Adam Wisnieski at the Crime Report: “In February, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) announced it was moving into a new era of transparency and openness with the launch of a new public crime map.
“Crime analysis and mapping data is now in the hands of the city’s citizens,” reads the first line of the press release.
According to the release, the MPD will feed incident report data to RAIDS (Regional Analysis and Information Data Sharing) Online, a nationwide crime map operated by crime analysis software company BAIR Analytics.
Since the announcement, Minneapolis residents have used RAIDS to look at reports of murder, robbery, burglary, assault, rape and other crimes reported in their neighborhoods on a sleek, easy-to-use map, which includes data as recent as yesterday.
On the surface, it’s a major leap forward for transparency in Minneapolis. But some question why the data feed is given exclusively to a single private company.
Transparency advocates argue in fact that the data is not truly in the hands of the city’s residents until citizens can download the raw data so they can analyze, chart or map it on their own.
“For it to actually be open data, it needs to be available to the public in machine readable format,” said Lauren Reid, senior public affairs manager for Code for America, a national non-profit that promotes participation in government through technology.
“Anybody should be able to go download it and read it if they want. That’s open data.”
The Open Knowledge Foundation, a national non-profit that advocates for more government openness, argues open data is important so citizens can participate and engage government in a way that was not possible before.
“Much of the time, citizens are only able to engage with their own governance sporadically — maybe just at an election every 4 or 5 years,” reads the Open Knowledge website. “By opening up data, citizens are enabled to be much more directly informed and involved in decision-making.
“This is more than transparency: it’s about making a full ‘read/write’ society — not just about knowing what is happening in the process of governance, but being able to contribute to it.”.
Minneapolis is not alone.
As Americans demand more information on criminal activity from the government, police departments are flocking to private companies to help them get the information into the public domain.
For many U.S. cities, hooking up with these third-party mapping vendors is the most public their police department has ever been. But the trend has started a messy debate about how “public” the public data actually is. Outsourcing Makes It Easy
For police departments, outsourcing the presentation of their crime data to a private firm is an easy decision.
Most of the crime mapping sites are free or cost very little. (The Omega Group’s CrimeMapping.com charges between $600 and $2,400 per year, depending on the size of the agency.)
The department chooses what information it wants to provide. Once the system is set up, the data flows to the companies and then to the public without a lot of effort on behalf of the department.
For the most part, the move doesn’t need legislative approval, just a memorandum of understanding. A police department can even fulfill a new law requiring a public crime map by releasing report data through one of these vendors.
Commander Scott Gerlicher of the MPD’s Strategic Information and Crime Analysis Division says the software has saved the department time.
“I don’t think we are entertaining quite as many requests from the media or the public,” he told The Crime Report. “Plus the price was right: it was free.”
The companies that run some of the most popular sites — The Omega Group’s CrimeMapping.com, Public Engines’ CrimeReports and BAIR Analytics’ RAIDS — are in the business of selling crime analysis and mapping software to police departments.
Some departments buy internal software from these companies; though some cities, like Minneapolis, just use RAIDS’ free map and have no contracts with BAIR for internal software.
Susan Smith, director of operations at BAIR Analytics, said the goal of RAIDS is to create one national map that includes all crime reports from across all jurisdictions and departments (state and local police).
For people who live near or at the edge of a city line, finding relevant crime data can be hard.
The MPD’s Gerlicher said that was one reason his department chose RAIDS — because many police agencies in the Minneapolis area had already hooked up with the firm.
The operators of these crime maps say they provide a community service.
“We try to get as many agencies as we possibly can. We truly believe this is a good service for the community,” says Gabriela Coverdale, a marketing director at the Omega Group. Raw Data ‘Off Limits’
However, the sites do not allow the public to download any of the raw data and prohibit anyone from “scraping,” using a program to automatically pull the data from their maps.
In Minneapolis, the police department continues to post PDFs and excel spreadsheets with data, but only RAIDS gets a feed with the most recent data.
