Last week I was in Singapore on with the IFES launch of Cyber and Information Resilience Elections Network (CIREN) Asia-Pacific. It was an honor and honestly a lot of fun.

CIREN is global initiative, now well into its second year, to increase the ability of election management bodies – AKA EMBs, AKA national election commissions – to prevent, detect, and respond to the cyber and information attacks that aim to damage elections around the world. These issues are obviously urgent and are going to be with us for a long, long time. That means the future of democracy lies not only with one-off solutions, like taking down a particular botnet or calling out a given disinformation campaign (both important!), but building strong and sustainable in-house capacity in EMBs to engage proactively with these threats as a core part of conducting an election. It also means they need stronger connections and a shared operational language to speak with all kinds of tech companies, who are so critical in providing a bird’s eye view of the internet, among other things.

The theory behind CIREN is pretty straightforward but important: these are regional and global threats, and the elections community needs to coordinate and respond at these scales. Not country by country whac-a-mole. The problem is we’re not very used to doing business that way, elections generally being national and local affairs, after all. We’re hoping CIREN, in various regional cohorts globally, can help create the space for transnational election security.

The CIREN...

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Big news for those rooting for the Fediverse - Wordpress.com now officially supports the WordPress ActivityPub plugin. This is a big deal because Wordpress.com is something like the 4th largest platform in the US, and WordPress the open source software is used by ~42% of websites. Official support means a commitment to keeping ActivityPub integration working and a soft but significant nudge to the community that it’s worth experimenting with. My bet is still with the Fediverse, including WP, Mastodon, and other integrators like WordPress to win out over other next-gen social media platforms. I hope! Announcement: “Engage a Wider Audience With ActivityPub on WordPress.com” and a good place to keep track of how it goes: “Fedidb WordPress stats”.

Some great resources articulating how to connect tech, human rights, and Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL/M&E):

• MERL Center
• MERL Tech
• MERL Github
• re: HCD in MERL
  

Who Can Use? lets you explore color combinations and how useable they are for people with different visual disabilities online. I love its simplicity, how it breaks down the category of “vision impairment” into the really rich array of needs and capacities that it actually corresponds to, and how it builds empathy instead of just spitting out a compliance report. I also love how it brings receipts. <3 <3 <3 whocanuse.com

A couple of related resources:

• Open Accessibility Conformance Report - an effort to create an open standard for government tech vendors to document the accessibility of their products
• ITI VPAT Accessibility Conformance Report standard
  

The premise in this podcast that LLM data harvesting is going to trigger a mass exodus (a la Reddit) from allowing crawling or public APIs seems a bit silly to me - traditional search would have done it and is still central to discoverability (plus most major platforms are already closed in this sense). But the point that we need to be aware that the expense of training models leads to market concentration is a vastly important one. LLM + walled gardens, sitting in a tree.

UK NHS is relying on Palantir as an infrastructure provider for public health data with predicatble results. Reliance on surveillance tech cos for gov services infrastructure is becoming normalized globally. When we think about digital transformation of public services, this kind of issue has to be front of mind - how else can the data be used or resold, inside or outside of gov? What technical and legal protections are in place and how strong are the institutions oversee and enforce them?

It’s totally fascinating listening to Michael Warner talk about “counterpublics” and the alt-right in this interview from 2018. It’s a good reminder that the structures of resistance can always be weaponized, as well as a kind of incredible time capsule, knowing what has happened since.

Last week I had the honor of being in Lusaka to support the government of Zambia’s portion of the global second Summit for Democracy. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems and the Electoral Commission of Zambia co-hosted a day zero event on threats to electoral integrity and I talked about digital threats and how traditional electoral integrity frameworks aren’t serving us well.

My argument: the elections community needs to take a page from the cybersecurity community and think about the “attack surface” of elections - including not only voting systems and the like but the information environment and all the civil society and corporate components that combined make or break elections and whether they are trusted.

The talk was streamed and is up on YouTube.

A two great reads on gender, gaming, and emerging digital spaces, such as community-led VR: Social VR & Gender Exploration:An open survey of VR users who have explored gender identity and expression in social VR (pdf) and Exploring Identity Through Gameplay: The Intersections of Tabletop Role-Playing Games, Game Design, and Queerness

Two oldies but goodies: Why is ‘ping’ a thing gives us the etymological ties between submarines, the foundations of the internet, and today’s terrible business speak. The Saddening is a beautiful snapshot from the early days of the pandemic shutdown and what it did to us culturally.