Femmetech

02/28/2018

Democracy, like complex technology, is messy and needs to serve a lot of functions for a lot of people. When a group like Ahora Madrid pushes an open and participatory government agenda into the realm of a completed product, it raises the bar for what’s achievable in our cities and democracies.

Learn more about what problems they've solved - and why the US struggles to solve the same - here:

The one simple thing that US digital infrastructure can’t do to encourage civic participation: Share UIDs

02/05/2018

Digital security can be a collaborative process! From working with NYC Safer Communities I developed a resource to guide technologists and folks stuck doing IT alike through a care-based approach to doing security audits and fixes.

Download a PDF guide to mini audits & go from freaked out to problem-solving with a digital security practice.

While the concept of a security audit can turn off some folks, I like to bring in data stewardship as a care practice to ground us in why digital security matters -- and how audits can become a normal

02/02/2018

Using is easy? NOPE. No data set is simple. Using it is satisfying? YES. On building with data from :

If you've never worked with data, you might think that finding an open data set available through a trusted city provider would be the end of your journey. And then, you'd open the data set, try to

11/09/2017

Should technology for liberation play a more central role in our movements?

Please join myself, Radical Action Design, Progressive Technology Project, May First / People Link and other progressive and social justice movement technologists for a special Technology and Revolution mini-convergence, Mon 11/13 @ Thoughtworks

Please join myself, Radical Action Design, Progressive Technology Project, May First / People Link and other progressive and social justice movement technologists for a special Technology and Revo

07/17/2017

Really good 30-minute explanation to machine learning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpGxLWOIZy4

A friendly introduction to the main algorithms of Machine Learning with examples. No previous knowledge required. If you like this, there's an extended versi...

07/14/2017

Casually getting mentioned in the 2017 NYC Open Data report! Did you know NYC agencies are legally required to make their (anonymized) data public, since our taxes pay for it and all? And therefore you can find all kinds on things on the Open data portal? https://moda-nyc.github.io/2017-Open-Data-Report/

12/06/2016

While the current political climate in the US is spawning mass interest in digital security, the situation as it stands has been created over the last 20 years or so, with concern and activism around the issue rising with the tide of technologies that are fueling the problems.

Here are the two types of security issues I want you to understand, and below are a few top-level actions you can consider taking.

Issue one: Protecting identity info, whereabouts, and sensitive text (credit card , SSNs) in your email or browser from malicious intent, surveillance, or censorship.

Issue two: Lessening the motherload of trace information that’s collected about each digital user to reduce the consumer identity data which companies sell, and which can be misused both intentionally and unintentionally.

What’s so dangerous about digital?

The most nefarious dangers generate from lack of expectation or awareness of the possible risks or outcomes of your actions. Many of us lock our houses because we expect that someone might try to enter our home. Many of us lock our email accounts with passwords.

But, the information we share, by emailing (at all), using public wifi, creating search records from our internet, all is essentially open to folks who know how to look at the networks we use to transfer that information. So, whether you just don’t want your credit card info or identity stolen, or don’t want a government to interfere with your movement work, digital network use is a risk.

Furthermore, many of us do not — and can not — lock the information we share digitally or via phones. It’s this ambient data that can be used to keep tabs on us, develop digital traces used to describe us, and deliver segmented ads and media, creating an echo chamber of our “persona interests”.

Worse, advances in data processing technologies lead one data scientist to refer to uses of the information collected from and about each of us digitally as a “weapons of math destruction,” capable of generating inequality. Many others agree.

Read more: http://www.femmetech.org/2016/12/digital-information-security-explaining-the-two-main-issues-how-to-deal-with-them/

download this resource as a PDF:infosec_resources_femmetechdec2016 While the current political climate in the US is spawning mass interest in digital security, the situation as it stands has been c

05/04/2016

Did you know you can opt out of "behavior optimized" (eg your online behavior tracking) Google ads in Chrome? Log in and go here: https://www.google.com/settings/u/0/ads/authenticated

03/29/2016

How people are using data visualization and media analysis tools to understand the current elections: http://blog.archive.org/2016/03/23/three-takeaways-after-logging-1032-political-ads-in-the-primaries/

The Political TV Ad Archive launched on January 22, 2016, with the goal of archiving airings of political ads across 20 local broadcast markets in nine key primary states and embedding fact checks and source checks of those ads by our journalism partners. We’re now wrapping up this first phase of th…

03/23/2016

"The most controversial area of the TPP has centred around provisions on intellectual property" : 24ways.org/2015/whats-ahead-for-your-data-in-2016/

03/03/2016

You wanna see more people who matter to you findable and recorded online? A wikipedia article gets #1 on google. Making a wikipedia account is easy and it's not very complex to edit a wiki. The great thing is that you don't have to be an expert (whatever the hell that means) -- when an existing article gets more editors making even tiny changes, it reinforces the authority of that article. Wikipedia is freakin dominated by white dudes. But it doesn't have to be. This s**t mattes and it's why I'm participating in a meetup this Saturday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism

Art+Feminism is pleased to announce its third annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, an all-day event designed to generate coverage of women and the arts on Wikipedia and encourage female editorship. The central New York event will take place at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Education and Research Buildin…

10/15/2015

Teaching today at the New School in an Archiving Memory class on technical aspects of digital collections. Dusted off my Raised Fist Digital Archive for the occasion: http://raisedfist.femmetech.org/

This flyer says “Assimilate My Fist” and has the classic mirror-of-Venus raised fist wielding a guitar. The guitar reads Tribe8, a rather…