Alan Palazzolo, a Code for America fellow who works as an interactive developer for the online non-profit newspaper MinnPost, used monthly reports from the MPD to build a crime application with a map and geographic-oriented chart of crime in Minneapolis.
Nevertheless, he finds the new tool limiting.
“[The MPD’s] ability to actually put out more data, and more timely data, really opens things up,” he said. “It’s great, but they are not doing that with us.”
According to Palazzolo, the arrangement gives BAIR a market advantage that effectively prevents its data from being used for purposes it cannot control.
“Having granular, complete, and historical data would allow us to do more in-depth analysis,” wrote Palazzolo and Kaeti Hinck in an article in MinnPost last year.
“Granular data would allow us to look at smaller areas,” reads the article. “[N]eighborhoods are a somewhat arbitrary boundary when it comes to crime. Often high crime is isolated to a couple of blocks, but aggregated data does not allow us to explore this.
“More complete data would allow us to look at factors like exact locations, time of day, demographic issues, and detailed categories (like bike theft).”
The question of preference gets even messier when looking at another national crime mapping website called SpotCrime.
Unlike the other third-party mapping sites, SpotCrime is not in the business of selling crime analysis software to police departments. It operates more like a newspaper — a newspaper focused solely on the police blotter pages — and makes money off advertising.
Years ago, SpotCrime requested and received crime report data via e-mail from the Minneapolis Police Department and mapped the data on its website. According to SpotCrime owner Colin Drane, the MPD stopped sending e-mails when terminals were set up in the police department for the public to access the data.
So he instead started going through the painstaking process of transferring data from PDFs the MPD posted online and mapping them.
When the MPD hooked up with RAIDS in February, Drane asked for the same feed and was denied. He says more and more police departments around the country are hooking up with one of his competitors and not giving him the same timely data.
The MPD said it prefers RAIDS over SpotCrime and criticized some of the advertisements on SpotCrime.
“We’re not about supporting ad money,” said Gerlicher.
Drane believes all crime data in every city should be open to everyone, in order to prevent any single firm from monopolizing how the information is presented and used.
“The onus needs to be on the public agencies,” he adds. “They need to be fair with the data and they need to be fair with the public.” he said.
Transparency advocates worry that the trend is going in the opposite direction.
Ohio’s Columbus Police Department, for example, recently discontinued its public crime statistic feed and started giving the data exclusively to RAIDS. The Columbus Dispatchwrote that the new system had less information than the old…”
Alexander Howard at E Pluribus Unum: “Citizensourcing and open innovation can work in the public sector, just as crowdsourcing can in the private sector. Around the world, the use of prizes to spur innovation has been booming for years. The United States of America has been significantly scaling up its use of prizes and challenges to solving grand national challenges since January 2011, when, President Obama signed an updated version of the America COMPETES Act into law.
According to the third congressionally mandated report released by the Obama administration today (PDF/Text), the number of prizes and challenges conducted under the America COMPETES Act has increased by 50% since 2012, 85% since 2012, and nearly six-fold overall since 2011. 25 different federal agencies offered prizes under COMPETES in fiscal year 2013, with 87 prize competitions in total. The size of the prize purses has also grown as well, with 11 challenges over $100,000 in 2013. Nearly half of the prizes conducted in FY 2013 were focused on software, including applications, data visualization tools, and predictive algorithms. Challenge.gov, the award-winning online platform for crowdsourcing national challenges, now has tens of thousands of users who have participated in more than 300 public-sector prize competitions. Beyond the growth in prize numbers and amounts, Obama administration highlighted 4 trends in public-sector prize competitions:
New models for public engagement and community building during competitions
Growth software and information technology challenges, with nearly 50% of the total prizes in this category
More emphasis on sustainability and “creating a post-competition path to success”
Increased focus on identifying novel approaches to solving problems
The growth of open innovation in and by the public sector was directly enabled by Congress and the White House, working together for the common good. Congress reauthorized COMPETES in 2010 with an amendment to Section 105 of the act that added a Section 24 on “Prize Competitions,” providing all agencies with the authority to conduct prizes and challenges that only NASA and DARPA has previously enjoyed, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which has been guiding its implementation and providing guidance on the use of challenges and prizes to promote open government.
