book – Page 148 – The Living Library

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

Curated on May 15, 2014October 10, 2018 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.

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.
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.
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.
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.

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

Open Source Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century

Curated on May 14, 2014October 10, 2018 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 May 7, 2014August 15, 2018 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.”

The Universe Is Programmable. We Need an API for Everything

Curated on May 5, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

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 May 5, 2014October 31, 2018 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….”

To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World

Curated on May 5, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Vincent Mosco: “In the wake of revelations about National Security Agency activities—many of which occur “in the cloud”—this book offers both enlightenment and a critical view. Cloud computing and big data are arguably the most significant forces in information technology today. In clear prose, To the Cloud explores where the cloud originated, what it means, and how important it is for business, government, and citizens. It describes the intense competition among cloud companies like Amazon and Google, the spread of the cloud to government agencies like the controversial NSA, and the astounding growth of entire cloud cities in China. From advertising to trade shows, the cloud and big data are furiously marketed to the world, even as dark clouds loom over environmental, privacy, and employment issues that arise from the cloud. Is the cloud the long-promised information utility that will solve many of the world’s economic and social problems? Or is it just marketing hype? To the Cloud provides the first thorough analysis of the potential and the problems of a technology that may very well disrupt the world.”

Handbook Of The International Political Economy Of Governance

Curated on April 29, 2014October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Anthony Payne, and Nicola Phillips: “Since the 1990s many of the assumptions that anchored the study of governance in international political economy (IPE) have been shaken loose. Reflecting on the intriguing and important processes of change that have occurred, and are occurring, Professors Anthony Payne and Nicola Phillips bring together the best research currently being undertaken in the field. They explore the complex ways that the global political economy is presently being governed, and indeed misgoverned. Covering all themes central to the field of politics, this extensive and detailed Handbook will be of great value to students of governance, political economy, international relations and development studies.”