Category: P2P / Panarchy

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Independent Voter: 43% Prefer Zombies to Congress

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Governance, P2P / Panarchy, Politics

IVNZombie Poll

It’s not exactly a vote of confidence in the powers that be: A sizable number of Americans think the undead would do a better job than our Representatives in Washington, D.C.

Americans ages 18 to 64 express slightly more confidence in zombies to run things than in the federal government. Seniors have more faith in the government.

Do over-the-top political attack ads work?

pissed off voterThe political advertising cycle is about to heat up again and outrageous attack ads are already hitting the airwaves. A new political advertisement attacking San Diego mayoral candidate Nathan Fletcher is raising eyebrows because it is from a political action committee: Zombies for Responsible Government:

VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWI7sEX3ME8

Two videos from the “Zombies for Responsible Government Opposing Nathan Fletcher for Mayor 2013” were posted within the past week. The group registered with the California Secretary of State in October.

Published reports said the documents filed with the San Diego City Clerk show the group was registered by David Bauer, a treasurer with the conservative Sacramento Valley Lincoln Club. However, those documents are not clear as to who is really behind the group.

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Patrick Meier: Second-Order Eyewitnesses — Twitter, Open Sources, and the Information Revolution the US Intelligence Community Refused to Think About….

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Transparency

 

Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Automatically Identifying Eyewitness Reporters on Twitter During Disasters

My colleague Kate Starbird recently shared a very neat study entitled “Learning from the Crowd: Collaborative Filtering Techniques for Identifying On-the-Ground Twitterers during Mass Disruptions” (PDF). As she and her co-authors rightly argue, “most Twitter activity during mass disruption events is generated by the remote crowd.” So can we use advanced computing to rapidly identify Twitter users who are reporting from ground zero? The answer is yes.

twitter-disaster-test Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Second-Order Eyewitnesses — Twitter, Open Sources, and the Information Revolution the US Intelligence Community Refused to Think About….”

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Jean Lievens: Peer2Politics on P2PValue

Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Transparency
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a new and increasingly significant model of social innovation based on collaborative production by citizens through the Internet.

Introduction

Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a new and increasingly significant model of social innovation based on collaborative production by citizens through the Internet.

This project will foster the CBPP phenomenon by providing a techno-social software platform specifically designed to facilitate the creation of resilient and sustainable CBPP communities.

The design of the P2Pvalue platform will be empirically and experimentally grounded. Through a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods, we will elaborate guidelines for the institutional and technical features that favour value creation in CBPP.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

The project focuses on three key areas of improvement over current platforms:

  • Enhancing community sustainability by adopting the governance, legal, economic, and technical infrastructures that favour value creation and resilience;
  • Supporting the contributors with systems of reward that allow value to flow back to the creators;
  • Integrating the functionalities of online social networking services and collaborative software in a privacy-aware platform based on a decentralised architecture.

Publications

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Patrick Meier: Why Anonymity is Important for Truth and Trustworthiness Online

Cultural Intelligence, Culture, Ethics, Governance, P2P / Panarchy
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Why Anonymity is Important for Truth and Trustworthiness Online

Philosophy Professor, Karen Frost-Arnold, has just published a highly lucid analysis of the dangers that come with Internet accountability (PDF). While the anonymity provided by social media can facilitate the spread of lies, Karen rightly argues that preventing anonymity can undermine online communities by stifling communication and spreading ignorance, thus leading to a larger volume of untrustworthy information. Her insights are instructive for those interested in information forensics and digital humanitarian action.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

To make her case, Karen distinguishes between error-avoidance and truth-attainment. The former seeks to avoid false beliefs while the latter seeks to attain true belief. Take mainstream and social media, for example. Some argue that the “value of traditional media surpasses that of the blogosphere […] because the traditional media are superior at filtering out false claims” since professional journalists “reduce the number of errors that might otherwise be reported and believed.” Others counter this assertion: “People who confine themselves to a filtered medium may well avoid believing falsehoods (if the filters are working well), but inevitably they will also miss out on valuable knowledge,” including many true beliefs.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Why Anonymity is Important for Truth and Trustworthiness Online”

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Jean Lievens: Peer to Peer (P2P) Lab 2013 Publications

P2P / Panarchy
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

A list of P2P Lab collaborators' publications in international peer-reviewed journals, starting from 2013:

2013

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Patrick Meier: Analyzing Fake Content on Twitter During Boston Marathon Bombings

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, Governance, P2P / Panarchy, Sources (Info/Intel)
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Analyzing Fake Content on Twitter During Boston Marathon Bombings

As iRevolution readers already know, the application of Information Forensics to social media is one of my primary areas of interest. So I’m always on the lookout for new and related studies, such as this one (PDF), which was just published by colleagues of mine in India. The study by Aditi Gupta et al. analyzes fake content shared on Twitter during the Boston Marathon Bombings earlier this year.

bostonstrongGupta et al. collected close to 8 million unique tweets posted by 3.7 million unique users between April 15-19th, 2013. The table below provides more details. The authors found that rumors and fake content comprised 29% of the content that went viral on Twitter, while 51% of the content constituted generic opinions and comments. The remaining 20% relayed true information. Interestingly, approximately 75% of fake tweets were propagated via mobile phone devices compared to true tweets which comprised 64% of tweets posted via mobiles.

Table1 Gupta et alThe authors also found that many users with high social reputation and verified accounts were responsible for spreading the bulk of the fake content posted to Twitter. Indeed, the study shows that fake content did not travel rapidly during the first hour after the bombing. Rumors and fake information only goes viral after Twitter users with large numbers of followers start propagating the fake content. To this end, “determining whether some information is true or fake, based on only factors based on high number of followers and verified accounts is not possible in the initial hours.”

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Analyzing Fake Content on Twitter During Boston Marathon Bombings”

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Jean Lievens: The Sharing Economy – Sharing Space with Capitalism

Crowd-Sourcing, Economics/True Cost, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

The Sharing Economy Isn't Quite a Kick to Capitalism's Crotch

Joshua Brustein

Bloomberg Businessweek, 18 October 2013

I was invited to a potluck dinner on Wednesday to meet a bunch of strangers and discuss the importance of sharing. Well, kind of. Our hosts were looking to bolster the so-called sharing economy, which, depending on who you talk to, is either a lightweight form of socialism or an artisanal flavor of capitalism spawned by the Internet.

The event had clearly attracted people from both camps. It wasn’t long before one guest trumpeted a desire to “kick capitalism in the crotch,” while several others gently reminded people to sign a petition supporting Airbnb, the peer-to-peer apartment renting service. One man offered to sing a few songs. I spent much of the evening wondering why my red pepper hummus, which is always a hit at Super Bowl parties, wasn’t as popular as the vegan mac ‘n’ cheese. Plus whoever made the salad put in way too many red onions.

Standing in the cloudy center of all this was a group called Peers, which popped up over the summer with the goal of becoming a grassroots movement based on sharing. The potluck dinner—and about 130 other events taking place in 90 cities around the world on the same week—is its first big push to bring people to the cause.

STORY: Airbnb, Coursera, and Uber: The Rise of the Disruption Economy

There have been movements based on sharing before, as my aging hippie parents remind me with increasing regularity. But the brand-name version is relatively new. In the past few years, a series of startups have based their business models on creating online platforms where people can sell one another access to their homes (Airbnb), labor (Taskrabbit), or possessions (Lyft, Sidecar). These companies bathe in the spirit of cooperation—and it’s clearly to their benefit to frame themselves as facilitators of generosity—but they are also marketplaces looking for commissions.

Read full article.