Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Leslie’s Wrap - borrowing Ben’s great idea
2009 Program Notes
•Presentation Notes from the Conference
•Bar Camps aka “Birds of a Feather” Groups
Organization and Resources
• Event tags
• Free Wifi in Porto
Links submitted by attendees
• ISDT visualizations by day
• nz-blackout - a story about NZ’s experience with a HADOPI type law.
•Session summaries from Monday by Ben Moskowitz
WEDNESDAY
If you have not signed up for the Casa Da Musica tour, you could organize something for Wednesday afternoon between 15:30 and 17:30.
THURSDAY
10:45 Organizational and democratic logic of participation: Introduction to research results. Mayo Fuster. Meet in the break room after first presentation.
11:00 Satyan Ramlal invites people to discuss Politics and the State of Africa. Location: Piolho (the cafe in the plaza near the Reitoria). Warigia Bowman invited.
12:00 Students for Free Culture Portugal. Luis Frias, Ines Carvallo, others. Location at Piolho.
14:00 Digital Revolution and Kids’ Educational Challenges. Several people signed up. Location?
Digital Revolution and Kids’ Educational Challenges
15:00 Notions of Civil Society, Citizens, civic. Location at Piolho, the cafe nearby. Satyan Ramlal initiates.
—————————————————————-
No time or date noted: Foz outing for dinner. Katrin Verclas, Luis Frias.
No time noted Global Public Library (no person identified; no place noted)
—————————————————————-
FRIDAY
10:30 Copyright Policy. Pat Aufderheide (after her presentaiton). Several people have signed up. Meet in break room.
12:30 Tools for digital activism: Participatory design patterns. Location is Maus Habitos (excellent lunch place) off Santa Catarina. Several people have signed up. Hosted by Chris McConnell.
]]>Tanya Notley, Tactical Technology Collective
Visualizing information and communicating for social change
If you are a researcher, you don’t need to be a designer. but you do need to think in a visual way. Flip the switch and start thinking visually.
1. Tactical tech terms
A. “info activism” is when rights activists turn information about their issues into action that will address it.
•Tactics: are the approaches that are used to strategically address a goal.
•Tools: media vehicle, what you use to implement your tactics
B. Tooklits and guides
have a methodology, designed in collaboration with many experts
x-in-a-box
C. Bring together rights activists, technologists, designers
2. History of Visualization
key tactic: visualize your message
a. deficit of info-design as a discipline
b. local and cultural specificity of aesthetics and visual information
c. helping artists work with local artistic and tech talent
it adds seeing to reading to make complex data easier to understand.
•two historical examples: snow mapped infection data, convincing officials to shut down a water pump that was creating a localized cholera pandemic.
•slave trade networks visualization.
3. Effective Examples
more recent:
•belfast telegraphic: middle east crisis, who backs an immediate cease-fire. yes: all countries. no: uk, us, israel.
•collected and analyzed child mortality data.
•hrw campaign about uzbekistan inclusion to edu: a city-map style diagram that, instead of highlighting tourist sports, highlights human rights violations. firing squad locations, etc. activists gave copies to delegates as they arrived at the airport. so effective that keynote speaker at summit had to acknowledge human rights violations.
•global witness violation
In sum:
Visualization can show how many, when where. It can visualize trends, compare elements, or reveal patterns. Good info design brings form an structure to information, making it easier to digest etc.
Video examples:
•Tunisian activists geo-tagging human rights violation videos so they show up near Tunisian presidential palace on Google Earth.
•Featured layers on Darfur crisis, on Google Earth. paid for by US holocaust museum. Spreadsheets, photos, videos, etc. They spent six months and Google promoted it.
•Moblile phones anecdote in Madacasgar. Citizen reporting in 2009 on government brutality during protests.Ushadidi is a crowd-sourced reportage platform, people could send emails, SMS, or whatever and it would aggregate other coverage. Gave a much broader view of what was happening in the country.
•Isreal-Lebanon war. Activists created maps of bombing and damaged infrastructure. In addition to awareness, helped facilitate reconstruction later on.
4. Break-out discussions
David: representing many voices on the web
Bellinha+Laurie: digital literacy
Luis: open Software
Sunil: privacy and security
Chris: distribution tools
Leslie: mapping policy
Micah: open data+open government
Rupert: freedom of information
Notes from information visualization break out sessions on Thursday
5.Questions
q: How do you make determinations about who to work with, what to do, what tech etc?
a: We have offices everywhere and a huge network, we just bring in the right people. Determination of who to work with: global consensus, not just serving Western needs. Ask partners: how are you working for rights? etc?
