William Hughes in AVClub: “Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users’ news feeds—specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users. Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It’s less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated.
In order to sign up for Facebook, users must click a box saying they agree to the Facebook Data Use Policy, giving the company the right to access and use the information posted on the site. The policy lists a variety of potential uses for your data, most of them related to advertising, but there’s also a bit about “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” In the study, the authors point out that they stayed within the data policy’s liberal constraints by using machine analysis to pick out positive and negative posts, meaning no user data containing personal information was actually viewed by human researchers. And there was no need to ask study “participants” for consent, as they’d already given it by agreeing to Facebook’s terms of service in the first place.
Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer is listed as the study’s lead author. In an interview the company released a few years ago, Kramer is quoted as saying he joined Facebook because “Facebook data constitutes the largest field study in the history of the world.”
Twiplomacy: “World leaders vie for attention, connections and followers on Twitter, that’s the latest finding of Burson-Marsteller’s Twiplomacy study 2014, an annual global study looking at the use of Twitter by heads of state and government and ministers of foreign affairs.
While some heads of state and government continue to amass large followings, foreign ministers have established a virtual diplomatic network by following each other on the social media platform.
For many diplomats Twitter has becomes a powerful channel for digital diplomacy and 21st century statecraft and not all Twitter exchanges are diplomatic, real world differences are spilling over reflected on Twitter and sometimes end up in hashtag wars. “I am a firm believer in the power of technology and social media to communicate with people across the world,” India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote in his inaugural message on his new website. Within weeks of his election in May 2014, the @NarendraModi account has moved into the top four most followed Twitter accounts of world leaders with close to five million followers.
More than half of the world’s foreign ministers and their institutions are active on the social networking site. Twitter has become an indispensable diplomatic networking and communication tool. As Finnish Prime Minister @AlexStubb wrote in a tweet in March 2014: “Most people who criticize Twitter are often not on it. I love this place. Best source of info. Great way to stay tuned and communicate.”
As of 25 June 2014, the vast majority (83 percent) of the 193 UN member countries have a presence on Twitter. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of all heads of state and heads of government have personal accounts on the social network.
As of 24 June 2014, the vast majority (83 percent) of the 193 UN member countries have a presence on Twitter. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of all heads of state and heads of government have personal accounts on the social network.
Most Followed World Leaders
Since his election in late May 2014, India’s new Prime Minister @NarendraModi has skyrocketed into fourth place, surpassing the the @WhiteHouse on 25 June 2014 and dropping Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül (@cbabdullahgul) and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (@RT_Erdogan) into sixth and seventh place with more than 4 million followers each.
Modi still has a ways to go to best U.S. President @BarackObama, who tops the world-leader list with a colossal 43.7 million followers, with Pope Francis @Pontifex) with 14 million followers on his nine different language accounts and Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono @SBYudhoyono, who has more than five million followers and surpassed President Obama’s official administration account @WhiteHouse on 13 February 2014.
In Latin America Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the President of Argentina @CFKArgentina is slightly ahead of Colombia’s President @JuanManSantos with 2,894,864 and 2,885,752 followers respectively. Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto @EPN, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff @dilmabr and Venezuela’s @NicolasMaduro complete the Latin American top five, with more than two million followers each.
Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta @UKenyatta is Africa’s most followed president with 457,307 followers, ahead of Rwanda’s @PaulKagame (407,515 followers) and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma (@SAPresident) (325,876 followers).
Turkey’s @Ahmet_Davutoglu is the most followed foreign minister with 1,511,772 followers, ahead of India’s @SushmaSwaraj (1,274,704 followers) and the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates @ABZayed (1,201,364 followers)…”
Lorelei Kelly at the Huffington Post: “It was hard to miss the giant mechanical giraffe grazing on the White House lawn last week. For the first time ever, the President organized a Maker Faire–inviting entrepreneurs and inventors from across the USA to celebrate American ingenuity in the service of economic progress.
