Zoomanitarians has been in the works for well over a year, so we’re excited to be going fully public for the first time. Zoomanitarians is a joint initiative between Zooniverse (Brook Simmons), Planet Labs (Alex Bakir) and myself at QCRI. The purpose of Zoomanitarians is to accelerate disaster damage assessments by leveraging Planet Labs’ unique constellation of 28 satellites and Zooniverse’s highly scalable microtasking platform. As I noted in this earlier post, digital volunteers from Zooniverse tagged well over 2 million satellite images (of Mars, below) in just 48 hours. So why not invite Zooniverse volunteers to tag millions of images taken by Planet Labs after major disasters to help humanitarians accelerate their damage assessments?
This seems like a step in the right direction for the world of academic publishing. ResearchGate News announces, “Peer Review Isn’t Working—Introducing Open Review.” We know that increasingly, papers based on shoddy research have been making it into journals supposedly policed by rigorous peer-review policies. Now, ResearchGate has launched a countermeasure—Open Review brings the review process to the public. The write up happily tells us:
“We’re excited to announce the launch of Open Review today. It’s designed to help you openly voice feedback and evaluate research that you have read and worked with, bringing more transparency to science and speeding up progress.
OpenText announces its new product: OpenText Tempo. The new file sharing collaboration platform is highlighted in the press release, “Social Collaboration Combined With Secure Files Sync and Share: Introducing OpenText Tempo.” OpenText describes Tempo as a project that required teamwork from all over the world.
OpenText Tempo will be able to:
“…provides an engaging user experience that combines the convenience of secure file sync and share with social collaboration and seamless integration to Content Server. It connects people with each other and with their content in a secure, compliant environment that enables open dialogues to take place, extending the value of content through the process of collaboration.”
It is the company’s first EIM application with integration for other products, including Tempo Note, Tempo Social, and Tempo Box. OpenText also says it improves Web site management, web experience management, and portal applications.
It is a commercially secure file sharing and social platform. Will Dropbox and other free services be able to something similar on at an appealing price point?
Can gaming cure disease? By creating games like EteRNA for protein folding and nano-engineering, Adrien Treuille and his colleagues are outsourcing research, each week scoring and then actually synthesizing top players' work. By studying players' strategies, scientists can improve their computer modeling while also creating new ways to fight disease.
Phi Beta Iota: Major observation by speaker: humans not only beat the computers, but they also learned and became more intuitive and innovative, vastly superior to the computers, over time. Also introduces the term crowd-solving.
“The Heritable Innovation Trust (H.I.T.) is framework developed as an alternative to the intellectual property system that is held under contract law, giving it a more flexible structure to allow for the consideration of innovations with communal stewardship and adapted over time. By operating under contract law and with an end-user-license agreement, the H.I.T. does not have the same jurisdictional limitations that patent, copyright, or trademark filings do. H.I.T. teams are invited to companies and communities around the globe to become experts on the culture and innovations of their hosts all of which is then documented into the trust repository that exists both in book form and as an online database. Community analyses are compiled using Integral Accounting, as system by which environments are assessed based on six dimensions: commodity, custom & culture, knowledge, money, technology, and well-being. Integral Accounting provides a more comprehensive look at the whole of a community to provide context for interactions and the innovations shared by the community. Any utilization of the information held in perpetual trust under the H.I.T. framework must be done in reciprocity, meaning that the first order transaction is always knowledge of how the information will be used then any further engagement must be done so in partnership with the originators of the information.”
Anyone working in digital can somewhat relate to the overuse of loosely defined marketing words – think ‘big data’ or ‘cloud computing’ (bzzzz). Growth hacking seems to be just another one of them.
In colloquial terms, growth hacking is associated with the exploitation of loopholes and the use of illegal techniques online to grow business development. Of course, in some cases this has been reality. When PayPal was first used on eBay, it was actually breaching the retailer’s T&C’s. Similarly, when Airbnb first started they poached their customers from Craigslist by spamming listings and inviting users to join their directory instead.
Click on Image to Enlarge
However, growth hacking can also simply be described as the ingenious use of tools, platforms and environments for business development, online AND offline – Google campus in East London, for example, is a good case of growth hacking taking place offline as start-ups use a shared working environment to maximise their potential. Online, growth hacking is the use of tracking and metric tools that teach us where our time is best spent; and the leveraging of platforms where target audiences and key players are.
‘Hacking’ does not necessarily equal to detrimental consequences for larger corporations either. Indeed, Paypal was then bought by eBay, and when Airbnb developed its interface it added the option to ‘post to Craigslist’.
Copyright Monopoly – Johnny Olsson: I’ve followed and participated in the copyright debate for years, and I’ve come to realize there are certain patterns that repeat themselves. You can roughly say there are three lines of defense: One that appeals to emotions, one that appeals to pragmatism, and one that appeals to a sense of responsibility. I’m going to take this opportunity and try to break them down.