Katrin Verclas, Mobile Phones and Social Development
Katrin Verclas’ lecture on mobile phones and social development (advocacy, activism, (other) NGO-activities) started with Verclas asking the audience about any of their work with mobile phones. Answers ranged from the use of mobile phones in information provision in Pakistan (USAID project), to mobile phones as tools for students for course-assignments, and to research into the gendering of cellphones in Canada.
Verclas proceeded to question the term “online” as it carries an assumption of web (or internet)-based connectivity only, and suggested the term “connected” as a better alternative, as it also includes mobile-phone based connections between humans.
Compared to the distinct nature of the new developments in the fields of the social benefit of mobile phones, and of mobile phone networks, Verclas noted that not enough research is currently being carried out in these fields and developments.
Even so, Verclas pointed out a caveat of a cycle beginning with techno-terministic hype and expectations about the possible effects of mobile phones on social development, to disillusionment about the actual effects, to, finally, a practical view on how mobile phones can “make life better”.
Some numbers were provided to indicate the ubiquitous spread / consumption of mobile phones. On a global scale, there are currently more than 4.5 billion mobile subscriptions, i.e. active SIM cards, and 3.1 billion unique users (though numbers are hard to guage - could be as many as 3.5 billion actual users) compared to other media / channels such as newspapers (480 million users) and television (1.5 billion users)
Mobile phones are being employed for such social change and advocacy uses as mobilization, collective action, and other uses. Verclas mentioned, among others, the following examples of how mobile phones are used around the world:
• The ability receive information on one’s mobile phone through the “Unstructured Supplementary Service Data” (USSD) protocol was emphasized for its use in three different situations, prevalent in Africa. First, the overview of the balance on a phone card allows people to decide when and how to communicate through missed calls (“Please Call Me”). Second, the protocol has been used to provide information in various advocacy-activities. Third, for awareness-raising and persuasion purposes, USSD messages have been accompanied with information on an AIDS helpline, which has increased the number of calls made to the helpline.
• The work of Tino Kreutzer shows that mobile phones are popular among the youth in townships in South Africa, even in contexts of low monetary resources, or situations with little webaccess with mobile phones.
• In Geneva, disability rights activists use mobile phones to demonstrate inaccessible (public) areas in the city, as a way to sensitize city officials to the problems faced by people with disabilities.
• An artist created an installation which allowed SMSes –from anyone- to be displayed on a projected image on a wall in a New York street. The projected image was political in nature.
• Mobile phones have been used for human rights advocacy purposes in Caïro, where police brutality has been recorded by mobile phone cameras by ordinary individuals (so called “Sousveillance” ) and distributed on the web.
• Ushahidi allows citizen reporting through SMS to be displayed on online maps, in, for example, the Gaza conflict in 2009.
• In general, users associate their mobile phones with personal, relational and emotional characteristics, and think about their mobile phones in these informal ways.
These are exciting developments and examples, but are we there yet? Verclas thinks we’re not. Even though she believes that (desktop) computers (for the specific purpose of social development) are “over, (and) done”, she’s concerned with several issues.
First, many people might be too poor to have access to and use mobile phones (leading perhaps to a mobile divide).
Second, she’s uncomfortable with the popular notion that relatively unsophisticated, and cheap, mobile phones are perfectly suitable for poor people. She notes that poor people are willing to find the money to use mobile phones, and feels that poor people should not be denied access to more sophisticated mobile devices.
The task at hand for researchers is to investigate mobile phones both in their immediate social context, as well as the broader enabling infrastructural environment (software, policies, operators, carriers).
With respect to the former, there’s currently too little real data on:
• User needs
• Patterns of actual ownership
• Patterns of use / usage (through ethnographic studies)
• Patterns of non-use
• Mobile phone-capabilities
• Sophisticated uses of mobile technology
• Impact research
With respect to the latter, more work needs to be done to study and act on:
• “Mobile phone eco-systems”
• Change the closed and commercial context of mobile phone operators
• Bottom-up development and innovation
• Open source in mobile phones
• Issues of cost and security
In conclusion, Verclas points to the great strides made in terms of number of users of mobile phones, but feels that there is an apparent inconsistency between rhetoric (everyone believes mobile connectivity is important) and reality (the private nature of the enabling environment and corporate interests inhibit open and universal use of mobile technology).
Tapan Parikh, Sustainable Economic Development and Information Systems
Tapan Parikh discussed the very different considerations that need to be taken into account when digital information systems for rural communities in developing countries are designed.
Parikh first outlined the impacts (online) digital communication can have in rural communities in developing countries. Digital transformations are considered a first opportunity for rural communities to engage in two-way communication with modern society.
Moreover, digital communication has a lot of potential benefit for rural communities in terms of the increased access to services and decreases in costs related to transportation, distance etc., for accessing these services.
