Category: Innovation

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Patrick Meier: Data Mining Wikipedia in Real Time for Disaster Response [or Any Current Event]

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Geospatial, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Data Mining Wikipedia in Real Time for Disaster Response

My colleague Fernando Diaz has continued working on an interesting Wikipedia project since he first discussed the idea with me last year. Since Wikipedia is increasingly used to crowdsource live reports on breaking news such as sudden-onset humanitarian crisis and disasters, why not mine these pages for structured information relevant to humanitarian response professionals?

In computing-speak, Sequential Update Summarization is a task that generates useful, new and timely sentence-length updates about a developing event such as a disaster. In contrast, Value Tracking tracks the value of important event-related attributes such as fatalities and financial impact. Fernando and his colleagues will be using both approaches to mine and analyze Wikipedia pages in real time. Other attributes worth tracking include injuries, number of displaced individuals, infrastructure damage and perhaps disease outbreaks. Pictures of the disaster uploaded to a given Wikipedia page may also be of interest to humanitarians, along with meta-data such as the number of edits made to a page per minute or hour and the number of unique editors.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Fernando and his colleagues have recently launched this tech challenge to apply these two advanced computing techniques to disaster response based on crowdsourced Wikipedia articles. The challenge is part of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), which is being held in Maryland this November. As part of this applied research and prototyping challenge, Fernando et al. plan to use the resulting summarization and value tracking from Wikipedia to verify related  crisis information shared on social media. Needless to say, I’m really excited about the potential. So Fernando and I are exploring ways to ensure that the results of this challenge are appropriately transferred to the humanitarian community. Stay tuned for updates. 

See also: Web App Tracks Breaking News Using Wikipedia Edits [Link]

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Patrick Meier: Could Lonely Planet Render World Bank Projects More Transparent?

Access, Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, Innovation, Resilience
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Could Lonely Planet Render World Bank Projects More Transparent?

Posted on June 3, 2013 | 5 Comments

That was the unexpected question that my World Bank colleague Johannes Kiess asked me the other day. I was immediately intrigued. So I did some preliminary research and offered to write up a blog post on the idea to solicit some early feedback. According to recent statistics, international tourist arrivals numbered over 1 billion in 2012 alone. Of this population, the demographic that Johannes is interested in comprises those intrepid and socially-conscious backpackers who travel beyond the capitals of developing countries. Perhaps the time is ripe for a new form of tourism: Tourism for Social Good.

There may be a real opportunity to engage a large crowd because travelers—and in particular the backpacker type—are smartphone savvy, have time on their hands, want to do something meaningful, are eager to get off the beaten track and explore new spaces where others do not typically trek. Johannes believes this approach could be used to map critical social infrastructure and/or to monitor development projects. Consider a simple smartphone app, perhaps integrated with existing travel guide apps or Tripadvisor. The app would ask travelers to record the quality of the roads they take (with the GPS of their smartphone) and provide feedback on the condition, e.g.,  bumpy, even, etc., every 50 miles or so.

They could be asked to find the nearest hospital and take a geotagged picture—a scavenger hunt for development (as Johannes calls it); Geocaching for Good? Note that governments often do not know exactly where schools, hospitals and roads are located. The app could automatically alert travelers of a nearby development project or road financed by the World Bank or other international donor. Travelers could be prompted to take (automatically geo-tagged) pictures that would then be forwarded to development organizations for subsequent visual analysis (which could easily be carried out using microtasking). Perhaps a very simple, 30-second, multiple-choice survey could even be presented to travelers who pass by certain donor-funded development projects. For quality control purposes, these pictures and surveys could easily be triangulated. Simple gamification features could also be added to the app; travelers could gain points for social good tourism—collect 100 points and get your next Lonely Planet guide for free? Perhaps if you’re the first person to record a road within the app, then it could be named after you (of course with a notation of the official name). Even Photosynth could be used to create panoramas of visual evidence.

