Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Jon Gertner at the New York Times: “In early 2021, a Wikipedia editor peered into the future and saw what looked like a funnel cloud on the horizon: the rise of GPT-3, a precursor to the new chatbots from OpenAI. When this editor — a prolific Wikipedian who goes by the handle Barkeep49 on the site — gave the new technology a try, he could see that it was untrustworthy. The bot would readily mix fictional elements (a false name, a false academic citation) into otherwise factual and coherent answers. But he had no doubts about its potential. “I think A.I.’s day of writing a high-quality encyclopedia is coming sooner rather than later,” he wrote in “Death of Wikipedia,” an essay that he posted under his handle on Wikipedia itself. He speculated that a computerized model could, in time, displace his beloved website and its human editors, just as Wikipedia had supplanted the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which in 2012 announced it was discontinuing its print publication.

Recently, when I asked this editor — he asked me to withhold his name because Wikipedia editors can be the targets of abuse — if he still worried about his encyclopedia’s fate, he told me that the newer versions made him more convinced that ChatGPT was a threat. “It wouldn’t surprise me if things are fine for the next three years,” he said of Wikipedia, “and then, all of a sudden, in Year 4 or 5, things drop off a cliff.”..(More)”.

The wisdom of crowds for improved disaster resilience: a near-real-time analysis of crowdsourced social media data on the 2021 flood in Germany

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mahsa Moghadas, Alexander Fekete, Abbas Rajabifard & Theo Kötter: “Transformative disaster resilience in times of climate change underscores the importance of reflexive governance, facilitation of socio-technical advancement, co-creation of knowledge, and innovative and bottom-up approaches. However, implementing these capacity-building processes by relying on census-based datasets and nomothetic (or top-down) approaches remains challenging for many jurisdictions. Web 2.0 knowledge sharing via online social networks, whereas, provides a unique opportunity and valuable data sources to complement existing approaches, understand dynamics within large communities of individuals, and incorporate collective intelligence into disaster resilience studies. Using Twitter data (passive crowdsourcing) and an online survey, this study draws on the wisdom of crowds and public judgment in near-real-time disaster phases when the flood disaster hit Germany in July 2021. Latent Dirichlet Allocation, an unsupervised machine learning technique for Topic Modeling, was applied to the corpora of two data sources to identify topics associated with different disaster phases. In addition to semantic (textual) analysis, spatiotemporal patterns of online disaster communication were analyzed to determine the contribution patterns associated with the affected areas. Finally, the extracted topics discussed online were compiled into five themes related to disaster resilience capacities (preventive, anticipative, absorptive, adaptive, and transformative). The near-real-time collective sensing approach reflected optimized diversity and a spectrum of people’s experiences and knowledge regarding flooding disasters and highlighted communities’ sociocultural characteristics. This bottom-up approach could be an innovative alternative to traditional participatory techniques of organizing meetings and workshops for situational analysis and timely unfolding of such events at a fraction of the cost to inform disaster resilience initiatives…(More)”.

How one group of ‘fellas’ is winning the meme war in support of Ukraine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Suzanne Smalley: “The North Atlantic Fella Organization, or NAFO, has arrived.

Ukraine’s Defense Ministry celebrated the group on Twitter for waging a “fierce fight” against Kremlin trolls. And Rep. Adam Kinzinger, D-Ill., tweeted that he was “self-declaring as a proud member of #NAFO” and “the #fellas shall prevail.”

The brainchild of former Marine Matt Moores, NAFO launched in May and quickly blew up on Twitter. It’s become something of a movement, drawing support in military and cybersecurity circles who circulate its meme backing Ukraine in its war against Russia.

“The power of what we’re doing is that instead of trying to come in and point-by-point refute, and argue about what’s true and what isn’t, it’s coming and saying, ‘Hey, that’s dumb,’” Moores said during a panel on Wednesday at the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington. “And the moment somebody’s replying to a cartoon dog online, you’ve lost if you work for the government of Russia.”

Memes have figured heavily in the information war following the Russian invasion. The Ukrainian government has proven eager to highlight memes on agency websites and officials have been known to personally thank online communities that spread anti-Russian memes. The NAFO meme shared by the defense ministry in August showed a Shiba Inu dog in a military uniform appearing to celebrate a missile launch.

