New York Times profile of a new crowdsourced service: “Watsi, which started last August, lets people donate as little as $5 toward low-cost, high-impact medical treatment for patients in third-world countries. The procedures range from relatively simple ones like fixing a broken limb to more complicated surgery — say, to remove an eye tumor. But the treatments generally have a high likelihood of success and don’t involve multiple operations or long-term care… Watsi represents the next generation of charities dependent on online donors, evolving the model started by sites like Kiva. With just a few mouse clicks, Kiva users, say, are able to lend money to a restaurant owner in the Philippines — and to examine her loan proposal and repayment schedule, to read about her and see her photograph.”
Translating public health into media
Jina Moore in the Columbia Journalism Review on the fifth “Envision” conference, convened by the UN’s Department of Public Information, the Independent Film Project, and Social Good Summit Partners: “These days, there’s lots of interest among the do-gooding world—nonprofits or NGOs, private foundations and public agencies—in how to use media. Partners in Health, to name just one big public health player, regularly uses videos and storytelling in its fundraising campaigns and on its website. So Envision’s focus on getting storytellers to understand and raise awareness about public health issues isn’t exactly new. The question is, is it useful?”
A new vocabulary for the 21st Century: Datafication
Kenneth Neil Cukier, data-editor at the Economist and co-author of “Big Data”: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (listen to an interview with Kenneth on NPR) recently explained at Big Think a new term that describes how data mediates our lives : Datafication.
“Datafication refers to the fact that we’re looking at more aspects of life that we never actually understood as being informational before. And finding out that that in fact there is an informational quality to it that we can render into a data format. So what we’re seeing with social media companies is they’re actually datafying aspects of the life that we never really saw that could be datafied. So for example Facebook datafies our friendships. Twitter datafies our whispers or maybe our stray thoughts. And LinkedIn datafies our professional contacts. And more and more and more are we seeing that we’re able to take the daily interactions of living, things that we never really saw that can be rendered into a data format and we’re putting it into data formats.”
Potential of datafication for re-imagining governance? Kenneth:
“you can just use your imagination and think of some of the extraordinary uses. One way that we’re doing it is looking at who contacts whom on Twitter and who’s one’s followers are. And we’re able to identify that, and we never known this before that subpopulations exist that are either immunized for the flu or are not. Now it’s a public health issue. The whole point of vaccinations is that you take a broad population, you vaccinate many but not all and everyone is covered. What we’ve just now learned with Twitter is that this idea of herd immunity might not be the case because there’s whole subgroups of the population that all don’t get vaccinated yet they all hang out together. They do virtually and we’re seeing that those virtual ties are also physical ties. I want to stress this sounds like it might be an intuitive thing. It’s not. It sounds like this might just be a nice thing to know, it’s deadly important. It’s very serious.”
Watch the Video ofKenneth on Datafication: