363 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2022
  2. Jan 2022
    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2022, January 9). Just a thought on this and the general vaccine mandate debate. As a behavioural scientist currently stuck in Germany where this is a live debate, it strikes me that the thoughts below address only part of the population: Those not currently vaccinated. But what about ... 1/2 [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1480213148032450565

  3. Dec 2021
    1. what companies want is different than what individuals want companies want an invoice companies want something tax deductible 00:24:34 companies want someone that is um keeping the lights on and that is responsive via email so you really have those obligations and one platform that helps with that is open collective 00:24:47 on open collective you can maybe put that burden of being a fiscal host to the maintainers of open collective they have a 501c6 program for 00:25:00 open source projects that acts as a fiscal host which means they will hand do all the invoicing and they will officially be the maintainers and if you as just an open source 00:25:14 maintainer often or a contributor of that project you want to get money from your project you have to send an invoice to open collective and i think that's the best of both worlds again 00:25:26 because it's very transparent progress a process companies are in the loop and you don't have to deal with all the financial stuff at least not yeah 00:25:39 with with companies

      Open Collective offers a valuable service to those organizations which normally fall between the cracks because, for a plurality of reasons, have not formed a normal legal structure. It provides them with the finanicial instruments normally only available to legal entities to accept funding that they normally would not otherwise have access to.

  4. Nov 2021
    1. Social convention, which has for so long worked against us, can if flipped become our greatest source of power, normalising what now seems radical and weird. If we can simultaneously trigger a cascading regime shift in both technology and politics, we might stand a chance. It sounds like a wild hope. But we have no choice. Our survival depends on raising the scale of civil disobedience until we build the greatest mass movement in history, mobilising the 25% who can flip the system.

      This is the core philosophy behind Stop Reset Go, but NOT NECESSARILY just in the direction of civil disobedience. To invest only in that is to put all our eggs in one basket that top down actors will be pressured beyond a certain threshold. It may happen, it may not, or it may just take too long. We must diversify and also invest in systematized bottom-up efforts.

    1. Though firmly rooted in Renaissance culture, Knight's carefully calibrated arguments also push forward to the digital present—engaging with the modern library archives where these works were rebound and remade, and showing how the custodianship of literary artifacts shapes our canons, chronologies, and contemporary interpretative practices.

      This passage reminds me of a conversation on 2021-11-16 at Liquid Margins with Will T. Monroe (@willtmonroe) about using Sönke Ahrens' book Smart Notes and Hypothes.is as a structure for getting groups of people (compared to Ahrens' focus on a single person) to do collection, curation, and creation of open education resources (OER).

      Here Jeffrey Todd Knight sounds like he's looking at it from the perspective of one (or maybe two) creators in conjunction (curator and binder/publisher) while I'm thinking about expanding behond

      This sort of pattern can also be seen in Mortimer J. Adler's group zettelkasten used to create The Great Books of the Western World series as well in larger wiki-based efforts like Wikipedia, so it's not new, but the question is how a teacher (or other leader) can help to better organize a community of creators around making larger works from smaller pieces. Robin DeRosa's example of using OER in the classroom is another example, but there, the process sounded much more difficult and manual.

      This is the sort of piece that Vannevar Bush completely missed as a mode of creation and research in his conceptualization of the Memex. Perhaps we need the "Inventiex" as a mode of larger group means of "inventio" using these methods in a digital setting?

  5. Oct 2021
    1. In the future envisioned here, decentralized networks play the role of governments, municipalities and intentional commons, fostering common goods. It is possible to produce common goods when a big-enough community cooperates to bear the cost of production and its implementation; but this, correspondingly, requires large-scale coordination, and large-scale coordination is generally a very hard problem. In this article we introduce Common Good, a blockchain-based application that solves this problem by enabling the coordination and motivation of different relevant actors for achieving a desired common good, by providing it with a “business model” just as in the profit-seeking sector. Our solution takes inspiration from the Social Impact Bonds (SIB) model.

      A proposal to use decentralized blockchain to make large scale coordination possible.

    1. Lean Canvas

      For the builders collective, I created some tools that are open source and useful for design and social architecture. Other projects are coding challenges to experiment with what is possible on the web.

      This experiment is based on the Lean Canvas, based on the Business Model Canvas from the book Business Model Generation.

      Type in the grey box at the top of the page. Click or tap in the boxes to add the text as a box in each section of the Lean Canvas. Click on the box to delete.

      There is no save functionality, so be sure to take a screenshot. Or roll your own by using the code on Codepen and GitHub.

    1. Apple Podcasts for Creators

      Today, I am learning about podcasting. Where to start? How about Apple?

      First, sign up as an individual, Stephen Bau, under the company name, Builders Collective.

      We're setting up your account.

      This could take up to a day, so check back later. When we're finished, you can start adding shows.


      I wonder why people use foot marks rather than apostrophes in their typography. Apple, you should know better.


      Minutes Later

      There's nothing here — yet.

      You haven't added any shows yet. Click Add Show to get started.


      Choose a Show Type

      You can publish a show on Apple Podcasts with or without an RSS feed, so the first step is to pick the type of show you want to distribute. Note that you’ll be able to add paid subscriber audio to either kind of show.

      Add a show with an RSS feed

      Your show will be available on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you distribute your RSS feed. This is the best option if you want to manage episodes through your podcast hosting provider.

      Add a show without an RSS feed

      Your show will only be available on Apple Podcasts. This is the best option if you want to manage episodes in Apple Podcasts Connect and offer a subscription.

    1. Jamstack

      The legacy version of the Run for Water site designed by Stephen Bau. Featured on Behance.

      This version is built with Jamstack, using Harp and DatoCMS.

      A similar approach could be used for the Co-Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

      A Modest Proposal

      Since the Buckminster Fuller Institute is using Airtable, it would be possible to follow the CSS-Tricks article on Going Jamstack with React, Serverless, and Airtable.

