Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.The Swine Flu and the University 2.0
Alberto Bustani, the rector of the campus Monterrey of Tec de Monterrey (full disclosure: he is a facebook friend of mine and I was/am Tec faculty) has just posted on his facebook profile a professionally produced video, where in front of the mural of the Tec rectoria he introduces one of my Tec colleagues from the medicine faculty, who discusses the pandemic and offers advice to the students. After less than 24 hours, it has been seen several hundred times, 126 have “liked†the video and 20 people have commented.
Also on his profile he announced that classes were suspended, however, that the exams would take place in early May. A lively discussion developed on what to do about the knowledge the content that the students were not able to learn, because of the missed classes.
Early last year, when he had hit the magic 5000 friends mark, he started a fan-page, and asked us to un-befriend him, but of course nobody did.
….Think about, what a powerful leadership tool social media has become in the last 24 months, imagine how much we need to learn about holding socially mediated leaders accountable, imagine what types of knowledge platforms we can can create, when we start to re-think the university, and imagine what we can do for life-long-learning. Let us take this seriously.
Reflecting Wolfram Alpha
in case you did not have the chance to watch the presentation at the Berkman Center yesterday, Stephan Shankland’s Cnet-article:
• Data curation. Wolfram Alpha uses public and licensed proprietary data sources, and the company uses automated processes and human choices to prepare the data. “At some point you need a human domain expert in front of it,” Wolfram said.
• Algorithms. Alpha must pick the right computational processes to present its results. “Inside Wolfram Alpah are 5 million to 6 million lines of Mathematica code that implement all those methods and models,” he said.
• Linguistic analysis to understand what a person typed. “I thought one of many things that could have gone wrong was that short, lazy things would (have) huge amounts of ambiguity,” for example figuring out whether “50 cent” had to do with musical artists or money. “That turned out to be not nearly as much of a problem as we expected.”
• Presentation. “There are tens of thousands of possible graphs. What do you want to show people?” Wolfram asked.
Issues that are not clear yet, are (a) does it work in the real world, (b) does it empower us or “the experts,” (c) is it really something new or does google already do it better with trendalizer (or Ralf/Martin with Eyeplorer), and (d) how important is the approach for data management? What do you think?
Search, Discovery, Real-time, and Knowledge-Mining?
For a while, we have been trying to develop a MECE framework to think about how we want to access data in our mediated environments. We started out with search (google), but missed that what was at the tip of our tongue, namely discovery (think any recommendation engine or stumbleupon), then where awed by the global thought stream (twitter and the facebook stream), but had always hoped for a chance to mine “real” knowledge.
There is the Eyeplorer, a startup from Berlin you might want to take a look at and today Stephen Wolfram of Mathematica fame will speak at the Berkman Center about his new venture Wolframalpha. Do watch it here at 3PM EST today (9 PM Erfurt time) Or watch and interact in Second Life: http://tinyurl.com/s6tv4
Stepping into the Facebook Stream
as we are constructing new socially mediated worlds by linking our analog lives to digital representations, a re-reading of Heraclite’s Fragment 41 becomes necessary: “You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.“Webmonkey writes:
The Facebook “stream†is the constantly updating river of news that displays what’s going on with you, your friends and whatever tidbits they’re talking about or sharing. Facebook defines the stream as the “the core Facebook product experience.†That’s definitely been the case since last month, when the site changed its default page design to bring the stream front and center.
The Open Stream API gives developers access to that flood of real-time information, and not just to re-publish it elsewhere, but to publish to it and interact with it by leaving comments. Soon, we’ll see specially-built third-party apps for interacting with Facebook, much like FriendFeed and similar sites allow for other social networking services. These apps will be able to let users filter content to see only specific types of posts, comment on items and mark items as favorites. These apps will be able to access Facebook from the desktop, through the browser and via mobile devices.
Now what types of applications would we want to transcend Heraclite’s wisdom? And what would that mean for humanity?
multi-channel teaching
what if you could get the attention of your students not only in the 1h 30 min of class, but during their idle-time, by twittering, blogging, facebook, etc. The debate in the class room should be more sophisticated (that is the assumption). What do you think?
Bread and Games 2.0 (guest article)
This is a guest post by Sebastian Haselbeck.