However, Parikh’s main point was that conventional approaches to the web, which emphasize text-based information and communication, are less applicable to rural realities.
Infrastructural issues (lack of power, connectivity), user-related issues (differences in culture, education, literacy), issues of affordability and lack of skilled human capital (designers, developers) in rural areas, have lead to the need for distinct considerations and approaches in rural computing.
The ways to “bridge such gaps for usable systems” , according to Parikh, are to engage with the rural users, “hang out a lot in villages”, find out what users’ needs are, and do “quick and dirty” prototyping to get ideas across.
Parikh cited several examples of such work in the domain of rural information systems, and the distinct approaches to computing that these studies made obvious.
The first small example illustrated the way a developer was oblivious to (illiterate) users’ cultural and regional contexts, when he designed a microfinance application in the colour grey, when instead the users’ cultural preference was to have many colours all around them (i.e. in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu).
The second example noted the importance of speech and spoken content in people’s own language, in making villagers (inexperienced in and wary of computers) more comfortable with working with and being around computers.
It is the importance of oral communication in rural contexts (over our current text-based conception of the web), which makes mobile phones “excellent devices”, and which prompts Parikh to ask how the internet can be reconceptualized to support oral communication.
In this respect, Parikh mentioned a third example of a study by his student Neil Patel into the design and use of a mobile phone-based system that supports professional and community-based agricultural extension, in the Indian state of Gujarat.
Given the importance of agriculture in overall economic development, agricultural extension provides farmers information on how to use and apply pesticides, fertilizers etc. Farmers currently depend too much on commercial agricultural dealers for information, and this has lead to harmful agricultural practices.
The mobile phone based system allows a range of communication between agricultural experts (instead of commercial dealers) and farmers, and among farmers themselves. Farmers can listen to news messages and they can ask questions to experts and other farmers in a-synchronous ways (the questions, answers, feedback and responses are recorded for playback). (according to a participant in the audience, the emphases on shared resources resembled the “Community Memory” system used in the 1970’s).
The results of the mobile-phone based agricultural extension system are that 50 users are making 1500 calls a month, which is more than 1 call a day per user per day. Moreover, “three times as many questions are answered by other farmers as by NGO experts”, which shows that the system provides more opportunities for farmers to give eachother contextual information.
Parikh’s final example showed the use of mobile phones for a range of activities by a rural coffee cooperative in Mexico, involved in organic certification. In this study undertaken by Parikh’s student Yael Schwartzman, mobile phones are used to carry out intensive data collection (formal data, feedback, data on farmers’ decisions, etc) by inspectors of rural produce.
Next to the benefits the system brings in terms of “standard” data management, the distinctiveness of the system lies in the transparency and direct interface it provides between producers (farmers) and consumers of the end-product of the rural produce, coffee.
Consumers are better able to judge the organic certification of the product, and assess for themselves whether fair trade has improved farmers’ lives. In the other direction, farmers get more transparency on the cuts made in different steps of the coffee’s supply chain. And, farmers would appreciate consumer-feedback for itself, and this could act as an incentive for farmers to do organic farming as a way to increase earnings. Finally, the system reduces time spent on inspections by the cooperative, and gives the cooperatives more information on the farmers’ situations.
Parikh pointed out that these fields of study (digital systems in rural contexts) are still young and a lot of “experimenting” is happening to find out “what works, and what doesn’t”.
Nevertheless, he concluded by listing the lessons learned so far:
• When tools are provided, these should help people help themselves (no philanthropy).
• It should be sought to empower existing institutions (villages, cooperatives, communities, governments), and make them work better (more transparent), instead of creating new institutions.
• The systems should increasingly make it possible to allow feedback on the systems themselves in order to improve programs.
Questions and Discussions
The questions mainly centered around facets of mobile networks and the “enabling environment”, and of new directions, developments and technologies for mobile-phone connectivity and services:
1) What should mobile phones do better than now?
Verclas: Challenges lie ahead in achieving “real p2p”: wifi channels on and among mobile phones themselves, ad-hoc mesh-networks outside of mobile phone networks (not in the interests of operators).
Parikh: Making devices more open will become challenging; mobile phones carry much computing power, but this is hardly used because of “walled garden approaches”. Cultural changes within companies will have to occur, and Microsoft and Google are already becoming more open in the mobile areas.
2) Isn’t SMS inappriopriate for illiterate people, why not use toll-free voice messages?
Parikh: SMS is popular because it is cheap; it is cheap because it uses “dead capacity” in networks (so the cost is zero). He agrees though that SMS is “not fun” and there are issues with language and literacy. Unlike SMS, voice is synchronous (“no load balancing”), and toll-free voice is not practical due to high costs. What can happen, is having asynchronous voice, where speech is saved, and sent when there is (cheap enough) capacity on the network.
