From “Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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.”

Big Data and Chicago's Traffic-cam Scandal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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….”
 

Follow the money: A study of cashtags on Twitter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Martin Hentschel and Omar Alonso at FirstMonday: “The popularity of Twitter goes beyond trending topics, world events, memes, and popular hashtags. Recently a new way of sharing financial information is taking place in social media under the name of cashtags, stock ticker symbols that are prefixed with a dollar sign. In this paper we present an exploratory analysis of cashtags on Twitter. Specifically, we investigate how widespread cashtags are, what stock symbols are tweeted more often, and which users tweet about cashtags in general. We analyze relationships among cashtags and study hashtags in the context of cashtags. Finally, we compare tweet performance to stock market performance. We conclude that cashtags, in particular in combination with other cashtags or hashtags, can be very useful for analyzing financial information and provide new insights into stocks and companies.”

The Rise of Virtual Advocacy Groups

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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….”

Behavior Analysis in Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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.”

Twitter Analytics Now Available To Everyone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Information Week: “All Twitter users can access a detailed report on their followers and individual tweets, including impressions, clicks, and engagement. Here’s what you need to know.
Twitter just made it easier for you to gauge how well your tweets resonate with your followers.
Ian Chan, front-end engineer at Twitter, announced yesterday in a tweet that all users now have access to its analytics platform, which launched in July but was open only to advertisers and verified accounts. The analytics provide details on your tweets’ engagement, clicks, retweets, favorites, replies, and more.
To access the analytics dashboard, log into analytics.twitter.com with your username and password. Analytics are provided to users who have had a Twitter account for at least 14 days, the company said….
Twitter’s analytics dashboard will probably appeal mostly to power users looking to reach more people and improve engagement. The social network does place restrictions on who can access it, however. In addition to the 14-day account requirement, users must primarily tweet in English, French, Japanese, or Spanish, the company said. Your account must also be public.”

In democracy and disaster, emerging world embraces 'open data'

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy Wagstaff’ at Reuters: “Open data’ – the trove of data-sets made publicly available by governments, organizations and businesses – isn’t normally linked to high-wire politics, but just may have saved last month’s Indonesian presidential elections from chaos.
Data is considered open when it’s released for anyone to use and in a format that’s easy for computers to read. The uses are largely commercial, such as the GPS data from U.S.-owned satellites, but data can range from budget numbers and climate and health statistics to bus and rail timetables.
It’s a revolution that’s swept the developed world in recent years as governments and agencies like the World Bank have freed up hundreds of thousands of data-sets for use by anyone who sees a use for them. Data.gov, a U.S. site, lists more than 100,000 data-sets, from food calories to magnetic fields in space.
Consultants McKinsey reckon open data could add up to $3 trillion worth of economic activity a year – from performance ratings that help parents find the best schools to governments saving money by releasing budget data and asking citizens to come up with cost-cutting ideas. All the apps, services and equipment that tap the GPS satellites, for example, generate $96 billion of economic activity each year in the United States alone, according to a 2011 study.
But so far open data has had a limited impact in the developing world, where officials are wary of giving away too much information, and where there’s the issue of just how useful it might be: for most people in emerging countries, property prices and bus schedules aren’t top priorities.
But last month’s election in Indonesia – a contentious face-off between a disgraced general and a furniture-exporter turned reformist – highlighted how powerful open data can be in tandem with a handful of tech-smart programmers, social media savvy and crowdsourcing.
“Open data may well have saved this election,” said Paul Rowland, a Jakarta-based consultant on democracy and governance…”
 

The Changing Nature of Privacy Practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cameron F. Kerry at TechTank (Brookings): “…Numerous commenters have observed that Facebook, among many marketers (including political campaigns like U.S. President Barack Obama’s), regularly conducts A-B tests and other research to measure how consumers respond to different products, messages and messengers. So what makes the Facebook-Cornell study different from what goes on all the time in an increasingly data-driven world? After all, the ability to conduct such testing continuously on a large scale is considered one of the special features of big data.
The answer calls for broader judgments than parsing the language of privacy policies or managing compliance with privacy laws and regulations. Existing legal tools such as notice-and-choice and use limitations are simply too narrow to address the array of issues presented and inform the judgment needed. Deciding whether Facebook ought to participate in research like its newsfeed study is not really about what the company can do but what it should do.
As Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky, CIPP/US, point out in an article on Facebook’s research study, “Increasingly, corporate officers find themselves struggling to decipher subtle social norms and make ethical choices that are more befitting of philosophers than business managers or lawyers.” They add, “Going forward, companies will need to create new processes, deploying a toolbox of innovative solutions to engender trust and mitigate normative friction.” Tene and Polonetsky themselves have proposed a number of such tools. In recent comments on Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights legislation filed with the Commerce Department, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) endorsed the use of internal review boards along the lines of those used in academia for human-subject research. The FPF also submitted an initial framework for benefit-risk analysis in the big data context “to understand whether assuming the risk is ethical, fair, legitimate and cost-effective.” Increasingly, companies and other institutions are bringing to bear more holistic review of privacy issues. Conferences and panels on big data research ethics are proliferating.
The expanding variety and complexity of data uses also call for a broader public policy approach. The Obama administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights (of which I was an architect) adapted existing Fair Information Practice Principles to a principles-based approach that is intended not as a formalistic checklist but as a set of principles that work holistically in ways that are “flexible” and “dynamic.” In turn, much of the commentary submitted to the Commerce Department on the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights addressed the question of the relationship between these principles and a “responsible use framework” as discussed in the White House Big Data Report….”

CrowdCriMa – a complete Next Generation Crowsourced Crisis Management Platform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pitch at ClimateCoLab: “The proposed #CrowdCriMa would be a disaster management platform based on an innovative, interactive and accountable Digital Governance Framework– in which common people, crisis response or disaster response workers, health workers, decision makers would participate actively. This application would be available for mobile phones and other smart devices.
Crowdsourcing Unheard Voices
The main function would be to help collecting voice messages of disaster victims in the forms of phone call, recorded voice, SMS, E-mail and Fax to seek urgent help from the authority and spread those voices via online media, social media, SMS and etc to inform the world about the situation. As still in developing countries, Fax communication is more powerful than SMS or email, we have also included FAX as one of the reporting tools.
People will be able to record their observations, potential crisis, seek helps and appeals for funds for disaster response works, different environment related activities (e.g. project for pollution free environment and etc). To have all functions in the #CrowdCriMa platform, an IVR system, FrontlineSMS-type software will be developed / integrated in the proposed platform.
A cloud-based information management system would be used to sustain the flow of information. This would help not to lose any information if communications infrastructures are not functioning properly during and after the disaster.
Crowdfunding:
Another function of this #CrowdCriMa platform would be the crowdfunding function. When individual donor logs in, they find the list of issues / crisis where fund is needed. An innovative and sustainable approach would be taken to meet the financial need in crisis / disaster and post-crisis financial empowerment work for victims.
Some services are available differently but innovative parts of this proposal is several services to deal disaster would be in platform so people do not need to use different platforms for disaster management work. ..”