New book by W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg: “The Logic of Connective Action explains the rise of a personalized digitally networked politics in which diverse individuals address the common problems of our times such as economic fairness and climate change. Rich case studies from the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany illustrate a theoretical framework for understanding how large-scale connective action is coordinated using inclusive discourses such as “We Are the 99%” that travel easily through social media. In many of these mobilizations, communication operates as an organizational process that may replace or supplement familiar forms of collective action based on organizational resource mobilization, leadership, and collective action framing. In some cases, connective action emerges from crowds that shun leaders, as when Occupy protesters created media networks to channel resources and create loose ties among dispersed physical groups. In other cases, conventional political organizations deploy personalized communication logics to enable large-scale engagement with a variety of political causes. The Logic of Connective Action shows how power is organized in communication-based networks, and what political outcomes may result.”
How Much Transparency Do We Really Want?
William Galston in the Wall Street Journal: “Transparency is very nearly the opposite of privacy. In the current controversy, it is a demand that the government make public matters it conducts in private and wants to keep private.
The argument for disclosure goes like this: If the government is acting in the name of the people, the people need to know what their government is doing. How else can they judge these activities? Democratic government means accountability to the public, and accountability requires disclosure. History testifies to the link between secrecy and the abuse of public power. Without disclosure, the people will find it difficult to restrain government’s excesses—most importantly, secret activities that could endanger our liberties.
Government transparency has a distinguished history. In 1795, Immanuel Kant propounded what is often called the principle of publicity: Roughly, if you cannot reveal the principle that guides your policy without undermining that policy, then the policy itself is fatally flawed from a moral point of view.
Little more than a century later, in his famous “Fourteen Points” speech about U.S. war aims and the principles that would guide the peace, President Woodrow Wilson called for “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”…
Yet the relation between collective security and individual liberty is not zero-sum. Because another 9/11-scale terrorist event might well lead to even more intrusive antiterrorism measures, reducing the likelihood of such an event could end up preventing serious infringements on liberty. Up to a point, liberty and security can be mutually reinforcing. But at what point do they become opposed?
This is not a judgment that can be left to experts in the executive branch. Ultimately, the people, acting through their elected representatives, must decide—and it is hard to see how they can do so unless all representatives, not just a select few, have the information they need to participate in such a decision. As we learned in the 1970s, however, public deliberation on intelligence matters is anything but cost-free.”
A Modern Approach to Open Data
Eric Mill at the Sunlight Foundation blog: “Last year, a group of us who work daily with open government data — Josh Tauberer of GovTrack.us, Derek Willis at The New York Times, and myself — decided to stop each building the same basic tools over and over, and start building a foundation we could share.
We set up a small home at github.com/unitedstates, and kicked it off with a couple of projects to gather data on the people and work of Congress. Using a mix of automation and curation, they gather basic information from all over the government — THOMAS.gov, the House and Senate, the Congressional Bioguide, GPO’s FDSys, and others — that everyone needs to report, analyze, or build nearly anything to do with Congress.
Once we centralized this work and started maintaining it publicly, we began getting contributions nearly immediately. People educated us on identifiers, fixed typos, and gathered new data. Chris Wilson built an impressive interactive visualization of the Senate’s budget amendments by extending our collector to find and link the text of amendments.
This is an unusual, and occasionally chaotic, model for an open data project. github.com/unitedstates is a neutral space; GitHub’s permissions system allows many of us to share the keys, so no one person or institution controls it. What this means is that while we all benefit from each other’s work, no one is dependent or “downstream” from anyone else. It’s a shared commons in the public domain.
There are a few principles that have helped make the unitedstates project something that’s worth our time:…”
Is Connectivity A Human Right?
“Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook): For almost ten years, Facebook has been on a mission to make the world more open and connected. Today we connect more than 1.15 billion people each month, but as we started thinking about connecting the next 5 billion, we realized something important: the vast majority of people in the world don’t have access to the internet.
Today, only 2.7 billion people are online — a little more than one third of the world. That is growing by less than 9% each year, but that’s slow considering how early we are in the internet’s development. Even though projections show most people will get smartphones in the next decade, most people still won’t have data access because the cost of data remains much more expensive than the price of a smartphone.
Below, I’ll share a rough proposal for how we can connect the next 5 billion people, and a rough plan to work together as an industry to get there. We’ll discuss how we can make internet access more affordable by making it more efficient to deliver data, how we can use less data by improving the efficiency of the apps we build and how we can help businesses drive internet access by developing a new model to get people online.
I call this a “rough plan” because, like many long term technology projects, we expect the details to evolve. It may be possible to achieve more than we lay out here, but it may also be more challenging than we predict. The specific technical work will evolve as people contribute better ideas, and we welcome all feedback on how to improve this.
Connecting the world is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. This is just one small step toward achieving that goal. I’m excited to work together to make this a reality.
For the full version, click here.“
White House Expands Guidance on Promoting Open Data
NextGov: “White House officials have announced expanded technical guidance to help agencies make more data accessible to the public in machine-readable formats.
Following up on President Obama’s May executive order linking the pursuit of open data to economic growth, innovation and government efficiency, two budget and science office spokesmen on Friday published a blog post highlighting new instructions and answers to frequently asked questions.
Nick Sinai, deputy chief technology officer at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Dominic Sale, supervisory policy analyst at the Office of Management and Budget, noted that the policy now in place means that all “newly generated government data will be required to be made available in open, machine-readable formats, greatly enhancing their accessibility and usefulness, while ensuring privacy and security.”
Do you want to live in a smart city?
