Category: Knowledge

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Event: 17-22 Sep Helsinki Open Knowledge Conference

Knowledge
Festival Home Page

Helsinki will host the first Open Knowledge Festival from September 17th to 22nd, 2012. The event, organized by The Open Knowledge Foundation (UK), The Finnish Institute in London and the Aalto Media Factory, will focus on the value that can be generated by opening up knowledge, the ecosystems of organisations that can benefit from such sharing and the impacts transparency can have in our society.

The OKFestival combines for the first time two annual events dedicated to open knowledge and information sharing: the Open Government Data Camp (OGDCamp), that last year gathered over 400 representatives of more than 40 nations in Warsaw (Poland), and the Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon), last year in Berlin (Germany).

The OKFestival 2012 programme features lectures, workshops, hackathons, satellite events, meetings, film screenings and participatory sessions. Thirteen main topic streams will be presented during the event: from Open Democracy and Citizen Movements to Open Cities, from Open Research and Education to Open Source Software, from Data Journalism and Visualisation to Gender and Diversity in Openness.

Learn more.

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Patrick Meier: SMS Advanced Search Capability for Crises

Geospatial, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Patrick Meier

Finally, A Decision-Support Platform for SMS Use in Disaster Response

Within weeks of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, I published this blog post entitled “How to Royally Mess Up Disaster Response in Haiti.” A month later, I published another post on “Haiti and the Tyranny of Technology.” I also called for an SMS Code of Conduct as described here. Some of the needs and shortcomings expressed in these blog posts have finally been answered by InfoAsAid‘s excellent Message Library, “an online searchable database of messages that acts as a reference for those wanting to disseminate critical information to affected populations in an emergency.”

Graphic at Source

“If used in the correct way, the library should help improve communication with crisis-affected populations.” As my colleague Anahi Ayala explains with respect to the disaster response in Haiti,

“One of the main problem that emerged was not only the need to communicate but the need for a coordinated and homogeneous message to be delivered to the affected communities. The problem was posed by the fact that as agencies and organizations were growing in number and size, all of them were trying in different ways to deliver messages to the beneficiaries of aid, with the result of many messages, sometimes contradicting each other, delivered to many people, sometimes not the right receiver for that message.”

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P2P Open Source In Depth: Open Manufacturing

Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Michel Bauwens

Open Manufacturing at P2P Foundation

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Ron Powell with Michael Saylor: The Impact of the Mobile Wave

Advanced Cyber/IO, Knowledge
Michael Saylor

The Impact of the Mobile Wave: A Spotlight Q&A with Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy

This BeyeNETWORK Spotlight features Ron Powell's interview with Michael Saylor, Chairman of the Board, President and CEO of MicroStrategy, and author of the recently released book, The Mobile Wave. Ron and Michael discuss the changes we will experience – and benefit from – as the mobile wave advances throughout the world.

BeyeNETWORK Spotlights focus on news, events and products in the business intelligence ecosystem that are poised to have a significant impact on the industry as a whole; on the enterprises that rely on business intelligence, analytics, performance management, data warehousing and/or data governance products to understand and act on the vital information that can be gleaned from their data; or on the providers of these mission-critical products.

Presented as Q&A-style articles, these interviews conducted by the BeyeNETWORK present the behind-the-scene view that you won’t read in press releases.

Michael, congratulations on your new book The Mobile Wave. Why did you feel it was time to write this book?

Michael Saylor: Ron, I think every ten years or so there's something really exciting in the information technology business. We’ve had the mainframe wave, the mini-computer wave, the personal computer (PC) wave, and then the Internet wave. I thought about writing a book around the Internet wave, but I was busy taking my company public and I didn't really have the time.

Now, along comes the mobile wave. It’s the fifth wave, I think, of computing. I feel this is my chance to actually put down in book form my thoughts about the history of science and how things all relate to this current mobile wave, and I may not get another chance in my lifetime. It's my first book, and I'm excited about it.

For readers of The Mobile Wave, what is the most surprising thing they will learn?

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Patrick Meier: Evolution in Live Mapping: The 2012 Egyptian Presidential Elections

Geospatial, Knowledge
Patrick Meier

Evolution in Live Mapping: The 2012 Egyptian Presidential Elections

My doctoral dissertation compared the use of live mapping technology in Egypt and the Sudan during 2010. That year was the first time that Ushahidi was deployed in those two countries. So it is particularly interesting to see the technology used again in both countries in 2012. Sudanese activists are currently using the platform to map #SudanRevolts while Egyptian colleagues have just used the tool to monitor the recent elections in their country.

Analyzing the evolution of live mapping technology use in non-permissive environments ought to make for a very interesting piece of research (any takers?). In the case of Egypt, one could compare the use of the same technology and methods before and after the fall of Mubarak. In 2010, the project was called U-Shahid. This year, the initiative was branded as the “Egypt Elections Project.”

According to my colleagues in Cairo who managed the interactive map, “more than 15 trainers and 75 coordinators were trained to work in the ‘operation room' supporting 2200 trained observers scattered all over Egypt. More than 17,000 reports, up to 25000 short messages were sent by the observers and shown on Ushahid’s interactive map. Although most reports received shown a minimum amount of serious violations, and most of them were indicating the success of the electoral process, our biggest joy was being able to monitor freely and to report the whole process with full transparency.”

Contrast this situation with how Egyptian activists struggled to keep their Ushahidi project alive under Mubarak in 2010. Last week, the team behind the current live map was actually interviewed by state television (picture above), which was formerly controlled by the old regime. Interestingly, the actual map is no longer the centerpiece of the project when compared to the U-Shahid deploy-ment. The team has included and integrated a lot more rich multimedia content in addition to data, statistics and trends analysis. Moreover, there appears to be a shift towards bounded crowdsourcing rather than open crowd-sourcing as far as election mapping projects go.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Evolution in Live Mapping: The 2012 Egyptian Presidential Elections”