“This progress is due to important steps that the Obama Administration has taken to make prizes a standard tool in every agency’s toolbox,” wrote Cristin Dorgelo, assistant director for grand challenges in OSTP, in a WhiteHouse.gov blog post on engaging citizen solvers with prizes:
In his September 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, President Obama called on all Federal agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges. Those efforts have expanded since the signing of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, which provided all agencies with expanded authority to pursue ambitious prizes with robust incentives.
To support these ongoing efforts, OSTP and the General Services Administration have trained over 1,200 agency staff through workshops, onlineresources, and an active community of practice. And NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (COECI) provides a full suite of prize implementation services, allowing agencies to experiment with these new methods before standing up their own capabilities.
Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy famously once said that “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” This rings true, in and outside of government. The idea of governments using prizes like this to inspire technological innovation, however, is not reliant on Web services and social media, born from the fertile mind of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. As the introduction to the third White House prize report notes:
“One of the most famous scientific achievements in nautical history was spurred by a grand challenge issued in the 18th Century. The issue of safe, long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail was of such great importance that the British government offered a cash award of £20,000 pounds to anyone who could invent a way of precisely determining a ship’s longitude. The Longitude Prize, enacted by the British Parliament in 1714, would be worth some £30 million pounds today, but even by that measure the value of the marine chronometer invented by British clockmaker John Harrison might be a deal.”
Centuries later, the Internet, World Wide Web, mobile devices and social media offer the best platforms in history for this kind of approach to solving grand challenges and catalyzing civic innovation, helping public officials and businesses find new ways to solve old problem. When a new idea, technology or methodology that challenges and improves upon existing processes and systems, it can improve the lives of citizens or the function of the society that they live within….”
The Guardian: “The abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria has lead to campaigns calling for their rescue, on social media and offline all around the world.
After Nigerian protestors marched on parliament in the capital Abuja calling for action on April 30, people in cities around the world have followed suit and organised their own marches.
A social media campaign under the hashtag #Bringbackourgirls started trending in Nigeria two weeks ago and has now been tweeted more than one million times. It was first used on April 23 at the opening ceremony for a UNESCO event honouring the Nigerian city of Port Harcourt as the 2014 World Book Capital City. A Nigerian lawyer in Abuja, Ibrahim M. Abdullahi, tweeted the call in a speech by Dr. Oby Ezekwesili, Vice President of the World Bank for Africa to “Bring Back the Girls!”
Another mass demonstration took place outside the Nigerian Defence Headquarters in Abuja on May 6 and many other protests have been organised in response to a social media campaign asking for people around the world to march and wear red in solidarity. People came out in protest at the Nigerian embassy in London, in Los Angeles and New York.
A global “social media march” has also been organised asking supporters to use their networks to promote the campaign for 200 minutes on May 8.
A petition started on Change.org by a Nigerian woman in solidarity with the schoolgirls has now been signed by more than 300,000 supporters. Amnesty International and UNICEF have backed the campaign, as well as world leaders and celebrities, including Hilary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai and rappers Wyclef Jean and Chris Brown, whose mention of the campaign was retweeted more than 10,000 times.
After three weeks of silence the Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan vowed to find the schoolgirls on April 3, stating: “wherever these girls are, we’ll get them out”. On the same day, John Kerry pledged assistance from the US.”
Book by (among others) by Manuel Castells, David Gelernter, Juan Vázquez, Evgeni Morozov et al: “Change: 19 Key Essays on How the Internet Is Changing Our Lives, is the sixth issue of BBVA’s annual series devoted to explore the key issues of our time. This year, our chosen theme is the Internet, the single most powerful vector of change in recent history. In the words of Arthur C Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The swiftness and reach of the changes wrought by the Internet indeed have a touch of magic about them.
