Category: Real Time

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Ushandi Moves Forward with Crisis Mapping Check-In

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Real Time
Michael Ostrolenk Recommends...

Crisis Mapping Meets Check-in

New features could make a Web tool that has helped track events in Japan and the Middle East even more useful.

Monday, March 28, 2011, By David Talbot

MIT Technology Review

EXTRACT:  The new feature is known as “check-in,” also used by social sites like Foursquare—in that case as a way of alerting friends to your presence at a particular location.

Click on Image to Enlarge

For Ushahidi, this is “a pretty powerful step forward,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a board member of the nonprofit, and a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “Adding check-in to this equation allows me to pull my data apart from the whole. That makes maps usable for multiple purposes—group reporting as well as tracking of my own movements.”

Enabling such tracking simply requires a GPS-equipped phone to allow a quick log-in to record whereabouts

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Live Crisis Mapping: Routing Around Old Mindsets

03 Environmental Degradation, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, CrisisWatch reports, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Maps, Mobile, Real Time, Tools
Click for Live Map with Substance Links

OCHA, UNOSAT and NetHope have been collaborating with the Volunteer Technical Community (VTC) specifically CrisisMappers, Crisis Commons, Open Street Map, and the Google Crisis Response Team over the past week.

The CrisisMappers Standby Task Force has been undertaking a mapping of social media, news reports and official situation reports from within Libya and along the borders at the request of OCHA. The Task Force is also aiding in the collection and mapping of 3W information for the response. UNOSAT is kindly hosting the Common Operational Datasets to be used during the emergency. Interaction with these groups is being coordinated by OCHA’s Information Services Section.

The public version of this map does not include personal identifiers and does not include descriptions for the reports mapped. This restriction is for security reasons. All information included on this map is derived from information that is already publicly available online (see Sources tab).

Click for Live Map with Substance Links

In the midst of this transition in Libya, one of the most devastating earthquakes in centuries hit northern Japan, causing one of the most destructive tsunamis in recent memory. Just hours after the earthquake, a member of Japan's OpenStreetMap community launched a dedicated Crisis Map for the mega-disaster. A few hours later, Japanese students at The Fletcher School (which is where the Ushahidi-Haiti Crisis Map was launched) got in touch with the Tokyo-based OpenStreetMap team to provide round-the-clock crisis mapping support.

Over 4,000 reports have been mapped in just 6 days. That's an astounding figure. Put differently, that's over 600 reports per day, or one report almost every two minutes for 24 hours straight over 6 days. What's important about the Japan Crisis Map is that the core operations are being run directly from Tokyo and the team there is continuing to scale it's operations. It's very telling that the Tokyo team did not require any support from the Standby Volunteer Task Force. They're doing an excellent job in the midst of the biggest disaster they've ever faced. I'm just amazed.

Tip of the Hat to Patrick Meier and Team at iRevolution.

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Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2011–Brilliance on Twitter

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Augmented Reality, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Real Time
Bruce Sterling

The South by Southwest® (SXSW®) Conferences & Festivals offer the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies. Fostering creative and professional growth alike, SXSW is the premier destination for discovery.

Phi Beta Iota: Jon Lebkowsky, himself a hero of the Hacker Revolution, has done something cool here.

  • 01 At Southby, science fiction authors talk like they know what’s going on.
  • 02 “There are people here who are younger than the event.”
  • 03 All the political language has been rendered toxic.
  • 04 Polarizing brand management. Culture wars. Politics from POV of a design critic.
  • 05 As a design critic, I criticize stuff that doesn’t exist yet.
  • 06 Bruce Sterling shows Worldchanging 2.0 (the book) at sxsw.
  • 07 Passionate virtuosity…. the ideas in Worldchanging 2.0 are passionate but lack virtuosity.
  • 08 We’ve got a series of problems that are poorly recognized.
  • 09 In our society, we don’t have any passionate virtuosity.Our political situation is the opposite, disgusted incompetence.

Continue reading “Bruce Sterling at SXSW 2011–Brilliance on Twitter”

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Crowd-Sourcing Comes of Age on Libya

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, Government, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Mobile, Real Time
May the Crowd be with you, always.

Volunteers Behind Libya Crisis Map: A True Story

Patrick Meier, iRevolutiion, 8 March 2011

My colleague Clay Shirky called it “Cognitive Surplus” in his recent book. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams refer to it as “MacroWikinomics” in theirs.