    1. Website by Stephen Bau

      I used a UIkit theme (Trek) for the redesign of the Run for Water site. I transitioned away from Jamstack, because the organization is centred around volunteers, and it was important to empower them to easily make changes to the marketing front end of their organization.

      The WordPress theme has a beautiful interface for managing content. However, it goes against the philosophy of COPE, recommended by Karen McGrane in her presentations on Content in a Zombie Apocalypse.

    1. A retrospective of 50 years as a human being on planet Earth.

      The Art of Noticing

      This is a compilation of articles that I had written as a way to process the changes I was observing in the world and, consequently, in myself as a reaction to the events. I have come to think of this process as the art of noticing. This process is in contrast to the expectation that I should be a productive member of society, a target market, and a passive audience for charismatic leaders: celebrities, billionaires, and politicians.

      • Social: fame
      • Economic: wealth
      • Political: power

      An Agent of Change

      To become an agent of change is to recognize that we are not separate, we are not individuals, we are not cogs in a machine. We are complex and diverse. We are designers. We are a creative, collective, self-organizing, learning community.

      We are in a process of becoming—a being journey:

      • Personal resilience
      • Social influence
      • Economic capacity
      • Political agency
      • Ecological harmony

      This is how we shift from an attention economy to an intention economy. Rather than being oriented toward the failures of the past, the uncertainty of the present, or the worries of the future, in a constant state of anxiety, stress, and fear, we are shifting our consciousness to manifest our intention through perception (senses), cognition (mind), emotion (heart), and action (body). We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We are the builders collective.

      We are one.

    1. This is the abuse of the power of the state to enforce the abuse of power of a tactical military police force to enforce an unlawful provincial court injunction in breach of Indigenous, Canadian, and international law.

      The Canadian genocide operates on the basis of exclusion, division, and disempowerment:

      • Social: learned helplessness
      • Economic: trained incapacities
      • Political: bureaucratic intransigence

      Watch the Canadian Prime Minister make the argument that institutions such as the Federal Government of the Dominion of Canada and the Catholic Church are set in their ways and inherently resistant to change. Change does not come from institutions, designed to maintain the status quo.

      If the issue of changing the name of a building in Parliament is going to take more conversation and more time, clearly time is on the side of Canada, but not on the side of the Indigenous Peoples. Democracy, capitalism, and constitutional monarchy are weapons of the state.

      The goal of white supremacy is to disempower through the ongoing threat of violence to legitimize the social, economic, and political architecture designed to manufacture the consent of the governed to the rule of law and the Crown.

      A culture of learned helplessness, trained incapacities, and bureaucratic intransigence are the social, economic, and political mechanisms of coercion that have worked so effectively over 153 years to design, build, and maintain a genocidal, apartheid state.

      It is not possible to make incremental changes to a killing machine to mitigate the harms. The Nazi regime had to be dismantled. The Canadian genocide ends with the dismantling of the Canadian regime. Declare the claims of the Crown to the land illegitimate. #LandBack

      The solution is simple. But white supremacy is about power. Letting go is hard. Until the mind of the White Supremacist changes, the public relations spectacles will continue, and the violence of the RCMP and the bureaucratic apartheid state will escalate genocide and ecocide.

      Individualism and the illusion of legislative representation disempower the solidarity of collective action, enabling the public consent and complicity in the Canadian genocide with impunity. Change would require agreement, coordination, and collaboration.

      We have a model for change that we can borrow from corporations that have weaponized collective consciousness, action, and governance. The design process has been proven as a successful model for global domination, monopolizing human time, energy, and resources.

      However, with greater disillusionment in the promises of our institutions, we are experiencing multiple systemic failures, leaving us with deep dissatisfaction in the existing reality with no sense of a desirable, feasible, or viable alternative.

      We are all designers. We can reclaim our power from the authoritarians to which we have abdicated our collective power. We can reclaim our social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. Indigenous History: Learning from the past to create a future that works for all

      We invite people to collaborate with us in the process of changing the world by first changing ourselves through the process of design.

      We are exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.

      We will begin by recreating our own realities by starting with an understanding of our relationships with each other and to all living beings and to the universe of shared experiences in which we find ourselves.

      We will begin with an appreciation of the complexity, diversity, and unity of this Creation that binds us to each other as neighbours and kin.

      We acknowledge that we are living on the unceded territories of those who have lived on these lands from time immemorial. We seek to share the good things of this earth, taking only what is given, living in reciprocity by giving back more than what we have been given.

  6. Sep 2021
    1. For the Stop Reset Go project, we are exploring how we achieve a group flow state that can connect us in an experience of deep humanity as we engage in a process of human inner transformation and social outer transformation. The goal of the project is bottom-up whole system change.

      The concept of a builders collective is to document what people are already doing to build a world that works for 100% of life.

    1. We are all designers

      A design brief for a project to reimagine our social architecture. The Design Science Studio is the new Bauhaus, the community, the builders collective who are building a world that works for 100% of life. The Stop Reset Go is the project that is exploring how we imagine, design, and build the kind of world that we want to live in. How do we empower humanity to be the designers who can engage in a process of bottom-up whole system change?

    1. The minds of other people can also supplement our limited individual memory. Daniel Wegner, a psychologist at Harvard, named this collective remembering “transactive memory.” As he explained it, “Nobody remembers everything. Instead, each of us in a couple or group remembers some things personally — and then can remember much more by knowing who else might know what we don’t.” A transactive memory system can effectively multiply the amount of information to which an individual has access. Organizational research has found that groups that build a strong transactive memory structure — in which all members of the team have a clear and accurate sense of what their teammates know — perform better than groups for which that structure is less defined.

      Transactive memory is how a group encodes, stores, and shares knowledge. Members of a group may be aware of the portions of knowledge that others possess which can make them more efficient.

      How can we link this to Cesar Hidalgo's ideas about the personbyte, etc.?

