Crowd-Sourcing – Page 20 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/07/082013/07/08

John Robb: Open Source Protests Everywhere — All Seeking Government Legitimacy Instead of Government Corruption

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Economics/True Cost, Governance, P2P / Panarchy, Politics

We're seeing protests everywhere. From Brazil to Turkey to Egypt.

What's going on? Here are some.

Once ignited, open source protest is hard to stamp out.

Open source protest is usually focused on a single overarching goal. In most recent cases, it's a call for a government that isn't corrupt.

“No corruption” is the type of goal everyone can get behind. To get a protest going, all there needs to be is a successful trigger event. Often, that an be as simple as a protest called by some group on Facebook that takes off virally.

Continue reading “John Robb: Open Source Protests Everywhere — All Seeking Government Legitimacy Instead of Government Corruption”

2013/07/07

Patrick Meier: Using Twitter to Analyze Secular vs. Islamist Polarization in Egypt in Real-Time

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial

Using Twitter to Analyze Secular vs. Islamist Polarization in Egypt in Real-Time

Large-scale events leave an unquestionable mark on social media. This was true of Hurricane Sandy, for example, and is also true of the widespread protests in Egypt this week. On Wednesday, the Egyptian Military responded to the large-scale demonstrations against President Morsi by removing him from power. Can Twitter provide early warning signals of growing political tension in Egypt and elsewhere? My QCRI colleagues Ingmar Weber & Kiran Garimella and Al-Jazeera colleague Alaa Batayneh have been closely monitoring (PDF) these upheavals via Twitter since January 2013. Specifically, they developed a Political Polarization Index that provides early warning signals for increased social tensions and violence. The analysis & graphs below include the very latest data and I will keep updating this post with new data over the next 24 hours.

Read rest of post.

2013/07/042013/07/04

Patrick Meier: Global Heat Map of Protests in 2013

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Data, Design, Geospatial, Governance

Global Heat Map of Protests in 2013

My colleague Kalev Leetaru recently launched GDELT (Global Data on Events, Location and Tone), which includes over 250 million events ranging from riots and protests to diplomatic exchanges and peace appeals. The data is based on dozens of news sources such as AFP, AP, BBC, UPI, Washington Post, New York Times and all national & international news from Google News. Given the recent wave of protests in Cairo and Istanbul, a collaborator of Kalev’s, John Beieler, just produced this digital dynamic map of protests events thus far in 2013. John left out the US because “it was a shining beacon of protest activity that distracted from the other parts of the map.”

Read full article with multiple graphics.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Global Heat Map of Protests in 2013”

2013/07/03

Jean Lievens: Rachel Botsman – How We Treat People Will Craft Our World – Collaborative Consumption and the Sharing Economy

Access, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Transparency

Rachel Botsman: How We Treat People Will Ultimately Drive Our World

Rachel Botsman advocated the advantage of reputation capital at Wired Money in London yesterday. She noted that an economy based on reputation is incredibly empowering, and will take us away from a financial world “based largely on faceless transactions and moving us to an age built on humanness that we [have] lost.” The reputation economy has already begun to take effect—Airbnb user Kate Kendall used Airbnb reviews to secure an apartment lease.

A reputation-based system will take time to establish, but has the potential to revolutionize the financial sector. This type of credibility adds “context, cause and character” to currently anonymous transactions. “How we treat people and how we behave will ultimately drive our world,” Botsman says.

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Rachel Botsman – How We Treat People Will Craft Our World – Collaborative Consumption and the Sharing Economy”

2013/07/03

Patrick Meier: Using Twitter to Map Blackouts

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Design, Geospatial, Governance

Using Twitter to Map Blackouts During Hurricane Sandy

I recently caught up with Gilal Lotan during a hackathon in New York and was reminded of his good work during Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record. Amongst other analytics, Gilal created a dynamic map of tweets referring to power outages. “This begins on the evening October 28th as people mostly joke about the prospect of potentially losing power. As the storm evolves, the tone turns much more serious. The darker a region on the map, the more aggregate Tweets about power loss that were seen for that region.” The animated map is captured in the video below.

. . . . . .

In sum, creating live maps of geo-tagged tweets is only a first step. Base-maps should be rapidly developed and overlaid with other datasets such as population and income distribution. Of course, these datasets are not always available acessing historical Twitter data can also be a challenge. The latter explains why Big Data Philanthropy for Disaster Response is so key.

Read full post.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Using Twitter to Map Blackouts”

2013/07/012013/07/01

Patrick Meier: Automatically Identifying Fake Images Shared on Twitter During Disasters

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Geospatial, Mobile, Science

Automatically Identifying Fake Images Shared on Twitter During Disasters

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to automatically predict the credibility of tweets generated during disasters. AI can also be used to automatically rank the credibility of tweets posted during major events. Aditi Gupta et al. applied these same information forensics techniques to automatically identify fake images posted on Twitter during Hurricane Sandy. Using a decision tree classifier, the authors were able to predict which images were fake with an accuracy of 97%. Their analysis also revealed retweets accounted for 86% of all tweets linking to fake images. In addition, their results showed that 90% of these retweets were posted by just 30 Twitter users.

Read full post with table of indicators.

2013/07/01

Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise Chapter 6

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Governance

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Six.

Swarm Management: The swarm must have mechanisms for conflict resolution, for decision making, and for reward culture. There are many ways to accomplish this. A traditional voting democracy is one of the worst.

Swarmwise chapters – one chapter per month
1. Understanding The Swarm
2. Launching Your Swarm
3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats
4. Control The Vision, But Never The Message
5. Keep Everybody’s Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily
6. Screw Democracy, We’re On A Mission From God (this chapter)
7. Surviving Growth Unlike Anything The MBAs Have Seen (Aug 1)
8. Using Social Dynamics To Their Potential (Sep 1)
9. Managing Oldmedia (Oct 1)
10. Beyond Success (Nov 1)The actual book is expected to be available by August 1, 2013.

Chapter Six Below the Line

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise Chapter 6”