Civic Tech Weekly November 27: The FCC Won’t Let Net Neutrality Be

This edition: Civic tech and digital rights news from the US🇺🇸Finland🇫🇮 China🇨🇳 and Somaliland🇸🇴

Good afternoon and happy Monday. Welcome back to our revamped and recharged edition of Civic Tech Weekly! Every Monday, the editors and civic hackers at g0v.news will present you with the most important civic tech and open data related news events of the past seven days. If you’re looking for an up-to-the-minute curated feed of civic tech news, please follow us on Twitter at @g0vnews or join on us on Slack, at g0v-tw.slack.com, and visit the #news section.

1. Trump’s FCC head will put an end to “net neutrality”

Photo courtesy of cool_revolution.

The US Federal Communications Commission (or FCC) announced this week its plan to roll back “net neutrality” regulations first introduced by the Obama administration. The rules prohibited US telecom companies from blocking or slowing down internet speeds for specific websites. If net neutrality is struck down by FCC commissioners, companies like AT&T and Comcast will be free to charge customers for access to specific web content. FCC head Ajit Pai said net neutrality rules “depressed investment in building and expanding broadband networks and deterred innovation.”

The FCC’s move is unpopular with social media companies, open source advocates, and even other heads of government. Wired co-founder John Battelle urged readers to “Call their congressperson! Tell them you don’t want the next crop of startups to be held for ransom by an oligarchy.” Canadian PM Justin Trudeau expressed his “concern” about the Trump administration’s decision, and said the repeal of net neutrality “does not make sense.”

2. The World Bank reflects on 5 years of opening government data

Photo courtesy of ping news.com.

The World Bank has released a new report reflecting on its five years of work helping countries in the Global South to open government data. Since 2012, The World Bank has spent more than $50 million USD in over 50 countries on open data related projects. The Bank helps governments in target countries perform open data readiness assessments (or ODRA), and measure the impact of current open data services. The report points to a number of success stories, including the first Africa Open Data Conference in Tanzania in 2015, setting up the Open Data Toolkit, and providing workshops for data literacy around the globe.

The report makes a number of recommendations, including the establishment of a “World Bank Open Data policy,” and adopting an “open by default” attitude towards future World Bank projects. The report also recommends developing monitoring and evaluation criteria for open data investments.

3. In Finland, fighting backdoor lobbying means opening up visitor logs at parliament

The Finnish Parliament. Photo courtesy of square (tea).

It’s not just governments in he Global South that struggle with “open by default.” The Finland chapter of Open Knowledge (OK) is trying to make the government’s dealings with lobbyists less opaque by opening up parliament’s visitor logs. Lobbying in Finland is unregulated, and meetings between companies and members of parliament (MPs) went unrecorded for years. Finland’s supreme court mandated parliament to open up its visitor logs, but has refused to release the logs outside parliament grounds. This summer, OK Finland meticulously photographed each physical page of the visitor log, then used open source tools like Tesseract and Tabula to scrape and structure the text. They also scraped the Finnish parliament’s website to connect names from the visitor log to possible links to MPs.

OK Finland then partnered with local journalists to write stories and interpret the data. Finnish media outlets discovered representatives from the nuclear industry, Russian payday loans providers, and Uber made frequent visits to parliament.

4. China makes good use of Tesla’s open source EV patents

Body of a Tesla EV. Photo courtesy of Pac Swire.

Chinese car companies have outright copied western car design and tech for years, but a new car company is playing by the rules with its copied patents. Electric vehicle start-up Xiaopeng Motors is using Tesla’s EV patents for its new line of SUVs. Tesla CEO Elon Musk made the patents available to the public in an effort to usher in the age of the electric car.

Xiaoping has borrowed design specs from Tesla’s battery packs, touch screen interfaces, and instrument clusters. The company has produced 15 all-electric SUVs, and plans to open a larger production facility in the north-eastern city of Zhengzhou.

