Amid the recent brouhaha over Twitter’s future — which some say is aimed at restricting what developers can do with the real-time information network, in an attempt to monetize it more easily — a number of critics have proposed duplicating the network using open-source tools and principles. This idea, which has also been proposed in the past by blogging pioneer and programmer Dave Winer, seems to have a lot of merit: after all, if a short-messaging utility like Twitter is a useful service for society to have, then why not recreate it as an open-source project? The only problem is that others have tried to do exactly that, and have mostly failed to achieve any traction. For better or worse, we seem to be stuck with Twitter.
Phi Beta Iota: The full combination of pieces is strongly recommended as a total read. The contributing author whose work has been forwarded by Brother John makes a fundamental ethical and intellectual mistake, assuming that there is a significant difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. Not so. This is not an either/or choice between two evils. True heroism demands a “neither” choice, and a demand for an Electoral Reform Summit in time to open November 2012 to all eight qualified parties, not just the two-party tyranny that fronts for those it has corrupted (business does not corrupt government — government shakes down business when it chooses to be corrupt). Learn more about imminent possibilities demanding only public intelligence and public integrity, at http://bigbatusa.org.
Dear Friend,
Below please find “From A ‘Politics of Hope’ To A ‘Politics of Heroism’,” recently published by Tikkun (see their spring issue on Occupy — http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/spring-2012-table-of-contents) It is an attempt to describe the politics that will be required, likely for the rest of our lives, if human civilization and American democracy are to be saved.
Berlin Institute of Technology researchers studied the problem of trend-setting among news sites to determine which websites lead the news coverage and which ones merely follow, Technology Review Physics arXiv Blogreports.
They took a snapshot of the words generated by 96 technology news websites at any instant in time and compared them to the words generated by one of these websites at an earlier time.
This allowed them to calculate whether the content of this single website is a good predictor of future content on other websites and ranked them according to this metric.
. . . . . . . . . .
In this case, the trend setters are simply the ones who post the wires stories first or who post so many of them that they are first often enough to seem like trend setters.
If you need a break but want to combine work with leisure, this movie suits that purpose. It's about an average guy who becomes omnipotent. He's not a bad guy, but omnipotent power overwhelms him. And eventually he screws everything up.
Only shared power can keep the most egotistical among us from being consumed by power to the point where our finite minds cause infinite damage.
1. For years there have been Declarations of INTERdependence and suggestions and organizing for INTERdependence day. I first learned about this 8 years ago and wrote it up at http://www.co-intelligence.org/interdependenceday.html Googling it today I see the movement has flourished – and it seems that the debate about when to celebrate “Interdependence Day” is shaking out in favor of September 12 (or September 10-12) – when the US's interdependence with the rest of the world came home in a painfully vivid way – rather than on July 4th. As far as I'm concerned, it would be very appropriate to celebrate Interdependence Day every month, or every week, or even every day. After all, interdependence could be considered the most important concept – I should say reality – in our world today. In his essay below, Shane Claiborne proclaims July 4th Interdependence Day and offers actions you can take to manifest your awareness of interdependence. I would add to his list: “Take some action to change the systems that so powerfully shape our interdependence, so that those systems help everyone – including our grandchildren – have high quality lives.”
2. A recent Bill Moyers' essay http://bit.ly/MRmQnZ notes that Independence Day is rooted in the famous words of Thomas Jefferson that all men are created equal, which Moyers sees as a betrayal, since Jefferson held slaves till the day he died and his will decreed they be sold to pay off his debts. On the other hand, Sharif Abdullah argues in an email to his network that Jefferson's failure was a weakness rather than a betrayal – a kind of weakness most of us share: “The reason Jefferson did not free his slaves is the same reason I drive a car that runs on gasoline — it would be very inconvenient not to do so. Just as we, two centuries later, look down on Jefferson for not living his values, how will our descendants treat me, the author of ‘Creating a World That Works for All', and my ‘weakness' of spewing tons of carbon into the atmosphere, because I want the convenience of not getting wet while traveling. While we may criticize Jefferson, we should do so with compassion — because we all share the same ‘weakness' for expediency and convenience.” As Matthew writes in the Bible, “first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.” Verily, verily, perhaps we should focus some serious resources and attention on both castings, and do it soon, since we are all interdependent and co-creating the much better or much worse world our grandchildren will live in.
