Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons


New book by David Bollier: “In our age of predatory markets and make-believe democracy, our troubled political institutions have lost sight of real people and practical realities. But if you look to the edges, ordinary people are reinventing governance and provisioning on their own terms. The commons is arising as a serious, practical alternative to the corrupt Market/State.

The beauty of commons is that we can build them ourselves, right now. But the bigger challenge is, Can we learn to see the commons and, more importantly, to think like a commoner?…

The biggest “tragedy of the commons” is the misconception that commons are failures — relics from another era rendered unnecessary by the Market and State. Think Like a Commoner dispels such prejudices by explaining the rich history and promising future of the commons — an ageless paradigm of cooperation and fairness that is re-making our world.
With graceful prose and dozens of fascinating examples, David Bollier describes the quiet revolution that is pioneering practical new forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves. Think Like a Commoner explains how the commons:

  • Is an exploding field of DIY innovation ranging from Wikipedia and seed-sharing to community forests and collaborative consumption, and beyond;
  • Challenges the standard narrative of market economics by explaining how cooperation generates significant value and human fulfillment; and
  • Provides a framework of law and social action that can help us move beyond the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism.

We have a choice: Ignore the commons and suffer the ongoing private plunder of our common wealth. Or Think Like a Commoner and learn how to rebuild our society and reclaim our shared inheritance. This accessible, comprehensive introduction to the commons will surprise and enlighten you, and provoke you to action.”

Are bots taking over Wikipedia?


Kurzweil News: “As crowdsourced Wikipedia has grown too large — with more than 30 million articles in 287 languages — to be entirely edited and managed by volunteers, 12 Wikipedia bots have emerged to pick up the slack.

The bots use Wikidata — a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and bots — to exchange information between entries and between the 287 languages.

Which raises an interesting question: what portion of Wikipedia edits are generated by humans versus bots?

To find out (and keep track of other bot activity), Thomas Steiner of Google Germany has created an open-source application (and API): Wikipedia and Wikidata Realtime Edit Stats, described in an arXiv paper.
The percentages of bot vs. human edits as shown in the application is constantly changing.  A KurzweilAI snapshot on Feb. 20 at 5:19 AM EST showed an astonishing 42% of Wikipedia being edited by bots. (The application lists the 12 bots.)


Anonymous vs. logged-In humans (credit: Thomas Steiner)
The percentages also vary by language. Only 5% of English edits were by bots; but for Serbian pages, in which few Wikipedians apparently participate, 96% of edits were by bots.

The application also tracks what percentage of edits are by anonymous users. Globally, it was 25 percent in our snapshot and a surprising 34 percent for English — raising interesting questions about corporate and other interests covertly manipulating Wikipedia information.

NatureNet: a model for crowdsourcing the design of citizen science systems


Paper in CSCW Companion ’14, the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing: “NatureNet is citizen science system designed for collecting bio-diversity data in nature park settings. Park visitors are encouraged to participate in the design of the system in addition to collecting bio-diversity data. Our goal is to increase the motivation to participate in citizen science via crowdsourcing: the hypothesis is that when the crowd plays a role in the design and development of the system, they become stakeholders in the project and work to ensure its success. This paper presents a model for crowdsourcing design and citizen science data collection, and the results from early trials with users that illustrate the potential of this approach.”

Four Threats to American Democracy


Jared Diamond in Governance: “The U.S. government has spent the last two years wrestling with a series of crises over the federal budget and debt ceiling. I do not deny that our national debt and the prospect of a government shutdown pose real problems. But they are not our fundamental problems, although they are symptoms of them. Instead, our fundamental problems are four interconnected issues combining to threaten a breakdown of effective democratic government in the United States.
Why should we care? Let’s remind ourselves of the oft-forgotten reasons why democracy is a superior form of government (provided that it works), and hence why its deterioration is very worrisome. (Of course, I acknowledge that there are many countries in which democracy does not work, because of the lack of a national identity, of an informed electorate, or of both). The advantages of democracy include the following:

  • In a democracy, one can propose and discuss virtually any idea, even if it is initially unpalatable to the government. Debate may reveal the idea to be the best solution, whereas in a dictatorship the idea would not have gotten debated, and its virtues would not have been discovered.
  • In a democracy, citizens and their ideas get heard. Hence, without democracy, people are more likely to feel unheard and frustrated and to resort to violence.
  • Compromise is essential to a democracy. It enables us to avoid tyranny by the majority or (conversely) paralysis of government through vetoes exercised by a frustrated minority.
  • In modern democracies, all citizens can vote. Hence, government is motivated to invest in all citizens, who thereby receive the opportunity to become productive, rather than just a small dictatorial elite receiving that opportunity.

