Type: book

The Collective Intelligence Handbook: an open experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Bernstein: “Is there really a wisdom of the crowd? How do we get at it and understand it, utilize it, empower it?
You probably have some ideas about this. I certainly do. But I represent just one perspective. What would an economist say? A biologist? A cognitive or social psychologist? An artificial intelligence or human-computer interaction researcher? A communications scholar?
For the last two years, Tom Malone (MIT Sloan) and I (Stanford CS) have worked to bring together all these perspectives into one book. We are nearing completion, and the Collective Intelligence Handbook will be published by the MIT Press later this year. I’m still relatively dumbfounded by the rockstar lineup we have managed to convince to join up.

It’s live.

Today we went live with the authors’ current drafts of the chapters. All the current preprints are here: http://cci.mit.edu/CIchapterlinks.html

And now is when you come in.

But we’re not done. We’d love for you — the crowd — to help us make this book better. We envisioned this as an open process, and we’re excited that all the chapters are now at a point where we’re ready for critique, feedback, and your contributions.
There are two ways you can help:

  • Read the current drafts and leave comments inline in the Google Docs to help us make them better.
  • Drop suggestions in the separate recommended reading list for each chapter. We (the editors) will be using that material to help us write an introduction to each chapter.

We have one month. The authors’ final chapters are due to us in mid-June. So off we go!”

Here’s what’s in the book:

Chapter 1. Introduction
Thomas W. Malone (MIT) and Michael S. Bernstein (Stanford University)
What is collective intelligence, anyway?
Chapter 2. Human-Computer Interaction and Collective Intelligence
Jeffrey P. Bigham (Carnegie Mellon University), Michael S. Bernstein (Stanford University), and Eytan Adar (University of Michigan)
How computation can help gather groups of people to tackle tough problems together.
Chapter 3. Artificial Intelligence and Collective Intelligence
Daniel S. Weld (University of Washington), Mausam (IIT Delhi), Christopher H. Lin (University of Washington), and Jonathan Bragg (University of Washington)
Mixing machine intelligence with human intelligence could enable a synthesized intelligent actor that brings together the best of both worlds.
Chapter 4. Collective Behavior in Animals: An Ecological Perspective
Deborah M. Gordon (Stanford University)
How do groups of animals work together in distributed ways to solve difficult problems?
Chapter 5. The Wisdom of Crowds vs. the Madness of Mobs
Andrew W. Lo (MIT)
Economics has studied a collectively intelligent forum — the market — for a long time. But are we as smart as we think we are?
Chapter 6. Collective Intelligence in Teams and Organizations
Anita Williams Woolley (Carnegie Mellon University), Ishani Aggarwal (Georgia Tech), Thomas W. Malone (MIT)
How do the interactions between groups of people impact how intelligently that group acts?
Chapter 7. Cognition and Collective Intelligence
Mark Steyvers (University of California, Irvine), Brent Miller (University of California, Irvine)
Understanding the conditions under which people are smart individually can help us predict when they might be smart collectively.

Chapter 8. Peer Production: A Modality of Collective Intelligence
Yochai Benkler (Harvard University), Aaron Shaw (Northwestern University), Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)
What have collective efforts such as Wikipedia taught us about how large groups come together to create knowledge and creative artifacts?

After Sustainable Cities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New book edited by Mike Hodson, and Simon Marvin: “A sustainable city has been defined in many ways. Yet, the most common understanding is a vision of the city that is able to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Central to this vision are two ideas: cities should meet social needs, especially of the poor, and not exceed the ability of the global environment to meet needs.
After Sustainable Cities critically reviews what has happened to these priorities and asks whether these social commitments have been abandoned in a period of austerity governance and climate change and replaced by a darker and unfair city. This book provides the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the new eco-logics reshaping conventional sustainable cities discourse and environmental priorities of cities in both the global north and south. The dominant discourse on sustainable cities, with a commitment to intergenerational equity, social justice and global responsibility, has come under increasing pressure. Under conditions of global ecological change, international financial and economic crisis and austerity governance new eco-logics are entering the urban sustainability lexicon – climate change, green growth, smart growth, resilience and vulnerability, ecological security. This book explores how these new eco-logics reshape our understanding of equity, justice and global responsibility, and how these more technologically and economically driven themes resonate and dissonate with conventional sustainable cities discourse. This book provides a warning that a more technologically driven and narrowly constructed economic agenda is driving ecological policy and weakening previous commitment to social justice and equity.
After Sustainable Cities brings together leading researchers to provide a critical examination of these new logics and identity what sort of city is now emerging, as well as consider the longer-term implication on sustainable cities research and policy.”