As a tool available to a reasonably wide public, the Internet is only twenty years old, but it is already the fundamental catalyst of the broadest based and fastest technological revolution in history. It is the broadest based because over the past two decades its effects have touched upon practically every citizen in the world. And it is the fastest because its mass adoption is swifter than that of any earlier technology. To put this into perspective – it was only 70 years after the invention of the aeroplane that 100 million people travelled by air; it took 50 years after the invention of the telephone for 100 million people to use this form of communication. The 100-million user mark was achieved by PCs after 14 years. The Internet made 100 million users after just 7 years. The cycles of adoption of Internet-related technologies are even shorter – Facebook acquired 100 million users in 2 years. It is impossible today to imagine the world without the Internet: it enables us to do things which only a few years ago would be unthinkable, and impinges on every sphere of our lives.”
Jeff McMahon at Forbes: “Energy-efficiency startups just need access to existing data—on electricity usage, housing characteristics, renovations and financing—to unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, two founders of startups said in Chicago Tuesday.
“One of the big barriers to scaling energy efficiency is the lack of data in the market,” said Andy Frank of Sealed, a startup that encourages efficiency improvements by guaranteeing homeowners a lower bill than they’re paying now.
In a forum hosted by the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, Frank and Matt Gee, founder of Effortless Energy, advocated an open-energy-data warehouse that would collect anonymized data from utilities, cities, contractors, and financiers, to make the data available for research, government, and industry.
“There needs to be some sort of entity that organizes all this information and has it in some sort of standard format,” said Gee, whose startup pays for home improvements up front and then splits the savings with investors and the homeowner.
According to Gee, the current $9.5 billion energy-efficiency market operates without data on the actual savings it produces for homeowners. He outlined the current market like this:
A regulatory body, usually a public utility commission, mandates that a utility spend money on efficiency.
The utility passes on the cost to customers through an efficiency surcharge (this is how the $9.5 billion is raised).
The utility hires a program implementer.
The program implementer sends auditors to customer homes.
Potential savings from improvements like new insulation or new appliances are estimated based on models.
Those modeled estimates determine what the contractor can do in the home.
The modeled estimates determine what financing is available.
In some cases, utilities will hire consultants to estimate the savings generated from these improvements. California utilities spend $40 million a year estimating savings, Gee said, but actual savings are neither verified nor integrated in the process.
“Nowhere in this process do actual savings enter,” Gee said. “They don’t drive anyone’s incentives, which is just absolutely astounding, right? The opportunity here is that energy efficiency actually pays for itself. It should be something that’s self-financed.”
For that to happen, the market needs reliable information on how much energy is currently being wasted and how much is saved by improvements….”
Webby 2014 Nominee: “Project Goal is to make information about accessible venues accessible to people.
About venues where people with disabilities can engage in sports and recreational activities, and live full lives without any barriers or stereotypes.
The Solution
To develop a website where everyone can not only find accessible venues in each city, but also add new venues to the website’s database.
Creating the accessibility rating list for russian cities to get an idea how accessible a particular city is, will draw the local governement’ s attention to this problem.
The foundation of the website is an interactive map of accessible venues in Russia, which can help people with disabilities find locations where they can participate in sports, take classes or recreate.
All you need to do is choose the necessary city and street, and the map will show all the accessible venues in the city.
The Result
After a few months of operation: — over 14 000 venues — over 600 cities —millions of people with disabilities have become able to live full lives
Helen Goulden in the Huffington Post: “Every month, a social research agency conducts a public opinion survey on 30,000 UK households. As part of this households are asked about what issues they think are the most important; things such as crime, unemployment, inequality, public health etc. Climate change has ranked so consistently low on these surveys that they don’t both asking any more.
On first glance, it would appear that most people don’t care about a changing climate.
Yet, that’s simply not true. Many people care deeply, but fleetingly – in the same way they may consider their own mortality before getting back to thinking about what to have for tea. And others care, but fail to change their behaviour in a way that’s proportionate to their concerns. Certainly that’s my unhappy stomping ground.
Besides what choices do we really have? Even the most progressive, large organisations have been glacial to move towards any form of real form of sustainability. For many years we have struggled with the Frankenstein-like task of stitching ‘sustainability’ onto existing business and economic models and the results, I think, speak for themselves.