The maker movement is a California original. Think R2D2 serving margaritas to a jester with an LED news scroll. The #nationofmakers Twitter feed has dozens of examples of collaborative production, of making, sharing and learning.
But since this was the White House, I still had to ask myself, what would the maker movement be if the economy was not the starting point? What if it was about civics? What if makers decided to create a modern, hands-on democracy?
What is democracy anyway but a never ending remix of new prototypes? Last week’s White House Maker Faire heralded a new economic bonanza. This revolution’s poster child is 3-D printing– decentralized fabrication that is customized to meet local needs. On the government front, new design rules for democracy are already happening in communities, where civics and technology have generated a front line of maker cities.
But the distance between California’s tech capacity and DC does seem 3000 miles wide. The NSA’s over collection/surveillance problem and Healthcare.gov’s doomed rollout are part of the same system-wide capacity deficit. How do we close the gap between California’s revolution and our institutions?
In California, disruption is a business plan. In DC, it’s a national security threat.
In California, hackers are artists. In DC, they are often viewed as criminals.
In California, “cyber” is a dystopian science fiction word. In DC, cyber security is in a dozen oversight plans for Congress.
in California, individuals are encouraged to “fail forward.” In DC, risk-aversion is bipartisan.
Scaling big problems with local solutions is a maker specialty. Government policymaking needs this kind of help.
Here’s the issue our nation is facing: The inability of the non-military side of our public institutions to process complex problems. Today, this competence and especially the capacity to solve technical challenges often exist only in the private sector. If something is urgent and can’t be monetized, it becomes a national security problem. Which increasingly means that critical decision making that should be in the civilian remit instead migrates to the military. Look at our foreign policy. Good government is a counter terrorism strategy in Afghanistan. Decades of civilian inaction on climate change means that now Miami is referred to as a battle space in policy conversations.
This rhetoric reflects an understandable but unacceptable disconnect for any democracy.
To make matters more confusing, much of the technology in civics (like list building petitions) is suited for elections, not for governing. It is often antagonistic. The result? policy making looks like campaigning. We need some civic tinkering to generate governing technology that comes with relationships. Specifically, this means technology that includes many voices, but has identifiable channels for expertise that can sort complexity and that is not compromised by financial self-interest.
Today, sorting and filtering information is a huge challenge for participation systems around the world. Information now ranks up there with money and people as a lever of power. On the people front, the loud and often destructive individuals are showing up effectively. On the money front, our public institutions are at risk of becoming purely pay to play (wonks call this “transactional”).
Makers, ask yourselves, how can we turn big data into a political constituency for using real evidence–one that can compete with all the negative noise and money in the system? For starters, technologists out West must stop treating government like it’s a bad signal that can be automated out of existence. We are at a moment where our society requires an engineering mindset to develop modern, tech-savvy rules for democracy. We need civic makers….”
The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on the networked public and was originally published in 2014.