The Social Machine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Judith Donath: “Computers were first conceived as “thinking machines,” but in the twenty-first century they have become social machines, online places where people meet friends, play games, and collaborate on projects. In this book, Judith Donath argues persuasively that for social media to become truly sociable media, we must design interfaces that reflect how we understand and respond to the social world. People and their actions are still harder to perceive online than face to face: interfaces are clunky, and we have less sense of other people’s character and intentions, where they congregate, and what they do.
Donath presents new approaches to creating interfaces for social interaction. She addresses such topics as visualizing social landscapes, conversations, and networks; depicting identity with knowledge markers and interaction history; delineating public and private space; and bringing the online world’s open sociability into the physical world. Donath asks fundamental questions about how we want to live online and offers thought-provoking designs that explore radically new ways of interacting and communicating.”

Learning from The Wealth of the Commons

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Paper by Mae Shaw in Special issue of the Community Development Journal on “Commons Sense New thinking about an old idea: “We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives’.

This is the starting point for what David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, the editors of The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (2012), describe as ‘an extended global exercise in commoning’ – Peter Linebaugh’s term for ‘the self-determination of commoners in managing their shared resources’ (p. 396). In other words, the book itself is offered as an active process of ‘making the path’ by presenting ‘some of the most promising new paths now being developed’. It is intended to be ‘rigorous enough for academic readers yet accessible enough for the layperson’. In this, it more than achieves its ambitions. The Wealth of the Commons is an edited collection of seventy-three short papers from thirty countries: ‘a collective venture of sharing, collaboration, negotiation and creative production among some of the most diverse commons scholars, activists and projects leaders imaginable’. This rich and diverse source of knowledge and inspiration could be described as ‘polyvocal’ in the sense that it presents a multiplicity of voices improvising around a single theme – sometimes in harmony, sometimes discordant, but always interesting.

The book brings together an impressive collection of contributors from different places, backgrounds and interests to explore the meaning of the commons and to advocate for it ‘as a new paradigm’ for the organization of public and private life. In this sense, it represents a project rather than an analysis: essentially espousing a cause with imperative urgency. This is not necessarily a weakness, but it does raise specific questions about what is included and what is absent or marginalized in this particular selection of accounts, and what might be lost along the way. What counts as ‘commons’ or ‘the commons’ or ‘the common’ (all used in the text) is a subject of discussion and contestation here, as elsewhere. The effort to ‘name and claim’ is an integral aspect of the project. As Jeffrey et al. (2012, p. 10) comment, ‘the struggle for the commons has never been without its own politics of separation and division’, raising valid questions about the prospects for a coherent paradigm at this stage. At the very least, however, this rich resource may prove seminal in countering those dominant paradigms of growth and development in which structural and cultural adjustments ‘serve as a justifying rhetoric for continuity in plunder’ of common resources (Mattei, p. 41).

The contributions fall into three general categories: those offering a critique of existing ‘increasingly dysfunctional’ market/state relations; those that ‘enlarge theoretical understandings of the commons as a way to change the world’; and those that ‘describe innovative working projects which demonstrate the feasibility’ of the commons.

What counts as the commons?

As acknowledged in many of the chapters, defining the commons in any consistent and convincing way can be deeply problematic. Like ‘community’ itself, it can be regarded to some degree as an ideological portmanteau which contains a variety of meanings. Nonetheless, there is a general commitment to confront such difficulties in an open way, and to be as clear as possible about what the commons might represent, what it might replace, and what it should not be confused with. Put most simply, the commons refers to what human beings share in nature and society that should be cherished for all now and for the future: ‘the term … provides the binding element between the natural and the social or cultural worlds’ (Weber p.11). Its profound challenge to the logic of competitive capitalist relations, therefore, is to ‘validate new schemes of human relations, production and governance … commonance’ (Bollier and Helfrich, p. xiv) that penetrate all levels of public and private life. This idea is explored in detail in many of the contributions.

The commons, then, claims to represent a philosophical stance, an intellectual framework, a moral and economic imperative, a set of organizing principles and commitments, a movement, and an emerging ‘global community of practice’ (O’Connell, 2012). It has also developed an increasingly shared discourse, which is designed to unsettle institutionalized norms and values and to reclaim or remake the language of co-operation, fairness and social justice. As the editorial points out, the language of capitalism is one that becomes ‘encoded into the epistemology of our language and internalized by people’. In community development, and elsewhere, we have become sensitized to the way in which progressive language can be appropriated to support individualistic market values. When empowerment can mean facilitated asset-stripping of local communities, and solidarity targets can be set by government (e.g. Scottish Government, 2007), then we must be wary about assuming proprietorial closure on the term ‘commons’ itself.

