Stefaan Verhulst
New Book by Luciano Florini (Chapter 1 (pdf): “Considers the influence information and communication technologies (ICTs) are having on our world; Describes some of the latest developments in ICTs and their use in a range of fields; Argues that ICTs have become environmental forces that create and transform our realities; Explores the impact of ICTs in a range of areas, from education and scientific research to social interaction, and even war..
Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues that the explosive developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is changing the answer to these fundamental human questions.
As the boundaries between life online and offline break down, and we become seamlessly connected to each other and surrounded by smart, responsive objects, we are all becoming integrated into an “infosphere”. Personas we adopt in social media, for example, feed into our ‘real’ lives so that we begin to live, as Floridi puts in, “onlife”. Following those led by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, this metaphysical shift represents nothing less than a fourth revolution.
“Onlife” defines more and more of our daily activity – the way we shop, work, learn, care for our health, entertain ourselves, conduct our relationships; the way we interact with the worlds of law, finance, and politics; even the way we conduct war. In every department of life, ICTs have become environmental forces which are creating and transforming our realities. How can we ensure that we shall reap their benefits? What are the implicit risks? Are our technologies going to enable and empower us, or constrain us? Floridi argues that we must expand our ecological and ethical approach to cover both natural and man-made realities, putting the ‘e’ in an environmentalism that can deal successfully with the new challenges posed by our digital technologies and information society.”
IDCubed: “From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Autonomy and Identity in a Digital Society explores a new generation of digital technologies that are re-imagining the very foundations of identity, governance, trust and social organization.
The fifteen essays of this book stake out the foundations of a new future – a future of open Web standards and data commons, a society of decentralized autonomous organizations, a world of trustworthy digital currencies and self-organized and expressive communities like Burning Man.
Among the contributors are Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the M.I.T. Human Dynamics Laboratory, former FCC Chairman Reed E. Hundt, long-time IBM strategist Irving Wladawksy-Berger, monetary system expert Bernard Lietaer, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, journalist Jonathan Ledgard and H-Farm cofounder Maurizio Rossi.
From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond was edited by Dr. John H. Clippinger, cofounder and executive director of ID3, and David Bollier, an Editor at ID3 who is also an author, blogger and scholar who studies the commons. The book, published by ID3 in association with Off the Common Books, reflects ID3’s vision of the huge, untapped potential for self-organized, distributed governance on open platforms.
The book is available in print and ebook formats (Kindle and epub) from Amazon.com and Off the Common Books. The book, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA), may also be downloaded for free as a pdf file from ID3.
One chapter that inspires the book’s title traces the 28-year history of Burning Man, the week-long encampment in the Nevada desert that have hosted remarkable experimentation in new forms of self-governance by large communities. Other chapters explore such cutting-edge concepts as
- evolvable digital contracts that could supplant conventional legal agreements;
- smartphone currencies that could help Africans meet their economic needs more effective;
- the growth of the commodity-backed Ven currency; and
- new types of “solar currencies” that borrow techniques from Bitcoin to enable more efficient, cost-effective solar generation and sharing by homeowners.
From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond also introduces the path-breaking software platform that ID3 has developed called “Open Mustard Seed,” or OMS. The just-released open source program enables the rise of new types of trusted, self-healing digital institutions on open networks, which in turn will make possible new sorts of privacy-friendly social ecosystems.
“OMS is an integrated, open source package of programs that lets people collect and share personal information in secure, and transparent and accountable ways, enabling authentic, trusted social and economic relationships to flourish,” said Dr. John H. Clippinger, executive director of ID3, an acronym for the Institute for Institutional Innovation and Data-Driven Design.
“The software builds individual privacy, security and trusted exchange into the very design of the system. In effect, OMS represents a new authentication, privacy and sharing layer for the Internet,” said Clippinger “– a new way to share personal information selectively and securely, without access by unauthorized third parties.”
A two-minute video introducing the capabilities of OMS can be viewed here.”
Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal: “The danger is microscopic regulation that we invite via the democratic process.
