Digital civil society in one minute and 26 seconds

From an interview at Worldview Stanford


Lucy Bernholz: Digital Civil Society from Worldview on Vimeo.

Death and digital civil society

Last week's episode of the Raw Data podcast is mostly about death.

That said, the last 7 minutes or so include some thoughts from me about our relationships to our digital data, why we need new rules for this resource, and why it matters during life as well as after it.

Take a listen: https://soundcloud.com/rawdatapodcast/episode-9-the-digital-afterlife

I show up around minute 20:00.

In addition to being fun to record, the interview process prompted me to think hard about perpetuity, immortality, the law and digital data. This is exciting. It also ties in nicely with an event on Giving in Time that Stanford PACS is co-hosting with Boston College School of Law - public event on campus on April 4, 2016. Stay tuned for more details. 

Thanks to the folks at Worldview Stanford and the Stanford Cyber Initiative! 

Civil society's (and philanthropy's) digital roots

Today's assigned readings on digital civil society:

• Neil Richards, The iPhone Case and the Future of Civil Liberties, Boston Review, February 2016 
• Neil Richards, Apple's Code = Speech Mistake, Technology Review, March 2016
• Cathy O'Neill, The Ethical Data Scientist, Slate, February 2016

Cathy O'Neill on "ethical data science." She looks at the way that society's values, our assumptions and software code influence each other. They are mutualistic. And increasingly inseparable. Those who write the algorithms, those who use them, and those whose lives are affected by them - in other words, all of us - need to understand this, question it, and use data and tools to lend new insights, not reinforce existing power imbalances.
 
Neil Richards on the need to be able to regulate code - software code and those who create it - in many uses and forms in the digital age and his admonition that Apple's arguments about privacy are sound, while their arguments about free speech are problematic. Applying a free speech framework to software code will make it very difficult to monitor and regulate uses of code that discriminate or cause other harms. And, increasingly, we are going to recognize that our civil rights battles are being fought on digital turf.

All three articles focus on our need to assume software code is fundamental now - to how decisions get made in society, business, and policy making. Indeed, they argue that software code under girds how we act as private citizens, associate with one another, and express ourselves. These rights, in turn, support civil society as we know it. Those of us focused on improving nonprofit or foundation action, on using digital tools for social outcomes, on building globally influential digital tools for social good need to take these lessons to heart.

Philanthropy and civil society now rests on software code - it is digital civil society.