Verclas: Much is already happening in this respect: Freedomphone and other technologies (VOIP and SMS queries) allow calls originating from NGOs. Voice of America (VOA) has developed its own voice information service, based on VOIP through “trixbox” (PBX). Next developments could include SMS-queries, after which one can be called back on the costs of the producer.
3) Are NGO-activities in the South on price negotiations wasted energy? Is change likely, what about pressure points in policy-respects ?
Parikh: There are challenges in how to allocate names more effectively.
Verclas: Policy is a problem; there’s a lack of organized consumer advocacy / consumer constituency, unlike the forum for mobile industry, GSMA. Governments and regulaters are weak compared to powerful operators, that rather dole out harmless “CSR-like MTM-charity dollars” (MTM = mobile to mobile) (….than be enganged in meaningful corporate reform).
4) Is there not a more symbiotic relationship between voice and graphic interfaces, and what is the role of participation?
Parikh: Yes, both text and voice modalities offer advantages that the other do not posses; they are complementary. However, computers are too much based on text. Graphics will become a complement to voice-based information (visualization of information). Multi-modal interfaces are the future, and we “should not be stuck in current main affordances”.
Bi-directional feedback loops in systems decrease transaction costs of participation, both in feedback on domains (agriculture etc) and on the systems themselves.
5) What are the emerging directions and risks of mobile banking?
Verclas: There are many different uses of mobile payments and banking in countries such as South Africa, Kenya, the Philipines, Uganda. For mobile payments, mobile phones require Near Field Communication (NFC), and are used, among others, for paying taxi-drivers. It can (or already does) play a huge role in facilitating remittances of migrant workers (which constitute the largest amount of cross/within-country money transfer).
While mobile banking is safe and saves trouble (and will make a lot of money for banks and operators), there are concerns about fraud and the changing role of operators into banking-like institutions.
Parikh: There are technological risks to mobile transfers of money, especially through SMS, which does not provide security or encryption. Besides, there are questions of privacy and the accountability of intermediaries.
6) What does mobile web have to offer, and what is the capacity of mobile networks given increasing use of mobile (web) services?
Verclas: Mobile web is controversial as it is expensive and as yet not user-friendly. However, new developments are emerging in the field of mobile web user interface design (Microsoft Research India, Nokia, etc).
Parikh: In terms of network bottlenecks, the issue is of the inapproprateness of HTML for GSM networks. The major physical cost is maintaining towers, and there are no solutions for mesh-networks as yet. The only way of making things cheap, is to consider (alternating) synchronous and a-synchronous ways of sending data / voice.
]]>Dr. Christian Sandvig is an Associate Professor of Communication, Media Studies, as well as Research Associate Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a researcher specializing in communication technology and public policy. Sandvig is also a Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
With an emphasis on large-scale internet content distribution, Christian Sandvig described the infrastructure required for mass content distribution, laid bare the financial significance of this distribution, and explored a handful of case studies.
Sandvig launched his talk by exploring the opportunities for mass content distribution in 1995. Sandvig used as an example “Channemals”, a failed cable television concept. Channemals was pitched as a 24/7 channel dedicated to animals; it was soundly rejected by the likes of Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, and Ted Turner. The concept was deemed “too weird” to be supported by a major network, but the pitchman was offered airtime in exchange for $17 million.
Fast forward to today: Urine-off sponsors the Puppy Channel, and there are plenty of other strange animal-related websites and content: I can has cheezburgers, YouTube videos, and so on. The lack of channels has historically put control of content distribution in the hands of a small elite; the internet is changing this, but truly large-scale content distribution remains expensive and undemocratic.
Sandvig introduced the term “infrastructure splintering”, coined by Graham and Marvin to describe the transition from infrastructure as a modernist ideal (roads, power, rail, water, which are all easy to quantify) to a much less well defined area of having and not having. Sandvig also introduced Davis’ criticism of the “fantasy of bootstrap capitalism”, suggesting that independent infrastructure is not as promising as some have indicated.
Sharing the throughput required to support a variety of content types, Sandvig demonstrated that video content in particular places very high pressure on internet infrastructure. Sandvig argued that there are two internets: – “the internet that serves the things that people want to see, and the internet that serves content that is very popular.” If you have an unpopular piece of content, you can use your internet service provider to distribute that content. If you have a very popular clip (a clip of Michael Phelps, for instance), you will need to use content distribution networks (CDNs) to distribute your content to the masses.