As Federici, in a particularly persuasive chapter, warns: ‘… capital is learning about the virtues of the common good’ (p. 46). She argues that, ‘since at least the 1990s, the language of the commons has been appropriated … by the World Bank and put at the service of privatization’. For this reason, it is important to think of the commons as a ‘quality of relations, a principle of co-operation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals’ (p. 50). This produces a different operational logic, which is explored in depth across the collection.

Deficiencies in the commons framework

To advance the commons as ‘a new paradigm’, it is necessary to locate it historically and to show the ways in which it has been colonized and compromised, as some of these pieces do. It may seem ironic that the meaning of ‘the commons’ to many people in the UK, for example, is that bear pit of parliamentary business, the House of Commons, in which adversarial rather than consensual politics is the order of the day. Reclaiming such foundational ideas is a lengthy and demanding process, as David Graeber shows in The Democracy Project, his recent account of the Occupy Movement, which for a time commanded considerable international interest. Drawing on Linebaugh, Federici contends that ‘commons have been the thread that has connected the history of the class struggle into our time’.

It is unfortunate, therefore, that the volume fails to address the relationship between organized labour and the commons, as highlighted in the introduction, because there is a distinctive contribution to be made here. As Harvey (2012) argues, decentralization and autonomy are also primary vehicles for reinforcing neoliberal class strategies of social reproduction and producing greater inequality. For example, in urban environments in particular, ‘the better the common qualities a social group creates, the more likely it is to be raided and appropriated by private profit-maximising interests’ leading inexorably to economic cleansing of whole areas. Gentrification and tourism are the clearest examples. The salience of class in general is an underdeveloped line of argument. If this authoritative collection is anything to go by, this may be a significant deficiency in the commons framework.

Without historical continuity – honouring the contribution of those ‘commoners’ who came before in various guises and places – there is a danger of falling into the contemporary trap of regarding ‘innovation’ as a way of separating us from our past. History in the past as well as in the making is as essential a part of our commons as is the present and the future – material, temporal and spiritual….”

Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rodrigo Davis: “Today I’m capping two years of studying the emergence of civic crowdfunding by submitting my master’s thesis to the MIT archives…You can read Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place in its entirety (173 pages) now,…
Crowdfunding is everywhere. People are using it to fund watches, comic books, even famous film directors are doing it. In what is now a $6 billion industry globally, I think the most interesting, disruptive and exciting work that’s happening is in donation-based crowdfunding. That’s worth, very roughly, $1.2 billion a year worldwide per year. Within that subset, I’ve been looking at civic projects, people who are producing shared goods for a community or broader public. These projects build on histories of community fundraising and resource pooling that long predate the Internet; what’s changed is that we’ve created a scalable, portable platform model to carry out these existing practices.
So how is civic crowdfunding doing? When I started this project very few people were using that term. No one had done any aggregated data collection and published it. So I decided to take on that task. I collected data on 1224 projects between 2010 and March 2014, which raised $10.74 million in just over three years. I focused on seven platforms: Catarse (Brazil), Citizinvestor (US), Goteo (Spain), IOBY (US), Kickstarter (US), Neighbor.ly (US) and Spacehive (UK). I didn’t collect everything. …
Here are four things I found out about civic crowdfunding.

