Crowd-Sourcing – Page 7 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/05/192014/05/19

Michel Bauwens: Transitioning to a Commons-Based Society

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Education, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, Money, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Transparency

Transitioning to a Commons-Based Society

Background on the FLOK Project

Michel Bauwens:

The National Plan of Ecuador recognizes and stresses that the global transformation towards knowledge-based societies and economies requires a new form for the creation and distribution of value in society. The National Plan's central concept is the achievement of ‘Buen Vivir' (Sumak Kawsay) or ‘good living'; but good living is impossible without the availability of ‘good knowledge', i.e. ‘Buen Conocer' (‘Sumak Yachay'). The third national plan for 2013-2017 explicitly calls for a open-commons based knowledge society[1].

President Correa himself exhorted young people to achieve and fight for this open knowledge society[2].

The FLOK Society is a joint research effort by the Coordinating Ministry of Knowledge and Human Talent, the SENESCYT (Secretaría Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación) and the IAEN (Instituto de Altos Estudios del Estado) to develop transition and policy proposals to achieve such an open commons-based knowledge society.

FLOK refers to:

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2014/05/132014/05/13

Patrick Meier: Latest Findings on Disaster Resilience – From Burma to California via the Rockefeller Foundation

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience

Latest Findings on Disaster Resilience: From Burma to California via the Rockefeller Foundation

I’ve long been interested in disaster resilience particularly when considered through the lens of self-organization. To be sure, the capacity to self-organize is an important feature of resilient societies. So what facilitates self-organization? There are several factors, of course, but the two I’m most interested in are social capital and communication technologies. My interest in disaster resilience also explains why one of our Social Innovation Tracks at QCRI is specifically focused on resilience. So I’m always on the lookout for new research on resilience. The purpose of this blog post is to summarize the latest insights.

This new report (PDF) on Burma assesses the influence of social capital on disaster resilience. More specifically, the report focuses on the influence of bonding, bridging and linking social capital on disaster resilience in remote rural communities in the Ayerwaddy Region of Myanmar. Bonding capital refers to ties that are shared between individuals with common characteristics characteristics such as religion or ethnicity. Bridging capital relates to ties that connect individuals with those outside their immediate communities. These ties could be the result of shared geographical space, for example. Linking capital refers to vertical links between a community and individuals or groups outside said community. The relationship between a village and the government or a donor and recipients, for example.

As the report notes, “a balance of bonding, bridging and linking capitals is important of social and economic stability as well as resilience. It will also play a large role in a community’s ability to reduce their risk of disaster and cope with external shocks as they play a role in resource management, sustainable livelihoods and coping strategies.” In fact, “social capital can be a substitute for a lack of government intervention in disaster planning, early warning and recovery.” The study also notes that “rural communities tend to have stronger social capital due to their geographical distance from government and decision-making structures necessitating them being more self-sufficient.”

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2014/05/052014/05/05

Jean Lievens: Stacco Troncoso Shares Helene Finidori on FLOK Society and the Commons

Access, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Education, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Spectrum, Transparency

Helene Finidori on FLOK Society and the Commons

Here’s an excellent summary, written by our good friend Helene Finidori from the Commons Abundance Network, on FLOK Society’s historical significance for the Commons and P2P movements. The article was originally published in STIR magazine and Helene has kindly given us permission to republish it here.

This column was published in STIR’s spring issue and is available to buy here

With the Free Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society project, peer-to-peer commons-based economics have a good chance of being institutionalised in Ecuador, or in other words, of entering at a nation-state level through the front door. This would be a world first.

Ecuador may not be particularly advanced as far as urban P2P dynamics are concerned, but its indigenous and rural communities have a long history of sharing knowledge. And since the election of a progressive government in 2007, the country is politically ahead in its determination to continue developing an economy based on the creativity of its citizens and on the sustainable leverage of its internal resources.

The focus here is to transition away from cognitive capitalism where value is commonly extracted via technology transfers through intellectual property rights mostly held by large foreign companies, generating dependencies on the global north and increasing the internal social divide. The goal is to shift towards a ‘social knowledge economy’ where knowledge is freely accessible, produced and shared through co-operative and open processes, and where the resulting knowledge commons can be built upon to accelerate innovation and the distribution of wealth.

