The vast majority of volunteers engaged in the Ushahidi-Haiti Crisis Map project (January 2010) were women. The Ushahidi-Chile Crisis Map (March 2010) was entirely spearheaded by women. Fast forward three years and women in 2013 are still the main driving force behind the field of crisis mapping. If you peruse the membership of the Standby Task Force’s Core Team, you’ll find that the majority are women. This cannot be mere coincidence. It follows, therefore, that the field of crisis mapping today would definitely not be what it is were it not for these amazing women, many of whom I am honored to count as friends.
Where is all this coming from, you might as? I just spoke at GSMA’s Mobile World Congress (MWC13) in Barcelona and was shocked (is horrified too strong a word?) by the total male domination of the mobile industry. (This is saying something given that I had spent the previous five weeks in Qatar). The only “group” of women I saw at the venue were teenage girls hired to serve as models so that men could pose with them for photo ops (no joke). This got me thinking about the communities that I belong to, such as the crisis mapping and humani-tarian technology communities. So I thought back to the early days (Haiti & Chile) and to the role of women in crisis mapping today. The contrast with GSMA could not possibly be starker.
So this post is dedicated to the amazing women who have made important contributions to the field of crisis mapping. The following is a list of colleagues who I have had the honor of working with and learning from over the past 3 years. (As always with long lists, they are fraught with danger: I really hope that no one has been left out; please email me and give me a hard time if I have!). A big, big thank you to all of you for your wisdom, tenacity and friendship. If I ever have daughters, I hope they become as formidable as all of you.
You are cordially invited to attend the 2013 Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities conference (OLKC) April 25-27, 2013 in Washington, D.C., USA. The OLKC annual conference provides a meeting point for those interested in the field and offers an excellent opportunity for leading scholars, young researchers, and scholar-practitioners to profit from discussion and lively exchange of ideas related to their theory, research and practice. Approximately 200 participants from all over the world are expected to attend this conference. The venue of the conference will be located at the GWU historic Foggy Bottom Campus in the heart of Washington, DC.
Keynote Speaker
We are pleased to announce our keynote speaker: Dr. Barbara Czarniawska. Dr. Czarniawska is Professor and Chair of Management Studies at Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Business, Economics and Law.
Theme
The theme of the OLKC 2013 Conference is: Translation, Transition & Transmission. The theme builds upon scholarly conversations around the dimensions of social knowledge and learning including translation, or how we interpret knowledge, transition, which involves evolution and recombination processes, and transmission, the dissemination and diffusion of knowledge across time and space. These dimensions of learning assist us in framing and exploring three key questions: how do we relate to each other, how do we know, and how do we socially integrate. This scholarly exploration has the potential to further serve as a foundation for translational research and transdisciplinary lines of inquiry to advance theory and research on social knowledge and learning and its impact on practice.
FREE: Digital copy of the book to anyone willing to arrange for its translation into any language (already in Chinese), and posting to Amazon as a book in that language. Keep the money. Spread the ideas.
This is the core graphic I created several years ago when I realized that the mainstream focus on open source software and open data was neglecting everything else. Open Source Everything is the most powerful politicl, economic, and social concept we have, in my view. We need to go “all in” on all the opens, simultaneously.
Open Source is the only approach — human or technical — that is affordable, interoperable, and scaleable. It makes no sense, for example, to worship at the altar of Open Data if this is merely feeding very large and generally predatory commercial proprietary software empires that extract licensing and maintenance fees while also mutating and migrating Application Program Interfaces (API) to block natural evalution within the Open Source Ecology.
I apologize for the book not being free online in English (it is available for foreign language translation and those eversions will be free online). I accepted a publishing company and do not regret that decision because the editor, Kathy Green, cut the book in half, removed one syllable from most words, and generally added magic to the book that was beyond my means. It also put the book in bookstores via Random House.
