User:Ishapunja/Sandbox

Below, I've included copies of the article I created on Marci Harris as well as the changes I've made on other articles (just the parts with the changes are included). Here is a brief summary of the changes I have made:

For my article on Marci Harris, I added a references section, added two more sources, and added another new heading about Harris's beliefs on civic technology, drawing a link between her and the bigger idea of civic technology explored in class. Total, I cited 17 sources in my article on Marci Harris. After I submitted it the first time, I followed Professor Harris's advice and changed the references so they were credible (using the Cite tool), and fixed small grammatical errors.

For my article on E-Government, I added a section about trust in E-government, edited the section on "Disadvantages" (where I cite two new sources), added a sentence on the limitations of E-goverment in local elections under the heading "Technology specific E-government" (and cited it) as well as the section on the "Definition" of E-gov, I total, I added 5 additional references (the references I contributed are all listed in the References section I copied and pasted).

For the article I edited on civic-technology, I added a sentence under the subheading "Breakthroughs in Civic Tech" about the use of civic technology in the Obama-Biden administration, and cited my source as well. I also added a sentence on an example of open data under the subheading "Span of civic tech space", along with a citation. I also added a hook sentence under the heading "History" about the importance of civic technology in today's digital age, and cited a scholarly journal. Lastly, under "effects of civic tech on social behavior", I added a sentence about the reader to leader framework and listed the source of the journal in which it was first hypothesized. Total, I cited 4 sources.

For my last edited article on Internet activism, the first edit I made was under the heading "Hashtag activism", where I mentioned and cited the hashtag "IamJada" to display how black feminism was perpetuated with hashtag activism. Under the section "Development Processes", I added a sentence on how internet activism is seen by some to ignore voices of marginalized groups. Under the heading "Development Processes", I added a paragraph on a study about internet activism and collective action, cited. My last edit was in the section "Examples of Early Internet Activism", in which I added a section on strategic voting in the early days of Internet activism. In total, I added 4 sources to this article.

Marci Harris

Marci Harris is a former lawyer, entrepreneur, and congressional staffer, best known for being the CEO and co-founder of PopVox, an online platform that connects voters with lawmakers. Now living in California, she is originally from West Tennessee, and started the website due to her experiences as a congressional staffer, with the goal of making the government more accessible to the average voter. The website began at the federal level and has plans to move to the state level in 2017. Harris and her initiatives are at the forefront of the civic technology movement, which aims to use technology in order to facilitate public participation in politics to pave the way for better government infrastructure.

Early Life

Harris was born in Tennessee, and attended the Lausanne Collegiate School, also known as the Lausanne Collegiate School for Girls, which is an independent, nonsectarian school for children in kindergarten through twelfth grade in Memphis. She comes from a long line of entrepreneurs, with her grandma taking over the local funeral parlor the family ran after her grandfather passed away, a radical move at the time. Her father started a real estate company, and Marci grew up with business being a dominant family conversation. Politics was also a highly contested issue in Harris's family with her father being a strong Republican and her mother being Democratic. Harris traveled much during her childhood and teen years. Marci was a sophomore in high school when she moved to Australia for six months in 1991, returning to Memphis to finish her senior year of high school. She then traveled to Paraguay before deciding to go to the Franklin School in Switzerland for College between 1993 and 1997.

Congress

2007-2010: Congress

After receiving a law degree at the University of Memphis and then a master of law at The American University in 2007, Harris went on to work in Congress as a congressional staffer for three years, focusing on issues of health care reform, medicare, waste fraud, and abuse.She first entered the congressional arena when she became the Tax, Trade, and Health Counsel to Pete Stark, and oversaw the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee in the areas of Medicare program integrity and transparency issues.

In her time at Congress, Harris was under President Barack Obama; notable congressional events under his presidency included the "Obamacare" implementation of health care, one of the most distinguishing characteristics of Obama's administration. For Harris, such events defined and shaped her experience in these arenas, signifying the need for citizen participation in their implementation.