      How would this idea have potentially helped oral cultures?

      She uses the example of a trauma resuscitation team helping to shorten hospital stays, but certainly there are many examples in the corporate world where corporate knowledge is helpful in decreasing time scales for particular outcomes.

    1. Building upon Sweeney and Rhinesmith’s approach, and bringing the conceptualizations of care [14,33,34], I propose the following framework:I define social practices as the acts of care performed by individuals and afforded by CTCs in order to promote self and community needs;Based on this study’s ethnography, I categorize social practices into three groups:Care work: the invisible work performed by the infomediaries, or any CTC worker, as described by Sweeney and Rhinesmith;Peer-to-peer care: individuals (CTC users) collaborating with each other so they can inform, take decisions, and strive towards their individual needs; andCommunity care: individuals (CTC users and infomediaries) acting collaboratively or individually in order to promote community wellbeing.It is important to emphasize that social practices also include other social acts that are not necessarily “care”, but given the interactions observed in the CTCs in the favelas, I chose an explicit care-focused lens as the basis of this framework in order to breakdown the social practices in a way that could help make a case for the importance of the CTCs beyond their ICT-focused roles.
  7. Aug 2021
    1. Currently, there is no formal or mandated monetary threshold applied to determine what is, or is not, considered material in the sustainability context. Many companies, especially large publicly traded ones, identify their own unique set of sustainability priorities on a regular basis, and include them in their sustainability reports and related disclosures.

      This is an opportunity for collective action to complement corporate action. Such collective action will be more effective if closely coordinated with individual actors as well as broader umbrella sectors, as in this particular case.

  8. Jul 2021
  9. Jun 2021
    1. intelligence collective réflexive

      Il ne s’agirait donc pas de simplement devenir collectivement «plus intelligent» (au sens d’efficace, dans un strict paradigme scientifique et technique pour accélérer le fonctionnement de l’économie), mais aussi réflexif: réfléchir aux conditions de cette société renouvelée, en proie à de nouvelles dynamiques de pouvoir extrêmement concentrées et asymétriques.

  10. May 2021
  11. Apr 2021
    1. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough.We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women's lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.

      pls read. u hate neo/liberal representation politics. not identity politics.

    1. Thus,understanding adolescents’subjective success perceptions and developing autonomysupportive learning environments would enable educators to be more responsive tostudents’perspectives and to tailor their success-based language in more meaningful,relevant, and psychologically healthy ways.

      Note

  12. Feb 2021
  13. Dec 2020
    1. les chercheurs en sciences humaines doivent donner l’exemple – dans leur pratique ! – d’une production de sens qui s’offre à la connaissance de la manière la plus transparente possible

      Injonction aux faiseurs de connaissance – autre morceau du programme de l’intelligence collective de Pierre Lévy?

      versant éthique?

  14. Oct 2020
  15. link-springer-com.uaccess.univie.ac.at link-springer-com.uaccess.univie.ac.at
  16. Sep 2020
  17. Aug 2020
  18. Jul 2020
  19. Jun 2020
    1. But tagging, alone, is still not good enough. Even our many tags become useless if/when their meaning changes (in our minds) by the time we go retrieve the data they point to. This could be years after we tagged something. Somehow, whether manually or automatically, we need agents and tools to help us keep our tags updated and relevant.

      search engines usually can surface that faster (less cognitive load than recalling what and where you store something) than you retrieve it in your second brain (abundance info, do can always retrieve from external source in a JIT fashion)

    1. Just as journalists should be able to write about anything they want, comedians should be able to do the same and tell jokes about anything they please

      where's the line though? every output generates a feedback loop with the hivemind, turning into input to ourselves with our cracking, overwhelmed, filters

      it's unrealistic to wish everyone to see jokes are jokes, to rely on journalists to generate unbiased facts, and politicians as self serving leeches, err that's my bias speaking

  20. May 2020
  21. Apr 2020
    1. Le public acquiert ainsi une nouvelle fonction : celle d’instance critique auquel doit s’exposer le pouvoir.

      fonction de l’espace public: un appareil critique (la critique est productrice d’espace public).

      le pouvoir, pour maintenir sa légitimité, doit être exposé à la sphère publique et se montrer à lui avec transparence; il doit pouvoir être challengé; s’il ne résiste pas à la critique publique, il ne mérite pas d’être en place.

      la possibilité de challenger l’instance publique est comparable à la publication des protocoles de sécurité utilisées dans le domaine public (ex. SSL/TLS): la sécurité des contenus encryptés tirent justement leur robustesse du fait que leur algorithme est public; quiconque pourrait le challenger à tout moment, si bien qu’on s’assure d’en éliminer toutes les failles (et l’intelligence collective peut être mise à contribution, le cas échéant).

  22. Dec 2019
    1. “NextNow Collaboratory is an interesting example of a new kind of collective intelligence: an Internet-enabled, portable social network, easily transferable from one social cause to another.”

      Sense Collective's TotemSDK brings together tools, protocols, platform integrations and best practices for extending collective intelligence beyond our current capabilities. A number of cryptographic primitives have emerged which support the amazing work of projects like the NextNow Collaboratory in exciting ways that help to upgrade the general purpose social computing substrate which make tools like hypothes.is so valuable.

    1. Four databases of citizen science and crowdsourcing projects —  SciStarter, the Citizen Science Association (CSA), CitSci.org, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (the Wilson Center Commons Lab) — are working on a common project metadata schema to support data sharing with the goal of maintaining accurate and up to date information about citizen science projects.  The federal government is joining this conversation with a cross-agency effort to promote citizen science and crowdsourcing as a tool to advance agency missions. Specifically, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), in collaboration with the U.S. Federal Community of Practice for Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing (FCPCCS),is compiling an Open Innovation Toolkit containing resources for federal employees hoping to implement citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. Navigation through this toolkit will be facilitated in part through a system of metadata tags. In addition, the Open Innovation Toolkit will link to the Wilson Center’s database of federal citizen science and crowdsourcing projects.These groups became aware of their complementary efforts and the shared challenge of developing project metadata tags, which gave rise to the need of a workshop.  

