Crowdsourcing

There has increasing discussion in recent years, in academia, in business, and in popular discourse, about the importance of social and technological networks for producing, evaluating, and disseminating information. Crowdsourcing is one example of a term that draws on network theory to describe (and also to advocate) new ways of producing information using socio-technical networks.

At the Crowdsourcing weblog, Jeff Howe defines the term as follows:

“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

The term draws on the idea of outsourcing: an organization turning to sources outside the organization in order to carry out essential organizational tasks. For example, a car manufacturer might outsource some (or all) of the production tasks involved in constructing a particular car to factories owned by someone else, often located in a foreign country where production costs are lower.

Crowdsourcing is closely connected to the ideas of open source and collaborative production. It also relies on research into social networks (recently given the popular term The Wisdom of Crowds) that suggests that the collective judgment of diverse groups of people acting independently often produces better decisions than any single individuals in the group, including experts.

New information technologies are not required for taking advantage of “the wisdom of crowds” or for engaging in crowdsourcing, but the design of many NITs can help promote the independent collaboration these ideas rely on.

Today in class we will discuss the idea of crowdsourcing and look at a few examples of crowdsourcing in action:

• iStockPhoto
• Innocentive
• Mechanical Turk

NITs, Surveillance, and Monitoring

In many respects, the same fundamental characteristics that make NITs good at giving users the opportunity to produce information and to collaborate online also make NITs good at monitoring and tracking what users are doing online.

Remember the major characteristics of New Information Technologies. They are:

• Digital: Information is converted into computer-readable formats consisting of electronic signals. Digitization makes information compact (meaning it can be transmitted quickly and stored easily), easily duplicated and uniform (information formats are the same as far as the computer is concerned).
• Networked: Linked in an inter-connected and inter-dependent system.
• Interactive: Communication is generally two-way rather than one-way.
• Socio-Technical: The characteristics of the system are based both on technical elements (what tools can do) and on social elements (what people choose to do or to allow).

We have seen how digitization allows users to communicate quickly and effectively, with a variety of formats; how networking and interactivity allow them to communicate individually (one to one) or collectively (one to many or many to many) to anyone on the network, and how communities can contribute to or be promoted by online communication.

Now consider the following:

• Interactivity: Whenever you go online, your computer is engaged in two-way communication with any other computer you try to connect to, and also with intermediary computers (the ones between you and the computer you are connecting to). Everything you do online, every site you visit, every email you send, requires a two-way sharing of information. This is a fundamental characteristic of how the internet works.
• Networking: Computer networks allow individual computers to connect individual users through that network. In turn, multiple networks are interconnected. Anytime you enter a local network or use that network to connect to another network, information about what you are doing is by necessity shared across those networks.
• Digitization: Because digital information is computer-readable, it is easy to save and easy to analyze. Anytime you search for a particular term in a search engine, every time you visit a particular web address, anytime you download a particular file or type of file, your action creates a “digital footprint,” a record of what you did. For someone with access to the records of what is done on your network, it would be relatively simple to set up a program to notify the network administrator of when you took a particular action and call attention of administrators to that fact. Digitization means that much surveillance can be done without direct human intervention.
• Socio-Technical Networks: A computer system is not just a collection of machines and wires. It is a managed system that is administered by people. When you go online, you are accessing the network through a system managed by someone. Often your access to the internet brings you into contact with multiple systems managed by private businesses, universities, NGOs, governments, and so on.

Common forms of internet surveillance and monitoring:

• Monitoring internet browsing
• Cookies
• Monitoring email
• Spoofing
• Internet and email filtering
• Blocking by Domain Name Server (DNS)
• Blocking by Internet Protocol (IP)
• Blocking by keywords
• DNS hijacking

Surveillance and Surveillance Society

Looking for someone? Here is a handy GPS service to help you find them. Just punch in their phone number at this satellite tracking site.

The idea that we are living in a surveillance society is not new. George Orwell’s 1984, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 are just a few examples of novels that have addressed the theme. And since the discipline began, sociologists have been interested in how societies use surveillance as a means of social control.

Today we will discuss the idea of surveillance and the surveillance society.