That the Collaborative Economy presents us with an opportunity – in Napster-like ways – to disrupt and evolve toward something more sustainable is compelling idea. Looking out to a future filled with opportunities to reconfigure how we produce, consume and dispose of the things we want and need to live, work and play.
Whether the journey toward sustainability is short or long, it will be punctuated with a good degree of turbulence, disruption and some largely unpredictable events. How we deal with those events and what role communities, collaboration and technology play may set the framework and tone for how that future evolves. Crises and disruption to our entrenched living patterns present ripe opportunities for innovation and space for adopting new behaviours and practices.
No-one is immune from the impact of erratic and extreme weather events. And if we accept that these events are going to increase in frequency, we must draw the conclusion that emergency state and government resources may be drawn more thinly over time.
Across the world, there is a fairly well organised state and international infrastructure for dealing with emergencies , involving everyone from the Disaster Emergency Committee, the UN, central and local government and municipalities, not for profit organisations and of course, the military. There is a clear reason why we need this kind of state emergency response; I’m not suggesting that we don’t.
But through the rise of open data and mass participation in platforms that share location, identity and inventory, we are creating a new kind of mesh; a social and technological infrastructure that could considerably strengthen our ability to respond to unpredictable events.
In the last few years we have seen a sharp rise in the number of tools and crowdsourcing platforms and open source sensor networks that are focused on observing, predicting or responding to extreme events:
• Apps like Shake Alert, which emits a minute warning that an earthquake is coming
• Rio’s sensor network, which measures rainfall outside the city and can predict flooding
• Open Source sensor software Arduino which is being used to crowd-source weather and pollution data
• Propeller Health, which is using Asthma sensors on inhalers to crowd-source pollution hotspots
• Safecast, which was developed for crowdsourcing radiation levels in Japan
Increasingly we have the ability to deploy open source, distributed and networked sensors and devices for capturing and aggregating data that can help us manage our responses to extreme weather (and indeed, other kinds of) events.
Look at platforms like LocalMind and Foursquare. Today, I might be using them to find out whether there’s a free table at a bar or finding out what restaurant my friends are in. But these kind of social locative platforms present an infrastructure that could be life-saving in any kind of situation where you need to know where to go quickly to get out of trouble. We know that in the wake of disruptive events and disasters, like bombings, riots etc, people now intuitively and instinctively take to technology to find out what’s happening, where to go and how to co-ordinate response efforts.
During the 2013 Bart Strike in San Francisco, ventures like Liquid Space and SideCar enabled people to quickly find alternative places to work, or alternatives to public transport, to mitigate the inconvenience of the strike. The strike was a minor inconvenience compared to the impact of a hurricane and flood but nevertheless, in both those instances, ventures decided waive their fees; as did AirBnB when 1,400 New York AirBnB hosts opened their doors to people who had been left homeless through Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The impulse to help is not new. The matching of people’s offers of help and resources to on-the-ground need, in real time, is.”
Paper by Peter Conradie and Dr. Sunil Choenni in Government Information Quarterly: “Due to expected benefits such as citizen participation and innovation, the release of Public Sector Information as open data is getting increased attention on various levels of government. However, currently data release by governments is still novel and there is little experience and knowledge thus far about its benefits, costs and barriers. This is compounded by a lack of understanding about how internal processes influence data release. Our aim in this paper is to get a better understanding of these processes and how they influence data release, i.e., to find determinants for the release of public sector information. For this purpose, we conducted workshops, interviews, questionnaires, desk research and practice based cases in the education program of our university, involving six local public sector organizations. We find that the way data is stored, the way data is obtained and the way data is used by a department are crucial indicators for open data release. We conclude with the lessons learned based on our research findings. These findings are: we should take a nuanced approach towards data release, avoid releasing data for its own sake, and take small incremental steps to explore data release.”
Keith Axline in Wired: “Think about it like this: In the Book of Genesis, God is the ultimate programmer, creating all of existence in a monster six-day hackathon.