Global Overview
The proportion of global population who use the Internet in 2013: 38.8%, up 3 percentage points from 2012
Increase in average global broadband speeds from 2012 to 2013: 17%
Percent of internet users surveyed globally that access the internet at least once a day in 2012: 96
Hours spent online in 2012 each month across the globe: 35 billion
Country with the highest online population, as a percent of total population in 2012: United Kingdom (85%)
Country with the lowest online population, as a percent of total population in 2012: India (8%)
Trend with the highest growth rate in 2012: Location-based services (27%)
Years to reach 50 million users: telephone (75), radio (38), TV (13), internet (4)
Growth Rates in 2014
Rate at which the total number of Internet users is growing: less than 10% a year
Worldwide annual smartphone growth: 20%
Tablet growth: 52%
Mobile phone growth: 81%
Percentage of all mobile users who are now smartphone users: 30%
Amount of all web usage in 2013 accounted for by mobile: 14%
Amount of all web usage in 2014 accounted for by mobile: 25%
Percentage of money spent on mobile used for app purchases: 68%
Growth of BitCoin wallet between 2013 and 2014: 8 times increase
Number of listings on AirBnB in 2014: 550k, 83% growth year on year
How many buyers are on Alibaba in 2014: 231MM buyers, 44% growth year on year
Social Media
Number of Whatsapp messages on average sent per day: 50 billion
Number sent per day on Snapchat: 1.2 billion
How many restaurants are registered on GrubHub in 2014: 29,000
Amount the sale of digital songs fell in 2013: 6%
How much song streaming grew in 2013: 32%
Number of photos uploaded and shared every day on Flickr, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp combined in 2014: 1.8 billion
How many online adults in the U.S. use a social networking site of some kind: 73%
Those who use multiple social networking sites: 42%
Dominant social networking platform: Facebook, with 71% of online adults
Number of Facebook users in 2004, its founding year: 1 million
Number of monthly active users on Facebook in September 2013: 1.19 billion, an 18% increase year-over-year
How many Facebook users log in to the site daily: 63%
Instagram users who log into the service daily: 57%
Twitter users who are daily visitors: 46%
Number of photos uploaded to Facebook every minute: over 243,000, up 16% from 2012
How much of the global internet population is actively using Twitter every month: 21%
Number of tweets per minute: 350,000, up 250% from 2012
Fastest growing demographic on Twitter: 55-64 year age bracket, up 79% from 2012
Fastest growing demographic on Facebook: 45-54 year age bracket, up 46% from 2012
How many LinkedIn accounts are created every minute: 120, up 20% from 2012
The number of Google searches in 2013: 3.5 million, up 75% from 2012
Percent of internet users surveyed globally that use social media in 2012: 90
Percent of internet users surveyed globally that use social media daily: 60
Time spent social networking, the most popular online activity: 22%, followed by searches (21%), reading content (20%), and emails/communication (19%)
The average age at which a child acquires an online presence through their parents in 10 mostly Western countries: six months
Number of children in those countries who have a digital footprint by age 2: 81%
How many new American marriages between 2005-2012 began by meeting online, according to a nationally representative study: more than one-third
How many of the world’s 505 leaders are on Twitter: 3/4
Combined Twitter followers: of 505 world leaders: 106 million
Combined Twitter followers of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga: 122 million
How many times all Wikipedias are viewed per month: nearly 22 billion times
How many hits per second: more than 8,000
English Wikipedia’s share of total page views: 47%
Number of articles in the English Wikipedia in December 2013: over 4,395,320
Platform that reaches more U.S. adults between ages 18-34 than any cable network: YouTube
Number of unique users who visit YouTube each month: more than 1 billion
How many hours of video are watched on YouTube each month: over 6 billion, 50% more than 2012
Proportion of YouTube traffic that comes from outside the U.S.: 80%
Most common activity online, based on an analysis of over 10 million web users: social media
People on Twitter who recommend products in their tweets: 53%
People who trust online recommendations from people they know: 90%
Mobile and the Internet of Things
Number of global smartphone users in 2013: 1.5 billion
Number of global mobile phone users in 2013: over 5 billion
Percent of U.S. adults that have a cell phone in 2013: 91
Number of which are a smartphone: almost two thirds
Mobile Facebook users in March 2013: 751 million, 54% increase since 2012
Growth rate of global mobile traffic as a percentage of global internet traffic as of May 2013: 15%, up from .9% in 2009
How many smartphone owners ages 18–44 “keep their phone with them for all but two hours of their waking day”: 79%
Those who reach for their smartphone immediately upon waking up: 62%
