Politics – Page 12 – Public Intelligence Blog

Making All Voices Count Using SMS and Advanced Computing

Local communities in Uganda send UNICEF some 10,000 text messages (SMS) every week. These messages reflect the voices of Ugandan youths who use UNICEF’s U-report SMS platform to share their views on a range of social issues. Some messages are responses to polls created by UNICEF while others are unsolicited reports of problems that youths witness in their communities. About 40% of text messages received by UNICEF require an SMS reply providing advice or an answer to a question while 7% of messages require immediate action. Over 220,000 young people in Uganda have enrolled in U-report, with 200 to 1,000 new users joining on daily basis. UNICEF doesn’t have months or the staff to manually analyze this high volume and velocity of incoming text messages. This is where advanced computing comes in.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Making All Voices Count Using SMS and Advanced Computing”

2013/08/12

Patrick Meier: Twitter as a Community Nervous System

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Data, Geospatial, Governance, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Transparency

Taking the Pulse of the Boston Marathon Bombings on Twitter

Social media networks are evolving a new nervous system for our planet. These real-time networks provide immediate feedback loops when media-rich societies experience a shock. My colleague Todd Mostak recently shared the tweet map below with me which depicts tweets referring to “marathon” (in red) shortly after the bombs went off during Boston’s marathon. The green dots represent all the other tweets posted at the time. Click on the map to enlarge. (It is always difficult to write about data visualizations of violent events because they don’t capture the human suffering, thus seemingly minimizing the tragic events).

Visualizing a social system at this scale gives a sense that we’re looking at a living, breathing organism, one that has just been wounded. This impression is even more stark in the dynamic visualization captured in the video below.

Read full post with additional video and graphics.

2013/08/112013/08/11

Tom Atlee: Surveillance and parasitism harm society’s collective intelligence

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost, Education, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Security, Sources (Info/Intel), Transparency

Surveillance and parasitism harm society’s collective intelligence

What this post is about: Society’s collective intelligence needs to be able to see clearly what’s going on and take action about it. Both NSA surveillance and corporate suppression of activism interfere with that vital dynamic. This post clarifies what’s going on in these dynamics and suggests strategies to counter them and increase society’s collective intelligence.

Any healthy living system will try to weed out challenges that threaten its functioning. That’s what immune systems do: they preserve business-as-usual in a body.

But this natural maintenance activity of a system can be counterproductive:
(a) when changing circumstances demand adaptive responses, when the system NEEDS to change its business-as-usual – and
(b) when the system has been parasitized by something that is using it for the parasite’s own purposes at the larger system’s expense.

Entire post below the line, with links.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Surveillance and parasitism harm society’s collective intelligence”

2013/08/05

Jean Lievens: The Sharing Economy — Whole Living

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Governance, Innovation, Mobile, Money, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Spectrum, Transparency

The sharing economy: a whole new way of living

From accommodation to cars, the internet is turning us from consumers into providers and challenging established business models. We talk to Martin Varsavsky, founder of Fon – the largest Wi-Fi company in the world – and profile two more pioneers, from TaskRabbit.com and BlaBlaCar.com

In 2006, serial entrepreneur and investor Martín Varsavsky – inspired by a conviction that he could cloak the world in free Wi-Fi by encouraging people to share their home connections – founded Fon in Madrid. The company is now the largest Wi-Fi network in the world, with almost 12m hot spots in more than 100 countries.

“My general thinking at the time was that we live in a world in which benefits are only accrued through economic growth and the endless consumption of resources, and that there have to be other ways that are of more benefit to people,” he says. “Why should everyone have their own car when most of the time they are not using them? Think of a marina full of boats. How frequently do those boats go out?”

Today, it has been argued that the sharing economy – which is perhaps best defined as a way of sweating underutilised assets, by building communities around them and turning consumers into providers – has the potential to reboot businesses across most economic categories. Indeed, Forbes magazine recently estimated that total revenues for the sector could top $3.5bn this year, with growth exceeding 25%. However, when setting up Fon, Varsavsky became convinced that people needed a nudge or financial incentive before they'd happily share their assets.

Read full article.

2013/08/04

Mini-Me: Give Every Afghan a Radio? Or Give Every Afghan OpenBTS with a Radio App? + OpenBTS Meta-RECAP

BTS (Base Transciever Station), Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Education, Governance, Hardware, Innovation, Mobile, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Software, Spectrum

Huh?

Overheard in the World Cafe:

Speaker A: My friend is creating a wide-area radio network for Afghanistan.

Speaker B: Afghanistan has no infrastructure — including radio stations. Although radio is popular, it is mostly shortwave, with a few local FM stations for the local Iman. And electricity for radio stations is spotty at best including in Kabul.

Speaker A: Well, I can build really cheap, “ultra” cheap, radio receivers.

Speaker B: As long as you are doing that, why not give them OpenBTS cell phones running on ambient energy, and include a radio app? Then get someone else — Google, Virgin Mobile, the Chinese or India — to focus on all-purpose cellular towers and tethered ballons?

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Give Every Afghan a Radio? Or Give Every Afghan OpenBTS with a Radio App? + OpenBTS Meta-RECAP”

2013/08/042013/08/04

Jean Lievens: Avaaz from Brazil — Voice of the People

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost, Governance, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience

Brazil’s Vinegar Revolution: Left in Form, Right in Content

Part 4 of 6: Avaaz – Be the Change the Global Elite Want

by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / August 3rd, 2013

In 2006 another ‘democracy’ project made its debut throughout the world. The organization is called Aavaz. According to its website:

Avaaz—meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages—launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.

Avaaz empowers millions of people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. Our model of internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be rapidly combined into a powerful collective force.

Read rest of Part 4.

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Gearóid Ó Colmáin is a political analyst based in Paris. He is a frequent contributor to Russia Today, Radio Del Sur and Inn World Report. His blog can be reached at Metrogael. Read other articles by Gearóid.

2013/08/022013/08/02

Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise Chapter Seven

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Governance, Innovation, Politics

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter Seven

Swarm Management: Following a high-profile event, your swarm just tripled in size in a week. You have twenty thousand new activists — new colleagues — that are all waiting for instructions from you, personally. They’re waiting for instructions from you because your name is the only one they know of. There are no MBA classes on how to handle this situation: those people talk about the challenges you encounter when growing by more than 10 percent a year. This is how you handle 200 percent growth in a week.

Swarmwise chapters – one chapter per month
1. Understanding The Swarm
2. Launching Your Swarm
3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats
4. Control The Vision, But Never The Message
5. Keep Everybody’s Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily (this chapter)
6. Screw Democracy, We’re On A Mission From God
7. Surviving Growth Unlike Anything The MBAs Have Seen (this chapter)
8. Using Social Dynamics To Their Potential (Sep 1)
9. Managing Oldmedia (Oct 1)
10. Beyond Success (Nov 1)The whole book is available for purchase from Amazon.

Full text of chapter below the line — this is a world-changing book.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise Chapter Seven”