Or, if you don’t like Biblical metaphors, you can think about it in simpler terms. Robert Moses was a programmer, shaping and re-shaping the layout of New York City for more than 50 years. Drug developers are programmers, twiddling enzymes to cure what ails us. Even pickup artists and conmen are programmers, running social scripts on people to elicit certain emotional results.
Keith Axline in Wired: “Everyone is becoming a programmer. The next step is to realize that everything is a program.
The point is that, much like the computer on your desk or the iPhone in your hand, the entire Universe is programmable. Just as you can build apps for your smartphones and new services for the internet, so can you shape and re-shape almost anything in this world, from landscapes and buildings to medicines and surgeries to, well, ideas — as long as you know the code.
That may sound like little more than an exercise in semantics. But it’s actually a meaningful shift in thinking. If we look at the Universe as programmable, we can start treating it like software. In short, we can improve almost everything we do with the same simple techniques that have remade the creation of software in recent years, things like APIs, open source code, and the massively popular code-sharing service GitHub.
The great thing about the modern software world is that you don’t have to build everything from scratch. Apple provides APIs, or application programming interfaces, that can help you build apps on their devices. And though Tim Cook and company only give you part of what you need, you can find all sorts of other helpful tools elsewhere, thanks to the open source software community.
The same is true if you’re building, say, an online social network. There are countless open source software tools you can use as the basic building blocks — many of them open sourced by Facebook. If you’re creating almost any piece of software, you can find tools and documentation that will help you fashion at least a small part of it. Chances are, someone has been there before, and they’ve left some instructions for you.
Now we need to discover and document the APIs for the Universe. We need a standard way of organizing our knowledge and sharing it with the world at large, a problem for which programmers already have good solutions. We need to give everyone a way of handling tasks the way we build software. Such a system, if it can ever exist, is still years away — decades at the very least — and the average Joe is hardly ready for it. But this is changing. Nowadays, programming skills and the DIY ethos are slowly spreading throughout the population. Everyone is becoming a programmer. The next step is to realize that everything is a program.
What Is an API?
The API may sound like just another arcane computer acronym. But it’s really one of the most profound metaphors of our time, an idea hiding beneath the surface of each piece of tech we use everyday, from iPhone apps to Facebook. To understand what APIs are and why they’re useful, let’s look at how programmers operate.
If I’m building a smartphone app, I’m gonna need — among so many other things — a way of validating a signup form on a webpage to make sure a user doesn’t, say, mistype their email address. That validation has nothing to do with the guts of my app, and it’s surprisingly complicated, so I don’t really want to build it from scratch. Apple doesn’t help me with that, so I start looking on the web for software frameworks, plugins, Software Developer Kits (SDKs) — anything that will help me build my signup tool.
Hopefully, I’ll find one. And if I do, chances are it will include some sort of documentation or “Readme file” explaining how this piece of code is supposed to be used so that I can tailor it to my app. This Readme file should contain installation instructions as well as the API for the code. Basically, an API lays out the code’s inputs and outputs. It shows what me what I have to send the code and what it will spit back out. It shows how I bolt it onto my signup form. So the name is actually quite explanatory: Application Programming Interface. An API is essentially an instruction manual for a piece of software.
Now, let’s combine this with the idea that everything is an application: molecules, galaxies, dogs, people, emotional states, abstract concepts like chaos. If you do something to any these things, they’ll respond in some way. Like software, they have inputs and outputs. What we need to do is discover and document their APIs.
We aren’t dealing with software code here. Inputs and outputs can themselves be anything. But we can closely document these inputs and their outputs — take what we know about how we interface with something and record it in a standard way that it can be used over and over again. We can create a Readme file for everything.
We can start by doing this in small, relatively easy ways. How about APIs for our cities? New Zealand just open sourced aerial images of about 95 percent of its land. We could write APIs for what we know about building in those areas, from properties of the soil to seasonal weather patterns to zoning laws. All this knowledge exists but it hasn’t been organized and packaged for use by anyone who is interested. And we could go still further — much further.
