[The previous blog talks about some resources to build data/information/knowledge stores to help improve environmental management. But the article below, recounting the current plans of the University of Toronto, says, “Are you sure that the public sector will conscientiously continue to serve as a faithful custodian of the digital resources now available.” Remember, for example, the dozens of marine science libraries that were simply closed and totally disassembled because of one budgetary decision in NOAA under a previous administration. But that couldn’t happen again, in your island, could it?]

Here’s the story from the University of Toronto as reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC):

University of Toronto Heads ‘Guerrilla Archiving Event’ to Preserve Climate Data ahead of Trump Presidency.

‘What we’re seeing is environmental McCarthyism,’ activist says of incoming administration

By Nicole Mortillaro,

CBC News Posted: Dec 14, 2016 5:28 PM ET
Last Updated: Dec 14, 2016 5:28 PM ET

The University of Toronto and other academic institutions are participating in an event to archive climate and environmental data before president-elect Donald Trump takes office on Jan. 20.

President-elect Donald Trump isn’t even in office yet, but environmentalists are deeply concerned about his views concerning climate change and the environment as a whole. Many are also worried that, once he takes office, years of climate and environmental research could be lost or much harder to access.

On Saturday, the University of Toronto, together with the University of Pennsylvania, is hosting what it calls a “guerrilla archiving event” to preserve any climate and environmental data before Trump takes office. It takes place at the Faculty of Information and runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

The event coincides with the Internet Archive’s End of Term 2016, a project that aims to preserve federal government information found on the internet at the end of each presidential term.

You may already be familiar with the Internet Archive: it’s home to the Wayback Machine, which searches old versions of web pages after they are updated. One of its offices is at the University of Toronto.

Volunteers welcome

The fear of information being deleted isn’t new. Sam-Chin Li, a government information librarian at the University of Toronto, who will be giving advice and direction to those involved on Saturday, said she was involved in archiving many federal government websites in 2013 when the [Canadian] Conservatives announced an amalgamation of 1,500 sites into one. She feared that much of the information could have been lost.

Li said that the incoming presidency worries her.

“Access to government information is so important. It’s really a foundation for a function of democracy. And we’re seeing all those things disappearing in front of our eyes, so how can we stand there not working?” Li said.

‘We’re learning that the stakes of environmental pollution are planetary.’
– Michelle Murphy, University of Toronto

Michelle Murphy, director of the University of Toronto’s Technoscience Research Unit, said that anyone can participate in Saturday’s event. The organizers don’t just need those with tech skills, but also people who know how to research and are familiar with environmental issues.

“It’s not just about those with programming/hacking skills,” she said. “Ultimately this is an archival process.”

Though the university doesn’t have any firm numbers on those who will attend, as of Wednesday afternoon, the Guerrilla Archiving Facebook page had 76 people who had confirmed they would be at the event.

The prospect of losing access to U.S. information isn’t just an American problem.

“We share waters; we share atmospheres,” Murphy said. “We’re learning that the stakes of environmental pollution are planetary.”

A collaborative effort

Patricia Kim, a graduate fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, will be in Toronto on Saturday to participate in the event. The two universities are working together to develop a framework for other academic facilities to utilize. The university — whose effort is called #datarefuge and will take place Jan. 13 to 14 — is providing short-term storage with a goal of long-term.

‘What we’re seeing is environmental McCarthyism.’
– Patricia Kim, University of Pennsylvania

Trump’s recent decision to choose Scott Pruitt as head of the EPA — he is known for opposing the EPA and even suing it during his time as Oklahoma attorney general — is concerning to Kim.

Trump adviser wants to cut NASA climate change research, calls it ‘politicized science’
Trump, who once called global warming a hoax, meets with climate change activist Al Gore
“What we’re seeing is environmental McCarthyism,” said Kim. But Kim is doing her part to safeguard existing databases and research, and she’s looking forward to participating in Saturday’s event.

Trump seemed to have wavered on his stance on climate change during a November visit to the office of the New York Times, saying that he’d “keep an open mind.” Still, that doesn’t mean he plans to soften his stance on the issue, Kim said.

That’s why she’s taking action now.