GIVE THIS BOOK AWAY! Random House Special Markets will sell heavily discounted cases of the book, consider inserting your corporate sticker and then handing the book out at hacker or other special events. Call: Director, Premium Sales: 1-212-572-2329 General Inquiry: 1-800-800-3246
No Extracts Provided from”Epilogue: My Conversion Experience”
TRANSLATE THIS BOOK
The translation rights are mine. Volunteers are working on Chinese, French, and Spanish versions that will be free online. A commercial German edition is under discussion. Translated chapters will be posted here at Phi Beta Iota as they become available, and translators are publicly recognized for their gift of labor to us all.
I would be honored to be invited to visit any group in person or via Skype. Here is my bio page, my email is at the bottom of that page.
Apart from this specific concept for uplifting humanity and moving us all forward in creating a prosperous world at peace, I am very interested in helping any individual or organization or country advance their capabilities of holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering.
I can also speak to any of the 98 categories in which I review non-fiction books at Amazon, and will happily engage as an individual (not as a non-profit CEO) in political discussions including what I learned from my six-week run as a candidate for the Reform Party presidential nomination in 2012.
WHAT DO “WISE DEMOCRACY” AND POWERFUL DIALOGUE AND DELIBERATION PROCESSES HAVE TO DO WITH PEERNESS?
P2P systems generate self-organization out of similarities and power equity: People eagerly move into productive/enjoyable relationships because of passions or needs they share with similar others when their interactions are not unduly hindered by arbitrary power-over dynamics. These relationships form naturally, needing little if any management and only simple forums to facilitate the connections.
Tom Atlee:
“There is a seeming contradiction between p2p systems and the approaches to wise democracy that I've been advocating.
P2P systems generate self-organization out of similarities and power equity: People eagerly move into productive/enjoyable relationships because of passions or needs they share with similar others when their interactions are not unduly hindered by arbitrary power-over dynamics. These relationships form naturally, needing little if any management and only simple forums to facilitate the connections.
Certain high quality group processes generate collective wisdom out of diverse people who may or may not have diverse levels of power in hierarchical systems: Such people need to be consciously brought together because they are normally and willingly separate. We actively seek people with different views, interests, roles, personalities, demographic characteristics, etc., because it is the positive use of that diversity that generates the wisdom (a “wholeness” to the resulting decision or understanding).
Yet both of these innovations – p2p systems and wisdom-generating forums – are leading edge social developments. Can some shared logic or coherent synergistic potency be found between them?
The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (Public Lab) is a community which develops and applies open-source tools to environmental exploration and investigation. By democratizing inexpensive and accessible “Do-It-Yourself” techniques, Public Laboratory creates a collaborative network of practitioners who actively re-imagine the human relationship with the environment.
The core Public Lab program is focused on “civic science” in which we research open source hardware and software tools and methods to generate knowledge and share data about community environmental health. Our goal is to increase the ability of underserved communities to identify, redress, remediate, and create awareness and accountability around environmental concerns. Public Lab achieves this by providing online and offline training, education and support, and by focusing on locally-relevant outcomes that emphasize human capacity and understanding.
Swarm Management: Launching a swarm is an intense event, where you can get hundreds or thousands of new colleagues in less than a day. You have a very short window for appreciating their interest, or they will take it elsewhere.
[Chapter one of the book is here. Chapter two picks up after having done due diligence whether the numbers work out to create a swarm.]
EXTRACT:
My point here is, if you’re thinking hard about how to gather a swarm for your idea:
Don’t worry about advertising.
Word of mouth is much more efficient than any campaign can ever be, but that requires that your idea – or rather, your presentation of it – meets four criteria: Tangible, Credible, Inclusive, and Epic.
Tangible: You need to post an outline of the goals you intend to meet, when, and how.
Credible: After having presented your daring goal, you need to present it as totally doable. Bonus points if nobody has done it before.
Inclusive: There must be room for participation by every spectator who finds it interesting, and they need to realize this on hearing about the project.
Epic: Finally, you must set out to change the entire world for the better – or at least make a major improvement for a lot of people.
If these four steps are good, then the swarm will form by itself. Quite rapidly, in the twenty-odd cases I have observed firsthand. Very rapidly. On the other hand, if these four components are not good enough, no amount of advertising or whitewashing is going to create the volunteer activist power that you want.