In the 1930s, when broadcasting was in its infancy, scholars saw the machinery of broadcasting as a “machine of culture”. Now, people are posting photos and videos of data centers around the world. There is a clear parallel between the industrialization of culture in 1930s and today, where there are giant facilities. However, there isn’t much scholarship around this topic.
Data storage and distribution is a major enterprise. For example, Google today has 36 data centers and each may cost $300 million. A variety of CDNs populate this marketplace, including Akamai, Amazon Web Services, and so on. Sandvig argued that these organizations are trying to create a parallel internet for paid content. Akamai serves content for Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Amazon, MySpace, Facebook, CNN, BBC, Google, and so on. They serve 10-20% of web traffic and 60% of all CDN traffic.
Most distribution agreements are private, but Amazon Web Services’ version (originally built exclusively for Amazon and now available commercially, with a few locations) posts prices ranging from $0.170 to 0.221 per 10TB outbound. This is big business: YouTube spent approximately $1 million a month on bandwidth in 2007, was accused of losing $1.4-1.6 million in 2009, and reportedly spends more than $1 per visitor in 2009.
Sandvig examined the common fascination with the “long tail” concept. Commentary around the long tail – which is used to describe the distribution of content, concepts, and so on – tends to focus on the shape of the curve. Some suggest that systems that are self-organizing will demonstrate many sources of information with some channels having major audiences and most having little. Clay Shirky and others suggest that the internet offers those sources with few viewers greater exposure. Benkler argues that a minimum number of sources on left is troubling.
Sandvig argued that there is no theoretical justification for the long tail. He asks, “how would you draw an ideal curve for TV? One to one? Very few sources? Straight line?” Instead, Sandvig believes we should be asking “how do you move up the long tail?” He suggests that there are things that should be viewed by a long audience, and things that don’t need to be. Thus, we should be paying attention not to the shape, but where the content is on the curve.
Sandvig introduced the BBC’s iPlayer as an example of the complexity of mass content distribution. As opposed to a private concern intent on maximizing shareholder value, the BBC is in an interesting position in that they have massive video archives which people are interested in seeing. Furthermore, those people believe they’ve already paid for that content through their tax dollars. Thus, the iPlayer. The BBC initially thought that a good way to distribute their video would be via online downloads. However, that content needs to run through an ISP’s network and the BBC began to worry about their bandwidth costs given they don’t have additional funding for this activity. They later settled on using peer-to-peer file sharing, but people reacted negatively because they didn’t want their iPlayer client sending video to other peoples’ computers via their ISP. Finally, the BBC decided to sign up for a CDN (Level3).
When we talk about things like the long tail, we emphasize the fact that you’re providing content that no one is looking at. Instead, we should be thinking about the content that everyone is looking at. Examples of massive distribution: content around Michael Jackson’s death, information around the inauguration of Barack Obama, etc.
Who pays for video that should be massively distributed, and cannot be “monetized”? Civil society, public broadcasters, and so on. Terms originally used to describe broadcasting and communications infrastructure (mass communication, gatekeeping, common carriage, interconnection) are now back, as if the internet were retro-fitted for broadcast model.
Discussion period:
Q: a common alternative to CDNs is P2P, but doesn’t that hurt the long end of the tail?
NBC’s new venture uses P2P, transferring more of the bandwidth costs to other networks. In real-time events, multi-casting is a good tool. At the end of the day, P2P doesn’t get you out of the problem of a lack of diversity.
Q: Is there data on when the content’s position on the long tail becomes profitable for companies?
The answer is never, since online video is largely unsupported by advertising. Some advertisers do use CPM, however, but it really depends on how much money it takes to run your business. Also, there will be situations where content is valuable to have up, but may not be supported by advertising at all.
Q: How do you approach and teach terms (common carriage, etc.) when there isn’t transparency in this sector or vast public technical knowledge?
You can find your way in by reverse-engineering things – hang around on message boards where people in this space hang around. Use LinkedIn message boards, for instance.
Q: Where is this industry going?
There is a lack of normative discourse around the future of content distribution; we seem to be drifting. The Internet of ten years from now looks like TV of 40 years ago. If you want to publish tings only to a few people, the tools will be there.
Q: Gendering of P2P or the gendering of YouTube? Who is uploading and downloading – which sex?
See Canadian scholar Jonathan Stern (MP3: the meaning of a format).
This breakout session focused on a) use cases in which secure data transmission is important and b) tools that are currently available to NGOs. After Sunil offered the group two cases, we discussed a number of questions and comments related to technologies (encryption) and secure practices/tactics.
We also discussed the opportunities and limitations of operating blogs within repressive societies: platform for outing negative behavior, risks associated with publishing such content, and the risks associated with hosting critical comments on your blog.
