First message: coronation | Civicist

It's civic technology: The University of Washington is trying to outsource a solution to the spread of the coronavirus, by publishing a new puzzle game sure Fold it challenge scientists and the public to build a protein that could prevent the virus from infiltrating human cells, Geekwires Nat Levy reports.

Members of the Taiwans g0v.tw civic tech community have built a trilingual website which matches government information on recent movements of confirmed coronavirus patients with user location history based on Google Maps timeline to verify whether or not they may have been in contact with patients, Sophia Yang reports for Taiwan News. You have to activate your Google Maps location history for this to work, and you also wonder how the government collects and shares sick people location history.

March and April are busy months on the calendar for civic tech conferences. So far, the coronavirus has claimed a major event: International Journalism Festival which was to take place from April 1-5 in Perugia, Italy, has been cancelled. Always listening: BetaNYCs Data School here in New York on March 7; Canada Summit Code March 10-11 in Toronto; Code for America Summit in Washington, DC, March 11-13; the Civic Innovation Forum in Johannesburg, March 18-20; TICTeC 2020 From March 24 to 25 in Reykjavik; and the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, Spain, April 20-24.

Apply: ioby, the civic crowdfunding platform and the leadership development center are looking to hire a chief engineer.

Apply: The National Domestic Worker Alliances Labs is looking to hire three technologists to join his team, a research and analysis director, a content director (Spanish language) and a product designer.

Coping with infodemia: NewsGuard has a list nearly 100 US websites with inaccurate information about the coronavirus, including ZeroHedge.com, RushLimbaugh.com and 54 domains associated with the NaturalNews.com network. NewsGuard editor Statnews John Gregory explains that much of the misinformation focuses on the unsubstantiated claim that the virus was created in a laboratory. He reports that Zero hedge, a blog of politics and finance, recorded 2.1 million shares of commitments, likes, comments, etc. on social media in the past 90 days. In contrast, the CDC website had only 175,000 social media engagements in the same period, even if CDC.gov is the best result in any Facebook search for the term coronavirus. The WHO website had only 25,000 commitments.

American scientist, technosociologist Zeynep Tufekci advice that taking precautions like stocking up on food is not apocalyptic behavior but our civic responsibility, because if we can slow the transmission of the disease at the hospital at the same time.

Tech and democracy: Almost half of 979 technology innovators, developers, business leaders and policy makers, non-scientific and non-random researchers and activists interrogates By the Pew Research Center last summer, they believe that the use of technology will mainly weaken the main aspects of democracy and democratic representation over the next decade, while 33% say that The use of technology will mainly strengthen the main aspects of democracy and democratic representation. The fears of the unscientific and non-random majority of the sample center on how technology is perceived to empower already powerful and weakened shared information systems. The hopes of the unscientific and nonrandom minority are centered on their feeling that human adaptability will lead to positive innovation and that leadership and activism will create positive change. (For the amount of attention this study has garnered, this is nothing more than an aggregation of what you could get if you somehow followed this particular group of 979 people online ; people have opinions, after all!)

Not explained by Pew: What exactly are the fundamental aspects of democracy and democratic representation? An implicit answer given by the authors of the report Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie is the idea that government responds in the best interest of citizens. In the United States, unfortunately large majorities of the public have told pollsters for decades that they do not believe that the political system is sensitive to them, but rather that it is mainly sensitive to some great interests. This deficit is a central aspect of democracy before the rise of the Internet and all the other technologies involved in the Pews survey.

Fast Company performs a series of parts called Hacking democracy see if technology can save democracy. First, a piece of Steven Melendez reports on Redditors who are trying to fight online disinformation. A vibrant example of their work: Canvas of Lies, an interactive graphic that shows many connections between the different actors in the world of information warfare.

To reinforce previous studies showing that Americans don't like the idea that political ads are targeted based on their personal characteristics, a new Gallup survey funded by the Knight Foundation find that 72% of Americans prefer that online political ads are not targeted at all, and an additional 20% are comfortable with such ads using limited and broad information such as gender, a person's age or postal code.

End time: Alphabets X Division a ad a new lunar hunting project to help conserve the world's oceans using technology that could better be called fishal reconnaissance.

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