Patrick Meier: Using CrowdFlower to Microtask Disaster Response — and Robert Steele on CrowdFlower to Manage Micro-gifting Local to Global Range of Needs & Fulfillment Table to Household Level

Architecture, Cloud, Crowd-Sourcing, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Transparency
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Using CrowdFlower to Microtask Disaster Response

Cross-posted from CrowdFlower blog

A devastating earthquake struck Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010. Two weeks later, on January 27th, a CrowdFlower was used to translate text messages from Haitian Creole to English. Tens of thousands of messages were sent by affected Haitians over the course of several months. All of these were heroically translated by hundreds of dedicated Creole-speaking volunteers based in dozens of countries across the globe. While Ushahidi took the lead by developing the initial translation platform used just days after the earthquake, the translation efforts were eventually rerouted to CrowdFlower. Why? Three simple reasons:

  1. CrowdFlower is one of the leading and most highly robust micro-tasking platforms there is;
  2. CrowdFlower’s leadership is highly committed to supporting digital humanitarian response efforts;
  3. Haitians in Haiti could now be paid for their translation work.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Using CrowdFlower to Microtask Disaster Response — and Robert Steele on CrowdFlower to Manage Micro-gifting Local to Global Range of Needs & Fulfillment Table to Household Level”

SchwartzReport: Truth by Design & Tipping Points

Architecture

schwartz reportWhat Will “Truth” Mean in the Future?

New technologies are changing what we can consider real.

Brad Allenby

Slate, 22 February 2013

EXTRACT

The engineers designing our planet and working on Human 2.0 are doing a lot of highly technical things with real tissues and materials and circuits and material cycles and built things. They are constrained by physical laws, less so by existing infrastructures, by economics, and by a whole suite of plans, roadmaps, and design objectives. But out of an unimaginable and vast universe of potential choices, the Earth 2.0 and Human 2.0 line will arise—and they will reflect the dreams, the archetypes, the conflicts, the cultures, the science fiction, the hopes, of humanity. The engineers and their networks and firms and technology systems and research institutions are the working Star Trek planet, and they will give you what you ask for. This is beyond the common lament of “playing God” of the anti-biotech campaigners, however, for what is being designed is everything—from the Earth itself to the designer herself. And it is your fantasies, your fiction, your hates and fears, your loves that guide the design, and the building, and the new truths.

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John Robb: Life in a Networked Age

Architecture, Culture, Governance
John Robb
John Robb

Life in a Networked Age

Here's some idle thinking for a sunny afternoon at the end of winter.

To access it, let's make a simple assumption that economics, politics, and warfare are all a function of the dominant technological substrate.

A technological substrate is the family of related technologies that we rely upon.  In the 20th Century, we were clearly reliant on an industrial substrate.

The challenges posed by industrial age technologies dictated the development of two management forms:  bureaucracy and markets.   Bureaucracies and markets are both decision making systems. These management forms dominated economics, politics, and warfare for centuries.

Neither system of management is sufficient as a solution for industrial economics, politics, or warfare.

Democracies use market decision making to determine leadership over a nation-state bureaucracy. Capitalism uses markets to determine leadership/control over corporate bureaucries.  Education uses bureaucracy to manage its institutions and a combination of markets and bureaucracy to allocate students.  The modern age was dominated by market based warfare (think: Wallenstein) but it is now firmly bureaucratic.

Although ideologies have been built and wars have been fought over the mix of bureaucracy and markets, neither system has proven dominant.  .

This simplification is useful when we shift the technological substrate.

In the last thirty years, we've seen a shift in the technological substrate.  This new susbstrate is increasingly a family of technologies related to information networks.

As this new substrate begins to take control, we're going to need new management forms.  Both bureaucratic and market systems are proving insuffient solutions to the challenges of a networked age.

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SchwartzReport: Putting Play – Imagination Back Into the Lives of Children

Architecture, Cultural Intelligence

schwartz reportTear Down the Swing Sets
NICHOLAS DAY – Slate

As the father of two Waldorf educated daughters, and the husband of a career Waldorf teacher, I have observed the truth of this report.

Ronlyn kept baskets of bits and pieces in baskets in her classroom, and not a single formal toy. It was fascinating to watch the inventiveness of her 5 year olds, and the many uses to which a corn cob, some pieces of 2×4 lumber, and colored scarves could be turned as her students created imaginary worlds. Their play required imagination in a way no video game, or complete miniature recreation could possibly stimulate.

What surprised me was that Ronlyn often had to teach her children to play when the school year began. Initially they would just sit, waiting to be entertained by some electronic gadget, or to push buttons. Play is the business of childhood, because it stimulates the brains of children, and imagination is an essential part of the process. Modern toys which leave nothing to the imagination, and risk-free plastic playgrounds completely miss this point.