      Sense Collective's Climate Tagger API and Pool Party Semantic Web plug-in are perfectly suited to support The Wilson Center's metadata schema project. Creating a common metadata schema that is used across multiple organizations working within the same domain, with similar (and overlapping) data and data types, is an essential step towards realizing collective intelligence. There is significant redundancy that consumes limited resources as organizations often perform the same type of data structuring. Interoperability issues between organizations, their metadata semantics and serialization methods, prevent cumulative progress as a community. Sense Collective's MetaGrant program is working to provide a shared infastructure for NGO's and social impact investment funds and social impact bond programs to help rapidly improve the problems that are being solved by this awesome project of The Wilson Center. Now let's extend the coordinated metadata semantics to 1000 more organizations and incentivize the citizen science volunteers who make this possible, with a closer connection to the local benefits they produce through their efforts. With integration into Social impact Bond programs and public/private partnerships, we are able to incentivize collective action in ways that match the scope and scale of the problems we face.

  23. Nov 2019
  24. Jun 2019
  25. Apr 2019
  26. Feb 2019
    1. In amplifying our intelligence, we are applying the principle of synergistic structuring that was followed by natural evolution in developing the basic human capabilities. What we have done in the development of our augmentation means is to construct a superstructure that is a synthetic extension of the natural structure upon which it is built. In a very real sense, as represented by the steady evolution of our augmentation means, the development of "artificial intelligence" has been going on for centuries.

      Engelbart explicitly noted that what he was trying to do was not just hack culture, which is what significant innovations accomplish, but to hack the process by which biological and cultural co-evolution has bootstrapped itself to this point. Culture used the capabilities provided by biological evolution -- language, thumbs, etc. -- to improve human ways of living much faster than biological evolution can do, by not just inventing, but passing along to each other and future generations the knowledge of what was invented and how to invent. Engelbart proposes an audio-visual-tactile interface to computing as a tool for consciously accelerating the scope and power of individual and collective intelligence.

    2. Our culture has evolved means for us to organize the little things we can do with our basic capabilities so that we can derive comprehension from truly complex situations, and accomplish the processes of deriving and implementing problem solutions. The ways in which human capabilities are thus extended are here called augmentation means, and we define four basic classes of them: 2a4 Artifacts—physical objects designed to provide for human comfort, for the manipulation of things or materials, and for the manipulation of symbols.2a4a Language—the way in which the individual parcels out the picture of his world into the concepts that his mind uses to model that world, and the symbols that he attaches to those concepts and uses in consciously manipulating the concepts ("thinking"). 2a4b Methodology—the methods, procedures, strategies, etc., with which an individual organizes his goal-centered (problem-solving) activity. 2a4c Training—the conditioning needed by the human being to bring his skills in using Means 1, 2, and 3 to the point where they are operationally effective. 2a4d The system we want to improve can thus be visualized as a trained human being together with his artifacts, language, and methodology. The explicit new system we contemplate will involve as artifacts computers, and computer-controlled information-storage, information-handling, and information-display devices. The aspects of the conceptual framework that are discussed here are primarily those relating to the human being's ability to make significant use of such equipment in an integrated system.

      To me, this is the most prescient of Engelbart's future visions, and the seed for future study of culture-technology co-evolution. I talked with Engelbart about this passage over the years and we agreed that although the power of the artifacts, from RAM to CPU speed to network bandwidth, had improved by the billionfold since 1962, the "softer" parts of the formula -- the language, methodology, and training -- have not advanced so much. Certainly language, training methods and pedagogy, and collaborative strategies have evolved with the growth and spread of digital media, but are still lagging. H/LAMT interests me even more today than it did thirty years ago because Engelbart unknowingly forecast the fundamental elements of what has come to be called cultural-biological co-evolution. I gave a TED talk in 2005, calling for an interdisciplinary study of human cooperation -- and obstacles to cooperation. It seems that in recent years an interdisciplinary understanding has begun to emerge. Joseph Henrich at Harvard, for one, in his recent book, The Secret of Our Success, noted:

      Drawing insights from lost European Explorers, clever chimpanzees, hunter-gatherers, cultural neuroscience, ancient bones and the human genome, Henrich shows that it’s not our general intelligence, innate brain power, or specialized mental abilities that explain our success. Instead, it’s our collective brains, which arise from a combination of our ability to learn selectively from each and our sociality. Our collective brains, which often operate outside of any individual’s conscious awareness, gradually produce increasingly complex, nuanced and subtle technological, linguistic and social products over generations.

      Tracking this back into the mist of our evolutionary past, and to the remote corners of the globe, Henrich shows how this non-genetic system of cultural inheritance has long driven human genetic evolution. By producing fire, cooking, water containers, tracking know-how, plant knowledge, words, hunting strategies and projectiles, culture-driven genetic evolution expanded our brains, shaped our anatomy and physiology, and influenced our psychology, making us into the world’s only living cultural species. Only by understanding cultural evolution, can we understand human genetic evolution.

      Henrich, Boyd, and RIcherson wrote, about the social fundamentals that distinguish human culture's methods of evolving collective intelligence in The Origin and Evolution of Culture:

      Surely, without punishment, language, technology, individual intelligence and inventiveness, ready establishment of reciprocal arrangements, prestige systems and solutions to games of coordination, our societies would take on a distinctly different cast. Thus, a major constraint on explanations of human sociality is its systemic structure

  27. Jan 2019
    1. It should be no surprise recognizing the problematic-theoretical simi­larities between disaster research and its "half-sibling" (e.g., see Wenger 1987), collective behavior. Both disaster research and collective behavior are at a theoretical standstill (e.g., see Aguirre and Quarantelli 1983), and both still rely upon every-day language rather than a broader scheme for describing events (e.g., see Weller and Quarantelli 1973, McPhail 1992). Works by Kreps and Bosworth (1994) and Dombrowsky (1981; 1987), (and perhaps Barton's 1970 classic work) reflect the theoretical attention disaster research needs to build.

