Less than a month into the New Year, the Tech team is working on some exciting initiatives for Q1 including our first in-house event on Wednesday, February 3rd featuring an expert panel on Innovation in 2016 Campaigning. If you haven’t already signed up to attend, you can RSVP here: Innovation in 2016 Campaigning – What Works and What’s Hype.
ARTICLES OF INTEREST:
How Does An Emerging Army Of Tech Donors Think In an era where vast wealth is pouring out of Silicon Valley, techies are rapidly entering the philanthropic arena. As reported by Inside Philanthropy, ‘never before has it been so easy to help in giving away money’. Several financial service institutions have already capitalized on this opportunity having established strategic giving centers. Identifying priorities, choosing philanthropic vehicles and administering grant making are but a few of the services provided to the new wave of major donors. With an appetite for risk, desire to learn from others and a decline in the creation of private foundations, active tech donors are evolving how we once examined traditional giving. Responsible for the shift towards early investment in philanthropic initiatives, techies are providing solutions to issues that would otherwise become more difficult to solve later on.
A New Platform Makes It A Lot Easier To Decide How To Vote In Elections Boasting a database of candidate endorsements on both a local and national scale, Change Politics is the favorite new political app amongst users who look to trusted organizations and their community to share information. Users can submit questions directly to candidates partnered with the platform, all which can be ‘upvoted’ by others using the site. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Jeb Bush and Ben Carson are among the first politicians involved. Working to transform low information citizens into engaged and informed voters, Change Politics is eager to expand from the national election to statewide and local elections here in the U.S. and beyond.
Zynga Is Now Offering Native Political Gaming Ads for Presidential Campaigns In collaboration with The Rubicon Group, Zynga is developing sponsored play ads targeting voters ahead of the 2016 presidential race. Appearing while users are playing a game, the ads will entice participants to play an optional mini game that reflects the style of the activity being enjoyed. With the number of smartphone gamers steadily increasing, creating action through programmatic ads is an opportunity campaigns can’t afford to miss. As stated by Zynga’s Chief Data Officer, “It’s not just that consumers are engaging with this content. It’s also that they’re remembering this content and that it’s impactful.”
TECH TIDBIT:
A subfield at the intersection of computer science and statistics, Machine Learning is concerned with developing algorithms that use pattern recognition, forecasting, and error (or variance) minimization to determine an output based off of observed information. Common uses for Machine Learning include classifying information into buckets, image or video recognition (is this a cat video?), and determining how many different distinct types of data are included in a data set. Machine learning is a key component in the artificial intelligence systems that curate our Facebook feeds and pick out songs that we may like on Pandora.
Guessing by the number of feed posts on Facebook you ignore to the last time you used Pandora, computers are still immature at discerning the data stored at their disposal. Most machine learning algorithms require a huge amount of data, well filtered, in order to make good decisions. Computers lag far behind even the youngest humans, who encompass the capability to learn from very small amounts of information. In short, we can look forward to a future filled with intelligent computer systems that learn from their surroundings, drive our cars, etc. Contributing to the ways in which AI systems are used to understand how social movements grow and exert influence is of particular interest. Of course we can’t forget about the inevitable robot bildungsroman – we’re truly excited for that.
FACT:
Self proclaimed activists tweet about climate change approximately 60% more per day than others.
EYE CANDY:
Check out this great visual of Superstorm Jonas: Watch The Whole Superstorm Jonas Hit New York City In Just 90 Seconds
for Equity & Evidence