Those who couldn’t recall a time their phone wasn’t within reach or in the same room: 1 in 4
Facebook users who access the service via a mobile device: 73.44%
Those who are “mobile only”: 189 million
Amount of YouTube’s global watch time that is on mobile devices: almost 40%
Number of objects connected globally in the “internet of things” in 2012: 8.7 billion
Number of connected objects so far in 2013: over 10 billion
Years from tablet introduction for tables to surpass desktop PC and notebook shipments: less than 3 (over 55 million global units shipped in 2013, vs. 45 million notebooks and 35 million desktop PCs)
Number of wearable devices estimated to have been shipped worldwide in 2011: 14 million
Projected number of wearable devices in 2016: between 39-171 million
How much of the wearable technology market is in the healthcare and medical sector in 2012: 35.1%
How many devices in the wearable tech market are fitness or activity trackers: 61%
The value of the global wearable technology market in 2012: $750 million
The forecasted value of the market in 2018: $5.8 billion
How many Americans are aware of wearable tech devices in 2013: 52%
Devices that have the highest level of awareness: wearable fitness trackers,
Level of awareness for wearable fitness trackers amongst American consumers: 1 in 3 consumers
Value of digital fitness category in 2013: $330 million
How many American consumers surveyed are aware of smart glasses: 29%
Smart watch awareness amongst those surveyed: 36%
Access
How much of the developed world has mobile broadband subscriptions in 2013: 3/4
How much of the developing world has broadband subscription in 2013: 1/5
Percent of U.S. adults that had a laptop in 2012: 57
How many American adults did not use the internet at home, at work, or via mobile device in 2013: one in five
Amount President Obama initiated spending in 2009 in an effort to expand access: $7 billion
Number of Americans potentially shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education, among other opportunities due to digital inequality: 60 million
American adults with a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 7 out of 10
Americans aged 18-29 vs. 65+ with a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 80% vs. 43
American adults with college education (or more) vs. adults with no high school diploma that have a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 89% vs. 37%
Percent of U.S. adults with college education (or more) that use the internet in 2011: 94
Those with no high school diploma that used the internet in 2011: 43
Percent of white American households that used the internet in 2013: 67
Black American households that used the internet in 2013: 57
States with lowest internet use rates in 2013: Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas
How many American households have only wireless telephones as of the second half of 2012: nearly two in five
States with the highest prevalence of wireless-only adults according to predictive modeling estimates: Idaho (52.3%), Mississippi (49.4%), Arkansas (49%)
Those with the lowest prevalence of wireless-only adults: New Jersey (19.4%), Connecticut (20.6%), Delaware (23.3%) and New York (23.5%)
Hachman, Mark. “Facebook Used by Half of the World’s Internet Users, Save Asia,” PC Mag, February 2012.
Hanun, Marya. “Klout,” Foreign Policy, August 9, 2013
Howle, Cynthia, Glenny Brock, and Alan Blinder. “Most of U.S. is Wired but Millions Aren’t Plugged In,” The New York Times, August 18, 2013.
“Key ICT indicators for developed and developing countries and the world (totals and penetration rates)”, International Telecommunications Unions (ITU), Geneva, February 27, 2013.
“Global Internet User Survey Sumary Reports,” The Internet Society, 2012, Accessed on August 13, 2013.
Mike Butcher at TechnologyCrunch: “The ability to collaborate on the draft of a document is actually fiendishly tedious online. Many people might be used to Microsoft Word ‘Track Changes’ (ugh) despite the fact it looks awful and takes some getting used to. Nor does Google Docs really create a collaboration experience that mere mortals can get into. Step in Poetica, a brand new startup co-founded by Blaine Cook, formerly Twitter’s founding lead engineer.
Cook has now raised an angel round of funding for the London-based company which is hoping to change how teams create, share and edit work on the web, across any devices and mediums.
Poetica, which opens its doors to new signups today, is a browser-based editor and Chrome extension that portrays a more traditional view of text collaboration – in the same way you might see someone scribble on a piece of paper….
Cook says the goal is to “bring rich collaboration tools based on cutting-edge technology and design to everyone” who wants to communicate online. In other words, they are going for a fairly big play here. And he reckons he can do it from London, over the Valley, where he worked at Twitter: “London has an incredible community of brilliant software engineers and designers, and a growing and supportive investor base.”