“Better safe than sorry.”

From the Welcome page of Spatial Reserves.

from Josh Tauberer at <https://medium.com/@joshuatauberer/civic-techs-act-iii-is-beginning-4df5d1720468#.k6xm0zxww >  (We can’t copy this short article to the NatureTech blog, so you have to go to the Medium.Com website — it’s legit.)

AND

Daniel X. O’Neil of SmartChicago at < http://civichall.org/civicist/an-education-in-community-technology/ >

AN EDUCATION IN COMMUNITY TECHNOLOGY

An exit interview with Daniel O’Neil upon leaving Smart Chicago.

BY: Daniel X. O’Neil,  JUNE 1, 2016

On Friday, Daniel O’Neil announced that he was leaving Smart Chicago after five years to join Ad Hoc LLC, the company recently hired to build vets.gov, where he will work on product development and business strategy. Civicist reached out to discuss Daniel’s departure, the lessons he has learned over the years, and where he sees civic technology going.

We’re also thrilled to announce that as of today Daniel will be joining Civicist’s roster of contributing editors. We look forward to sharing his work more frequently!

Civicist: How did your work at Smart Chicago change over your five years as executive director?

Daniel O’Neil: The main shift that I can describe is one from ‘civic tech’ to ‘community technology.’ When we first started, I had just left EveryBlock, where we pioneered open data and were deeply enmeshed in the new civic tech movement. At Smart Chicago, some of the first things we did were hosting hackathons, writing open data policies for municipalities, and starting projects with Code for America.

There was a lot of hope that civic tech would lead to new businesses and create new ways for people to interact with their government. Smart Chicago was at the center of all of that nationally. As time went by, however, we found that the people we were working with were all high-capacity, highly educated technologists. They were all very nice people and they had perfectly good ideas, but they weren’t the core people we were built to work with.

And after some time, we saw that we weren’t creating that much technology that actually helps people. This was around the time that there was a lot of questioning of the model of hackathons, when we decided/convinced ourselves that “building community” in this space was a goal—that having hackathons was less about the tech and more about the community.

The funny thing is that all of this was already built into our organization before I got here. We were charged with spending tens of millions of dollars in BTOP money. This was money for innovative community strategies, digital skills initiatives, new hardware in libraries, and public housing—things of that kind. I had a background in community technology, but I think I had an arrogance about tech.

A lot of it was an education—and sometimes not a very pleasant one. I was a believer in open data, a believer in the power of technology to help people, a believer in the founding idea that technologists could solve problems if they just coded the right things. I came to see the limits of these tools and the value of bringing technologists together without a community context.

What’s wrong with building community?

When you build a “community,” as it is currently defined in civic tech, you are by definition ignoring the existence of the other people who live near you and you supposedly seek to serve.

When you seek to have a hack night or a hackathon or some other tech-focused event, an enormous amount of the time is spent on explaining the frame—of telling people what you care about (civic tech), of your skills (coding, UX, whatever), of your interests (the common good).

It wastes time.

There are so many meetings, so many places where people gather to discuss their common interests and goals. Go to them!

You mean existing meetings? Is the main problem that these community-building groups are actually being created as separate and apart from existing community groups?

Exactly.

And then we create our own clumsy structures which are designed to (supposedly) circle back to community need.

By “meeting” I mean any place where regular residents gather to talk about our shared lives. In almost all instances, there are parts of those meetings that relate to technical needs. The problem is that when we invite people to civic tech meetings, we are necessarily leading with our framework (“we love civic tech and we think we can use it to solve your problems!”) rather than simply being present with them.

We try to foster that with our Smart Chicago Documenters program, where we pay people to attend public meetings.

Our Smart Health Centers program is another example. We designed it around human needs around health-care tech like patient portals and health-oriented content on the web. Youth-Led Tech, where we meet the needs of youth and employ young people who are starting tech careers.

At a recent meeting of the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force at a local high school, residents were able to speak about their concerns, their specific needs, hopes, and dreams. They were deeply engaged with government, all night. It was then taken over by protesters. Smart Chicago was there to document the whole thing—to hear their voices, to listen to and record what they had to say. It was not theoretical.