      Connects crisis informatics research with collective behavior.

      I wonder though does Neal define collective behavior and collection action differently?

      Look at these citations:

      Quarantelli, E.L. 1985. Emergent Citizen Groups in Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Activities. Final Report 33. Newark, Delaware: Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware

      Turner, Ralph and Lewis Killian. 1987. Collective Behavior. Third Edition. Engle­wood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

      Weller, Jack M. and E. L. Quarantelli. 1973. "Neglected Characteristics of Collec­tive Behavior," American Journal of Sociology 79:665-85.

      Wenger, Dennis. 1987. "Collective Behavior and Disaster Research." Pp. 213-237 in Sociology of Disasters, edited by R. Dynes, B. De Marchi and C. Pelanda. Milan, Italy: Franco Angeli.

    2. Also, with disaster research having strong theoretical ties with the study of collective behavior(Wenger 1987), and with the field of collective behavior often looking at issues related to social change {e.g., riots, social move­ments), another link between disasters and social change has implicitly

      Neal connects concerns about disaster-driven social change and the natural desire for people to respond via some collective action impulse.

      Nice segue into SBTF as collection action motivated by social change

    1. By examiningwork practices, and tracing how those practices are reified in the social-technical organization of a group that is forming and stabilizing as they do the work, we learn not just what this particular group did, but also how the mechanisms by which collective action in digital environments are organizedbottom-up. We also learn how those lessonsaregraduated into prescriptivetop-down direction to sustain and direct future action

      Interesting frame of reference for this study that also helps to unpack the contribution of the SBTF research.

      Perhaps Elinor Ostrom's work could be helpful here too.

  28. Sep 2018
    1. Perpetual progress is a strong statement of the transhumanist commitment to seek “more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an open-ended lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to continuing development. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities as individuals, as organizations, and as a species. Growing in healthy directions without bound.”

      The author further identify the true meaning of transhumanism as it is now focusing more of a mesh making all humans quite uniform, taking away culture and amplifying the idea of the collective being a single organism. The authors are more so repeating themselves as it is similar to previous points. The repetition may be there to reinforce the claim of the collective being a single organism. It is rather interesting that it diverse from promoting individualism where people gets to have their own culture and political ideologies, the author is effectively saying that humans should not have a mind of their own but interlinked with others to move within a direction with efficiency.

  29. Aug 2018
    1. "... groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.” [41]

      Collective intelligence definition.

      Per the authors, "collective intelligence is a superset of social computing and crowdsourcing, because both are defined in terms of social behavior."

      Collective intelligence is differentiated from human computation because the latter doesn't require a group.

      It is differentiated from crowdsourcing because it doesn't require a public crowd and it can happen without an open call.

    1. hus it becomes possible to see how ques-tions around data use need to shift from asking what is in the data, to include discussions of how the data is structured, and how this structure codifies value systems and social practices, subject positions and forms of visibility and invisi-bility (and thus forms of surveillance), along with the very ideas of crisis, risk governance and preparedness. Practices around big data produce and perpetuate specific forms of social engagement as well as understandings of the areas affected and the people being served.

      How data structure influences value systems and social practices is a much-needed topic of inquiry.

    2. Big data is not just about knowing more. It could be – and should be – about knowing better or about changing what knowing means. It is an ethico- episteme-ontological- political matter. The ‘needle in the haystack’ metaphor conceals the fact that there is no such thing as one reality that can be revealed. But multiple, lived are made through mediations and human and technological assemblages. Refugees’ realities of intersecting intelligences are shaped by the ethico- episteme-ontological politics of big data.

      Big, sweeping statement that helps frame how big data could be better conceptualized as a complex, socially contextualized, temporal artifact.

    3. Burns (2015) builds on this to investigate how within digital humanitarianism discourses, big data produce and perform subjects ‘in need’ (individuals or com-munities affected by crises) and a humanitarian ‘saviour’ community that, in turn, seeks answers through big data

      I don't understand what Burns is arguing here. Who is he referring to claims that DHN is a "savior" or "the solution" to crisis response?

      "Big data should therefore be be conceptualized as a framing of what can be known about a humanitarian crisis, and how one is able to grasp that knowledge; in short, it is an epistemology. This epistemology privileges knowledges and knowledge- based practices originating in remote geographies and de- emphasizes the connections between multiple knowledges.... Put another way, this configuration obscures the funding, resource, and skills constraints causing imperfect humanitarian response, instead positing volunteered labor as ‘the solution.’ This subjectivity formation carves a space in which digital humanitarians are necessary for effective humanitarian activities." (Burns 2015: 9–10)

    4. Crises are often not a crisis of information. It is often not a lack of data or capacity to analyse it that prevents ‘us’ from pre-venting disasters or responding effectively. Risk management fails because there is a lack of a relational sense of responsibility. But this does not have to be the case. Technologies that are designed to support collaboration, such as what Jasanoff (2007) terms ‘technologies of humility’, can be better explored to find ways of framing data and correlations that elicit a greater sense of relational responsibility and commitment.

      Is it "a lack of relational sense of responsibility" in crisis response (state vs private sector vs public) or is it the wicked problem of power, class, social hierarchies, etc.?

      "... ways of framing data and correlations that elicit a greater sense of responsibility and commitment."

      That could have a temporal component to it to position urgency, timescape, horizon, etc.

    5. In some ways this constitutes the production of ‘liquid resilience’ – a deflection of risk to the individuals and communities affected which moves us from the idea of an all-powerful and knowing state to that of a ‘plethora of partial projects and initiatives that are seeking to harness ICTs in the service of better knowing and governing individuals and populations’ (Ruppert 2012: 118)

      This critique addresses surveillance state concerns about glue-ing datasets together to form a broader understanding of aggregate social behavior without the necessary constraints/warnings about social contexts and discontinuity between data.