Jane Wakefield from BBC News: “In the future everything in a city, from the electricity grid, to the sewer pipes to roads, buildings and cars will be connected to the network. Buildings will turn off the lights for you, self-driving cars will find you that sought-after parking space, even the rubbish bins will be smart. But how do we get to this smarter future. Who will be monitoring and controlling the sensors that will increasingly be on every building, lamp-post and pipe in the city?…
There is another chapter in the smart city story – and this one is being written by citizens, who are using apps, DIY sensors, smartphones and the web to solve the city problems that matter to them.
Don’t Flush Me is a neat little DIY sensor and app which is single-handedly helping to solve one of New York’s biggest water issues.
Every time there is heavy rain in the city, raw sewage is pumped into the harbour, at a rate of 27 billion gallons each year.
Using an Arduino processor, a sensor which measures water levels in the sewer overflows and a smart phone app, Don’t Flush Me lets people know when it is ‘safe to flush’.
Meanwhile Egg, a community-led sensor network, is alerting people to an often hidden problem in our cities.
Researchers estimate that two million people die each year as a result of air pollution and as cities get more over-crowded, the problem is likely to get worse.
Egg is compiling data about air quality by selling cheap sensor which people put outside their homes where they collect readings of green gases, nitrogen oxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO)….
The reality is that most smart city projects are currently pretty small scale – creating tech hubs or green areas of the city, experimenting with smart electricity grids or introducing electric buses or bike-sharing schemes.”
Collaboration In Biology's Century
Todd Sherer, Chief Executive Officer of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, in Forbes: “he problem is, we all still work in a system that feeds on secrecy and competition. It’s hard enough work just to dream up win/win collaborative structures; getting them off the ground can feel like pushing a boulder up a hill. Yet there is no doubt that the realities of today’s research environment — everything from the accumulation of big data to the ever-shrinking availability of funds — demand new models for collaboration. Call it “collaboration 2.0.”…I share a few recent examples in the hope of increasing the reach of these initiatives, inspiring others like them, and encouraging frank commentary on how they’re working.
Open-Access Data
The successes of collaborations in the traditional sense, coupled with advanced techniques such as genomic sequencing, have yielded masses of data. Consortia of clinical sites around the world are working together to collect and characterize data and biospecimens through standardized methods, leading to ever-larger pools — more like Great Lakes — of data. Study investigators draw their own conclusions, but there is so much more to discover than any individual lab has the bandwidth for….
Crowdsourcing
A great way to grow engagement with resources you’re willing to share? Ask for it. Collaboration 2.0 casts a wide net. We dipped our toe in the crowdsourcing waters earlier this year with our Parkinson’s Data Challenge, which asked anyone interested to download a set of data that had been collected from PD patients and controls using smart phones. …
Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration 2.0
The more we uncover about the interconnectedness and complexity of the human system, the more proof we are gathering that findings and treatments for one disease may provide invaluable insights for others. We’ve seen some really intriguing crosstalk between the Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease research communities recently…
The results should be: More ideas. More discovery. Better health.”
A collaborative way to get to the heart of 3D printing problems
PSFK: “Because most of us only see the finished product when it comes to 3D printing projects – it’s easy to forget that things can, and do, go wrong when it comes to this miracle technology.
3D printing is constantly evolving, reaching exciting new heights, and touching every industry you can think of – but all this progress has left a trail of mangled plastic, and a devastated machines in it’s wake.
The Art of 3D Print Failure is a Flickr group that aims to document this failure, because after all, mistakes are how we learn, and how we make sure the same thing doesn’t happen the next time around. It can also prevent mistakes from happening to those who are new to 3D printing, before they even make them!”
On our best behaviour
Paper by Hector J. Levesque: “The science of AI is concerned with the study of intelligent forms of behaviour in computational terms. But what does it tell us when a good semblance of a behaviour can be achieved using cheap tricks that seem to have little to do with what we intuitively imagine intelligence to be? Are these intuitions wrong, and is intelligence really just a bag of tricks? Or are the philosophers right, and is a behavioural understanding of intelligence simply too weak? I think both of these are wrong. I suggest in the context of question-answering that what matters when it comes to the science of AI is not a good semblance of intelligent behaviour at all, but the behaviour itself, what it depends on, and how it can be achieved. I go on to discuss two major hurdles that I believe will need to be cleared.”
Crowd-Sourcing the Nation: Now a National Effort
Release from the U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey: “The mapping crowd-sourcing program, known as The National Map Corps (TNMCorps), encourages citizens to collect structures data by adding new features, removing obsolete points, and correcting existing data for The National Map database. Structures being mapped in the project include schools, hospitals, post offices, police stations and other important public buildings.
Since the start of the project in 2012, more than 780 volunteers have made in excess of 13,000 contributions. In addition to basic editing, a second volunteer peer review process greatly enhances the quality of data provided back to The National Map. A few months ago, volunteers in 35 states were actively involved. This final release of states opens up the entire country for volunteer structures enhancement.
To show appreciation of our volunteer’s efforts, The National Map Corps has instituted a recognition program that awards “virtual” badges to volunteers. The badges consist of a series of antique surveying instruments ranging from the Order of the Surveyor’s Chain (25 – 50 points) to the Theodolite Assemblage (2000+ points). Additionally, volunteers are publically acclaimed (with permission) via Twitter, Facebook and Google+….
Tools on TNMCorps website explain how a volunteer can edit any area, regardless of their familiarity with the selected structures, and becoming a volunteer for TNMCorps is easy; go to The National Map Corps website to learn more and to sign up as a volunteer. If you have access to the Internet and are willing to dedicate some time to editing map data, we hope you will consider participating!”