Full notes captured by Ben M:
Privacy and Security. Sunil tells two stories:
1. Malaysian blogger, Jeff (actually became a politician in the last election). In Malaysia, revealing information about environmental issues or corruption can land you in jail. Jeff has a network of informants to help him report on all issues. Jeff couldn’t authenticate this, however. So they started using GPG (open source information of PGP), asynchronronous authentication.
2. Human rights organizations in Burma maintain databases of violations. In Burma, if they find encrypted files on your computer they’ll beat you until you reveal the key. There’s a software package that allows you to hit a button to erase the database if an arrest is imminent.
Questions/Discussion:
Q: How well does Tor work in places like Burma?
A: Tor and Psyphon are two schemes for anonymmization . Every time you communicate with the internet, it’s encrypted in the browser (via plugin) and through a different proxy Tor server. So it’s client-server setup. Psyphon is a p2p alternative. But you need a peer somewhere else, and you’re at the mercy of the peer. You also put the benevolent peer at risk because they take over liability.
The downside with Tor is that it’s very, very slow. So the way to get around this is to disable Tor when you’re doing something non-sensistive. Another problem is that you can detect encrypted traffic (https:) and they’ll come knocking on your door.
Comment: at some point you’re just getting down to steganography.
Comment: tactics are more important than technology for grassroots organizations.
Comment: Burma censorship powered out of California corporation.
Comment: the biggest constituency of this stuff is pirates.
Comment: the Pirate Bay doesn’t even know where its servers are. Nick notes new efforts to open torrent trackers.
Comment: the problem with the Internet is jurisdiction.
Comment: Iranian customs checks your Facebook page to find out who your friends are.
Comment: HuffPo automatically filters criticism of Huffington.
Sunil: this reminds me of an NGO in Thailand that runs a blog. If someone comments on the blog and is slandering the king, the blog is liable. Now people are building commenting engines that are remote-hosted RSS feeds.
Tap: you could just create a botnet that just generates nonstop comments criticizing the king on every blog!
Conversation starter: Encryption can be really empowering from an individual perspective, but also very dangerous.
Notes from mapping break out session
• Interests of people there: Free culture Pt; adapting maps so people can add information themselves; social entrepreneurship projects; mapping for activism – E. Timor, coop locations, etc.; environmental activism; artists working in maps; municipal govn. Desiring better local information; connecting nat’l participants with local activists.
• How online mapping systems work: openstreetmaps.org
o There’s a Canvas; 24 tiles, open street maps
o Hosting is very expensive
o (comparisons with google maps – more detail. Anyone can use google maps maker but downloading them for re-use is illegal).
o Use vector data to locate coordinates and map beginning and end of an object. Wiki.openstrteetmap.org
o Use online or offline editor to edit maps, then enter data, system will render data (every 2 days)
o Can download from open street maps from cellphone. Geographic, routing, can add this sort of info.
o Don’t have easy way to add data – but do have “open layers” to create open layers on top of open street map. ExAMPLES: can add images to open street maps (analog to pin dots). Still all vector based. (openlayers.org)
• Examples:
o Gallery.openlayers.org – lots of examples.
o “heat” maps where crimes have occurred.
o Disaster preparedness – what is mapped?
o Ex. Of open source activity (from red hat);
o “walking-papers.org” – capacity building without GPS devices – annotate by hand! (not perfect data but easy). Online editor for maps is called “Potlatch”. Collaborative mapping of areas in Gaza that have been bombed – lots of people using handheld GPS.
o Brainoff technology – another mapping facility.
• Annual conference – Copenhagen, recently. Use car GPS devices and map them and then share data. GPS devices sometimes illegal (Cuba; were illegal until recently in Egypt).
• Can go back in history and see history of map – just like wiki.
Comment on how forms of authority deal with data from certain places – favela data dealt with differently by city government in Rio than data from other areas.
Useful Links from InformationDesign Software Opensource&More; break out session
http://www.data.gov/
http://flowingdata.com/
http://oakland.crimespotting.org
http://www.flickr.com/groups/geotagging/pool/map?mode=group
http://senseable.mit.edu/nyte/
http://eagereyes.org/
http://www.informationdesign.org/archives/cat_information_design.php
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/
http://benfry.com/
http://www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/entry15385.shtm
OpenSource Software Tools:
www.processing.org
http://vue.tufts.edu/
Inclusive Design
Things that exclude:
*Physical Barriers
**sound/video for blind/deaf/etc
**small type
**Mousing
*“I don’t belong here”
**Language
**Gendered Aesthetics
**Intimidating (Long forms, complex user experience)
**Cultural Biases (Whitespace)
*Access/Resources
**Little access to communication devices (computers)
**Lack of experience with computing (late bloomers)
**Firewalls/Net Filters/no plugins
Solutions?