Why should we Americans keep reminding ourselves of those fundamental advantages of democracies? I would answer: not only in order to motivate ourselves to defend our democratic processes, but also because increasing numbers of Americans today are falling into the trap of envying the supposed efficiency of China’s dictatorship. Yes, it is true that dictatorships, by closing debate, can sometimes implement good policies faster than can the United States, as has China in quickly converting to lead-free gasoline and building a high-speed rail network. But dictatorships suffer from a fatal disadvantage. No one, in the 5,400 years of history of centralized government on all the continents, has figured out how to ensure that a dictatorship will embrace only good policies. Dictatorships also prevent the public debate that helps to avert catastrophic policies unparalleled in any large modern First World democracy—such as China’s quickly abolishing its educational system, sending its teachers out into the fields, and creating the world’s worst air pollution.
That is why democracy, given the prerequisites of an informed electorate and a basic sense of common interest, is the best form of government—at least, better than all the alternatives that have been tried, as Winston Churchill quipped. Our form of government is a big part of the explanation why the United States has become the richest and most powerful country in the world. Hence, an undermining of democratic processes in the United States means throwing away one of our biggest advantages. Unfortunately, that is what we are now doing, in four ways.
First, political compromise has been deteriorating in recent decades, and especially in the last five years. That deterioration can be measured as the increase in Senate rejections of presidential nominees whose approvals used to be routine, the increasing use of filibusters by the minority party, the majority party’s response of abolishing filibusters for certain types of votes, and the decline in number of laws passed by Congress to the lowest level of recent history. The reasons for this breakdown in political compromise, which seems to parallel increasing levels of nastiness in other areas of American life, remain debated. Explanations offered include the growth of television and then of the Internet, replacing face-to-face communication, and the growth of many narrowly partisan TV channels at the expense of a few broad-public channels. Even if these reasons hold a germ of truth, they leave open the question why these same trends operating in Canada and in Europe have not led to similar deterioration of political compromise in those countries as well.
Second, there are increasing restrictions on the right to vote, weighing disproportionately on voters for one party and implemented at the state level by the other party. Those obstacles include making registration to vote difficult and demanding that registered voters show documentation of citizenship when they present themselves at the polls. Of course, the United States has had a long history of denying voting rights to blacks, women, and other groups. But access to voting had been increasing in the last 50 years, so the recent proliferation of restrictions reverses that long positive trend. In addition to those obstacles preventing voter registration, the United States has by far the lowest election turnout among large First World democracies: under 60% of registered voters in most presidential elections, 40% for congressional elections, and 20% for the recent election for mayor of my city of Los Angeles. (A source of numbers for this and other comparisons that I shall cite is an excellent recent book by Howard Steven Friedman, The Measure of a Nation). And, while we are talking about elections, let’s not forget the astronomical recent increase in costs and durations of election campaigns, their funding by wealthy interests, and the shift in campaign pitches to sound bites. Those trends, unparalled in other large First World democracies, undermine the democratic prerequisite of a well-informed electorate.
A third contributor to the growing breakdown of democracy is our growing gap between rich and poor. Among our most cherished core values is our belief that the United States is a “land of opportunity,” and that we uniquely offer to our citizens the potential for rising from “rags to riches”—provided that citizens have the necessary ability and work hard. This is a myth. Income and wealth disparity in the United States (as measured by the Gini index of equality/inequality, and in other ways) is much higher in the United States than in any other large First World democracy. So is hereditary socioeconomic immobility, that is, the probability that a son’s relative income will just mirror his father’s relative income, and that sons of poor fathers will not become wealthy. Part of the reason for those depressing facts is inequality of educational opportunities. Children of rich Americans tend to receive much better educations than children of poor Americans.
That is bad for our economy, because it means that we are failing to develop a large fraction of our intellectual capital. It is also bad for our political stability, because poor parents who correctly perceive that their children are not being given the opportunity to succeed may express their resulting frustration in violence. Twice during my 47 years of residence in Los Angeles, in 1964 and 1993, frustration in poor areas of Los Angeles erupted into violence, lootings, and killings. In the 1993 riots, when police feared that rioters would spill into the wealthy suburb of Beverly Hills, all that the outnumbered police could do to protect Beverly Hills was to string yellow plastic police tape across major streets. As it turned out, the rioters did not try to invade Beverly Hills in 1993. But if present trends causing frustration continue, there will be more riots in Los Angeles and other American cities, and yellow plastic police tape will not suffice to contain the rioters.
The remaining contributor to the decline of American democracy is the decline of government investment in public purposes, such as education, infrastructure, and nonmilitary research and development. Large segments of the American populace deride government investment as “socialism.” But it is not socialism. On the contrary, it is one of the longest established functions of government. Ever since the rise of the first governments 5,400 years ago, governments have served two main functions: to maintain internal peace by monopolizing force, settling disputes, and forbidding citizens to resort to violence in order to settle disputes themselves; and to redistribute individual wealth for investing in larger aims—in the worst cases, enriching the elite; in the best cases, promoting the good of society as a whole. Of course, some investment is private, by wealthy individuals and companies expecting to profit from their investments. But many potential payoffs cannot attract private investment, either because the payoff is so far off in the future (such as the payoff from universal primary school education), or because the payoff is diffused over all of society rather than concentrated in areas profitable to the private investor (such as diffused benefits of municipal fire departments, roads, and broad education). Even the most passionate American supporters of small government do not decry as socialism the funding of fire departments, interstate highways, and public schools.