Surveillance is:

“Purposeful, routine, systematic and focused attention paid to personal details, for the sake of control, entitlement, management, influence or protection.” (UK Information Commissioner’s Office, A Report on the Surveillance Society, p. 4)

• Purposeful: there is a reason that can be used to justify the surveillance
• Routine: it isn’t unusual, it happens as part of our normal lives
• Systematic: it is planned and scheduled, not random
• Focused: it examines details that can be linked to individuals rather than just aggregating community information

We often associate surveillance primarily with (authoritarian) governments and with technology. But although governments of all types frequently engage in surveillance, businesses and individuals do as well. And although technology is often used to carry out surveillance, it is not a requirement. In a surveillance society, however, the (often widely accepted) use of technologies to help generate and process surveillance information has the potential to fundamentally change social relationships.

“The surveillance society is a society which is organised and structured using surveillance-based techniques. To be under surveillance means having information about one’s movements and activities recorded by technologies, on behalf of the organisations and governments that structure our society. This information is then sorted, sifted and categorised, and used as a basis for decisions which affect our life chances.” (A Report on the Surveillance Society: Summary Report, p. 3)

Surveillance is not always a negative thing, and the purposes for surveillance are often widely shared in societies:

• Law enforcement and protection of order
• Maintaining public health
• Ensuring efficiency management of public and private concerns

Surveillance can refer to physical observation of people or places, but it also (and increasingly) refers to gathering, sorting, and interpreting data about them. Surveillance is a pervasive part of modern life. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that residents of major cities are photographed by surveillance cameras every five minutes on average. Many of our interactions with governments and businesses require us to provide personal data, whether with ID cards, bank teller cards, or in other forms, and this data is stored and available for a variety of uses, whether legitimate or not.

Discussion: What are some examples of surveillance you can think of? What purposes might they be meant to achieve?

Even when the purposes of surveillance may be widely shared, the surveillance can raise issues such as:

• Violation of privacy
• Discrimination
• Misuse of information/abuse of authority

But the features of NITs can also easily be used to:

• Record and monitor what we do with our computers or in any communications we engage in that travel through computers
• Gather, collate, process and share data about us
• Efficiently manage physical surveillance systems
  • Data Brokering: Computerized databases are used to store large amounts of information about people. Markets have emerged in which companies buy information in order to collate it and provide complex profiles of individuals.
  • RFID: Radio Frequency Identification Devices are used to store and deliver information that can be retrieved over distance (through radio signals).
  • Keystroke Monitoring Software: Special software can be used to record every keystroke on a computer keyboard.
  • Online Video Surveillance Networks: Online networks allow for easy monitoring and management of video, audio, and other surveillance systems.

Useful Links:

• UK Information Commissioner’s Office, A Report on the Surveillance Society (links to full report and supporting material)
• CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering)
• The Surveillance Camera Players (New York)
• Urban Eye Project (UK)

Internet Governance and OPJ in KZ

The term “Internet governance” refers to a broad range of decisions–by governments, the private sector, and civil society–that affect the character of the internet.

The assigned article, “Internet Governance in Kazakhstan,” (by Rachid Nougamanov) highlights some of the governance issues that might affect the opportunities that people have to carry out online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan. The article includes:

• Internet usage: Who has access to the internet? According to the article, internet penetration in Kazakhstan (i.e. how many people have access) is only about 4 percent of the population. Even of that 4 percent, most people access the internet only occasionally at home. The high cost of the internet in the country presents an economic barrier for much of the population (as does the high cost of computer equipment).
• Internet legislation: All websites in Kazakhstan are legally classified as mass media. This means that potentially the government could make the same requirements of individual web users that it makes of broadcast and published media. Generally it has not enforced such requirements. (And doing so seems like it would be extremely difficult.) However, the government has sometimes acted on requirements, for example, that sites bearing the .kz domain be physically stored on computers located in Kazakhstan. The government has also made reference to forthcoming internet legislation intended to regulate internet content more directly, but no such legislation has yet appeared. The article does discuss an announced policy for increased government control of a “single information space,” which could affect internet publishers and users.
• Criminal Prosecution: In some cases, people who have published information on the internet has been subject to prosecution under laws such as those prohibiting insults to the president, or for threatening the security of the country.
• Blocking and Filtering: Internet sites can be blocked (the network is set so that a particular site or page is unable to load or loads very slowly) or filtered (the network is set to block access to pages that contains particular terms). The article suggests incidents of blocking in Kazakhstan. According to the OpenNet Initiative, there are suspicions of filtering in Kazakhstan, though not so dramatically as in some other countries.