Your ideas go here :)
Scott S. Robinson, “Slouching toward digital apartheid in Latin America”
Scott S. Robinson received his Ph.D in Social Anthropology from Cornell University and currently teaches in the Anthropology Department at the Universidad Metropolitana, Iztapalapa Campus, in México DF.
Robinson presented the four stage Internet development in Latin America: 1º commercial dial-up; 2º official connectivity program, 3º the emerging culture of cyber cafés; 4º what he called the emergent cyber-apartheid (elites access to broadband vs. mobile telephones for the rest of the population).
Robinson pointed out that in Latin America, regulatory agencies lack political, legal and institutional independence, and also that there are dramatic income distribution differentials and limited consumer protection.
Currently, mobile telephony surpasses fixed lines and those who are young and poor may have a prepaid mobile phone and use a cyber café.
According to the 2007 Monelos State survey led by Scott Robinson and his researching team, the Mexican cyber cafés mostly use Windows OS and are unfamiliar with open source tools. Their most frequent users are students of both sexes but teachers don’t use them. This means that there’s a growing gulf between students and teachers.
The commercial cyber café model is different from the telecenter model. In fact, the telecenter is a point of access to the Internet, generally sponsored by an NGO, that offers training and creates information available online for dealing with local problems. On the other hand, cyber cafés’ patrons make little use of educational and learning opportunities and are much more oriented toward a consumption model of renting screen time.
However, according to Robinson, national elites prefer this kind of access and consumption because they don’t have very deep commitment to truly universal access.
Robinson concluded his presentation by calling our attention to contradictory scenarios such as:
* Mobile telephony and cyber cafés synergy or discrimination?
* A young client universe with a potential innovation caldron or a captive consumer of infotainment?
* Digital inclusion or apartheid?
Finally, Robinson introduced some concrete proposals to the participants of the International School on Digital Transformation. These were namely to create an online study portal with a broad range of study questions with a logical route to correct answers keyed to university multiple choice entrance exams and to catalyze regional hardware, software, botnet and virus security check-up networks anchored in cyber cafés.
Discussion: Questions to Scott Robinson included why media activism around technology built during the nineties is fading away and what happens when community communications become commodified. Scott Robinson said that national elites and operators such as Microsoft aren’t interested in universal Internet access and that he doesn’t see innovation coming from the elite. When asked about the sustainability of telecenters, Scott Robinson said that if the telecenters aren’t community sustained and funded they are unable to survive.
Warigia Bowman, “Challenges and opportunities for information technology policy in East Africa”
Warigia Bowman earned her doctorate at Harvard at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi Department of Public Policy Leadership. She is keenly interested in rural development issues, both in the United States and in Africa.
Warigia began by asking us, if we had already been in Africa, since the African reality is completely different from that of the developed North. According to Warigia, Africa is the frontier of policy and the frontier of technology. However, she said, we need to reframe Africa and consider it as a place of opportunity and economic growth.
“Today, I am not going to use powerpoint”, Warigia said, calling our attention to the fact that some of the older kinds of technology, such as books, the printing press, copy machines, telephones, radio, TV, etc., are more in use in the developing world. As Warigia reminded us, information technology is not just the computers and Internet but also the written notes she held in her hand or the chalk and the blackboard in a rural village school.
Warigia’ s research is focused in East Africa, namely in the countries of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania, and she is really interested in the access to ICTs in rural East Africa. According to her, some of the core questions we need to address while studying the rural east African context are: Who, What, Where, How and For Whom? We must keep in mind that penetration rates are low and widely divergent between African countries and within African countries and one of the most interesting questions is “what is the technology that is best suited to getting access for rural areas?” In 2009, two consortia, TEAMS and Eassy, brought an undersea cable to the Eastern Africa coast and as Warigia said: “Now we have cable, so we are at a technological choice point as Douglas Schuler suggested. It is the right approach to cable all rural areas in Africa?” As she pointed out it is most likely that phone based, low-bandwidth application will be fundamental as well.
Africans should be thought of as active producers of technology and content and not as mere passive consumers. In this emerging, highly complex and contradictory, scenario, the public sector can create a fertile environment through laws, policies and regulation which makes it easy for private sector actors to enter the ICT market. Civil society can force the government to act and academics should act as part of the civil society promoting political and technical solutions that keep Africa connected, not isolated.
Warigia concluded her talk by calling our attention to some critical issues:
- Electrification. The rural electrification is a real constraint. It may not be desirable to fill Africa with the same amount of electric consumables that the developed North, Warigia said. We need to think about more sustainable solutions.
- Literacy. How can we use public access points to increase both literacy and digital literacy?