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Patrick Meier: Crowdsourcing Syrian Crisis via Twitter API

Crowd-Sourcing, Innovation, Knowledge
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Crowdsourcing Crisis Information from Syria: Twitter API vs Firehose

Over 400 million tweets are posted every day. But accessing 100% of these tweets (say for disaster response purposes) requires access to Twitter’s “Firehose”. The latter, however, can be prohibitively expensive and also requires serious infrastructure to manage. This explains why many (all?) of us in the Crisis Computing & Humanitarian Technology space use Twitter’s “Streaming API” instead. But how representative are tweets sampled through the API vis-a-vis overall activity on Twitter? This is important question is posed and answered in this new study, which used Syria as a case study.

The analysis focused on “Tweets collected in the region around Syria during the period from December 14, 2011 to January 10, 2012.” The first dataset was collected using Firehose access while the second was sampled from the API. The tag clouds above (click to enlarge) displays the most frequent top terms found in each dataset. The hashtags and geoboxes used for the data collection are listed in the table below.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

. . . . .

In terms of social network analysis, the the authors were able to show that “50% to 60% of the top 100 key-players [can be identified] when creating the networks based on one day of Streaming API data.” Aggregating more days’ worth of data “can increase the accuracy substantially. For network level measures, first in-depth analysis revealed interesting correlation between network centralization indexes and the proportion of data covered by the Streaming API.”

Read full post with graphs and other links.

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Jean Lievens: Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Education, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Collaboration depends on communication, and content depends on combination of social negotiation and creative energy.

Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work

Mark Elliott

M/C Journal, May 2006

Introduction

1The steady rise of Wikipedia.org and the Open Source software movement has been one of the big surprises of the 21st century, threatening stalwarts such as Microsoft and Britannica, while simultaneously offering insights into the emergence of large-scale peer production and the growth of gift economies.

2Many questions arise when confronted with the streamlined efficacy and apparent lack of organisation and motivation of these new global enterprises, not least “how does this work?” Stigmergic collaboration provides a hypothesis as to how the collaborative process could jump from being untenable with numbers above 25 people, towards becoming a new driver in global society with numbers well over 25,000.

Complete post with references below the line.

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Robin Good: Automated Topic-Specific Online Curation Tool

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Software

Robin GoodKurator is a web service which allows you to easily customize one or more visual magazines that automatically aggregate the hashtags, lists, Twitter users, Facebook pages and RSS feeds you specify.

Specifically, you can aggregate from the following sources:

  • Twitter User
  • Twitter List
  • Twitter Keywords
  • Twitter Hastags
  • Twitter Mentions
  • Twitter Top Followers
  • Facebook Page
  • Facebook Keywords
  • RSS Feed

You can also filter and specify specific keywords that you want to be included/excluded.

Kurators offers the ability to title each stream, and to customize somewhat the look of the final magazine by providing a few templates and layouts and access to the controls to adjust the font style, size and color.

The final stream can be published as a web page on Kurator or exported directly to WordPress as a “page”.

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Jean Lievens: Le management de l’intelligence collective (vers une nouvelle gouvernance) – Managing Collective Intelligence (Toward a New Corporate Governance) — Human 2X Tech, 9 Graphics

Architecture, Collective Intelligence, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Education, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, Mobile, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Science, Security, Sources (Info/Intel)
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Managing collective intelligence – Toward a New Corporate Governance

by

In a production economy, value creation depends on land, labor and capital. In a knowledge economy, value creation depends mainly on the ideas and innovations to be found in people’s heads.

Those ideas cannot be forcibly extracted.

All one can do is mobilize collective intelligence and knowledge. If knowing how to produce and sell has become a basic necessity, it no longer constitutes a sufficiently differentiating factor in international competition. In the past, enterprises were industrial and commercial; in the future, they will increasingly have to be intelligent.

The intelligent enterprise stands on three pillars: collective intelligence, knowledge management and information and collaboration technologies and needs the vital energy of intellectual cooperation.

Managing collective intelligence implies a radical change that will naturally elicit a lot of resistance. But we’re talking about a social innovation. Once it is in place, once the resistance has subsided, no one will want to go back to the way it was! As always, the problem lies “not in developing new ideas but in escaping from the old ones.” Keynes.

Complete in English with Graphics:  2013-05-28 managingcollectiveintelligence

Comment and Selective Graphics from English Below the Line

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