Mindless – Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans


New book by Simon Head: “The tools of corporate efficiency—expert systems, databases, and operations management—have improved our lives significantly, but with a cost: they’re turning us into mindless drones.
We live in the age of Computer Business Systems (CBSs)—the highly complex, computer-intensive management programs on which large organizations increasingly rely. In Mindless, Simon Head argues that these systems have come to trump human expertise, dictating the goals and strategies of a wide array of businesses, and de-skilling the jobs of middle class workers in the process. CBSs are especially dysfunctional, Head argues, when they apply their disembodied expertise to transactions between humans, as in health care, education, customer relations, and human resources management. And yet there are industries with more human approaches, as Head illustrates with specific examples, whose lead we must follow and extend to the mainstream American economy.
Mindless illustrates the shortcomings of CBS, providing an in-depth and disturbing look at how human dignity is slipping as we become cogs on a white collar assembly line.”

Can Twitter Predict Major Events Such As Mass Protests?


Emerging Technology From the arXiv : “The idea that social media sites such as Twitter can predict the future has a controversial history. In the last few years, various groups have claimed to be able to predict everything from the outcome of elections to the box office takings for new movies.
It’s fair to say that these claims have generated their fair share of criticism. So it’s interesting to see a new claim come to light.
Today, Nathan Kallus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge says he has developed a way to predict crowd behaviour using statements made on Twitter. In particular, he has analysed the tweets associated with the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt and says that the civil unrest associated with this event was clearly predictable days in advance.
It’s not hard to imagine how the future behaviour of crowds might be embedded in the Twitter stream. People often signal their intent to meet in advance and even coordinate their behaviour using social media. So this social media activity is a leading indicator of future crowd behaviour.
That makes it seem clear that predicting future crowd behaviour is simply a matter of picking this leading indicator out of the noise.
Kallus says this is possible by mining tweets for any mention of future events and then analysing trends associated with them. “The gathering of crowds into a single action can often be seen through trends appearing in this data far in advance,” he says.
It turns out that exactly this kind of analysis is available from a company called Recorded Future based in Cambridge, which scans 300,000 different web sources in seven different languages from all over the world. It then extracts mentions of future events for later analysis….
The bigger question is whether it’s possible to pick out this evidence in advance. In other words, is possible to make predictions before the events actually occur?
That’s not so clear but there are good reasons to be cautious. First of all, while it’s possible to correlate Twitter activity to real protests, it’s also necessary to rule out false positives. There may be significant Twitter trends that do not lead to significant protests in the streets. Kallus does not adequately address the question of how to tell these things apart.
Then there is the question of whether tweets are trustworthy. It’s not hard to imagine that when it comes to issues of great national consequence, propaganda, rumor and irony may play a significant role. So how to deal with this?
There is also the question of demographics and whether tweets truly represent the intentions and activity of the population as a whole. People who tweet are overwhelmingly likely to be young but there is another silent majority that plays hugely important role. So can the Twitter firehose really represent the intentions of this part of the population too?
The final challenge is in the nature of prediction. If the Twitter feed is predictive, then what’s needed is evidence that it can be used to make real predictions about the future and not just historical predictions about the past.
We’ve looked at some of these problems with the predictive power of social media before and the challenge is clear: if there is a claim to be able to predict the future, then this claim must be accompanied by convincing evidence of an actual prediction about an event before it happens.
Until then, it would surely be wise to be circumspect about the predictive powers of Twitter and other forms of social media.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1402.2308: Predicting Crowd Behavior with Big Public Data”

