Civic Tech Is Ready for Investment | Hacker News Reader

Civic Tech Is Ready for Investment

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11 pointsfreshkurt4 comments

The US Government understands that by funding the right NGOs and CSOs, it can project power by laundering its intentions through the goodwill and civic intentions of entrepeneurs, volunteers and activists. But it often takes this too far and embarrasses itself (as was the case with the Cuban Twitter NGOs).

This isn't exactly illegal - but the use of NGOs and CSOs to foment revolutions, weaken regimes, organize protests and replace governments around the world is starting to get significant resistance from other states which results in closed borders and fractured rather than unified global civil interaction. Russia has fully obliterated all civil organizations from the West because it was not able to differentiate which ones were puppets for the CIA or State Department and due to frustration with both the political upheaval they were organizing and the role they played in leading the Euromaiden protests in Ukraine.

Understand that if your civil project is being invested in it is because it magnifies US power. On its face that's not a bad thing - we probably want to live and certainly benefit greatly from a powerful nation - it just means that you should be aware about what you are getting yourself involved in.

As an American it's in my interests to have a powerful United States. Sadly the ruling elite of the country have been fixated on military power. I would much prefer policies that promoted soft power, or the ability to co-opt rather than coerce.

Our global tech leadership would be enhanced if the NSA reoriented with a focus much more on its defensive mission, rather than it's offensive capability.

Freedom is our brand, and they are diluting the hell out of it.

Civilization IV is a great teacher of the concept of soft power, known as culture in the game. When you're citizens are happy and your cities are the envy of the world, other nations want to join with you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power

Washington believes, and there's probably some truth to it, that the ability to project soft power comes after, or at least in tandem with, hard power guarantees.

The US utilizes soft power all the time and is and has been heavily invested in soft power. But soft power taken too far looks like coups or staged dissent, and America's soft power can sometimes be powerful enough to look like - or actually be - this.

That is to say that the overuse of soft power, or perhaps just the clumsy wielding of it, also dilutes the brand.

The recent investment in Nepal is a great example of soft power done right (IMO).

Yeah, when private citizens are needed to make government programs work efficiently, it makes me wonder why the service is provided by the government in the first place.

If "civic tech" is an attempt to move functions of the government (say, parts of the DMV process) into the private sector, I'm really interested. If it's an attempt to leverage the private sector to support outdated and/or bloated government bureaucracy, I'm not so interested.

In other words, a lot of the technology problems government faces can be solved by deciding to pivot -- change or restrict the scope of an agency or program, make clear rules about how the "civic tech" folks can grow an business or non-profit in the space that's being made.

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