Cognitive surplus

I watched the TED talk by Clay Shirkey on how social media can make history.  In both talks, he discussed the idea that people are producing knowledge and information.  In the talk about social media making history, he used the examples of the Twitter reports on the earthquake in China, and the destruction of schools and death of school children. People in China tweeted about the earthquake and its destruction even before the government reported on it.  It reminded me of the 2011 green revolution in Iran which was mainly being transmitted via Twitter. I remember following Twitter closely at that time, as it was providing minute-by-minute information about the revolution.
Shirkey's talk about cognitive surplus was equally interesting and informative.  He discussed the platform Ushahidi, which gathers reports from the field, aggregates them, puts them on a map and makes them public.  this kind of open source platform is now being used to report on snow clean up in Washington DC and was used to report on the earthquake in Haiti.  I can think of many uses for it in our region - to report racist attacks, car accidents, etc.  He emphasized the notion that we have trillion hours a year of free time, and that with the opportunity, we like to create and share. 

I will end this post with a comment about wiki, and its banishing of editors from gender related articles. While I don't know what gamergate it, and I don't feel like looking it up, I think wiki needs to recruit some more women editors. Only one in ten of its editors are women!

TED talks

The TED talk by Yochai Benkler was quite interesting, and it shocked me how old that TED talk is.  I realize that it's taking 10 years at least for this concept of knowledge sharing, collaborative social production, peer production, open source, etc, to get rooted. In many ways, ten years later, I realized that this is so much a part of our culture, and not just the culture of the Digital Generation, but more and more, it has become  the culture of those who are Digital Migrants.   Probably about 15 years ago, when buying a new computer, I received a CD with an enyclopedia on it. It never worked, but it was considered then something new and different. Yochai Benkler reminded me of that encyclopedia on CD that I never used when he mentioned searching for information about Barbie Doll on Encarta, Encyclopedia.com and in Wikipedia. What differences the three sources provide! My guess is that if I looked up Encarta now, I wouldn't find anything.  10 years ago when Yochai Benkler made this TED talk, 60,000 volunteers were working on an Open Source Directory for Yahoo, which he noted people did for social motivations. I'm always surprised when I come across a directory of sources on the internet, as this seems so old-fashioned and out-dated already.



I liked how Benkler framed these (then) emerging social collaborative platforms, as challenges to the market-based sites, i.e. the P2P is a challenge to the record industry, the free open source is a challenge to Microsoft etc. It's important to realize that this isn't only limited to the internet revolution.  In the last few years, we can now study and learn with the best professors around the world through open sourced university classes.  All that's needed is an internet connection.

I also very much enjoyed the TED talk by Lawrence Lessing. The remixed videos were very funny. I particularly agreed with his statement about the internet being an opportunity to revive the read-write content that Souza had envisioned, even if some of it represents an "amateur culture."  I also agree 100% with Lessing's statement that our generation lives life against the law.  If there is one thing that I've learned from this class, it's that I am involved in this digital culture without even realizing it, such as contributing the occasional Wiki edit, and relying on the weak links on facebook for various favors, to living against the law by downloading books and music without regard to copyright laws.



I did want to comment briefly on the Community of Practice. I've participated in one that brings together fundraisers, mainly to complain about lack of funds, but also to discuss new ways of getting funding etc.  The group is mainly internet-based, but it also meets on occasion.  My experience in organizations, however, has been that they don't care what employees learn in their communities of practice.  So while it's a good chance to share information, often it's rarely applied. 

Two Mothers Learn to Manage Knowledge Then and Now

Check out the video that I did!

Comments on last class

I tried to look at some of the wiki-based programs for organizations, as were mentioned in our discussion about wikipedia, as I work in an organization and am always interested in ways of improving the sharing of information.   Unfortunately, they all seem to be paid sites.  SocialText looked interesting. It's a social intranet for a business or organization, enabling microblogging, people directories, etc. Although every organization I've worked in could use such a wiki, most organizations tend to continue to adhere to keeping the information to themselves.  I spent much of last year trying to put together a database of donors and contacts, thousands of them.  I was supposed to sit down with the director of this organization who kept all the information in his head, and didn't want to share.  It was an impossible task.  Even if "capturing the tacit information" is part of the organizational culture, all it takes is one person who refuses to turn that tacit information into explicit information.  The discussion of putting an "expert on a diskette" is ideal, but sadly, it's very difficult to do.

As we discussed Wikipedia again this past week, one thing that I'm not sure was mentioned is the concept of peer review within Wikipedia.  There is a strong element of peer review in everything that is put into Wiki.  Benkler in The Wealth of Networks emphasizes the use of peer review and accreditation in Slashdot, the leading technology newsletter on the Web, also created by thousands of users. Users comment on initial submissions, often reaching hundreds of comments.  It is the comments, or in essence, the "peer review" to the submissions that render the stories relevant.   The users are also rated according to good and bad comments.  Moderators also are assigned to provide accreditation to posts, and users can choose to see posts that are considered high quality posts.  I am reading another article about a site called Research Blogging, a collaborative blog on peer-reviewed scientific research, with the idea that by blogging about these articles, scholars are giving them accreditation, and also exposing this research to a much wider audience.


