P2P / Panarchy – Page 22 – Public Intelligence Blog

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.

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]

2013/06/04

Rickard Falkvinge: Is Bitcoin a Threat to US National Security?

Money, P2P / Panarchy, Politics

Can Bitcoin Bring Down (What's Left Of) the US Economy?

Swarm Economy: Bitcoin represents a significant threat to the currency domination of the USA, which is the only thing propping up the nation’s status as a worldwide superpower. Following the USA’s defaulting on all its international loans on August 15, 1971, the US trade balance has been maintained using a combination of military threats and telling people to buy US dollars just to fund the ongoing consumption of the USA. Where other world currencies have failed to challenge the USD, and therefore this mechanism of maintaining US economic dominance, bitcoin may succeed.

EXTRACT

What would happen if the US were one day unable to continue its overspending? We would see a mighty crash of the global economy, but more importantly, the US would come down in a Soviet-style collapse, only much worse due to structural differences. (To understand these differences, consider the fact that public transport kept running through the Soviet collapse, and that most families were well-prepared for food shortages. In the US, you would instead have people stranded in suburbs with no fuel, food, or medicine – only lots of weapons and ammo. See Orlov’s collapse gap for more on this structural difference.)

Enter bitcoin, which can break the cycle of borrowing and overspending.

As we observed, the key reason that people are forced to buy US Dollars today is that it’s the international mechanism of exchange of value. If you want a gadgetoid from China or India, you need to first buy US dollars, and then exchange the US Dollars for the gadgetoid. But as we have seen, bitcoin far outshines the US Dollar in every aspect as a value token for international trade. Using bitcoin is cheaper, easier, and much much faster than today’s international systems for transfer of value.

Pretty much everybody I’ve spoken to who is involved in international trade would switch to a bitcoin-like system in a heartbeat if they were able to, venting years of built-up frustration with the legacy banking system (which uses the USD). If that happens, the US won’t be able to find buyers for its newly-printed money that keeps its economy propped up (and its military funded).

If the cycle of dollar lock-in breaks, the United States of America comes crashing down. Hard. It would seem inevitable at this point, and bitcoin may be the one mechanism that breaks the cycle.

Read full post.

2013/06/02

Jean Lievens: Global Sharing Day 2 June – the Mind-Shift Begins

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Economics/True Cost, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience

Related Articles

2013/06/012013/06/01

Patrick Meier: Analysis of Multimedia Shared on Twitter After Tornado — Instagram Rules

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Software, Transparency

Analysis of Multimedia Shared on Twitter After Tornado

Humanitarian organizations and emergency management offices are increasingly interested in capturing multimedia content shared on social media during crises. Last year, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) activated the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) to identify and geotag pictures and videos shared on Twitter that captured the damage caused by Typhoon Pablo, for example. So I’ve been collaborating closely with my colleague Hemant Purohit to analyze the multimedia content shared by millions of tweets posted after the Category 5 Tornado devastated the city of Moore, Oklahoma on May 20th. The results are shared below along with details of a project I am spearheading at QCRI to provide disaster responders with relevant multimedia content in real time during future disasters.

For this preliminary multimedia analysis, we focused on the first 48 hours after the Tornado and specifically on the following multimedia sources/types: Twitpic, Instagram, Flickr, JPGs, YouTube and Vimeo. JPGs refers to URLs shared on Twitter that include “.jpg”. Only ~1% of tweets posted during the 2-day period included URLs to multimedia content. We filtered out duplicate URLs to produce the following unique counts depicted above and listed below.

Twitpic = 784
Instagram = 11,822
Flickr = 33
JPGs = 347
YouTube = 5,474
Vimeo = 88

Clearly, Instagram and Youtube are important sources of multimedia content during disasters. The graphs below (click to enlarge) depict the frequency of individual multimedia types by hour during the first 48 hours after the Tornado. Note that we were only able to collect about 2 million tweets during this period using the Twitter Streaming API but expect that millions more were posted, which is why access to the Twitter Firehose is important and why I’m a strong advocate of Big Data Philanthropy for Humanitarian Response.

Read full post with more graphs.

2013/05/30

Jean Lievens: Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work

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

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.

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work”

2013/05/302013/06/03

Robin Good: Automated Topic-Specific Online Curation Tool

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

Kurator 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”.

Continue reading “Robin Good: Automated Topic-Specific Online Curation Tool”

2013/05/282013/05/28

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)

Managing collective intelligence – Toward a New Corporate Governance

by Olivier Zara

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

Continue reading “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”

Category: P2P / Panarchy

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