#OSE Open Source Everything – Page 183 – Public Intelligence Blog

The Sharing Economy is Exploding: Knok’s 7 Key Factors Why Home Swap is the Perfect Example of a Sharing Service

Knok, the fastest growing home exchange community, shows that house swapping is the perfect example of collaborative consumption.

(PRWEB) May 08, 2013

This year has seen the consolidation of the sharing economy and several conferences around this theme confirm it. In April, 150 sharing economy leaders joined author and organizer Lisa Gansky in San Francisco for Let's Mesh. In May, the OuiShareFest in Paris brought together over 500 people from all over Europe, and in June, the sharing economy is Le Web’s theme for its London event.

After the output of these events and the discussions on the future of the sharing economy with practitioners around the world, Knok has created a list of the 7 most relevant reasons why home exchange is a great example of a collaborative consumption business:

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Home Swaps and Other Sharing Value Networks”

2013/05/092013/05/09

Steven Aftergood: Making Government Information Open and Machine Readable

Data

Making Government Information Open and Machine Readable

An executive order issued by President Obama today directs that “the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable.”

“As one vital benefit of open government, making information resources easy to find, accessible, and usable can fuel entrepreneurship, innovation, and scientific discovery that improves Americans’ lives and contributes significantly to job creation,” states Executive Order 13642 on Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information.

The new order was welcomed by the Sunlight Foundation, a proponent of open access to government data, particularly because it establishes a requirement to produce an inventory of “datasets that can be made publicly available but have not yet been released.” That will facilitate enforcement and advancement of the open data agenda, Sunlight said.

While one wants to believe in the efficacy of the order and to affirm the good faith intentions behind it, it is necessary to recognize how remote it is from current practice, particularly in the contentious realm of national security information.

The CIA, for example, has stubbornly refused to release the contents of its CREST database of declassified documents, even though the documents contained there are entirely declassified. The CREST database is not open, it’s not machine-readable, and you can’t have a copy.

Meanwhile, the Obama White House itself has refused to publish even its unclassified Presidential Policy Directives (with a few exceptions), forcing requesters to litigate for access, or to surrender.

2013/05/092013/05/09

Stephen E. Arnold: A Fresh Look at Big Data & Big Data (-) Human Factor (+) Transformation (+) RECAP

Access, Advanced Cyber/IO, Architecture, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Design, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Key Players, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Strategy, Threats

A Fresh Look at Big Data

May 8, 2013

Next week I am doing an invited talk in London. My subject is search and Big Data. I will be digging into this notion in this month’s Honk newsletter and adding some business intelligence related comments at an Information Today conference in New York later this month. (I have chopped the number of talks I am giving this year because at my age air travel and the number of 20 somethings at certain programs makes me jumpy.)

I want to highlight one point in my upcoming London talk; namely, the financial challenge which companies face when they embrace Big Data and then want to search the information in the system and search the Big Data system’s outputs.

Notice that precision and recall has not improved significantly over the last 30 years. I anticipate that many search vendors will tell me that their systems deliver excellent precision and recall. I am not convinced. The data which I have reviewed show that over a period of 10 years most systems hit the 80 to 85 percent precision and recall level for content which is about a topic. Content collections composed of scientific, technical, and medical information where the terminology is reasonably constrained can do better. I have seen scores above 90 percent. However, for general collections, precision and recall has not been improving relative to the advances in other disciplines; for example, converting structured data outputs to fancy graphics.

I don’t want to squabble about precision and recall. The main point is that when an organization mashes Big Data with search, two curves must be considered. The first is the complexity curve. The idea is that search is a reasonably difficult system to implement in an effective manner. The addition of a Big Data system adds another complex task. When two complex tasks are undertaken at the same time, the costs go up.

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: A Fresh Look at Big Data & Big Data (-) Human Factor (+) Transformation (+) RECAP”

2013/05/082013/05/08

Neal Rauhauser: Drowning IndoChina

03 Environmental Degradation, Geospatial

Drowning Indochina

Yesterday’s Visualizing 400ppm Carbon Dioxide showed before/after coastline maps of what we can expect given the carbon we have already put into the atmosphere. All of Delaware and Maryland’s eastern shore disappear, Florida south of Gainesville goes for a swim, and the San Francisco Bay reaches Sacramento.

The effects in Indochina and neighboring Bangladesh are even more profound. Yangon, Myanmar (4.4M), Bangkok, Thailand (8.3M), Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (7.5M), and Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2.3M) will all be submerged if the increase is only 20M and historically we should expect more like 25M at that level of CO2.

Read full post and see maps.

2013/05/072013/05/07

Berto Jongman: Integrating Traditional Knowledge

Knowledge

Witnessing a South African healer at work

By Pumza FihlaniBBC News, Johannesburg

EXTRACT:

Ms Siswana is one of thousands of young men and women who are balancing the demands of a career with the calling to be a messenger for deceased ancestors, or “amadlozi”.

Sangomas have played a central role in many African cultures dating back many years; they were seen as custodians of their communities and were consulted by villagers to heal the sick, communicate with the gods on their behalf and to protect villages from harm.

They are essentially diviners – a channel between the physical world and the afterlife.

They believe that through a special “calling” known in Zulu as ubizo, they are able to access advice and guidance through possession by an ancestor, throwing bones or by interpreting dreams.

In today's South Africa, sangomas are often seen as unsophisticated, uneducated and backwards.

Despite this, they remain the first point of contact for physical and psychological ailments for about 80% of black South Africans according to authorities.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Integrating Traditional Knowledge”

2013/05/072013/05/07

Jean Lievens: Social Media and Culture — We Are All Digital Immigrants

Culture

We Are All Digital Immigrants

Does technological progress change the human condition? Techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci took the time to speak with Martin Eiermann about the rise of Al Jazeera, accelerating change and the conventions of online interaction.

Zeynep Tufekci is an American sociologist, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and culture. Follow her on Twitter at @techsoc.

EXTRACTS:

Tufekci: The question about causality is not very fruitful when framed as an either/or. First, “online” is part of the real world. What the online does is reconfigure and augment the “offline” to open up new spaces and to allow new forms of connectivity, coordination and collaboration. Second, revolutions are always multi-causal.

. . . . . . . . .

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Social Media and Culture — We Are All Digital Immigrants”

2013/05/07

Graphic: Open Hardware Innovation Ecology

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost, Hardware

Source