So what exactly are you doing differently, to meet people where they are? These are still Smart Chicago-created programs, right?

Yes, they are all programs invented at and run by Smart Chicago.

But we left 1871, the downtown incubator we had worked out of for years. We stopped doing event programming with civic tech people altogether. We hired fewer Rails and Django programmers at $125/hour and hired more instructors to teach kids how to make WordPress websites at $15-20/hour.

And we literally do meet people where they are. We’ve conducted CUTGroup tests in about 20 libraries, all over the county. Smart Chicago is teaching 30 youth in the juvenile detention center, talking about the Internet of Things in neighborhoods. We do the work.

The turning point for us was in February 2013 when we launched the Civic User Testing Group. As I wrote in the Origins chapter of The CUTGroup Book, we failed at getting regular residents to show up to our programs:

I realized that with a value proposition that starts with “If you develop an app,” there was no way we were going to get regular people to show up. We were offering $15,000 in prizes in four cities, but our program was too involved:

1. Come to a meeting on a weeknight
2. Develop/present an original idea for an “app”
3. Persuade one or more developers to build the idea
4. Follow the process through to completion
5. Submit the finished site/app
6. Prosper

When we got to Belleville—as far south as one could get in Illinois—we had the mayor, some developers from St. Louis, and zero members of the public. There had to be an easier way.
So I invented a specific, detailed methodology to engage residents around technology. That was where things changed for us.

What would you have done differently from the beginning, knowing what you know now?

I would have immediately built jobs programs for regular people in technology. Things like Smart Health Centers and Youth-Led Tech. I never would have created programs that focused on high-tech solutions built by high-tech people.

What’s next for Smart Chicago? What would you like to see the organization accomplish after you’ve left? If you were staying for another five years, what programs would you start, continue, or end?

The Chicago Community Trust, along with The MacArthur Foundation, will lead the search for a new executive director. They’re looking for a national leader who will be based in Chicago and who can continue to lead the way in community-based technology work.

In the meantime, Kyla Williams, who has been at Smart Chicago nearly from the start, is the interim executive director. She is an inventive, creative leader who has been at the heart of things and she will continue the work.

If I were staying another five years, I would want to go way harder at community engagement—find more ways to allow people to speak with each other, make joint decisions, plan our shared lives. We have very few methods for this. There is enormous segregation in this city. People are rarely invited outside of their own neighborhoods to share discussion. It needs a lot of work.

What’s the one thing the civic tech movement needs more than anything else? Or should the movement be shelved entirely in favor of community tech?

Yes, the civic tech movement should be shelved. It has run its course. The models of hack nights and civic apps and techno-determinist solutions have proven ineffective.

The dominant social movements of the last five years have next to nothing to do with civic tech. Black Lives Matter, the rise of racist Trumpian political ideas, marriage equity—they owe nothing to civic tech.

These forces used consumer-grade technology like Twitter and Facebook to drive their agendas while civic tech people are checking in code to Github.

Although you are describing a fairly common understanding of civic tech, Civic Hall co-founders Micah Sifry and Andrew Rasiej have proposed a “big tent” definition of the term, which I think is broad enough to include Smart Chicago’s community technology organizing, the kind of government technology work that Ad Hoc LLC does, as well as the apps and tools produced by the civic tech and open data organizers you describe above.

Yes, I have seen that—starting with last year’s PDF. I was stunned and pleased to see the focus on worker movements and the needs of regular people on stage. I put a lot of stock in what Civic Hall is doing, and I believe they’ve got their heads on straight.

What does this bigger, broader movement need?

It needs a general agreement by its partisans on the way forward.

We need a general agreement that we have to move from placing the alpha-geek at the center of our movement. We have to stop paying lip service to “build with, not for” and actually start implementing those principles into our work. We have to build on the methods we invented at Smart Chicago and make them better and more effective at discerning community need.

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with Civicist! Anything else you’d like to add?

In five years, our team at Smart Chicago has rarely been more than three people. By keeping our heads down and working with regular Chicagoans, we’ve built a case for the right conceptual model for an organization that uses technology to make lives better. We need more organizations to adopt this model.

BY: DANIEL X. O’NEIL