Developing an open government plan in the open


Tim Hughes at OGP: “New laws, standards, policies, processes and technologies are critical for opening up government, but arguably just as (if not more) important are new cultures, behaviours and ways of working within government and civil society.
The development of an OGP National Action Plan, therefore, presents a twofold opportunity for opening up government: On the one hand it should be used to deliver a set of robust and ambitious commitments to greater transparency, participation and accountability. But just as importantly, the process of developing a NAP should also be used to model new forms of open and collaborative working within government and civil society. These two purposes of a NAP should be mutually reinforcing. An open and collaborative process can – as was the case in the UK – help to deliver a more robust and ambitious action plan, which in turn can demonstrate the efficacy of working in the open.
You could even go one step further to say that the development of an National Action Plan should present an (almost) “ideal” vision of what open government in a country could look like. If governments aren’t being open as they’re developing an open government action plan, then there’s arguably little hope that they’ll be open elsewhere.
As coordinators of the UK OGP civil society network, this was on our mind at the beginning and throughout the development of the UK’s 2013-15 National Action Plan. Crucially, it was also on the minds of our counterparts in the UK Government. From the start, therefore, the process was developed with the intention that it should itself model the principles of open government. Members of the UK OGP civil society network met with policy officials from the UK Government on a regular basis to scope out and develop the action plan, and we published regular updates of our discussions and progress for others to follow and engage with. The process wasn’t without its challenges – and there’s still much more we can do to open it up further in the future – but it was successful in moving far beyond the typical model of government deciding, announcing and defending its intentions and in delivering an action plan with some strong and ambitious commitments.
One of the benefits of working in an open and collaborative way is that it enabled us to conduct and publish a full – warts and all – review of what went well and what didn’t. So, consider this is an invitation to delve into our successes and failures, a challenge to do it better and a request to help us to do so too. Head over to the UK OGP civil society network blog to read about what we did, and tell us what you think: http://www.opengovernment.org.uk/national-action-plan/story-of-the-uk-national-action-plan-2013-15/

Choosing Not to Choose


New paper by Cass Sunstein: “Choice can be an extraordinary benefit or an immense burden. In some contexts, people choose not to choose, or would do so if they were asked. For example, many people prefer not to make choices about their health or retirement plans; they want to delegate those choices to a private or public institution that they trust (and may well be willing to pay a considerable amount for such delegations). This point suggests that however well-accepted, the line between active choosing and paternalism is often illusory. When private or public institutions override people’s desire not to choose, and insist on active choosing, they may well be behaving paternalistically, through a form of choice-requiring paternalism. Active choosing can be seen as a form of libertarian paternalism, and a frequently attractive one, if people are permitted to opt out of choosing in favor of a default (and in that sense not to choose); it is a form of nonlibertarian paternalism insofar as people are required to choose. For both ordinary people and private or public institutions, the ultimate judgment in favor of active choosing, or in favor of choosing not to choose, depends largely on the costs of decisions and the costs of errors. But the value of learning, and of developing one’s own preferences and values, is also important, and may argue on behalf of active choosing, and against the choice not to choose. For law and policy, these points raise intriguing puzzles about the idea of “predictive shopping,” which is increasingly feasible with the rise of large data sets containing information about people’s previous choices. Some empirical results are presented about people’s reactions to predictive shopping; the central message is that most (but not all) people reject predictive shopping in favor of active choosing.”

Structuring Big Data to Facilitate Democratic Participation in International Law


New paper by Roslyn Fuller: “This is an interdisciplinary article focusing on the interplay between information and communication technology (ICT) and international law (IL). Its purpose is to open up a dialogue between ICT and IL practitioners that focuses on the ways in which ICT can enhance equitable participation in international legal structures, particularly through capturing the possibilities associated with big data. This depends on the ability of individuals to access big data, for it to be structured in a manner that makes it accessible and for the individual to be able to take action based on it.”

LocalWiki turns open local data into open local knowledge


Marina Kukso at OpenGovVoices:” LocalWiki is an open knowledge project focusing on giving everyone the opportunity to collaborate to create and share all kinds of information about the place where they live.

The project started in 2004 in Davis, Calif. as the Davis Wiki, now the primary local information resource for Davis residents. One-in-seven residents have contributed to the project and, in a given month, almost every resident uses it.

In 2010, we received funding from the Knight Foundation to bring LocalWiki to many more communities. We created a wiki software specifically designed for local collaboration and have seen adoption in more than 70 communities worldwide. People now use LocalWiki for everything from mapping out nature trails to planning a grassroots mayoral election candidate debate….

There’s a great deal of expertise within our communities, and at LocalWiki we see part of the mission of our work as providing a platform for people to contextualize and make meaning out of the information made available through open data and open gov efforts at the local level.

There are obviously limitations to the ability of programming laypeople to make use of open data to create new knowledge to drive action, most notably many people’s lack of expertise in data analysis, but with LocalWiki we hope to at least address some of those limitations by making it significantly easier for people to collaborate to create meaning out of open data and to share it with others. This is why LocalWiki has a wysiwyg editor, which includes mapping as a core feature and prioritizes usability in design.

Finally, adding information about a community on LocalWiki is a way to create new open data. It’s incredibly important to make things like internal city crime statistics public, but residents’ perspectives on the relative safety of their neighborhoods is a different kind of data that provides additional insights into public safety challenges and adds complexity to the picture created by statistics.”