What is cognitive surplus? The trillion hours of free time enjoyed by the world's educated population every year. Don and Tony describe MacroWikinomics as mass distributed collaboration on scales we've never seen before thanks to technology.

We're familiar with deficits and shortages, writes, Clay, but when it comes to surplus social capital, things quickly become unpredictable—especially when this capital scales thanks to the use of social networking platforms and Web 2.0 technologies. But then again, says Clay, “Many of the unexpected uses of communication tools are surprising because our old beliefs about human nature were so lousy.”

Rest of story, maps, photos….

Phi Beta Iota: Over bagels and lox yesterday, Doug Rushkoff summarized his intention for ContactCon: “to take us back to 1992, but this time with 2012 technology and human understanding.”  Here is what the US Government was told in 1992 about crowd-sourcing.  20 years and 1 trillion dollars later (20 years, average of 50 billion a year), we still have the world's most expensive ineffective wasteland pretending to “do” intelligence.  The lunacy continues.

1992 AIJ OSS Steele’s Original Vision

1992 AIJ Fall ‘New Paradigm” and Avoiding Future Failures

Reference: 1992 USMC C4I Campaign Plan

1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (An Alternative Paradigm)

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Freedom Box: The Short Pitch as of March 2011

Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), microfinancing, Mobile, Peace Intelligence, Privacy, Real Time, Reform, Technologies

FreedomBox right now as I see it

by James Vasile as posted to HackerVisions, a blog at the intersection of Freedom, Technology, & Community

People have been asking me for a short description of the FreedomBox that doesn’t get too technical but also gets into some details. So here’s my capsule pitch, a short form version of how I see the FreedomBox right now:

The FreedomBox just raised $80K in donations via Kickstarter (the campaign is still going on, if you want to donate) on the strength of positive press in the NYTimes, WSJ, Wired and CBS Evening News. We’re at the very beginning of putting together a team to build this thing. This week we will announce our tech lead, an A+ name with the experience and contacts to lead our architecture design.

Continue reading “Freedom Box: The Short Pitch as of March 2011”

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Crisis Mapping Libya: This Is No Haiti…

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Mobile, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Real Time
Michael Ostrolenk Recommends...

Crisis Mapping Libya: This is No Haiti

Patrick Meier

March 4, 2011 at 8:14 am

We activated the Standby Volunteer Task Force (SBTF) on March 1st and quickly launched a Crisis Map of Libya to support humanitarian preparedness opera-tions. This is the largest deployment of the Task Force since it was formed at the 2010 International Conference on Crisis Mapping in Boston (ICCM 2010). I'm amazed at how far we've come since the response to the Haiti earthquake.

Phi Beta Iota: We've been championing Open Everything since 1988, each year growing from our first realization that Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) was urgently needed to bring government back to accountability, legitimacy, and sanity through transparency.  Below are two graphics, two briefings and two chapters that summarize our recent work in this area.  Here we want to emphazize the emergence of the Autonomous Internet Road Map and the fact that the Crisis Mapping initiative is a very strong manifestation of the power of public intelligence in the public interest.

See Also:

Graphic: Open Everything

Graphic: Intelligence Maturity Scale

2010 M4IS2 Briefing for South America — 2010 M4IS2 Presentacion por Sur America (ANEPE Chile)

2010 The Ultimate Hack Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer Earth (Chapter for Counter-Terrorism Book Out of Denmark)

2007 Open Everything: We Won, Let’s Self-Govern

Seven Answers–Robert Steele in Rome

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DEMO Spring 2011 Cyber-Social Launches

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Information Operations (IO), Key Players, Mobile, Real Time, Technologies
Click for Home Page

NEW: Below, organized by category, are names, links (first to overview, last to web site), and product descriptions for each of the companies launching at DEMO Spring 2011.  According to several of those who have attended past events, this one was “a cut above” an already high standard.  What came across clearly was the new level to which social media is going, being embedded deeply with all products and services, not just overlain.

Name Link leads to OVERVIEW page including company contact, financial, and video.  ON THE WEB leads to company site.  Categories are Cloud, Consumer, Enterprise, Mobile, and Social & Media.

Continue reading “DEMO Spring 2011 Cyber-Social Launches”