Each of these areas highlights a governance mechanism that could potentially affect opportunities for online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan. Although the ways we use the internet may sometimes make is seem like an unregulated arena, the potential for government intervention can have a real affect on how people actually use the internet.

The article concludes by pointing out some of the principles in the Declaration of the World Summit on the Information Society:

1. The technical architecture of the internet should not allow for censorship of news or editorial opinion, nor should “self-regulation” be used to regulate content;
2. The system should respect Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (i.e. Press Freedom);
3. “Ethics” should not be used to promote censorship;
4. There must be a separation recognized between legitimate and illegitimate communication online.

‘Pedia vs. ‘Tannica, Head to Head and Toe to Toe

Before this term I hadn’t looked at the Encyclopedia Britannica website for some time, and when I did I was surprised to find how much the site seems to mimic some aspects of the Wikipedia site.

• Both sites feature a relatively sparse layout with seemingly little attention paid to graphic design;
• Both sites offer user interactivity on their opening pages: Wikipedia with its standard interactive tabs and discussion features; Britannica with links to blogs, forums, and other seemingly participatory features;
• Both sites prominently display links to new and featured information, news, and so on.

As I recall, in the past Britannica has not had so many apparently interactive features, and I wonder whether this design is in part an attempt to adopt some of the elements that have made Wikipedia popular. If so, I think the folks at ‘tannica are missing the point: it’s Wikipedia’s openness (in contrast to Britannica’s still-closed system) that makes it popular. Consider a few comparisons:

• Anyone with access to the internet and some relatively simple skills can become a contributor to Wikipedia; in contrast, Britannica is a closed system of experts. Even Britannica’s weblogs (almost by definition an open medium) are written by a select group of experts. (They do, however, seem to allow general readers to comment on the ‘blogs.)
• Wikipedia content is available for free, both to read and to republish; most Britannica content requires a paid subscription for full access, and none is available for free republication.

Depending upon your perspective, you might see either of these characteristics as a point in favor of either encyclopedia. In fact, discussions about whether Wikipedia is a reliable resource are focused on its “wide open” character as opposed to Britannica’s closed system of experts.

Most of us are accustomed to systems of expertise in which we rely on people in authority to provide reliable information. Think of how schools work, governments, hospitals, and so on. This is the model that Britannica relies on (check out their authors, board members, and so on.)

The expert model has to be closed, because it assumes that expertise is something rare and that potential experts must be evaluated and confirmed as experts prior to participating.

This is a model with proven success (though it isn’t always successful). And if we consider the Wikipedia model simply to be opening the floodgates, for example, to allow anyone to enter a hospital, a university, or another expert institution and to begin acting like an expert, then perhaps we should be skeptical.

But that isn’t exactly what Wikipedia does. Yes, anyone can sign up to contribute at Wikipedia, and the process tries not to constrain contributors much. But what this project relies on is a large community of users who, working online, not only write and edit entries, but they evaluate and discuss entries, they consider the strengths and weaknesses of material, and they have systems to control people who abuse their freedom on the site.

Some examples:

• At the front end of many articles (such as the open source article) are announcements about suggestions on how to improve the article.
• The discussion page of each article is used, well, to discuss changes, proposed changes, and other issues related to the article’s content.
• The history page provides a list of changes and a way to revert edited articles to a previous state.

These are just a few of the mechanisms that Wikipedia uses to allow members of the community to work to improve the site. But perhaps the most important element of the Wikipedia system is this: they rely on a community of users who focus on one major goal: to produce a reliable, authoritative online encyclopedia. In the end, Wikipedia can only work if the majority of people in the community work toward that goal in good faith.

Open Production and Closed Production

In the last class we discussed collaborative and open source production, and we introduced Wikipedia and compared it to standard academic encylcopedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica. I want to make the comparison a bit more explicit.

