The People > Learn about civic tech > Books - (31)
A list of books exploring different issues like how civic tech can be used to meet challenges in the cities, how to increase democratic participation, or what are the best ways to combat ethical concerns.
By Laura Kurgan The past two decades have seen revolutionary shifts in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The data flows that condition much of our lives now regularly include Global Positioning System (GPS) readings and satellite images of a quality once reserved for a few militaries and intelligence agencies, and powerful geographic information system (GIS) software is now commonplace. These new technologies have raised fundamental questions about the intersection between physical space and its representation, virtual space and its realization. In Close Up at a Distance, Laura Kurgan offers a theoretical account of these new digital technologies of location and a series of practical experiments in making maps and images with spatial data. Neither simply useful tools nor objects of wonder or anxiety, the technologies of GPS, GIS, and satellite imagery become, in this book, the subject and the medium of a critical exploration. Close Up at a Distance records situations of intense conflict and struggle, on the one hand, and fundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space, on the other. Kurgan maps and theorizes mass graves, incarceration patterns, disappearing forests, and currency flows in a series of cases that range from Kuwait (1991) to Kosovo (1999), New York (2001) to Indonesia (2010).
Three years of organizing, writing, and documenting in Chicago civic tech at the Smart Chicago Collaborative. By Christopher Whitaker Edited by Daniel X. O'Nei…
Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation [Joel Gurin] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers.
The book looks at organizing models, civic tech, governance, citizen engagement and how to fund, staff, and train the next generation of leaders to revitalize democracy.
A bold reassessment of "smart cities" that reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers, by Shannon Mattern
The Federal Bureaucracy in the Digital Age. By Amanda Clarke
systemic racism, cannot be solved with yesterday’s toolkit. Solving PublicProblems shows how readers can take advantage of digital technology, data,and the collective wisdom of our communities to design and deliver powerfulsolutions to contemporary problems."
Edited by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider: Ours to Hack and to Own, the rise of platform cooperativism, a new vision for the future of work and a fairer Internet.
Why local government needs more technologists and how you too can serve US governments struggle to keep pace with rapidly advancing technologies and with the expectations of the public for governmental service delivery akin to what they experience in other aspects of their normal daily lives. While more technologists are needed to serve in local government to help accelerate its digital transformation, no guide for aspiring Public Sector Technologists exists. Until now.
Democracy for Realists assails the romantic folk-theory at the heart of contemporary thinking about democratic politics and government, and offers a provocative alternative view grounded in the actual human nature of democratic citizens.
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Civic Tech Field Guide
Civic Tech Field Guide