I recently wrote a critical comment on Philipp’s blog entry on a note by Ed Felten. Click here to read the original blog post. It dealt with the understanding of open government and transparency, and how outreach is only one side of the 2.0 coin. On the thought of politics and the web 2.0 “bandwagon†– as I called it – I wrote:
“The danger within politics jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon is clearly that governments and politicians will use these tools to keep the citizens at bay. While we are busy watching Merkel’s video blog and reading Guembel’s tweets, we don’t ask questions at the same time. Very convenient for the politicians and we’ll see more of that. Bread and games 2.0â€
Here is why I am so skeptical about the way governments and politicians are employing the tools of the world wide web. In many cases, the effects are rather negligible. Clearly, what Felten calls “outreach†is a marked improvement in how citizens are being informed about politics. Yet the real decisions are still made behind closed curtains, and no matter how much citizens know about what politicians seem to be doing, as long as they do not get a say in it, what is the point? Transparency does not solely come from knowledge, it comes from empowerment. Only when the public is in a position to use the information gained towards political ends, does it server a real democratic purpose. All too often it appears to me that politicians’ blogs, twitter messages and Facebook profiles are nothing more than entertainment, to keep us busy and occupied, so we forget what is really at stake. Like the games in ancient Rome. Bread and games for the masses. Laugh, applaud, cheer, but don’t question. Public actors need to step out of the shadow of bread and games 2.0 and start employing these tools to real purposes. Barack Obama’s new open government directives sound fantastic, but will U.S. citizens get real change, or just twice the amount of PDF files and blog posts? Time to rethink the client (more on that right here).
Sebastian Haselbeck is a graduate student at the Erfurt School of Public Policy and webmaster of the Center for Public Management and Governance.
Putting Obama’s Transparency Guidelines to the Test
(written by Emilene Martinez, the National Security Archives, Washington DC and LNS-Guestblogger)
I started working at the National Security Archive in 2001 requesting information related to US foreign policy in Latin America to one of the most secretive administrations in American history. Asking for government records was not easy – to begin with, backlogs plagued the system (with requests related to Mexico being responded in an average of 2 years, although the Freedom of Information Act clearly states that agencies have 20 days to comply). Furthermore, the administration issued clear guidelines that encouraged government officials to withhold information: the President rewrote the Executive Order on Classified National Security Information, removing a section that instructed agencies to declassify information if they doubted it merited to be classified. Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a Memorandum on Freedom of Information in May 2001 encouraging agencies to: “carefully consider the protection†of national security when making disclosure decisions under the FOIA.
Increased transparency and government accountability were key commitments of Obama’s presidential campaign. More than sixty organizations, among them the National Security Archive, called on President-elect Obama to fulfill campaign promises and to: “restore efficiency and openness to the Freedom of Information Act process, reform the classification system to reduce overclassification and facilitate greater declassification, and ensure that presidential records are handled in accordance with the law and Congress’ intentâ€. On day one in office, President Barack Obama issued a memo on FOIA which directs all agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure†and apply this presumption “to all decisions involving FOIA.†President Obama also made clear that “the government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.†Moreover Attorney General Eric Holder issued a Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act last month, where he encourages agencies to: “make discretionary disclosures of information†and clearly specifies that “an agency should not withhold records merely because it can demonstrate, as a technical matter, that the records fall within a scope of a FOI exemption.â€
Now, the challenge for openness advocates is to put the new transparency guidelines to the test.
In December 2008, in partnership with journalist Manuel Mora MacBeath, the Archive requested information related to the activities of Mexican right-wing organizations in the 70s. To our surprise, last March we got a response from the CIA (after 3 months not 2 years) to two specific requests informing us that the agency could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence†of the records pertaining our request because of “the fact of the existence or nonexistence†of the requested records is classified. Our request was denied pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b) (1) and (b) (3) related to national security and information identifying personnel in sensitive units.
Yesterday, we filed an appeal to the CIA’s Release Panel arguing that records related to the right-wing organizations mentioned in the request have been already disclosed in Mexico. Intelligence records from the Mexican Federal Security Directorate (Dirección Federal de Seguridad) regarding these groups’ activities are available for public access at the Mexican National Archives and have been mentioned in countless publications, including the bestseller by journalist Ãlvaro Delgado “El Yunque: The Radical Right in Powerâ€. The fact that the information regarding these organizations is publicly available in Mexico, and is no longer considered sensitive, lead us to question how the release of information related to them would affect the current national security of the United States. Furthermore, in the past the Archive has successfully obtained records from the CIA related to activities of other Mexican dissident groups during the same time period.
In our appeal, of course, we quoted the Obama and Ashcroft directives – let us see how well all the discourse is put into practice. I will keep you posted on any new developments on the case!
*The CIA denial generated front-page news in León Guanajuato (a right-wing stronghold), you can view the article here: http://www.am.com.mx/Nota.aspx?ID=320127. More information on this case is also available at Manuel Mora’s blog: http://mejoroficio.blogspot.com.
Guestblogging on “Living-Network-Society”
In the upcoming weeks, I will have several guest bloggers participating in the conversation. The all share a fresh perspective and have been involved in the living-network-society experience for the last several years. Some of our select authors are:
- Emilene, who has been pushing transparency in Latin America at the National Security Archives since 2004.
- Sofia will be reflecting on networked strategy (she’s the kid in the candy store at the BCG strategy institute in New York).
- Sebastian is the mind behind this website and as a true millenial is investigating the political theory of the feedback culture.
Expect to be surprised!
Winter School Pictures
Below you find some of the pictures from the World 2.0 Winter School (W2W Garmisch). As you can see at least my kids really enjoyed it.
