Open Review Brings Peer Review to the Scientific Masses

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.

“With Open Review you can:

Continue reading “Stephen E. Arnold: Open Review Breaks the Back of Citation Cabals and Incestuous Science”

2013/10/282013/10/28

Patrick Meier: Second-Order Eyewitnesses — Twitter, Open Sources, and the Information Revolution the US Intelligence Community Refused to Think About….

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Transparency

Automatically Identifying Eyewitness Reporters on Twitter During Disasters

My colleague Kate Starbird recently shared a very neat study entitled “Learning from the Crowd: Collaborative Filtering Techniques for Identifying On-the-Ground Twitterers during Mass Disruptions” (PDF). As she and her co-authors rightly argue, “most Twitter activity during mass disruption events is generated by the remote crowd.” So can we use advanced computing to rapidly identify Twitter users who are reporting from ground zero? The answer is yes.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Second-Order Eyewitnesses — Twitter, Open Sources, and the Information Revolution the US Intelligence Community Refused to Think About….”

2013/10/24

Jean Lievens: Peer2Politics on P2PValue

Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Transparency

Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a new and increasingly significant model of social innovation based on collaborative production by citizens through the Internet.

Introduction

Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a new and increasingly significant model of social innovation based on collaborative production by citizens through the Internet.

This project will foster the CBPP phenomenon by providing a techno-social software platform specifically designed to facilitate the creation of resilient and sustainable CBPP communities.

The design of the P2Pvalue platform will be empirically and experimentally grounded. Through a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods, we will elaborate guidelines for the institutional and technical features that favour value creation in CBPP.

The project focuses on three key areas of improvement over current platforms:

Enhancing community sustainability by adopting the governance, legal, economic, and technical infrastructures that favour value creation and resilience;
Supporting the contributors with systems of reward that allow value to flow back to the creators;
Integrating the functionalities of online social networking services and collaborative software in a privacy-aware platform based on a decentralised architecture.

Publications

2013/08/26

Patrick Meier: Making All Voices Count Using SMS and Advanced Computing

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Transparency

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.

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2013/08/132013/08/13

Jean Lievens: Vision for a Data Commons

Cloud, Data, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience, Transparency

Our Vision

People everywhere have been organizing a more ethical economy, but they work in relative isolation, fragmented by geography, sector, and even organizational form.

Many organizations collect information about a small piece of these efforts. In every situation, there is another organization for which that information overlaps. In every case there is an opportunity to share that will strengthen all the organizations participating.

Sharing requires effort, it requires trust, and it requires infrastructure. The Data Commons is a cooperative of organizations that are sharing – sharing the costs of this effort, trusting each other with their information, and building infrastructure to make sharing is easy.

Members of the Data Commons Cooperative are principled economic organizations that want it to be easy to share with each other, and with the world, in the movement for a more ethical economy.

Examples of information overlap

Uniting the movements

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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.

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Category: Transparency

Stephen E. Arnold: Open Review Breaks the Back of Citation Cabals and Incestuous Science