There’s a new Crowdmap in town called DeadUshahidi. The site argues that “Mapping doesn’t equal change. Using crowdsourcing tech like Ushahidi maps without laying the strategic and programmatic ground work is likely not going to work. And while we think great work has been done with crowdsourced reporting, there is an increasing number of maps that are set up with little thought as to why, who should care, and how the map leads to any change
In some ways this project is stating the obvious, but the obvious sometimes needs repeating. As Ushahidi’s former Executive Director Ory Okolloh warned over two years ago: “Don’t get too jazzed up! Ushahidi is only 10% of solution.” My own doctoral research, which included a comparative analysis of Ushahidi’s use in Egypt and the Sudan, demonstrated that training, preparedness, outreach and strategic partnerships were instrumental. So I do appreciate DeadUshahidi’s constructive (and entertaining!) efforts to call attention to this issue and explain what makes a good crowd-sourced map.
At the same time, I think some of the assumptions behind this initiative need questioning. According to the project, maps with at least one of the following characteristics is added to the cemetery:
No one has submitted a report to your map in the last 12 months.
For time-bound events, like elections and disasters, the number of reports are so infinitesimally small (in relation to the number of the community the map is targeting) that the map never reached a point anywhere near relevance. (Our measure for elections is, for instance, # of submissions / # of registered voters > .0001).
The map was never actually started (no category descriptions, fewer than 10 reports). We call that a stillbirth.
Mapping doesn’t equal change, but why assume that every single digital map is launched to create change? Is every blog post written to create change? Is every Wikipedia article edit made to effect change? Every tweet? What was the impact of the last hard copy map you saw? Intention matters and impact cannot be measured without knowing the initial motivations behind a digital map, the intended theory of change and some kind of baseline to measure said change. Also, many digital maps are event-based and thus used for a limited period of time only. They may no longer receive new reports a year after the launch, but this doesn’t make it a “dead” map, simply a completed project. A few may even deserve to go to map heaven—how about a UshahidiHeaven crowdmap?
I’m also not entirely convinced by the argument that the number of reports per map has to cross a certain threshold for the crowdsourced map to be successful. A digital map of a neighborhood in Sydney with fewer than one hundred reports could very well have achieved the intended goal of the project. So again, without knowing or being able to reliably discern the motivations behind a digital map, it is rather farfetched to believe that one can assess whether a project was success-ful or not. Maybe most of the maps in the DeadUshahidi cemetery were never meant to live beyond a few days, weeks or months in the first place.
That said, I do think that one of the main challenges with Ushahidi/Crowdmap use is that the average number of reports per map is very, very low. Indeed, the vast majority of Crowdmaps are stillborn as a forthcoming study from Internews shows. Perhaps this long-tail effect shouldn’t be a surprise though. The costs of experimenting are zero and the easier the technology gets, the more flowers will bloom—or rather the more seeds become available. Whether these free and open source seeds actually get planted and grow into flowers (let alone lush eco-systems) is another issue and one dependent on a myriad of factors such as the experience of the “gardener”, the quality of the seeds, the timing and season, the conditions of the soil and climate, and the availability of other tools used for planting and cultivation.
Or perhaps a better analogy is photography. Thanks to Digital Cameras, we take zillions more pictures than we did just 5 years ago because each click is virtually free. We’re no longer limited to 24 or 36 pictures per roll of film, which first required one to buy said roll and later to pay for it again to be developed. As a result of digital cameras, one could argue that there are now a lot more bad quality (dead) pictures being uploaded everywhere. So what? Big deal. There is also more excellent amateur photography out there as well. What about other technologies and media? There are countless of “dead” Twitter accounts, WordPress blogs, Ning platforms, customized Google Maps, etc. Again, so what?
Neogeography is about democratizing map-making and user-generated maps. Naturally, there’s going to be learning and experimentation involved. So my blog post is not written in defense of Ushahidi/Crowdmap but rather in defense of all amateur digital mappers out there who are curious and just want to map whatever the heck they well please. In sum, and to return to the gardening analogy if I may, the more important question here is why the majority of (Usha)seeds aren’t planted or don’t grow, and what can be done about this in a pro-active manner. Is there something wrong with the seed? Do would-be gardeners simply need more gardening manuals? Or do they need more agile micro-tasking and data-mining tools? The upcoming Internews report goes a long way to explaining the why & what and TechChange’s course on Ushahidi may be one way to save some future maps from ending up in the DeadUshahidi cemetery prematurely.