      Skimmed the Ruppert paper, sadly doesn't engage with time and topologies.

    6. Indeed, as Chandler (2015: 9) also argues, crowdsourcing of big data does not equate to a democratisation of risk assessment or risk governance:

      Beyond this quote, Chandler (in engaging crisis/disaster scenarios) argues that Big Data may be more appropriately framed as community reflexive knowledge than causal knowledge. That's an interesting idea.

      *"Thus, It would be more useful to see Big Data as reflexive knowledge rather than as causal knowledge. Big Data cannot help explain global warming but it can enable individuals and household to measure their own energy consumption through the datafication of household objects and complex production and supply chains. Big Data thereby datafies or materialises an individual or community’s being in the world. This reflexive approach works to construct a pluralised and multiple world of self-organising and adaptive processes. The imaginary of Big Data is that the producers and consumers of knowledge and of governance would be indistinguishable; where both knowing and governing exist without external mediation, constituting a perfect harmonious and self-adapting system: often called ‘community resilience’. In this discourse, increasingly articulated by governments and policy-makers, knowledge of causal connections is no longer relevant as communities adapt to the real-time appearances of the world, without necessarily understanding them."

      "Rather than engaging in external understandings of causality in the world, Big Data works on changing social behaviour by enabling greater adaptive reflexivity. If, through Big Data, we could detect and manage our own biorhythms and know the effects of poor eating or a lack of exercise, we could monitor our own health and not need costly medical interventions. Equally, if vulnerable and marginal communities could ‘datafy’ their own modes of being and relationships to their environments they would be able to augment their coping capacities and resilience without disasters or crises occurring. In essence, the imaginary of Big Data resolves the essential problem of modernity and modernist epistemologies, the problem of unintended consequences or side-effects caused by unknown causation, through work on the datafication of the self in its relational-embeddedness.42 This is why disasters in current forms of resilience thinking are understood to be ‘transformative’: revealing the unintended consequences of social planning which prevented proper awareness and responsiveness. Disasters themselves become a form of ‘datafication’, revealing the existence of poor modes of self-governance."*

      Downloaded Chandler paper. Cites Meier quite a bit.

    7. ut Burns finds that humanitarian staff often describe the local communities and ‘crowds’ as the ‘eyes, ears and sensors’ of UN staff, which does not index a genuine collaborative relationship. He states: ‘In all these cases, the discourse talks of putting local people “in the driving seat” when in reality the direction of the journey has already been decided’ (Burns 2015: 48). Burns (2015: 42) also notes that this leads to a transformation of social responsibility into individual responsibility.Neoliberalism’s promotion of free market norms is therefore much more than the simple ideology of free market economics. It is a specific form of social rule that institutionalises a rationality of competition, enterprise indi-vidualised responsibility. Although the state ‘steps back’ and encourages the free conduct of individuals, this is achieved through active intervention into civil society and the opening up of new areas to the logic of private enter-prise and individual initiative. This is the logic behind the rise of resilience

      Burns criticism of humanitarian response as not truly collaborative and an abdication of the state's responsibility for social welfare to the private sector.

    8. The UNHCR has even called for the refugees themselves to also develop their own data solutions and ideas (see Palmer 2014) as a way to help build their ideologies into the data infrastructures and thus bring their prisms into view. This could create a richer situational awareness and a better ability to understand and deal with unfolding and future crises by supporting resilient communities through giving them the means of data producing and sharing

      Participatory-design and community-centered design could be very helpful in this regard but this argument seems overstated.

      Evokes concerns about "distant suffering" (see: Chouliaraki, 2008): Who gets to share? What community? Refugees are not homogeneous.

    9. Doing so switches the discourse from vulnerability, where there is a need for external protection mobilised from above to come in and rescue the refugees, to one of resilience, where self- sufficiency and autonomy are part of the equation (Meier 2013).

      The dichotomy between state-led response vs community-coordinated response as the only ways to deliver aid seems unnecessarily limited.

      It can be both and other models/new ideas.

      Conflict- and persecution-driven humanitarian needs are often rife with complexity and receive scant attention outside of the humanitarian INGO sector.

    10. Yet, at the same time as power is exercised by both the state and corporations, power is gathering from the bottom up in new ways. In disaster response, a dynamic interplay between publics and experts is captured by the concept of social collective intelligence (Büscher et al. 2014); a disruptive innovative force that is challenging the social, economic, political and organisational practices that shape disaster response.

      Cited paper references social media and DHN work.

    11. Since the data is already being collected on a regular basis by ubiquitous private firms, it is thought to contain information that will increase opportunities for intelligence gathering and thereby security. This marks a shift from surveillance to ‘dataveillance’ (van Dijck 2014), where the impetus for data processing is no longer motivated by specific purposes or suspicions, but opportunistic discovery of anomalies that can be investigated. For crisis management this could mean benefits such as richer situation awareness, increased capacity for risk assess-ment, anticipation and prediction, as well as more agile response

      Dataveillance definition.

      The supposed benefits for crisis management don't correspond to the earlier criticisms about data quality, loss of contextualization, and predictive analytics accuracy.

      The following paragraph clears up some of the overly optimistic promises. Perhaps this section is simply overstated for rhetorical purposes.

    12. lthough Snowden’s revelations shocked the world and prompted calls for a public debate on issues of privacy and transparency

      I understand the desire to use a topical hook to explain a complex topic but referring to the highly contentious Snowden scandal as a frame seems risky (alienating) and could potentially undermine an important argument about the surveillance state should new revelations be revealed about his motives/credibility.