Chinese automakers are aggressively pushing into the global EV market, and a number of big players in the Chinese market have predicted EVs will dominate the Chinese car market by 2030.

5. Freedom House reports on rise of fake news during elections

Freedom on the Net in 2017. Photo courtesy of Freedom House.

Freedom House has noted the alarming rise of “online manipulation and disinformation tactics” during elections around the world, in its “2017 Freedom on the Net” report. The annual report by Freedom House analyzes online freedom for 65 countries, taking into account obstacles to access, limits on content, and violation of user rights. Countries are then given a rank from 1 (the best score) to 100 (the worst score), and given a status of free, partly free, and not free.

Freedom House noted that disinformation tactics during elections and continued cyber attacks on NGOs and the free press had a direct impact on internet freedom this year. This lead to a decline in overall scores in internet freedom for 2017. China was once again listed as the world’s “worst abuser of internet freedom,” followed by Syria and Ethiopia.

6. Take control of your social media algorithm with Gobo!

Photo courtesy of gobo.

In the aftermath of the Brexit and Trump victories, social media companies came under fire for making algorithms that do not cater to impartial news sources, and creating ecosystems conducive for trolling. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have refused to detail how these algorithms produce the content users see in our social media feeds. But thanks to the work of Ethan Zuckerman at the MIT Media Lab, social media users can take better control of what they see, and how much they want to see of it.

The new web tool is called “Gobo”, and allows users to filter their feeds by “politics”, “seriousness”, “rudeness”, “gender”, “brands”, and “virality.” By allowing a wide range of filters, Gobo hopes to get users out of echo chambers that simply reflect viewpoints they’ve already heard. Users can also remove all brands from their feed, remove trolls from their feed, and add more gender diversity to their feed.

7. Avoiding voter fraud in Somaliland through iris recognition tech

A Somali women voting in a recent Somaliland election. Photo courtesy of Teresa Krug.

The government of Somaliland is using iris recognition technology to cut down on voter fraud. It is the first place in the world to use the technology in a presidential election.

Somaliland declared independence from Somalia in 1991, but is not recognized as a state by any other country. This is the first election for Somaliland since 2010.

But despite a leapfrog in voter identification technology, Somaliland opposition party Waddani accused the victor of the election Muse Bihi Abdi, of “stuffing the ballot boxes with forged ballot papers.”

Nevertheless, officials in Somaliland hopes to bring iris recognition to other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In Other Civic Tech News:

Global

1. Can blockchain bring voting online?
2. Transparency of multilateral organizations is inadequate, says Open State

South Asia

1. Intel and Karnataka government to build systems and open data for automotive safety

Asia Pacific

1. Christchurch City Council launches open data API programme

Sub-Saharan Africa

1. Internet of Elephants uses AR to get up close to endangered species, turns their migrations into a game

Eastern and Western Europe

1. Omidyar Network Announces New Commitments to Support Growth of Civic Technology in Central and Eastern Europe
2. ‘Tallinn declaration’ commits EU to increase use of open source
3. NHS Digital announces API Lab with INTEROPen
4. Increasing openness of institutions in the Western Balkans
5. Latest EU study shows EU countries are racing to the top with Open Data to drive digital innovation

Latin America and the Caribbean

1. Americas Regional Meeting of the Open Government Partnership is held in Argentina
2. How Paraguay created 27 bureaus of access to information in just 10 days
3. Uruguay’s Fiscal Transparency Portal, another step towards consolidating public information access

Middle East and North Africa

1. How communication technology became a tool of repression: the case of the UAE

North America

1. A Year of tech solidarity under President Trump
2. Digital Cities Survey 2017 — Winners Announced
3. The new ‘digital’ sanctuaries
4. San Antonio launches civic innovation program
5. Report urges cities to consider equity as they adopt emerging tech
6. Closing the Empathy Gap between Government and Citizens with VR
7. How opening city data can support racial justice
8. The Supreme Court’s next (cautious, careful) move into the digital age

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