Big data techniques are new in the world. It will take time to know how to feel about them and whether and how they should be legally corralled. For sheer inanity, though, there’s no beating a recent White House report quivering about the alleged menace of “digital redlining,” or the use of big-data marketing tactics in ways that supposedly disadvantage minority groups.
This alarm rests on an extravagant misunderstanding. Redlining was a crude method banks used to avoid losses in bad neighborhoods even at the cost of missing some profitable transactions—exactly the inefficiency big data is meant to improve upon. Failing to lure an eligible customer into a sale, after all, is hardly the goal of any business.
The real danger of the new technologies lies elsewhere, which the White House slightly touches upon in some of its fretting about police surveillance. The danger is microscopic regulation of our daily activities that we will invite on ourselves through the democratic process.
Soon it may be impossible to leave our homes without our movements being tracked by traffic and security cameras able to read license plates, identify faces and pull up data about any individual, from social media postings to credit reports.
Private businesses are just starting to use these techniques to monitor shoppers in front of shelves of goodies. Towns and cities have already embraced such techniques as revenue grabs, encouraged by private contractors peddling automated traffic cameras.
Witness a festering Chicago scandal. This month came federal indictments of a former city bureaucrat, an outside consultant, and the former CEO of Redflex Traffic Systems, the company that operated the city’s traffic cameras until last year….”
John Kay in the Financial Times: “Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s 2003 book on the science of picking baseball teams, was perhaps written to distract himself from his usual work of attacking the financial services industry. Even after downloading the rules of baseball, I still could not fully understand what was going on. But I caught the drift: sabermetrics, the statistical analysis of the records of players, proved a better guide than the accumulated wisdom of experienced coaches.
Another lesson, important for business strategy, was the brevity of the benefits gained by the Oakland A’s, Lewis’s sporting heroes. If the only source of competitive advantage is better quantitative analysis – whether in baseball or quant strategies in the financial sector – such an advantage can be rapidly and accurately imitated.
At the same time, another genre of books proclaims the virtues of instinctive decision-making. Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (2005) begins with accounts of how experts could identify the Getty kouros – a statue of naked youth purported to be of ancient Greek provenance and purchased in 1985 for $9m – as fake immediately, even though it had supposedly been authenticated through extended scientific tests.
Gary Klein, a cognitive psychologist has for many years monitored the capabilities of experienced practical decision makers – firefighters, nurses and military personnel – who make immediate judgments that are vindicated by the more elaborate assessments possible only with hindsight.
Of course, there is no real inconsistency between the two propositions. The experienced coaches disparaged by sabermetrics enthusiasts were right to believe they knew a lot about spotting baseball talent; they just did not know as much as they thought they did. The art experts and firefighters who made instantaneous, but accurate, judgments were not hearing voices in the air. But no expert can compete with chemical analysis and carbon dating in assessing the age of a work of art.
There are two ways of reconciling expertise with analysis. One takes the worst of both worlds, combining the overconfidence of experience with the naive ignorance of the quant. The resulting bogus rationality seeks to objectivise expertise by fitting it into a template.
It is exemplified in the processes by which interviewers for jobs, and managers who make personnel assessments, are required to complete checklists explaining how they reached their conclusion using prescribed criteria….”
at Connectivity: “Ever since the launch of MoveOn in 1998, I have been evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of virtual advocacy groups compared to traditional, brick-and-mortar advocacy groups.
I hypothesized that organizing and working mostly online would allow advocates to escape a conundrum that ensnare those that rent pricey office space. As I have observed over the years, many brick-and-mortar groups dilute the effectiveness of their email programs for advocacy by inserting fundraising appeals into their email stream. As they emerged in the wake of MoveOn, virtual advocacy groups offered a new model of nimble organizations that could focus less on fundraising and more on advocacy.
Marketing guru Seth Godin describes this process as flipping the funnel. Like a funnel, he says traditional organizations ask supporters for self-sustaining money as broadly as they can, but mobilize a very small percent of them to do so. For this trickle of funds, they end up alienating many in the process. Much of the money raised, meanwhile, simply goes towards giving its supporters a megaphone to advocate for the organizations’ causes.
