Mobile – Page 30 – Public Intelligence Blog

2010/02/202011/02/21

Review: SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa

6 Star Top 10%, Associations & Foundations, Autonomous Internet, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Communications, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Public), Media, Mobile, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Priorities, Public Administration, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Beyond Six Stars–Hugely Important Useful Collection

February 20, 2010

Edited by Sokari Ekine

Contributing authors include Redante Asuncion-Reed, Amanda Atwood, Ken Banks, Chrstinia Charles-Iyoha, Nathan Eagle, Sokari Ekine, Becky Faith, Joshua Goldstein, Christian Kreutz, Anil Naidoo, Berna Ngolobe, Tanya Notley, Juliana Rotich, and Bukeni Wazuri

This book will be rated 6 Stars and Beyond at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, where we can do things Amazon refuses to implement here, such as sort useful non-fiction into 98 categories, many of the categories focused on stabilization & reconstruction, pushing back against predatory immoral capitalism, and so on.

When the book was first brought to my attention it was with concern over the price. The price is fair. Indeed, the content in this book is so valuable that I would pay $45 without a second thought. I am especially pleased that the African publishers have been so very professional and assured “Look Inside the Book”–please do click on the book cover above to read the table of contents and other materials.

This is the first collection I have seen on this topic, and although I have been following cell phone and SMS activism every since I and 23 others created the Earth Intelligence Network and put forth the need for a campaign to give the five billion poor free cell phones and educate them “one cell call at a time,” other than UNICEF and Rapid SMS I was not really conscious of bottom-up initiatives and especially so those in Africa where the greatest benefits are to be found.

I strongly recommend this book as a gift for ANYONE. This is potentially a game-changing book, and since I know the depth of ignorance among government policy makers, corporate chief executives, and larger non-governmental and internaitonal organization officials, I can say with assurance that 99% of them simply do not have a clue, and this one little precious book that gives me goose-bumps as I type this, could change the world by providing “higher education” to leaders who might then do more to further the brilliant first steps documented in this book.
Continue reading “Review: SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa”

2010/02/202010/02/20

Search: how much is al-qaeda worth?

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Mobile

Very cool question. We don't have the answers, but here are a few thoughts.

Who benefits? There is only one beneficiary of Al Qaeda as a virtual actor: the US Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Congressional Complex whose outrageously wasteful funding and excessive (70%) obligations to contractors are bankrupting the US economy, but who cares as long as the corporate gravy train keeps rolling along. The indigenous peoples seeking self-determination, including the long-repressed people of Saudi Arabia and the long-repressed peoples of Palestine, do not benefit from a model that Mahatma Gandhi clearly understood was self-destructive. Non-violence is the only sustainable path to self-determination.

Calculating value. With the above firmly in mind, Al Qaeda's “value” to the sole beneficiary, the MIICC, is a combination of three sums:

1. The sums Al Qaeda and related groups receive from governments, corporations, and individuals interested in sustaining radical Islamic violence against both Muslims and the West.

2. The sums the US and others spend on false flag operations attributed to Al Qaeda (the underpants bomber is probably an Israeli false-flag operation with US consent and colalboration)

3. The sums the MIICC receives from a corrupt Congress that has not done a serious national security baseline evaluation of need since Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) retired from his post as Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

What is Al Gaeda Worth? Our wild-ass but informed guess is $1 trillion a year. That one trillion a year is both positive value (for those that benefit) and negative value (for all the others). With one trillion a year we could have brought the USA into the 21st Century, funded free cell phones for the five billion poor so they could create infinite stabilizing and self-sustaining wealth, and created a prosperous world at peace.

Continue reading “Search: how much is al-qaeda worth?”

2010/02/122010/02/12

Journal: Taming Twitter–Emergence of Baby World Brain?

Analysis, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Technologies, Threats, Tools

Taming Twitter’s Streams With Automated Web Sites

Unlike Facebook, whose builders strive to make it an ever more organized social network, Twitter seems to thrive on being a jumble. It is an egalitarian sort of mess: Twitter does not sort its users into categories, does not tag some as celebrities, does not map out who does lunch with whom in the real world. You and Shaquille O’Neal are Twitter equals, only he has an extra 2.8 million followers.

There is also a Web site, Listorious listorious.com where volunteers publish personally chosen lists of posters to follow based on specific themes. But it is hit or miss. The Best of Photography list is a sharp collection of 29 eye-catching feeds, but Tech News People is a pile of 499 journalists for you to sort through.

So, how do you figure out who to follow? Start with a sweeping generalization: Twitter users can be grouped into different categories. For each, there is an automated site somewhere that lets you follow the genre without having to find and follow dozens, or even hundreds, of individual Twitter streams.