    13. While seemingly avoiding the traps of exerting top- down power over people the state does not yet have formal control over, and simultaneously providing support for self- determination and choice to empower individuals for self- sufficiency rather than defining them as vulnerable and passive recipients of top- down protection (Meier 2013), tying individual aid to mobile tracking puts refugees in a situation where their security is dependent upon individual choice and the private sector. Apart from disrupting traditional dynamics of responsibility for aid and protection, public–private sharing of intel-ligence brings new forms of dataveillance

      If the goal is to improve rapid/efficient response to those in need, is it necessarily only a dichotomy of top-down institutional action vs private sector/market-driven reaction? Surely, we can do better than this.

      Data/predictive analytics abuses by the private sector are legion.

      How does social construction vs technological determinism fit here? In what ways are the real traumas suffered by crisis-affected people not being taken into account during the response/relief/resiliency phases?

    14. However, with these big data collections, the focus becomes not the individu-al’s behaviour but social and economic insecurities, vulnerabilities and resilience in relation to the movement of such people. The shift acknowledges that what is surveilled is more complex than an individual person’s movements, communica-tions and actions over time.

      The shift from INGO emergency response/logistics to state-sponsored, individualized resilience via the private sector seems profound here.

      There's also a subtle temporal element here of surveilling need and collecting data over time.

      Again, raises serious questions about the use of predictive analytics, data quality/classification, and PII ethics.

    15. Andrejevic and Gates (2014: 190) suggest that ‘the target becomes the hidden patterns in the data, rather than particular individuals or events’. National and local authorities are not seeking to monitor individuals and discipline their behaviour but to see how many people will reach the country and when, so that they can accommodate them, secure borders, and identify long- term social out-looks such as education, civil services, and impacts upon the host community (Pham et al. 2015).

      This seems like a terribly naive conclusion about mass data collection by the state.

      Also:

      "Yet even if capacities to analyse the haystack for needles more adequately were available, there would be questions about the quality of the haystack, and the meaning of analysis. For ‘Big Data is not self-explanatory’ (Bollier 2010: 13, in boyd and Crawford 2012). Neither is big data necessarily good data in terms of quality or relevance (Lesk 2013: 87) or complete data (boyd and Crawford 2012)."

    16. as boyd and Crawford argue, ‘without taking into account the sample of a data set, the size of the data set is meaningless’ (2012: 669). Furthermore, many tech-niques used by the state and corporations in big data analysis are based on probabilistic prediction which, some experts argue, is alien to, and even incom-prehensible for, human reasoning (Heaven 2013). As Mayer-Schönberger stresses, we should be ‘less worried about privacy and more worried about the abuse of probabilistic prediction’ as these processes confront us with ‘profound ethical dilemmas’ (in Heaven 2013: 35).

      Primary problems to resolve regarding the use of "big data" in humanitarian contexts: dataset size/sample, predictive analytics are contrary to human behavior, and ethical abuses of PII.

    17. Surveillance studies have tracked a shift from discipline to control (Deleuze 1992; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Lyon 2014) exemplified by the shift from monitoring confined populations (through technologies such as the panopticon) to using new technologies to keep track of mobile populations.

      Design implication for ICT4D and ICT for humanitarian response -- moving beyond controlled environment surveillance to ubiquitous and omnipresent.

    18. As Coyle and Meier (2009) argue, disasters are often seen as crises of information where it is vital to make sure that people know where to find potable water, how to ask for help, where their relatives are, or if their home is at risk; as well as providing emergency response and human-itarian agencies with information about affected populations. Such a quest for information for ‘security’, in turn, provides fertile ground for a quest for technological solutions, such as big data, which open up opportunities for the extended surveillance of everyday life. The assumption is that if only enough information could be gathered and exchanged, preparedness, resilience and control would follow. This is particularly pertinent with regard to mobile pop-ulations (Adey and Kirby 2016)

      The Information is Aid perspective that drives my research agenda.

    19. hird, at this juncture, control is being equated with visibility and visibility with personal security. But how these individuals are made visible matters for both privacy and security, let alone the politics of conflating refugees, migration and terrorism. Indeed, working with specific data framing mechanisms affects how the causes and effects of disasters are identified and what elements and people are considered (Frickel 2008

      A finer point on threat surveillance that stems from how classifications and categories are framed.

      This also gets at post-colonial interpretations of people, places, and events.

      See: Winner, Do Artifacts Have Politics? See: Bowker and Star, Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. See: Irani, Post-Colonial Computing

    20. There is an uneasy coming together of diverse computational and human intelligences in these intersections, and the ambiguous nature of intelligence – understood, on the one hand, as a capacity for perceiving, learning and under-standing and, on the other, as information obtained for strategic purposes – marks complex relationships between ‘good’ and ‘dark’ aspects of big data, surveil-lance and crisis management.

      The promise and peril of gathering collective intelligence, surveillance, and capturing big data during humanitarian crises.

    1. Although peer production is central to social scientific and legal researchon collective intelligence, not all examples of collective intelligence created inonline systems are peer production. First, (1) collective intelligence can in-volve centralized control over goal-setting and execution of tasks.

      Not all collective intelligence is peer production.

      Peer production must adhere to values: de-centralized control, broad range of motives/incentives and FLOSS/creative commons rights.

    2. Consistent with this exam-ple, foundational social scientific research relevant to understanding collec-tive intelligence has focused on three central concerns: (1) explaining the or-ganization and governance of decentralized projects, (2) understanding themotivation of contributors in the absence of financial incentives or coerciveobligations, and (3) evaluating the quality of the products generated throughcollective intelligence systems.

      Focus of related work in collective intelligence studies:

      • organizational governance • motives • product quality

    3. Historically,researchers in diverse fields such as communication, sociology, law, and eco-nomics have argued that effective human systems organize people through acombination of hierarchical structures (e.g., bureaucracies), completely dis-tributed coordination mechanisms (e.g., markets), and social institutions ofvarious kinds (e.g., cultural norms). However, the rise of networked systemsand online platforms for collective intelligence has upended many of the as-sumptions and findings from this earlier research.