Today, most of an advocacy organization’s supporters already have their own megaphone: social media. So instead of alienating so many supporters with fundraising appeals to buy them a megaphone, Godin says advocacy groups should instead ask supporters to use the megaphones they already have on their behalf. Thus, the funnel is flipped into a megaphone and supporters don’t have to become alienated by excessive fundraising appeals.
This concept is central to any effective social media campaign. And with no rent to pay, virtual organizations should be best positioned to take advantage of the strategy.
In practice, virtual advocacy groups pioneered back in the ‘90s by MoveOn have proven to be more efficient purveyors of their members’ messages. And at the organizations I spoke to for this article, shifting work online has created workplaces that live up to their founders’ values, too.
I reached out to Nita Chaudhary and Kat Barr, the co-executive director and chief of staff of UltraViolet, an advocacy group formed to fight sexism and expand women’s rights in the U.S. I spoke to MomsRising executive director Kristin Row-Finkbeiner, whose group takes on critical issues facing women, mothers and families. I also consulted Joan Blades, co-founder of both MoveOn and MomsRising who currently works for a new start-up called Great Work Cultures, which promotes a variety of new workplace organizational models that are more respectful of employee work-life balances. Both Chaudhary and Barr previously worked at MoveOn.
MoveOn, MomsRising and UltraViolet are not merely virtual advocacy groups, but are three of the most successful advocacy groups in the U.S. with many millions of supporters among them….”
Paper by Reza Zafarani and Huan Liu in IEEE Intelligent Systems (Volume 29, Issue 4, 2014): “With the rise of social media, information sharing has been democratized. As a result, users are given opportunities to exhibit different behaviors such as sharing, posting, liking, commenting, and befriending conveniently and on a daily basis. By analyzing behaviors observed on social media, we can categorize these behaviors into individual and collective behavior. Individual behavior is exhibited by a single user, whereas collective behavior is observed when a group of users behave together. For instance, users using the same hashtag on Twitter or migrating to another social media site are examples of collective behavior. User activities on social media generate behavioral data, which is massive, expansive, and indicative of user preferences, interests, opinions, and relationships. This behavioral data provides a new lens through which we can observe and analyze individual and collective behaviors of users.”
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at GigaOm: “The Knight Foundation looked at the 28 media-focused startups it funded as part of its News Challenge competition in 2010 and 2011 and came up with some useful lessons for those who might want to follow in their footsteps
Media startups are a lot like any other startup, in the sense that they are a risky bet on an idea or vision — but what makes them even harder is that they are aimed at an industry that is undergoing unprecedented upheaval, filled with potential customers who are struggling to keep their heads above water. What does success look like in that kind of environment? The Knight Foundation knows better than most, since it has funded dozens of startup ventures over the years through its News Challenge, and it has come out with a report that looks at what it has learned.
The report considered the progress of 28 projects that applied for and won funding as part of the 2010-2011 Knight News Challenge competitions, and includes a profile of each — from the Front Porch Forum, a Vermont-based community-building service that started up in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, to a winner called FrontlineSMS, which uses mobile technology to serve the information needs of small communities that don’t have reliable internet access.
Among the lessons that Knight drew from this roster of winners is one that will sound familiar to any technology startup or venture capital partner: namely, make sure your idea serves a market need, as opposed to just being a cool technical solution. This is especially important in an industry like media, the report says:
Selling innovations to news organizations is extremely difficult because they may lack the money and time to spend on innovative projects or the technical capacity to take full advantage of new tools. The innovation may also be entering a market guarded by institutions that may be resistant to change. Fundamentally, unless an innovation addresses a pressing need, journalists and news organizations will not adopt it.”
FehrAdvice (Switzerland):” Der im “Behavioral Economics Guide 2014″ erschienene Beitrag von FehrAdvice zur Behavioral Change Matrix steht Ihnen nun auch als Einzeldokument zum Download zur Verfügung”. Download (PDF, 487KB) (English)