Phi Beta Iota: This article provides an extraordinary bridge to the future, when Twitter could become the real-time feed for inputs easily sorted in an infinite number of “back offices” that remix the information by threat, policy, player, and zip code. The difference between Google and Twitter is that Twitter empowers the end-user, Google ravages the end user (intellectually and metaphorically speaking).

2010/02/122010/02/12

Journal: Ushahidi Rocks in Haiti–New Schematic

08 Wild Cards, Analysis, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Computer/online security, Ethics, Geospatial, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Technologies, Threats, Tools

Full Story Online

Project 4636 Revisited: The Updated Info Graphic
UPDATE: Since this graphic was published, a few additional clarifications have come to light. Please see Robert’s comment for more details.

Shortly after we posted the original Project 4636 info graphic, a few folks involved in the project got in touch to see if we could clarify the process. There are a lot of moving parts, many of which are constantly changing, and so the original graphic didn’t quite reflect the exact process as well as it could have. With that in mind, we worked with Josh Nesbit of Frontline SMS Medic and Nicolás di Tada of InSTEDD to make sure the graphic reflected the process as accurately as possible. The biggest update that we made is that InSTEDD’s Nuntium SMS Gateway and the Thomson Reuters Foundation Emergency Information System are now the first entities that receive and process incoming SMS’s. Everything else is pretty much the same.

a ushahidi graphic — Click for Zoomable Version

Journal: Haiti Rolling Directory from 12 January 2010

2010/02/032010/02/04

Journal: Whither Twitter?

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Geospatial, Mobile, Real Time, Technologies

Twitter not all that popular among teenagers, report finds

“I don't know a single person who uses Twitter,” says Samara Fantie, 17, of Gaithersburg, who added that with so many of her friends on Facebook, Twitter seems beside the point.

Fantie listed its drawbacks, saying it appears to be less secure, more public and too condensed. “Teenagers like to talk, and 140 characters is just not enough,” she said. Facebook “does everything Twitter offers, only it's better. It would be like going backwards.”

Blogs Just Aren't Cool Any More, Teens Say

Blogging is slowly becoming the domain of adults, as a recent Pew study shows more teens abandoning the medium for social networks.

The study, conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, showed a decline in the number of teens who say they blog, from 28 percent in 2006 to 18 percent in 2009, when the study was conducted. Just 52 percent comment on their friends' blogs, versus 76 percent three years ago.

By contrast, the survey found that about 10 percent of adults maintain a blog, a figure that has remained unchanged.

Phi Beta Iota: We appear to be in an interregnum, with some very serious perople such as Pierre Levy and Jeff Jarvis seeing the enormous potential of Twitter, while the run of the mill “crowd” may be bored. Our view: Twitter is a game changer in part because geospatial location and identity are embedded, it is both mobile and real-time, and back office trends and aggregation and clustering can be attached. Something really cool is happening, and Pew missed it.

2010/02/032010/02/03

Journal: The Twitter Train Has Left the Station

Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Mobile, Real Time

Hundreds of thousands of people now rely on Twitter every day for their business. Food trucks and restaurants around the world tell patrons about daily food specials. Corporations use the service to handle customer service issues. Starbucks, Dell, Ford, JetBlue and many more companies use Twitter to offer discounts and coupons to their customers. Public relations firms, ad agencies, schools, the State Department — even President Obama — now use Twitter and other social networks to share information.

There are communication and scholarly uses. Right now, an astronaut, floating 250 miles above the Earth, is using Twitter and conversing with people all over the globe, answering both mundane and scientific questions about living on a space station.

Most importantly, Twitter is transforming the nature of news, the industry from which Mr. Packer reaps his paycheck. The news media are going through their most robust transformation since the dawn of the printing press, in large part due to the Internet and services like Twitter. After this metamorphosis takes place, everyone will benefit from the information moving swiftly around the globe.

2010/01/312010/02/01

Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents

Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Historic Contributions, InfoOps (IO), IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Strategy, Technologies, Threats, Tools

The software chapter in Book: INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH–Chapter 22 Technical Intelligence Enablers Loaded is being doubled up as our smarter colleagues churn it around, it will probably be extended several pages and have more linked references.

Here are the four requirements documents for the all-source fusion analytic workstation converging in 1989–we do not have this today because no one has ever tried to manage the US Government's approach to IT–distributed chaos and centralized ignorance just will not do.

1989 Webb (US) CATALYST: Computer-Aided Tools for the Analysis of Science & Technology

Reference 1989 Analyst 2000

1988 Generic Intelligence Center Production Requirements

Reference: 1989 USMC Work-Up for JNIDS VI All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation

1988-2009 OSINT-M4IS2 TECHINT Chronology

Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]

2001 Porter (US) Tools of the Trade: A Long Way to Go