In 1888, the psychologist Stanley Hall published a story about a sand pile. A minor classic, it describes how a group of children created a world out of a single load of sand. These children were diligent, they were imaginative, they were remarkably adult.

More than a century later, at the architect David Rockwell’s Imagination Playground in lower Manhattan, small humans scurry back and forth all day long, carrying Rockwell’s oversized blue foam blocks from self-devised task to self-devised task. These children are intent, they are cooperative, they are resourceful. The scene resembles nothing so much as Stanley Hall’s sand pile-with each grain of sand much bigger and much bluer. (Except for the bits of actual sand, that is.)

More than any playground in recent memory, the Imagination Playground has inspired an outburst of excitement. It’s a hit with the hip parents who take their kids to Dan Zanes concerts, and is just as crowded as one. But it also represents something much more mundane: the triumph of loose parts. After a century of creating playgrounds for children, of drilling swing sets and plastic forts into the ground, we have come back to children creating their own playgrounds. Loose parts-sand, water, blocks-are having a moment.

The resurgence of loose parts is an attempt to put the play back in playgrounds. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of exuberant playground design, culminating in the great Richard Dattner adventure playgrounds in New York City. Then the grownups got skittish. Down came the merry-go-rounds and the jungle gyms, and in their place, a landscape of legally-insulated, brightly-colored, spongy-floored, hard-plastic structures took root. Today, walking onto a children’s playground is like exiting the interstate: Regardless of where you are, you see the exact same thing.

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Yoda: Functional Beauty and User Experience

Architecture
Got Crowd? BE the Force!
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Beautiful, force is.

Functional Beauty and User Experience

Beauty is one of the oldest and most powerful concepts in human history—inspiring artists and lighting up cultural movements, philosophical debates, and, in modern times, curious scientific interest. Beauty is a desirable feature of the products we buy, with the power to shape consumer choices and preferences.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

While the nature of beauty is still a mystery, the nature of design is unquestionably linked to the beautification of crafts throughout human history.

Designers purposely create beautiful solutions so people can enjoy solving problems, working, or pursuing goals. In recent years, concepts like visual design, aesthetics, information architecture, and usability have helped designers create more ways for people to enjoy using technology. However, when it comes to interaction design, functional beauty outweighs aesthetics—here’s why:

Understanding Functional Beauty   .   Creating Functional Beauty   .   Usability   .   Ingenuity   .   Aesthetics   .   Rhythm   .   Personality

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Catalina is a self-taught designer and the co-host of the podcast BrightLounge. She studied Psychology and Marketing, before combining her passions and becoming and interaction designer at Velora Studios. In 2011 she started traveling the world, filming and co-hosting BrightLounge, a podcast featuring interviews with designers and entrepreneurs from around the world. Her motto is “Stay creative, grow curious”.

Journal of #SOCMINT: Inteligencia Colaborativa: Un Recurso para la Innovación Abierta

Architecture, Crowd-Sourcing, Knowledge
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

#SOCMINT  Use Google Translate at top of middle column.

Si yo sé algo que tú no sabes sobre lo que tú estás trabajando y tú sabes algo que yo no sé, lo lógico sería colaborar. Pero, si yo te lo cuento existe el riesgo de que tú se lo cuentes a otros,  impidiendo o reduciendo el beneficio que yo pudiera obtener por ello, o que revelándote una parte, me des las gracias y completes el resto por tu cuenta. Este es uno de los argumentos que el premio Nobel de Economía de 1972, John Kenneth Arrow, daba para explicar que en la actividad inventiva existe un fallo de mercado y justifica la intervención de los poderes públicos para que no se produzca una escasez de recursos en ella. El modelo de innovación de la “Factoría de Inventos” de Edison, donde todo se cocía internamente, incluso el carácter individualista y la fama de jugador duro atribuidos a éste, responden a un planteamiento cerrado de la innovación, una traducción del dilema presentado por Arrow.

Sin embargo, este planteamiento resulta contradictorio con la naturaleza creativa  propia de la innovación. Crear es fundamentalmente asociar, conectar, explorar, cuestionar y relacionarse. Quizá por eso cada día aparecen más innovaciones y nuevas empresas fruto de procesos colaborativos y asociaciones no siempre evidentes, como pueden ser los casos de BMW y Peugeot-Citröen que están desarrollando un nuevo concepto de vehículo híbrido conjuntamente, Lego, que obtiene propuestas de nuevos diseños de sus clientes más acérrimos y finalmente fabrica los que tienen mayor demanda, o ESMT, una escuela de negocios de Berlín fundada por los propios negocios[1].

¿POR QUE NO DEBEMOS RENUNCIAR A LA INNOVACIÓN ABIERTA?

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