Giving Compass' Take:

• Forbes reports on eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's investment in Luminate, a global philanthropic organization that seeks to empower citizens with new technology.

• One notable takeaways is the three ways Luminate measures impact: direct impact on people, policy impact and ecosystem building. How can this evidence-based model be applied to other endeavors in the same sector?

• Here are some key issues when it comes to governing technology.

The Guardian has recently published the results of an extensive study showing that European populist parties have more than tripled their support in the last 20 years. In the most recent national elections, one in four Europeans voted for a populist party. Europe is not alone in experiencing this phenomenon. At the beginning of 2018, the Economist’s Democracy Index recorded the “worst decline in global democracy in years”. The analysis concluded that less than 5% percent of the world’s population lives in “a full democracy” and warned that more than half of the 167 countries assessed had seen an overall decline across five broad indicators: electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties.

A factor in this worldwide “democratic recession” seems to be the use of technology. As Claudia Alvares, a professor at Lusofona University in Lisbon explains, “the anger that populist politicians manage to channel is fuelled by social media posts, because social media are very permeable to the easy spread of emotion. The end result is a rise in the polarisation of political and journalistic discourse.” As a response to these worrying trends, Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, has launched Luminate, a global philanthropic organization focused specifically on supporting technology that “empower[s] people and institutions to build just and fair societies”

Read the full article about Pierre Omidyar's investment in civic tech by Tudor Mihailescu at Forbes.