Gavin Newsom and Ken Goldberg at the SFGate: “Although the results of last week’s primary election are still being certified, we already know that voter turnout was among the lowest in California’s history. Pundits will rant about the “cynical electorate” and wag a finger at disengaged voters shirking their democratic duties, but we see the low turnout as a symptom of broader forces that affect how people and government interact.
The methods used to find out what citizens think and believe are limited to elections, opinion polls, surveys and focus groups. These methods may produce valuable information, but they are costly, infrequent and often conducted at the convenience of government or special interests.
We believe that new technology has the potential to increase public engagement by tapping the collective intelligence of Californians every day, not just on election day.
While most politicians already use e-mail and social media, these channels are easily dominated by extreme views and tend to regurgitate material from mass media outlets.
We’re exploring an alternative.
The California Report Card is a mobile-friendly web-based platform that streamlines and organizes public input for the benefit of policymakers and elected officials. The report card allows participants to assign letter grades to key issues and to suggest new ideas for consideration; public officials then can use that information to inform their decisions.
In an experimental version of the report card released earlier this year, residents from all 58 counties assigned more than 20,000 grades to the state of California and also suggested issues they feel deserve priority at the state level. As one participant noted: “This platform allows us to have our voices heard. The ability to review and grade what others suggest is important. It enables elected officials to hear directly how Californians feel.”
Initial data confirm that Californians approve of our state’s rollout of Obamacare, but are very concerned about the future of our schools and universities.
There was also a surprise. California Report Card suggestions for top state priorities revealed consistently strong interest and support for more attention to disaster preparedness. Issues related to this topic were graded as highly important by a broad cross section of participants across the state. In response, we’re testing new versions of the report card that can focus on topics related to wildfires and earthquakes.
The report card is part of an ongoing collaboration between the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative at UC Berkeley and the Office of the Lieutenant Governor to explore how technology can improve public communication and bring the government closer to the people. Our hunch is that engineering concepts can be adapted for public policy to rapidly identify real insights from constituents and resist gaming by special interests.
You don’t have to wait for the next election to have your voice heard by officials in Sacramento. The California Report Card is now accessible from cell phones, desktop and tablet computers. We encourage you to contribute your own ideas to amplify California’s collective intelligence. It’s easy, just click “participate” on this website: CaliforniaReportCard.org”
Lyndsey Gilpin at Techcrunch: “When we think of the sharing economy, what often comes to mind are sites like Airbnb, Lyft, or Feastly — the platforms that allow us to meet people for a specific reason, whether that’s a place to stay, a ride, or a meal.
But what about sharing something much simpler than that, like answers to our questions about the world around us? Sharing knowledge with strangers can offer us insight into a place we are curious about or trying to navigate, and in a more personal, efficient way than using traditional web searches.
“Sharing an answer or response to question, that is true sharing. There’s no financial or monetary exchange based on that. It’s the true meaning of [the word],” said Maxime Leroy, co-founder and CEO of a new app called Enquire.
Enquire is a new question-and-answer app, but it is unlike others in the space. You don’t have to log in via Facebook or Twitter, use SMS messaging like on Quest, or upload an image like you do on Jelly. None of these apps have taken off yet, which could be good or bad for Enquire just entering the space.
With Enquire, simply log in with a username and password and it will unlock the neighborhood you are in (the app only works in San Francisco, New York, and Paris right now). There are lists of answers to other questions, or you can post your own. If 200 people in a city sign up, the app will become available to them, which is an effort to make sure there is a strong community to gather answers from.
Leroy, who recently made a documentary about the sharing economy, realized there was “one tool missing for local communities” in the space, and decided to create this app.
“We want to build a more local-based network, and empower and increase trust without having people share all their identity,” he said.
Different social channels look at search in different ways, but the trend is definitely moving to more social searching or location-based searching, according to according to Altimeter social media analyst Rebecca Lieb. Arguably, she said, Yelp, Groupon, and even Google Maps are vertical search engines. If you want to find a nearby restaurant, pharmacy, or deal, you look to these platforms.
