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.”
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.
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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.
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and US Institute of Peace (USIP) co-organized a fascinating workshop on “Sensing & Shaping Emerging Conflicts” in November 2012. I had the pleasure of speaking at this workshop, the objective of which was to “identify major opportunities and impediments to providing better real-time information to actors directly involved in situations that could lead to deadly violence.” We explored “several scenarios of potential violence drawn from recent country cases,” and “considered a set of technologies, applications and strategies that have been particularly useful—or could be, if better adapted for conflict prevention.”
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This explains why Sanjana is right when he emphasizes that “Technology needs to be democratized […], made available at the lowest possible grassroots level and not used just by elites. Both sensing and shaping need to include all people, not just those who are inherently in a position to use technology.” Furthermore, Fred is spot on when he says that “Technology can serve civil disobedience and civil mobilization […] as a component of broader strategies for political change. It can help people organize and mobilize around particular goals. It can spread a vision of society that contests the visions of authoritarian.”
In sum, As Barnett Rubin wrote in his excellent book (2002) Blood on the Doorstep: The Politics of Preventive Action, “prevent[ing] violent conflict requires not merely identifying causes and testing policy instruments but building a political movement.” Hence this 2008 paper (PDF) in which I explain in detail how to promote and facilitate technology-enabled civil resistance as a form of conflict early response and violence prevention.
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.
OpenTopic is a news curation service which allows you to aggregate, monitor and filter any number of sources and to publish and share your selected ones to you selected outlets: from your WordPress site, to your social media channels and to your email newsletter engine. Within OpenTopic you can create one or more “Topic” dashboards. These are essentially display pages that aggregate incoming fresh content from the sources you specify. You can jump from one Topic dashboard to the next at the click of your mouse. To curate stories you simpy select the ones that are relevant to your audience and you are provided with an editing module to modify and personalize the story content. At this point you can also select on which one of your outlets (Channels) that story will be published and you can customize the story differently for each one of them. There is even an option that allows you to set-up some form of automated curation, by giving you the option to set up a set of simple rules, which when match, will trigger the publishing of a news story. OpenTopic allows you to hook up to an extended number of possible Channels, making it easy for you to post from one location to your web site, RSS feed, social media and newsletter. Last but not least, OpenTopic integrates a full analytics service, capable of reporting and showcasing the performance of your curation work across stories and distribution channels. My comment: Excellent tool for social media and community managers, as well as web marketing specialists in need to support effectively the finding of relevant news on a topic and the easy publishing to different channels from a centralized platform. Easy to use.
Thanks to you, last week’s report on the collaborative economy was readily received, and has been viewed over 26k times, the media picked up on it, and bloggers alike. As we digest what it means, it’s important to recognize this is the next phase in the internet, and the next phase of social business. An interesting finding is that the second era (social) and the third era (collaborative economy), use the same technologies (social technologies) but instead of sharing media and ideas –people are sharing goods and services. This is all part of a continuum and we need to see our careers progress as the market moves forward with us.
[Social technology enabled the sharing of media and ideas called social business –the same tools enable sharing of goods and services called the collaborative economy]
Click on Image to Enlarge
Internet Phases: Past, Present, and Future
Attribute
Brand Experience Era
Customer Experience Era
Collaborative Economy Era
Driving technology
CMS and HTML
Social Technologies
Social Technologies
Years
1995: Internet had 14% american adoption
2005: Business blogging disrupted corporations
2013: AirBnb, TaskRabbit, Lyft, gain mainstream attention
Here is what they have as of today. An extraordinary effort that should soon become automated. You won't find these on LinkedIn! Click for individual Venn diagram similar to the Keystone Pipeline shown below.,
Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine this being done at every level of government from the municipality on up, across every policy domain, with whole systems analytics, true cost economics, and all trade-offs clearly visible. This is where we are going. Humanitarian technology and Open Source Everything (OSE) are going to empower the public in a manner no government or corporation can conceive or achieve.