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Stacco Troncoso Shares Helene Finidori on FLOK Society and the Commons”

2014/04/28

Jean Lievens: Open Source Urbanism & “Right to Infrastructure”

Access, Architecture, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Geospatial, Governance, Innovation, Manufacturing, Materials, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience

The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism

Alberto Corsín Jiménez

Abstract. This paper develops an analytical framework to place the rise of open source urbanism in context, and develops the concept of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as expressive of new ecologies of urban relations that have come into being. It describes, first, a genealogy for open source technology, focusing in particular on how open source urban hardware projects may challenge urban theory. It moves then to describe in detail various dimensions and implications of an open source infrastructural project in Madrid. In all, the paper analyses three challenges that the development of open source urban infrastructures is posing to the institutions of urban governance and property: the evolving shape and composition of urban ecologies; the technical and design challenges brought about by open source urban projects; and the social organisation of the ‘right to infrastructure’ as a political, active voice in urban governance. In the last instance, the right to infrastructure, I shall argue, signals the rise of the ‘prototype’ as an emerging figure for contemporary sociotechnical designs in and for social theory.
Keywords: open source urbanism, infrastructures, urban ecologies, urban commons, right to the city, prototypes

Corsín Jiménez A, 2014, “The right to infrastructure: a prototype for open source urbanism” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(2) 342 – 362

PDF (21 Pages): 2014 Open Source Urbanism Right to Infrastructure

2014/04/282014/04/28

Patrick Meier: Got TweetCred? Use This Tool To Automatically Identify Credible Tweets

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, Innovation, IO Tools, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience

Got TweetCred? Use it To Automatically Identify Credible Tweets

What if there were a way to automatically identify credible tweets during major events like disasters? Sounds rather far-fetched, right? Think again.

The new field of Digital Information Forensics is increasingly making use of Big Data analytics and techniques from artificial intelligence like machine learning to automatically verify social media. This is how my QCRI colleague ChaTo et al. already predicted both credible and non-credible tweets generated after the Chile Earthquake (with an accuracy of 86%). Meanwhile, my colleagues Aditi, et al. from IIIT Delhi also used machine learning to automatically rank the credibility of some 35 million tweets generated during a dozen major international events such as the UK Riots and the Libya Crisis. So we teamed up with Aditi et al. to turn those academic findings into TweetCred, a free app that identifies credible tweets automatically.

We’ve just launched the very first version of TweetCred—key word being first. This means that our new app is still experimental. On the plus side, since TweetCred is powered by machine learning, it will become increasingly accurate over time as more users make use of the app and “teach” it the difference between credible and non-credible tweets. Teaching TweetCred is as simple as a click of the mouse. Take the tweet below, for example.

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2014/04/072014/04/07

Stephen E. Arnold: Open Review Breaks the Back of Citation Cabals and Incestuous Science

Access, Crowd-Sourcing, Economics/True Cost, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Science, Transparency

Open Review Brings Peer Review to the Scientific Masses

This seems like a step in the right direction for the world of academic publishing. ResearchGate News announces, “Peer Review Isn’t Working—Introducing Open Review.” We know that increasingly, papers based on shoddy research have been making it into journals supposedly policed by rigorous peer-review policies. Now, ResearchGate has launched a countermeasure—Open Review brings the review process to the public. The write up happily tells us:

“We’re excited to announce the launch of Open Review today. It’s designed to help you openly voice feedback and evaluate research that you have read and worked with, bringing more transparency to science and speeding up progress.

“With Open Review you can:

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2014/04/052014/04/05

Berto Jongman: Federico Pistono on Learn Anything Anywhere [Grossly Over-Sold But Provided for Information]

Crowd-Sourcing, Education

IEET contributor, Federico Pistono discuses a project him and an international team are working on that will allow anyone, anywhere access to information in all languages, cultures, and economic situations ON VIDEO. Home page: esplori.net

BOOK: Robots Will Steal Your Job But That's OK: How to Survive Economic Collapse and Be Happy (2014)

BOTTOM LINE: They make software tools available for individuals to create specific small video learning modules suitable for hand-held learning. This is NOT a concept for a global brain or a distributed diaspora of volunteers.