Mark Rosenman impeccably synthesizes the need for building political power in the philanthropic sector. Writing for Philantopic (emphasis mine): Grantmaking foundations are being taught an important lesson, but most of them don’t seem inclined to learn it. The Tea Party movement has shown that building political power is of much greater consequence to the causes [...]
I ran across a year-old article I had bookmarked from GovTech entitled “Do Apps for Democracy and Other Contests Create Sustainable Applications?” (via Justin Massa) For the past two years, innovation contests have swept the country in a contagious craze, from Washington, D.C., to New York City, from San Francisco to Portland. Even first lady [...]
Today I attended a developer meeting at Boston City Hall for their Citizen Connect API, a to-be-launched Open311 implementation. The city currently has official iPhone and Android apps that allow community members to submit broken streetlights, potholes, graffiti and snow removal, but the intent of the “open” part is to allow unaffiliated developers to integrate [...]
The New York Times yesterday gave a breakdown of proposals to change how donors calculate donations in their taxes: All three deficit reduction proposals from the blue ribbon panels would eliminate the deduction in its current form. One of the panels, the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform would give taxpayers a tax credit [...]
A brief history of the United State’s subsidies to journalism and the press, from The Nation’s “How to Save Journalism” by John Nichols and Robert McChesney: Even those sympathetic to subsidies do not grasp just how prevalent they have been in American history. From the days of Washington, Jefferson and Madison through those of Andrew [...]
I just finished reading a New York Times editorial “Is the Supreme Court About to Kill Off the Exclusionary Rule?” that ended with this line: “Nothing can destroy a government more quickly,” the [Federal Supreme Court noted in Mapp v. Ohio], “than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter [...]
The story of the slightly smaller Government-Letter sized paper (from Wikipedia): There is an additional paper size, to which the name “government-letter” was given by the IEEE Printer Working Group: the 8 in × 10½ in (203.2 mm × 266.7 mm) paper that is used in the United States for children’s writing. It was prescribed [...]