- Gender. We must take into consideration women’s social and cultural constrains in what concerns attending public access points and envision alternative gender based solutions such as allowing them to attend different times and spaces than men.
- Environment. Hardware needs to be able to withstand potentially hostile physical environment.
- Recycling and sustainability. We should be aware of the disposal and recycling of hardware.
Discussion: Government can play a positive role and we can make political choices about technology. Telecenters sustainability is a problem all over the world and according to Warigia if she was to build one she would keep it small and would ask people, namely the women and the elderly, what they really need. A telecenter is a multitask place that should meet the true needs of the community. Warigia stressed some positive examples in what concerns public politics such as the Uganda’s case where the regulation made it easy for private sectors actors to enter ICT market fostering a very competitive market.
]]>Jorge gave an overview of examples of recent and new way of using social networks and the conversations and memes taking place there, including how news spread/and how this data is tracked online.
Jorge started out with describing a Facebook Quizz that students of his had developed - Which teacher of the Communications Dept of the New University of Lisbon are you? There was some controversy around this but it spread rapidly, of course. Jorge then referenced #iranelections—Jorge said that the twitter hashtag is still trending and people have still green profiles even after a month and less activity on iran. The meme is still holding (though Katrin’s editorial comment here is that #iranelection is somehow being artificially kept alive because the number of tweets has actually sharply declined since the demonstrations subsided)
Other examples:
Outlook 2010 - is broken, let’s fix it user campaign - let’s use twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft
You twitface Youtube video—
And see also: http://www.whatthetrend.com/trend/You+Twit+Face
Digg - Kevin Rose founder of Digg who posted the code to crack copy-protected DVDs
New paper analyzing memes online: see www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pubs/quotes-kdd09.pdf -
Memetracking and the Dymanics of the News Cycle
* pulse of mainstream media news/ and then the delayed effect of blogs - 3-9 hour delay in the blog peak
* is there a hive mind happening here - real-time intelligence happening on the web? what is lacking in the hive mind is that we have memory, whereas on the web it’s nothing more than an archive
He closes with Tim Berner’s Lee quote—the web is all about connecting people, no distinction between web 1.0 and 2.0 in the end—we designed the web with interaction and participation in mind
Discussion:
* Discussion of the heartbeat of mainstream media and blog media—is there a difference in quality in the two blips? depends on the extent of the phrase/simpler phrases get copied more?
* Discussion about tech and teachers and the fact that teachers are slow adopters - their students are way ahead in the use of technology/the problem is that we have to teach teachers how to use new media/
* what would you advise to old duffers who have trouble with new tools? Key questions: what are you teaching? how are you teaching? Students teaching their teachers—digital citizenship/younger ones teaching the older ones
* re. Memetracker paper: isn’t media dissemination rather a bow tie—alternative viral flow? Blogs feed the news, news disseminate, blogs reverberate mainstream news…
* there is something in this trend / maybe very similar in more private settings/facebook posts/ but there is no data, of course
“(...) Mas o melhor do mundo são as crianças (...)”—Fernando Pessoa (1888 - 1935)
——
What Pessoa wrote, everybody agrees, I guess, which can be translated to something like: “(...) But the best of the world are the children (...)”
SOME CONTEXT
Digital technologies are changing our world, posing new challenges to societies, citizens, professionals, business, culture, values, communication, (... please add other things here), and in particular, education and children.
The first contact of our kids with digital technologies is being made earlier and earlier… from 13-10-6-4-2 years old.
In several countries, 6 years old kids are receiving mini-laptops, elementary schools are being equipped with technological kits (digital boards, computers, 100Mbps internet connection, digital contents, etc). Altogether, these changes are allowing and promoting transformations in kids’ education, posing new challenges to all involved: students, teachers, parents, publishers, IT professionals, governance, etc.
This is already changing how kids face media, for example, but more change will come, I guess.
(add your ideas…)
SOME QUESTIONS
* what are the challenges we should be prepared to face, as parents, educators, IT professionals, ... ?
* what are the opportunities and threats created by these changes in educational settings?
* what are the pros and cons?
* ... (add your questions)...
SOME NOTES (after discussions)
* technology is influencing pre-teens education: contents, methods, tools
* technology is sometimes a hurdle, but only the first one, probably the easier;
* there are several personal, social and pedagogical hurdles on the process of improving digital literacy of pre-teens under educational settings
* there is a large set of research opportunities on this topic, covering several knowledge areas, from engineering to education and social sciences.
Thanks to all that shared ideas about this topic during ISDT09.
YOUR NOTES
... note text…
your name, contact
... note text…
your name, contact
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Leslie’s Wrap - borrowing Ben’s great idea