2010-Present: Popvox

It was during her time working for Stark that Harris got her idea for Popvox, noticing that Congress oftentimes received much input from the public, but oftentimes failed to organize it efficiently enough to employ it constructively. After leaving the hill in 2010, Marci went on to co-found PopVox with UCLA alum Radha Chaudhry as well as the help of other civic tech enthusiasts. The website contains a plethora of public information about bills that's are introduced in Congress. Advocacy organizations can register for a profile on the website and include their positions on certain bills, stating whether they support them or oppose them. The website gained rapid traction, going on to win the SxSW BizSpark Accelerator startup competition in 2011 and was named one of the Top Open Government Websites by Read Write Web. In addition to running PopVox, Marci currently serves on the board of LaunchTN, which is a public-private partnership aimed at fostering entrepreneurship among high-growth companies in her home town of Tennessee. Additionally, she mentors at Code for America Accelerator in San Francisco, California. For her main project, PopVox, Harris has goals of testing out a pilot platform at state levels for the website to integrate from federal to state level. She plans on traveling throughout the country to speak about the PopVox and its goals, and her next stops are Knoxville, Chattanooga, Nashville, and Jackson, finally ending her tour in Memphis.

Harris's Views on Civic-Technology

In a 2014 interview with TechPresident reporter Sonia Roubini, Harris described her views on civic technology's role in future political participation, stating, "transparency, government technology, and civic engagement are different and complementary things that require different approaches and different expertise". Harris's statement reveals her belief in the distinction between technology and government as two sides of the same coin, noting instead that technology is a tool and asset that should be used to further open government. She used her own platform as an example of this idea, and said "The true power of POPVOX is not its technology, however. It is in the voices of people sharing their personal stories with their elected representatives."

In a six-minute 2012 Ted Talk video in which she spoke, Harris conveyed her belief that through technology, people can gain more power than powerful lobbyists, armed with financial power.

Personal life

Harris currently resides in California, where her main priority is carrying out her duties as CEO of Popvox. She has employed the help of her brother, who serves as COO of the website.

References

Category:American women chief executives Category:University of Memphis alumni Category:Washington College of Law alumni Category:Living people

E-government

Definition

In electronic government systems, government operations are supported by web-based services. It involves the use of information technology, specifically the Internet, to facilitate the communication between the government and its citizens.

Disadvantages

There are many considerations and potential implications of implementing and designing e-government, including disintermediation of the government and its citizens, impacts on economic, social, and political factors, vulnerability to cyber attacks, and disturbances to the status quo in these areas. See also Electronic leviathan. The political nature of public sector forms are also cited as disadvantages to e-government systems.

Trust

Trust in e-governance is very highly dependent on its performance and execution, which can be measured through the effectiveness of current actions. This is much riskier and prone to fluctuation than a system of trust that is based on reputation because performance does not consider past actions.

Technology-specific e-government

The previous concern about developments in E-government concerning technology are due to the limited use of online platforms for political reasons by citizens in local political participations.

Civic Technology

Breakthrough events in Civic Technology

The Obama-Biden administration allowed for the smooth integration of civic technology into the American political sphere. Their administration utilized many civic tech strategies in order to facilitate political participation of the average citizen.

Span of the civic technology space

OneBusAway, a mobile app that displays real-time transit info, exemplifies the open data use of civic technology. It is maintained by volunteers and has the civic utility of helping people navigate their way through cities. It follows the idea that technology can be a tool for which government can act as a society-equalizer.

History

Civic technology has had increasing promise and importance with time, as we currently live in a digital age, a period in which digital communications are the foundation for political and economic exchanges.

Effects of civic technology on social behavior

Preece & Shneiderman discuss the important social aspect of civic technology with a discussion of the "reader-to-leader framework", which follows that users inform readers, who inform communicators, who then inform collaborators, before finally reaching leaders. This chain of communication allows for the interests of the masses to be communicated to the implementors.

Internet Activism

Hashtag activism

One example of the powerful rise of hashtag activism can be seen in the black feminist movement's use of hashtags to convey their cause. The famous hashtag "IamJada" was an internet backlash to the mocking "#Jadapose" that went viral, ensuing after a sixteen-year old old girl Jada Smart was photographed following her gang rape In this instance, a hashtag was employed to convey a powerful anti-rape message.

Development processes

Exploring the dynamics of online activism for expressing resistance to a powerful organization, a study published in Information and Organization developed a critical mass approach to online activism. The results were integrated in a four-year longitudinal process model that explains how online activism started, generated societal outcomes, and changed over time. The model suggests that online activism helped organize collective actions and amplify the conditions for revolutionary movements to form. Yet, it provoked elites’ reactions such as Internet filtering and surveillance, which do not only promote self-censorship and generate digital divide, but contribute to the ultimate decline of activism over time.

The issue of the mass media's centrality has been highly contested, with some people arguing that it promoted the voices of marginalized groups while others believe it sends forth the messages of the majority alone, leaving minority groups to have their voices robbed.

Examples of early activism

The engagement in the practice of strategic voting was another development that came with Internet activism. People coordinated their vote pairing by entering their contact information into an online database, thereby reducing cost completely.