A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide

What Hacker News says

1. jjj123Jul 2021
   If you’re interested in getting into civic tech I can’t recommend this book enough: A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide by Cyd Harrell (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1040593).

   I read it about 6 months into my first civic tech job and it was so useful I wish I read it before I started my job search!

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2. canduSep 2020
   Lots of competing opinions on what the big question in politics is, so I figured I'd add my own :)

   To me, the biggest question in politics is: how do we build political / societal systems whose impact on human society is consistently positive and equitable?

   This implies _fundamental_ changes in those systems. To wit: publicly-funded R&D returning value to the public purse, and not just to private companies (see: Mazzucato's "The Entrepreneurial State"); effective and highly coordinated wealth / corporate tax regimes (see: Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"); complete transformation of education and its relationship to both human psychology and technology (see: Papert's "Mindstorms"); eradicating the very concept of "good" and "bad" neighborhoods through massive and equitable investment in schools, housing, mixed-use zoning, mixed-income development, multi-modal transit, functional green space, etc. (see: Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein's "A Pattern Language"); and, backing it all, a modern, responsive, truly digital government that is empowered to invest in tools and technologies to continually improve both internal work and external service delivery (see: Cyd Harrell's "A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide").

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