Although this wasn't specifically mentioned in class,  I very much enjoyed the reading by Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous.  He argues the prestigious Bettmann Archive of historic photographs is on the verge of being buried because of the way it's been catalogued, using an actual card catalogue of 11 million photographs.  While photographs are retrievable, it takes a number of days, and the information recorded about each photograph is very limited.  On the other hand, Weinberger discusses Corbis, which holds 4 million digital images.  Although smaller than the Bettman Archive, the digitalization of the photographs has enabled immediate retrieval and a much wider range of cataloguing these images.   He also mentions the concept of tagging photographs, which users on Flickr have done for the millions of photos uploaded to flickr.  Although tagging is a relatively simple act, it's another form of collaborative work that is helping people to organize and manage information. 

Crowdsourcing

 Still  on the subject of crowdsourcing, Waze is one crowdsourcing apps that I use regularly.  It's a community-based traffic map, with users inform other users of traffic jams, road closures, police traps etc.  I never had considered it a crowdsourcing site before, but it really is.   However, misuse of crowdsourcing,  as was the case when students at the Technion faked a traffic jam, can cause this kind of application to be unreliable. Similar reports about fake traffic jams in Los Angeles were refuted by the Waze developers. 

With all the reports of sexual harrasment in Egypt, Egyptian women have created an online map, based on crowdsourcing, meant to track sexual harassment.  They are able to submit reports online, which then appear on a map of Egypt.  I don't know how effective it is, but it's certainly meant as a deterrent.

Unfortunately, crowdsourcing hasn't really reached its fullest potential. I can think of many uses for it in our city, such as creating an interactive map of events, which are shared by users within the community.  It could be used to keep track of racist attacks, of places where garbage hasn't been cleaned, or where there are available parking spots, or other kinds of information sharing or requests for information/assistance.

Wisdom of the crowds

Although it seems that the wisdom of the crowds is usually correct, that may not always be the case. I spent a few (bored) evenings as an online "volunteer"  to transcribe genealogical information for an online archive that was engaging in Crowdsourcing.  While it struck me as a great idea, mainly because I was interested personally in accessing some of the files that were being transcribed, I realized how erroneous this kind of crowdsourcing could be. I transcribed several files without reading the directions.  I submitted files with numerous mistakes mainly because I couldn't be bothered to read the directions. I'm not sure anyone was going to clean up after my mistakes either.

I have to admit that I suffer from information overload.  I don't read emails anymore because I subscribed to too many political and work-related email lists. I've tried to organize them into files in gmail, but have found it too overwhelming.  As a result, I miss important emails about school meetings etc. Strangely though on facebook, I'm always happy to read as much information as I can, and am willing to scroll forever reading posts from hours before.  I suppose that this is the "Fear of missing out," which is probably why my cellphone battery dies after a few hours of checking email and facebook.

I have noticed on facebook that most of my good friends (in real life) overlap with one another, although in some cases I know that they aren't really good friends with one another.  Usually when somebody who doesn't know anyone else that I know requests a friendship, I wonder what they want from me, or how do they even know me.  Unfortunately, my attempt to run netvizz in Facebook didn't work the way I thought it should, and just yielded names and numbers. So I tried WolframAlpha and I received a lot of information, some of it interesting, some not.  The most amusing was that Ahmad was the most common name among my friends.  And my friend Aviva will be very happy to hear that she was listed as a top "social connector."   I found this interesting too, when I log onto facebook, including at 3 am.

Unfortunately, I could not save this information as it requires a subscription!

Reflections on Wikipedia

I never thought very highly of Wikipedia, especially when my former students (and we are talking university students) often used it as their main source for research papers, and/or copied verbatim from it.  It struck me as being similar to using an Encyclopedia, and what a shame when there were dozens of sources written by known experts on a given subject.  I'm beginning to rethink my attitudes towards it, however, as I find myself using it more and more to find information, especially as an initial source. I would never ever ever think of using it as a source in a bibliography though, unless it was a research paper on Wikipedia.  The way in which Wikipedia uses information and produces knowledge, in a collaborative effort, that can be changed, edited, and corrected, or totally rewritten is also appealing.   Vannevar Bush in 1945 predicted this collaborative research and production of knowledge in his article originally published in the Atlantic Journal.  As a scientist, he predicted many technological innovations, writing that "a records if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted."   He suggested that in the future, encyclopedias could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox.  Although I think he was considering microfilm (which is already outdated and extinct), yet he also writes about pressing buttons which would enable readers to consult library books "with greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf."  Was he imagining Google Books? He certainly predicted the creation of Wikipedia, writing that "new forms of encyclopedias will appear," with specialists (or self-proclaimed ones) writing with "associative trails" about given subjects.  Isn't this what Wiki is? A new kind of encyclopedia, where all kinds of people collaborate together, and where links can take readers to associated subjects? The featured entry now about the 2014 FIFA World Cup has links to the reunification of Germany, winning teams in previous years, players, controversies, protests, injuries, etc. Not exactly the dry entry that one might find in the Encyclopedia Britannica, is it?