PTKO’s weekly reads, curated for you: February 28, 2020 edition

3 minute read

The world we live in is constantly changing–and the technology systems we rely on turn-over even faster. In order to stay up to date on best practices, new developments, and emerging theories, we are always reading. We share these articles internally and figured we should be sharing with you as well. Here’s what we’ve been reading this week.

Nieman Lab

There are lots of ways to combat misinformation. Here are some creative ones from across three continents

There are many studies on misinformation and ways to combat it, but they’re often focused on traditional reporters and editors. In four new reports published today, Full Fact, an independent fact-checking charity in the United Kingdom, partnered with Africa Check (which fact checks in several count…

Tony Kopetchny says: There are lots of organizations talking about how to address mis-information and this article shows a few examples of how (the three groups listed) are working to make it happen. There is also an emphasis on media literacy, which I think is 100% right and will be overlooked constantly since it is not a tech solution but rather offline, person to person

Time- Online

Artificial Intelligence Has a Problem With Gender and Racial Bias

Machines can discriminate in harmful ways. Here’s how we fix the problem.

Patti DeBow says: Our clients often have missions to solve social inequities, so how do they effectively leverage exciting new technology (that has potential to improve their operations and drive efficiency) without compounding the problems they’re trying to solve? As more and more orgs in the nonprofit sector start to adopt AI in a variety of ways – tagging of digital assets, data modeling, personalized digital experiences – they should be sensitive to it’s limitations and potential pitfalls.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

Five Foundations Address the “Starvation Cycle”

Presidents of five leading foundations are working together to advance solutions to chronic underfunding of their grantees.

Patti Debow says: I love that people are trying to solve the not so glamorous problems of nonprofits – no one likes to talk about funding operations, it doesn’t make for a good story, and (as you can see by the length of this article) when you dig into it it’s a lot of bureaucracy around grant-making processes. I also appreciated the who’s-who list of big foundation players – seeing the big guns tackle this is great – it says they’re interested in more impactful grant-making and are investing in that!

CNET

This could be Microsoft’s most important product in 2020. If it works

ElectionGuard isn’t designed to make voting machines safe from hackers. It’s meant to make hacking them pointless.

Nate Parsons says: This is a good project to keep your eyes on in the civic space.

Written by

Lisa McHenry

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