However, she credits Aardvark as one of the first in the space, which was a social search engine founded in 2007 that used instant messaging and email to get answers from your existing contacts. Google bought the company in 2010. It shows the idea of crowdsourcing answers isn’t new, but the engines have become “appified,” she said.
“Now it’s geo-local specific,” she said. “We’re asking a lot more of those geo-local questions because of location-based immediacy [that we want].”
Think Seamless, with which you find the food nearby that most satisfies your appetite. Even Tinder and Grindr are social search engines, Lieb said. You want to meet up with the people that are closest to you, geographically….
His challenge is to offer rewards to incite people to sign up for the app. Eventually, Leroy would like to strengthen the networks and scale Enquire to cities and neighborhoods all over the world. Once that’s in place, people can start creating their own neighborhoods — around a school or workplace, where they hang out regularly — instead of using the existing constraints.
“I may be an expert in one area, and a newbie in another. I want to emphasize the activity and content from users to give them credit to other users and build that trust,” he said.
Usually, our first instinct is to open Yelp to find the best sushi restaurant or Google to search the closest concert venue, and it will probably stay that way for some time. But the idea that the opinions and insights of other human beings, even of strangers, is becoming much more valuable because of the internet is not far-fetched.
Admit it: haven’t you had a fleeting thought of starting a Kickstarter campaign for an idea? Looked for a cheaper place to stay on Airbnb than that hotel you normally book in New York? Or considered financing someone’s business idea across the world using Kiva? If so, then you’ve engaged in social search.
Suddenly, crowdsourcing answers for the things that pique your interest on your morning walk may not seem so strange after all.”
Adrienne Lafrance in the Atlantic: “People tend to talk about the Internet the way they talk about democracy—optimistically, and in terms that describe how it ought to be rather than how it actually is.
This idealism is what buoys much of the network neutrality debate, and yet many of what are considered to be the core issues at stake—like payment for tiered access, for instance—have already been decided. For years, Internet advocates have been asking what regulatory measures might help save the open, innovation-friendly Internet.
But increasingly, another question comes up: What if there were a technical solution instead of a regulatory one? What if the core architecture of how people connect could make an end run on the centralization of services that has come to define the modern net?
It’s a question that reflects some of the Internet’s deepest cultural values, and the idea that this network—this place where you are right now—should distribute power to people. In the post-NSA, post-Internet-access-oligopoly world, more and more people are thinking this way, and many of them are actually doing something about it.
Among them, there is a technology that’s become a kind of shorthand code for a whole set of beliefs about the future of the Internet: “mesh networking.” These words have become a way to say that you believe in a different, freer Internet.
* * *
Mesh networks promise the things we already expect but don’t always get from the Internet: they’re fast, reliable, and relatively inexpensive. But before we get into the particulars of what this alternate Internet might look like, a quick refresher on how the one we have works:
Your computer is connected to an Internet service provider like Comcast, which sends packets of your data (the binary stuff of emails, tweets, Facebook status updates, web addresses, etc.) back and forth across the network. The packets that move across the Internet encounter a series of checkpoints including routers and servers along the paths your data travels. You can’t control these paths or these checkpoints, so your data is subject to all kinds of security threats like hackers and snooping NSA agents.
So the idea behind mesh networking is to skip those checkpoints and cut out the middleman service provider whenever possible. This can work when each device in a network connects to the other devices, rather than each device connecting to the ISP.
It helps to visualize it. The image on the left shows a network built around a centralized hub, like the Internet as we know it. The image on the right is what a mesh network looks like:
Think of it this way: With a mesh network, each device is like a mini cell phone tower. So instead of having multiple devices rely on a single, centralized hub; multiple devices rely on one another. And with information ricocheting across the network more unpredictably between those devices, the network as a whole is harder to take out.