The Shiba Inu has long been a motif in internet culture. According to Vice’s Motherboard, the use of Shiba Inu to represent a “fella” waging online war against the Russians dates to at least May when an artist started rewarding fellas who donated money to the Georgian Legion by creating customized fella art for online use…(More)”.

Policy Choice and the Wisdom of Crowds

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nicholas Otis: “Using data from seven large-scale randomized experiments, I test whether crowds of academic experts can forecast the relative effectiveness of policy interventions. Eight-hundred and sixty-three academic experts provided 9,295 forecasts of the causal effects from these experiments, which span a diverse set of interventions (e.g., information provision, psychotherapy, soft-skills training), outcomes (e.g., consumption, COVID-19 vaccination, employment), and locations (Jordan, Kenya, Sweden, the United States). For each policy comparisons (a pair of policies and an outcome), I calculate the percent of crowd forecasts that correctly rank policies by their experimentally estimated treatment effects. While only 65% of individual experts identify which of two competing policies will have a larger causal effect, the average forecast from bootstrapped crowds of 30 experts identifies the better policy 86% of the time, or 92% when restricting analysis to pairs of policies who effects differ at the p < 0.10 level. Only 10 experts are needed to produce an 18-percentage point (27%) improvement in policy choice…(More)”.

Crowdsourced Politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ariadne Vromen, Darren Halpin, Michael Vaughan: “This book focuses on online petitioning and crowdfunding platforms to demonstrate the everyday impact that digital communications have had on contemporary citizen participation. It argues that crowdsourced participation has become normalised and institutionalised into the repertoires of citizens and their organisations. 

To illustrate their arguments the authors use an original survey on acts of political engagement, undertaken with Australian citizens. Through detailed interviews and online analysis they show how advocacy organisations now use online petitions for strategic interventions and mobilisation. They also analyse the policy issues that mobilise citizens on crowdsourcing platforms, including a unique dataset of 17,000 petitions from the popular non-government platform, Change.org. Contrasting mass public concerns with the policy agenda of the government of the day shows there is a disjuncture and lack of responsiveness to crowdsourced citizen expression. Ultimately the book explores the long-term implications of citizen-led change for democracy. ..(More)”.

Mapping community resources for disaster preparedness: humanitarian data capability and automated futures

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Anthony McCosker et al: “This report details the rationale, background research and design for a platform to help local communities map resources for disaster preparedness. It sets out a first step in improving community data capability through resource mapping to enhance humanitarian action before disaster events occur.The project seeks to enable local community disaster preparedness and thus build community resilience by improving the quality of data about community strengths, resources and assets.

In this report, the authors define a gap in existing humanitarian mapping approaches and the uses of open, public and social media data in humanitarian contexts. The report surveys current knowledge and present a selection of case studies delivering data and humanitarian mapping in local communities.

Drawing on this knowledge and practice review and stakeholder workshops throughout 2021, the authors also define a method and toolkit for the effective use of community assets data…(More)”

Toward a Demand-Driven, Collaborative Data Agenda for Adolescent Mental Health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stefaan Verhulst et al: “Existing datasets and research in the field of adolescent mental health do not always meet the needs of practitioners, policymakers, and program implementers, particularly in the context of vulnerable populations. Here, we introduce a collaborative, demand-driven methodology for the development of a strategic adolescent mental health research agenda. Ultimately, this agenda aims to guide future data sharing and collection efforts that meet the most pressing data needs of key stakeholders…

We conducted a rapid literature search to summarize common themes in adolescent mental health research into a “topic map”. We then hosted two virtual workshops with a range of international experts to discuss the topic map and identify shared priorities for future collaboration and research…

Our topic map identifies 10 major themes in adolescent mental health, organized into system-level, community-level, and individual-level categories. The engagement of cross-sectoral experts resulted in the validation of the mapping exercise, critical insights for refining the topic map, and a collaborative list of priorities for future research…

This innovative agile methodology enables a focused deliberation with diverse stakeholders and can serve as the starting point for data generation and collaboration practices, both in the field of adolescent mental health and other topics…(More)”.