Both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica are examples of collaborative production. They are publications that are created through the cooperative efforts of many people. Similarly, in both cases these group efforts aim to produce something similar: an encyclopedia–a publication that is intended to provide authoritative information on a wide range of topics.

Both Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica are also available online. Keep this in mind, because it indicates that the use of internet technology is not the determining factor in the fundamental characteristics of each project. Part of what it means to refer to the internet as a socio-technical network is that the character of the network (the things it allows us to do, for example) depends both on what the technology makes possible and on the social arrangements (the decisions people make) about how to use the technology, or how to allow others to use the technology. Both these projects use the internet, but the project organizers have made different decisions about what they should allow people to do with their projects while using the internet.

What we will focus on today is how each of these projects is an example of an open or closed production model.

In general, an open production model has the following characteristics:

• Fewer barriers to participation in the production process;
• Access to materials produced is relatively unrestricted

In contrast, a closed production model has these characteristics:

• More barriers to participation in the production process;
• Access to materials produced is more restricted

Today we will examine Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica and try to gather specific examples that indicate how each process might be following one or another of these models. We will also try to see how each project attempts to demonstrate how its chosen production model helps to produce an authoritative, credible resource.

We will work in four groups, two looking at Wikipedia, the other two at Britannica. For the purposes of this exercise, the Wikipedia group should look particularly at About Wikipedia and the Britannica group at About Britannica (and associated links), though each group should also explore their respective sites further.

On your individual weblogs, write a brief entry this week (due at the beginning of Friday’s class) in which you consider, using at least a few specific examples a) how your assigned site is an example of an open or closed process, and b) how the project’s process might produce an authoritative, credible resource.

We will examine the sites today and have our discussion on this issue on Friday.

Some questions to consider:

• How do you get access to information at the site? Are there restrictions on access?
• Who produces information? How is participation in this process restricted?
• Are there different rules for different types of information?
• How does the project try to ensure the information produced is accurate/authoritative/credible?
• Britannica blog
• Open Britannica
• Britannica Board, terms of use,

Collaborative and Open Source Production

 

Collaborative Production and Open Source Production are important concepts for understanding new information technologies and their relation to social networks. For our purposes, we can understand these as closely related terms describing social arrangements through which groups of people work together in order to create something.

Collaborative Production can refer to any creative process in which several people (or more) cooperate. In a new information technology environment, the term takes on special importance because NITs reduce the limitations of collaboration. Interactive networks allow more people to work together. They can communicate instantly, and they do not necessarily require face-to-face interaction. Digitization allows for the creation of multiple copies (or multiple versions) of documents and other file types. In short, NITs can create new opportunities for expanded collaboration among more people than an “old media” environment can enable.

The term open source is often used to refer to a method for creating and improving software, but has been applied more broadly to any kind of collaborative production process that attempts to keep restrictions on participation as limited as possible.

Today we will have a quick introduction to these concepts and we will look at one of the best-known examples of online collaborative production, Wikipedia.

For this week, please:

• Explore the Wikipedia site;
• Read About Wikipedia;
• Read the Wikipedia article on Open Source;
• Read the Wikipedia article on Wikis

NITs, Journalism and Community

In the course so far we have looked at several readings that address New Information Technologies in relation to journalism and to community. This is a very popular/controversial topic, both within online communities and in the journalism profession (which is its own community). There are many reasons for this, including:

1. Mainstream news organizations are losing audience–fewer people read newspapers, watch television news, or listen to radio news.
2. More people are turning to the internet as a source of information, community-building, and entertainment.
3. News industries are looking for ways to use the internet to remain relevant to audiences.
4. Online, people look for more opportunities to interact and “have a voice.”
5. Tension among journalism professionals and NIT news amateurs.

Some ideas we will consider today:

• Gatekeeper: When applied to media, the gatekeeper role is one of filtering information for the audience. This can have both positive effects (ensuring only the most reliable information gets to the audience) and negative effects (preventing people from getting useful or important information).
•  Professional Journalism (values, standards, division of labor) vs. Amateur/Participatory Journalism.
• Audience: People who “receive” information. Thinking of people who use media as an audience suggests communication goes primarily one way, that there are limited opportunities for interactivity, and that there is a clear hierarchy in media communication.
• Conversation: If we think of media communication as a conversation (a discussion among people), then we tend to focus on how the communication promotes opportunity for people to become part of the conversation.
• Credibility: Authority, believability. Something that we look for in news information sources.
• Community as a shared place and enterprise
• Community around a newspaper vs. community around a website
• Some examples (news and otherwise) of community online:
• neweurasia.net
• The New York Times
• OhMyNews
• The Guardian
• Baristanet
• Craig’s List
• ebay
• YouTube
• hi5

Weblogs as Community Conversations

Today in class we will begin the process of building community around your group project sites.

