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!