  1. Civic crowdfunding is small-scale but relatively successful, and it has big ambitions.Currently the average civic crowdfunding project is small in scale: $6,357 is the median amount raised. But these civic projects seem to be doing pretty well. Projects tagged ‘civic’ on Kickstarter, for instance, succeed 81% of the time. If Civic were a separate category, it would be Kickstarter’s most successful category. Meanwhile, most platform owners and some incumbent institutions see civic crowdfunding as a new mechanism for public-private partnerships capable of realizing large-scale projects. In a small minority of cases, such as the three edge-case projects I explored in Chapter 3 of my thesis, civic crowdfunding has begun to fulfill some of those ambitions. For the center of gravity to shift further in the direction of these potential outcomes, though, existing institutions, including government, large non-profits and the for-profit sector, will need to engage more comprehensively with the process.
  2. Civic crowdfunding started as a hobby for green space projects by local non-profits, but larger organizations are getting involved. Almost a third of campaigners are using civic crowdfunding platforms for park and garden-related projects (29%). Event-based projects, and education and training are also popular. Sports and mobility projects are pretty uncommon. The frequency of garden and park projects is partly because these projects are not capital intensive, and they’re uncontroversial. That’s also changing. Organizations from governments to corporations and large foundations, are exploring ways to support crowdfunding for a much wider range of community-facing activities. Their modes of engagement include publicizing campaigns, match-funding campaigns on an ad-hoc basis, running their own campaigns and even building new platforms from the ground up.
  3. Civic crowdfunding is concentrated in cities (especially those where platforms are based). The genre is too new to have spread very effectively, it seems. Five states account for 80% of the projects, and this is partly a function of where the platforms are located. New York, California are our top two, followed by Illinois and Oregon. We know there’s a strong trend towards big cities. It’s hard work for communities to use crowdfunding to get projects off the ground, especially when it’s an unfamiliar process. The platforms have played a critical role in building participants’ understanding of crowdfunding and supporting them through the process.
  4. Civic crowdfunding has the same highly unequal distributional tendencies as other crowd markets. When we look at the size distribution of projects, the first thing we notice is something close to a Pareto distribution, or Long Tail. Most projects are small-scale, but a small number of high-value projects have taken a large share of the total revenue raised by civic crowdfunding. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. On Kickstarter most successful projects are between 5 and 10k, and 47% of civic projects I studied are in the same bracket. The problem is that we tend to remember the outliers, such as Veronica Mars and Spike Lee – because they show what’s possible. But they are still the outliers.

Now, here are two things we don’t know.

  1. Will civic crowdfunding deter public investment or encourage it?
  2. Will civic crowdfunding widen wealth gaps?”

Open Source Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Christopher Hobbs, Matthew Moran and Daniel Salisbury: “This edited volume takes a fresh look at the subject of open source intelligence (OSINT), exploring both the opportunities and the challenges that this emergent area offers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In particular, it explores the new methodologies and approaches that technological advances have engendered, while at the same time considering the risks associated with the pervasive nature of the Internet.
Drawing on a diverse range of experience and expertise, the book begins with a number of chapters devoted to exploring the uses and value of OSINT in a general sense, identifying patterns, trends and key areas of debate. The focus of the book then turns to the role and influence of OSINT in three key areas of international security – nuclear proliferation; humanitarian crises; and terrorism. The book offers a timely discussion on the merits and failings of OSINT and provides readers with an insight into the latest and most original research being conducted in this area.”
Table of contents:
PART I: OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE: NEW METHODS AND APPROACHES
1. Exploring the Role and Value of Open Source Intelligence; Stevyn Gibson
2. Towards the discipline of Social Media Intelligence ‘ SOCMINT’; David Omand,  Carl Miller and Jamie Bartlett
3. The Impact of OSINT on Cyber-Security; Alastair Paterson and James Chappell
PART II: OSINT AND PROLIFERATION
4. Armchair Safeguards: The Role of OSINT in Proliferation Analysis; Christopher Hobbs and Matthew Moran
5. OSINT and Proliferation Procurement: Combating Illicit Trade; Daniel Salisbury
PART III: OSINT and Humanitarian Crises
6. Positive and Negative Noise in Humanitarian Action: The OSINT Dimension; Randolph Kent
7. Human Security Intelligence: Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Humanitarian Crises; Fred Bruls and Walter Dorn
PART IV:OSINT and Counter-terrorism
8. Detecting Events from Twitter: Situational Awareness in the Age of Social Media; Simon Wibberley and Carl Miller
9. Jihad Online: What Militant Groups Say about Themselves and What it Means for Counterterrorism Strategy; John Amble
Conclusion; Christopher Hobbs, Matthew Moran and Daniel Salisbury

#Bring back our girls

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
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.”

Change: 19 Key Essays on How the Internet Is Changing Our Lives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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.”

The Universe Is Programmable. We Need an API for Everything

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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…”

Thanks-for-Ungluing launches!

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog from Unglue.it: “Great books deserve to be read by all of us, and we ought to be supporting the people who create these books. “Thanks for Ungluing” gives readers, authors, libraries and publishers a new way to build, sustain, and nourish the books we love.
“Thanks for Ungluing” books are Creative Commons licensed and free to download. You don’t need to register or anything. But when you download, the creators can ask for your support. You can pay what you want. You can just scroll down and download the book. But when that book has become your friend, your advisor, your confidante, you’ll probably want to show your support and tell all your friends.
We have some amazing creators participating in this launch….”

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