First, though, I want to point out an entry by journalism instructor Mindy McAdams discussing the idea that weblogs are conversations, and also refer back to Kairzhan’s entry on community.

Part of the reason I mention McAdams’s entry is the idea itself: you should try to envision your group weblog as part of a larger conversation. This conversation includes your groupmates, of course. But it should also include other participants: people writing weblogs that may address your interests; people who write the news; people you talk to, and so on.

As McAdam’s suggests, however, the weblog “conversation” is not quite the same as conversations you might have in the physical world, and you will have to get used to the difference. Notice, from this entry, how she participates in the conversation on the issue: she draws from several different sources (weblog entries and comments, as well as her experience in face-to-face interactions), citing and linking as necessary. The links she uses provide online connections to support the more important element of her entry: dealing with, drawing from, and responding to other people’s ideas.

McAdams writes a very popular weblog. I think it’s popular because she approaches it as a well-informed participant in a community conversation, and because she uses the technical tools available to her in ways that promote the conversation, allowing others to find her work online. In part through her weblog, she is a very visible member of a community of people interested in online journalism.

Now getting back to Kairzhan’s post, he discusses many kinds of communities and subcommunities. But what is most important to me here is his advice for people who want to develop their communities of friends: “People, be outgoing. Be optimists, use every opportinities in your life. Be polite and interesting and you will have a lot of friends like do I ))))”

This is good advice to keep in mind, not just for building friendships, but for developing a community of people who engage in conversation with your weblog. Look for opportunities to interact with others, online or off. Write at your own weblog, but make sure you write sometimes about what others are writing, and do it sincerely.

The reasons this works online are both social (people will be more interested in what you have to say) and technical (larger numbers of meaningful links makes it more likely your site will be found). If you can apply these principles to your weblog, you will likely see results that show people are interested in having a conversation with you.

First steps:

1. Make sure your group weblog is set up to receive unmoderated comments and trackback “pings”
2. Locate at least a few weblogs that interest you and subscribe to them using Bloglines or Google blog search. Read them regularly. If you read something that is really of interest to you there, leave a comment at that site or write an entry at your site discussing what’s said at the other site. (Avoid doing both at the same time, or you may be seen as doing too much self-promotion.) You can also find sites by following links at the sites you are reading.
3. Remember you can use our course weblogs for #2 (it’s fine to have conversations with classmates), but do not limit yourself to these. Look for other sources as well, and don’t limit yourself only to weblogs.
4. Build a blogroll of sites that you see as part of the “conversations” you want to be involved in (draw on those from #2 above).

Some reflections on community

Draft in progress….

Looking over what some students have written about their communities, I see that we tend to see different groupings as communities:

Ivan writes about his work as a community. He works with many different kinds of people, but all focused on one goal–publishing a magazine. As he puts it: this community “gives me an opportunity to talk and communicate with these different people. Each of them has their own opinion that I have to consider. It’s like move back and force and talk to people in order to create a one single magazine page.“

Kairzhan has discussed several levels of community, best friends, neighbors, study mates, and so on. He even mentions online community. Even within a group of friends, he sees “sub-communities”:

“(I)n communitie of my Best friends I have a lot of Sub-communities. I have a Sub-communitie of friends who I do know from school, they are the Best ))) I have a Sub-communitie of friends from KIMEP, they are the minority. Also I have a communitie of friends from KBTU, a lot of friends. And I have a small Sub-communitie of friends from my yard. Sometimes I do connect two or more Sub-communities, but they are still prefer to be independent. I connect them only on football match, or some anniversary.”
Alua writes about family, friends, and KIMEP community. Gulnara (like me) is part of the KIMEP Times community. It makes me curious about how we might see each as similar or different.