“You end up with a network that is much harder to disrupt,” said Stanislav Shalunov, co-founder of Open Garden, a startup that develops peer-to-peer and mesh networking apps. “There is no single point where you can unplug and expect that there will be a large impact.”
Plus, a mesh network forms itself based on an algorithm—which again reduces opportunities for disruption. “There is no human intervention involved, even from the users of the devices and certainly not from any administrative entity that needs to arrange the topology of this network or how people are connected or how the network is used,” Shalunov told me. “It is entirely up to the people participating and the software that runs this network to make everything work.”
Your regular old smartphone already has the power to connect to other smartphones without being hooked up to the Internet through a traditional carrier. All you need is the radio frequency of your phone’s bluetooth connection, and you can send and receive data over a mesh network from anyone in relatively close proximity—say, a person in the same neighborhood or office building. (Mesh networks can also be built around cheap wireless routers or roof antennae.)…
For now, there’s no nationwide device-to-device mesh network. So if you want to communicate with someone across the country, someone—but not everyone—in the mesh network will need to be connected to the Internet through a traditional provider. That’s true locally, too, if you want the mesh network hooked up to the rest of the Internet. Mesh networks are more reliable in a crowd because devices can rely on one another—rather than each device trying to ping the same overburdened cell phone tower. “The important thing is we can use any of the Internet connections that anybody in that mesh network is connected to,” Shalunov said. “So maybe you are connected to AT&T and I am connected to Comcast and my phone is on Verizon and there is a Sprint subscriber nearby. If any of these will let the traffic through, all of it will get through.”
* * *
Mesh networks have been around, at least theoretically, for at least as long as the Internet has existed…”
Steve Kelman at FCW: “Innovation, particularly in government, can be very hard. Lots of signoffs, lots of naysayers. For many, it’s probably not worth the hassle.
Yet all sorts of examples are surfacing about ways civil servants, non-profits, startups and researchers have thought to use social media — or data mining of government information — to get information that can either help citizens directly or help agencies serve citizens. I want to call attention to examples that I’ve seen just in the past few weeks — partly to recognize the creative people who have come up with these ideas, but partly to make a point about the relationship between these ideas and the general issue of innovation in government. I think that these social media and data-driven experiments are often a much simpler way for civil servants to innovate than many of the changes we typically think of under the heading “innovation in government.” They open the possibility to make innovation in government an activity for the civil service masses.
One example that was reported in The New York Times was about a pilot project at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to do rapid keyword searches with phrases such as “vomit” and “diarrhea” associated with 294,000 Yelp restaurant reviews in New York City. The city is using a software program developed at Columbia University. They have now expended the monitoring to occur daily, to get quick information on possible problems at specific restaurants or with specific kinds of food.
A second example, reported in BloombergBusinessWeek, involved — perhaps not surprisingly, given the publication — an Israeli startup called Treato that is applying a similar idea to ferretting out adverse drug reactions before they come in through FDA studies and other systems. The founders are cooperating with researchers at Harvard Medical School and FDA officials, among others. Their software looks through Twitter and Facebook, along with a large number of patient forum sites, to cull out from all the reports of illnesses the incidents that may well reflect an unusual presence of adverse drug reactions.
These examples are fascinating in themselves. But one thing that caught my eye about both is that each seems high on the creativity dimension and low on the need-to-overcome-bureaucracy dimension. Both ideas reflect new and improved ways to do what these organizations do anyway, which is gather information to help inform regulatory and health decisions by government. Neither requires any upheaval in an agency’s existing culture, or steps on somebody’s turf in any serious way. Introducing the changes doesn’t require major changes in an agency’s internal procedures. Compared to many innovations in government, these are easy ones to make happen. (They do all need some funds, however.)
What I hope is that the information woven into social media will unlock a new era of innovation inside government. The limits of innovation are much less determined by difficult-to-change bureaucratic processes and can be much more responsive to an individual civil servant’s creativity…”