How crowdfunding is shaping the war in Ukraine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “This month Aerorozvidka, a Ukrainian drone unit, celebrated the acquisition of four Chinese-made DJI Phantom 3 drones, provided by a German donor. The group, founded in 2014 after the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, is led by civilians. The gift is just one example of crowdfunding in Russia’s latest war against Ukraine. Citizens from both sides are supplying much-needed equipment to the front lines. What is the impact of these donations, and how do the two countries differ in their approach?

Private citizens have chipped in to help in times of war for centuries. A writing tablet found near Hadrian’s Wall in northern England mentions a gift of sandals, socks and underwear for Roman soldiers. During the first world war America’s government asked civilians to knit warm clothing for troops. But besides such small morale-boosting efforts, some schemes to rally civilians have proved strikingly productive. During the second world war Britain introduced a “Spitfire Fund”, encouraging civilian groups to raise the £12,600 (£490,000, or $590,000, in today’s money) needed to build the top-of-the-range fighter. Individual contributors could buy wings, machineguns or even a rivet, for six old pence (two and a half modern ones) apiece. The scheme raised around £13m in total—enough for more than 1,000 aircraft (of a total of 20,000 built)…(More)”.

On the Power of Networks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Jay Lloyd: “A mosquito net made from lemons, a workout shirt that feeds sweat to cyanobacteria to generate electricity, a water filter using moss from the Andes—and a slime mold that produces eerie electronic music. For a few days in late June, I logged on to help judge the Biodesign Challenge, a seven-year-old competition where high school and college students showcase designs that use biotechnology to address real problems. Fifty-six teams from 18 countries presented their creations—some practical, others purely speculative.

The competition is, by design, cautiously optimistic about the potential for technology to solve problems such as plastic pollution or malaria or sexually transmitted diseases. This caution manifests in an emphasis on ethics as a first principle in design: many problems the students seek to solve are the results of previous “solutions” gone wrong. Underlying this is a conviction that technology can help build a world that not only works better but is also more just. The biodesign worldview starts with research to understand problems in context, then imagines a design for a biology-based solution, and often envisions how that technology could transform today’s power dynamics. Two projects this year speculated about using mRNA to reduce systemic racism and global inequality. 

The Biodesign Challenge is a profoundly hopeful exercise in future-building, but the tensions inherent in this theory of change became clear at the awards ceremony, which coincided with the Supreme Court’s announcement of the reversal of Roe v. Wade, ending the right to abortion at the national level. The ceremony took place under a cloud, and these entrancing proposals for an imagined biofuture sharply juxtaposed with the results of the blunt exercise of political power. 

Clearly, networks of people devoted to a cause can be formidable forces for change—and it’s possible that Biodesign Challenge itself could become such a network in the future. The group consists of more than 100 teachers and judges—artists, scientists, social scientists, and people from the biotech industry—and the challengers themselves, who Zoom in from Shanghai, Buenos Aires, Savannah, Cincinnati, Turkey, and elsewhere. As biotechnology matures around the world, it will be applied by networks of people who have determined which problems need to be addressed…(More)”.

Crowdsourcing Initiatives in City Management: The Perspective of Polish Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ewa Glińska, Halina Kiryluk and Karolina Ilczuk: “The past decade has seen a rise in the significance of the Internet facilitating the communication between local governments and local stakeholders. A growing role in this dialog has been played by crowdsourcing. The paper aims to identify areas, forms, and tools for the implementation of crowdsourcing in managing cities in Poland as well as the assessment of benefits provided by the use of crowdsourcing initiatives by representatives of municipal governments. The article utilized a quantitative study method of the survey realized on a sample of 176 city governments from Poland. Conducted studies have shown that crowdsourcing initiatives of cities concern such areas as culture, city image, spatial management, environmental protection, security, recreation and tourism as well as relations between entrepreneurs and city hall, transport and innovations. Forms of stakeholder engagement via crowdsourcing involve civic budgets, “voting/polls/surveys and interviews” as well as “debate/discussion/meeting, workshop, postulates and comments”. The larger the city the more often its representatives employ the forms of crowdsourcing listed above. Local governments most frequently carry out crowdsourcing initiatives by utilizing cities’ official web pages, social media, and special platforms dedicated to public consultations. The larger the city the greater the value placed on the utility of crowdsourcing…(More)”.