For example, between the science community, the medical industry and the billions of human experiences, we could probably have a pretty extensive API mapped out of the human stomach — one that I’d love to access when I’m up at 3am with abdominal pains. Maybe my microbiome is out of whack and there’s something I have on-hand that I could ingest to make it better. Or what if we cracked the API for the signals between our eyes and our brain? We wouldn’t need to worry about looking like Glassholes to get access to always-on augmented reality. We could just get an implant. Yes, these APIs will be slightly different for everyone, but that brings me to the next thing we need.
A GitHub for Everything
We don’t just need a Readme for the Universe. We need a way of sharing this Readme and changing it as need be. In short, we need a system like GitHub, the popular online service that lets people share and collaborate on software code.
Let’s go back to the form validator I found earlier. Say I made some modifications to it that I think other programmers would find useful. If the validator is on GitHub, I can create a separate but related version — a fork — that people can find and contribute to, in the same way I first did with the original software.
This creates a tree of knowledge, with giant groups of people creating and merging branches, working on their small section and then giving it back to the whole.
GitHub not only enables this collaboration, but every change is logged into separate versions. If someone were so inclined, they could go back and replay the building of the validator, from the very first save all the way up to my changes and whoever changes it after me. This creates a tree of knowledge, with giant groups of people creating and merging branches, working on their small section and then giving it back to the whole.
We should be able to funnel all existing knowledge of how things work — not just software code — into a similar system. That way, if my brain-eye interface needs to be different, I (or my personal eye technician) can “fork” the API. In a way, this sort of thing is already starting to happen. People are using GitHub to share government laws, policy documents, Gregorian chants, and the list goes on. The ultimate goal should be to share everything.
Yes, this idea is similar to what you see on sites like Wikipedia, but the stuff that’s shared on Wikipedia doesn’t let you build much more than another piece of text. We don’t just need to know what things are. We need to know how they work in ways that let us operate on them.
The Open Source Epiphany
If you’ve never programmed, all this can sound a bit, well, abstract. But once you enter the coding world, getting a loose grasp on the fundamentals of programming, you instantly see the utility of open source software. “Oooohhh, I don’t have to build this all myself,” you say. “Thank God for the open source community.” Because so many smart people contribute to open source, it helps get the less knowledgeable up to speed quickly. Those acolytes then pay it forward with their own contributions once they’ve learned enough.
Today, more and more people are jumping on this train. More and more people are becoming programmers of some shape or form. It wasn’t so long ago that basic knowledge of HTML was considered specialized geek speak. But now, it’s a common requirement for almost any desk job. Gone are the days when kids made fun of their parents for not being able to set the clock on the VCR. Now they get mocked for mis-cropping their Facebook profile photos.
These changes are all part of the tech takeover of our lives that is trickling down to the masses. It’s like how the widespread use of cars brought a general mechanical understanding of engines to dads everywhere. And this general increase in aptitude is accelerating along with the technology itself.
Steps are being taken to make programming a skill that most kids get early in school along with general reading, writing, and math. In the not too distant future, people will need to program in some form for their daily lives. Imagine the world before the average person knew how to write a letter, or divide two numbers, compared to now. A similar leap is around the corner…”
Book by Vincent Mosco: “In the wake of revelations about National Security Agency activities—many of which occur “in the cloud”—this book offers both enlightenment and a critical view. Cloud computing and big data are arguably the most significant forces in information technology today. In clear prose, To the Cloud explores where the cloud originated, what it means, and how important it is for business, government, and citizens. It describes the intense competition among cloud companies like Amazon and Google, the spread of the cloud to government agencies like the controversial NSA, and the astounding growth of entire cloud cities in China. From advertising to trade shows, the cloud and big data are furiously marketed to the world, even as dark clouds loom over environmental, privacy, and employment issues that arise from the cloud. Is the cloud the long-promised information utility that will solve many of the world’s economic and social problems? Or is it just marketing hype? To the Cloud provides the first thorough analysis of the potential and the problems of a technology that may very well disrupt the world.”
