve lived in a variety of cities including Berkeley, Brentwood, and San Diego, to name a few. Needless to say, I am quite happy to be back in beautiful Northern California.
I came aboard the Civinomics Express for a number of reasons. The first, and perhaps most important of these is that I believe in what they are doing. As a student of sociology, I have spent a considerable amount of time delving into the problems that persist in our communities, be it access to clean water, food, housing, education, or something else entirely. While these problems may be deeply embedded within a much larger historical and political context, I believe the key towards implementing pragmatic change is to start locally by drawing from our own community members. One of the benefits of living in a diverse, interconnected society is that we can utilize our different life experiences, knowledge, and skill sets to build something bigger, and ideally, better. Naturally, one of the best ways to start this process is by fostering community dialogue, which is one of Civinomics' central principles.
This might all sound a bit idealistic and utopian, which is why I’d encourage you all to take a look at some of the varied ways mass collaboration, or crowdsourcing, is currently being used. Mathew Ingram at GigaOM wrote a great article on the ability of crowdsourcing to inform and create legislation. TED recently launched TheCity2.org, a new site designed to empower citizens by rethinking and reshaping our cities collaboratively. And of course, companies like Netflix, Wikipedia, and crowdSPRING have been using crowdsourcing for a while.
That being said, there are a number of different directions crowdsourcing can take. The most important factor is that our communities are given the opportunity to be included in the first place. This is where Civinomics comes into play. The team here is committed to providing a platform where anyone can contribute towards the betterment of his or her community.
I’m ecstatic to be a part of this process and I look forward to see what’s in store.
-Noelle