      Benkler argues that the process, motives, and cultural norms of online network-driven knowledge work are different than systems previously studied and should be re-evaluated.

  30. Jul 2018
    1. This point ties into the conceptualisation of time as collec-tive [29] and entangled [43]. The infrastructure that sup-ports a 24/7 society is one that relies on people as well as technologies, the conventional nine-to-five work rhythm, for example, being underpinned by people working shifts outside of these hours.

      How are the concepts of collective and entangled time reflected in virtual social coordination, if at all? Is it the same, similar or something wholly different?

    2. How can we design for time as collective and interdependent, rather than individualised on the one hand, or explicitly scheduled on the other? What does it mean to position collective time not as something that is achieved when people come together, but as a set of relationships through which they are connected? Both Sharma and Mazmanian and Erickson raise this challenge while highlighting the difficulty in addressing it; neither offer a solution.

      The big question!

      Design implication: One advantage that SBTF has is that its work is very relationship-oriented.

  31. Jun 2018
    1. "When tasks require high coordination because the work is highly interdependent, having more contributors can increase process losses, reducing the effectiveness of the group below what individual members could optimally accomplish". Having a team too large the overall effectiveness may suffer even when the extra contributors increase the resources. In the end the overall costs from coordination might overwhelm other costs.
    2. Research performed by Tapscott and Williams has provided a few examples of the benefits of collective intelligence to business:[38] Talent utilization At the rate technology is changing, no firm can fully keep up in the innovations needed to compete. Instead, smart firms are drawing on the power of mass collaboration to involve participation of the people they could not employ. This also helps generate continual interest in the firm in the form of those drawn to new idea creation as well as investment opportunities.[38] Demand creation Firms can create a new market for complementary goods by engaging in open source community. Firms also are able to expand into new fields that they previously would not have been able to without the addition of resources and collaboration from the community. This creates, as mentioned before, a new market for complementary goods for the products in said new fields.[38] Costs reduction Mass collaboration can help to reduce costs dramatically. Firms can release a specific software or product to be evaluated or debugged by online communities. The results will be more personal, robust and error-free products created in a short amount of time and costs. New ideas can also be generated and explored by collaboration of online communities creating opportunities for free R&D outside the confines of the company.[38]
    3. While modern systems benefit from larger group size, the serialized process has been found to introduce substantial noise that distorts the collective output of the group. In one significant study of serialized collective intelligence, it was found that the first vote contributed to a serialized voting system can distort the final result by 34%
  32. Apr 2018
    1. Thus the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut; and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property, without the assignation or consent of any body. The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them.

      It would be very interesting to discuss this and the surrounding passages in light of the armed standoff that occurred in either Oregon or Washington about a year ago regarding the use of federal lands for grazing purposes by the local ranchers.

  33. Oct 2017
  34. Jun 2017
    1. a collective, a community of similarly minded people who helped Sam learn and meet the very particular set of needs that he had

      In participatory cultures, this is also called an affinity group. We share a set of values and interests, and end up learning from one another based on this group. What collectives do you belong to?

    1. L’expérience littéraire du Général Instin n’est sans doute pas unique. Instin n’invente évidemment pas l’écriture collective, le déplacement des formes et leurs interrelations. En revanche, la durée dans laquelle s’inscrit le projet lui donne une épaisseur et une dimension rare sinon inédite.
  35. Dec 2016
  36. Nov 2016
    1. Microsoft Confirms Its Chinese-Language Chatbot Filters Certain Topics

      What has humanity come to -- Micrsoft, one of America's leading computer companies, is selling China network AI's that help enforce Communist censorship?

      We cannot stop other countries from censoring their net, and we should let American vendors sell into nets censored by local law. But -- if we care for democracy and anything even approaching America's current relatively wide equality of power between humans -- we better show the world that a nation with a substantially uncensored, AI-amplified, democratic network can kick butt. Otherwise a democratic human future in the rapidly approaching age of machine superintelligence looks unlikely.

      So let's use collective media, collective intelligence, and a basic set of collective human values to create an AI amplified superdemocracy.

      The AI singularity is rapidly approaching. Machines that can do virtually everything humans do much faster and better than humans are probably only 5 to 15 years away. If you care at all for anybody, including yourself, that may be living then -- it is important for you that machine superintelligence happen well for humanity. As I wrote in 2010 in an article entitled "Collective Intelligence -- Our Only Hope for Surviving the Singularity":

      "The Singularity will NOT occur in a vacuum.

      "It will NOT occur in a realm of pure science, engineering, or philosophy. It will NOT occur in one instant, one year, or one decade.

      "Instead, it WILL occur --- over multiple decades --- in the real world --- one dominated by struggles for --- personal --- corporate --- political --- and national --- survival, money, and power. How the Singularity's wildly transformative technologies will be developed and deployed will be decided largely by collective entities --- by corporations --- governments --- political parties --- militaries --- bureaucracies --- interest groups --- criminal gangs --- the media --- and public opinion."

      So -- if we want the future to be anything other than a sci-fi horror movie -- job one should be using the net and AI to make America and, ultimately humanity, collectively superintelligent.

  37. Sep 2016
  38. Jan 2016
    1. We are each making interventions around education that stress collective rather than individualized, personalized, or privatized modes of learning. For me, a participatory learning environment is one that respects and values the contributions of each participant, whether teacher, student, or someone from the outside community.

      I do not see collective learning moving away from personalised learning. I can choose to participate in any learning activity (such as this one)....that's my choice...yet I am also choosing to work collectively (hopefully).

    1. convention collective nationale Judicial branch: Supreme Court of Appeals or Cour de Cassation, judges are appointed by the president from nominations of the High Council of the Judiciary; Constitutional Council or Conseil Constitutionnel, three members appointed by the president, three members appointed by the president of the National Assembly, and three appointed by the president of the Senate; Council of State or Conseil d'Etat.