Howard Rheingold's Library tagged smartmobs →  View Popular

"The internet is meant to help activists, enable democratic protest and weaken the grip of authoritarian regimes. But it doesn’t—in fact, the web is a boon for bullies "

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/...-dictators-watch-us-on-the-web - Preview

smartmobs

"he case involving Li Yuejun and Wang Jue is the best known example of this phenomenon to date. In a video that was widely distributed in February of 2006, Wang Jue holds a tiny grey kitten in her hands as she gazes at it lovingly. The cat makes soft meowing noises as she places it on the ground and with her gold tone high heels she impales the kitten's head through the eye socket. The kitten cries out in pain. The scene continues until the skull is stomped and the kitten is silenced with death in a pool of blood.

China doesn't have clear laws against animal cruelty. But the netizens of China didn't need any laws to support them when they condemned the women, now named "Kitten Killer of Hangzhou.""

www.hplusmagazine.com/...search-and-destroy-engines - Preview

smartmobs

"The Conservatives have obtained another leaked document, a government report on public sector IT.

Laptop computerThis leak isn't likely to generate lurid headlines, as the report on transforming government by using "interactive (web 2.0) tools and processes, cloud computing technology and service-oriented architecture (SOA)" isn't exactly dynamite.

Still, the Conservatives have come up with quite a clever idea - they've put the document online and are inviting the public to comment on every part of it as they frame the party's response.

They've built a website called Make IT Better, and say their aim is " to throw open the process and allow people to contribute their ideas on how policy should be designed".

They're calling this "crowdsourcing" policy - but how far is it likely to go and will it prove a major feature of political engagement from now on?

The Conservatives say they've already used this idea back in 2007 to enlist the public's help in shaping their manifesto, with a site called Stand Up, Speak Up. "

www.bbc.co.uk/...politics_of_crowdsourcing.html - Preview

collective_intelligence crowdsourcing smartmobs

"Consider the Open Source model for software, where long-distance collaboration produces innovative, effective, robust, and freely-available software and systems.

Could a variant of this model be applied to problems in healthcare, community safety, disaster response, education, energy sustainability, environmental protection, and other contemporary issues?

A group led by Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland is proposing to explore this. They've written a White Paper on a "National Initiative for Social Participation". "

iparticipate.wikispaces.com/...NISP+White+Paper+-+6-02-09.pdf - Preview

collective_intelligence smartmobs

"CitySourced is a real time mobile civic engagement tool. CitySourced provides a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civil issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution; an opportunity for government to use technology to save money and improve accountability to those they govern; and a positive, collaborative platform for real action. Our platform is called CitySourced, as it empowers everyday citizens to use their smart phones to make their cities a better place. "

www.citysourced.com/Home.aspx - Preview

civic_engagement smartmobs mobile_devices

"Handheld Human Rights uses mobile phones to connect human rights workers around Burma’s borders. Using mobile text messages connected with a detailed computer interface, HHR helps aid workers quickly and securely share critical information in order to coordinate responses and save lives.

HHR allows groups to:

* Disseminate key information and messages to field workers.
* Facilitate communication between groups.
* Collect data that can be mapped on an international website.
* Rapidly disseminate news of human rights violations to the international community and advocacy groups."

www.digital-democracy.org/programming - Preview

smartmobs ict mobile_devices

"GoodGuide, one of my favorite applications for the iPhone, just got a cool new feature — barcode scanning. Users could already consult the app for data on whether a product was healthy, environmentally-friendly, and socially-responsible, but now you don’t have to type in a search. Just scan the barcode, and the app brings up the relevant information.

The San Francisco company also announced a $5.5 million second round of funding led by new investor Physic Ventures, with participation from New Island Capital and existing investors New Enterprise Associates and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. GoodGuide previously raised $3.73 million."

digital.venturebeat.com/...odes-to-find-the-best-products - Preview

mobile_devices smartmobs

"To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, KulturProjekte Berlin set up a virtual “Berlin Twitter Wall” where individuals could post their thoughts on the occasion through use of a Twitter hashtag #FOTW. The site’s introduction further invites participants to “let us know which walls still have to come down to make our world a better place!” Chinese netizens have made their voices heard on this last point, and Chinese comments bashing the Great Firewall and Internet censorship now dominate the site. Selections of these comments are translated by CDT below:"

chinadigitaltimes.net/...o-tear-down-the-great-firewall - Preview

twitter smartmobs

"The story of Sun Zhongjie, a 19-year-old driver who chopped off his finger to decry police entrapment, shows how the Internet has become an effective tool of public protest in this tightly controlled country.

Almost every form of open dissent is outlawed in China, but mass protests organized online are increasingly putting pressure on police, judges and other officials -- and getting results.

Last June in Hubei province, an online campaign by netizens, as they are popularly called here, helped free a 22-year-old waitress arrested for killing a local official in what appeared to be a clear case of self-defense. In Nanjing, a top official was expelled from the Communist Party and jailed after angry netizens posted photos online of him smoking expensive cigarettes, sporting a pricey watch and driving a Cadillac. "

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009110818166.html - Preview

smartmobs public_sphere

"HurricaneWiki.org: A project of the Hurricane Information Center"

www.hurricanewiki.org/...Main_Page - Preview

smartmobs wiki

"We've seen how social media like Twitter and Facebook can be used as part of a winning election strategy, but the same tools don't seem to influence elected officials or public policy.

Maybe it's because elected officials are rarely on Facebook or Twitter themselves -- those posts you see are from their proxies. Or maybe there's something different about the dynamic when it comes to generating momentum for or against a given law -- it's easier to get excited about a person than a law -- but there's also more fragmentation in cyberspace.

What I mean is, it's pretty easy to coalesce electronic activity -- both for and against -- around a particular candidate. Particularly when a social-media-savvy manager is running a campaign, it's fairly easy to ensure that the "official" Facebook page or Twitter account gets all the hits.

But it’s very different with issues, even big ones, because no one owns an issue the same way a campaign manager owns a candidate. "

www.informationweek.com/...NQW50B2TTPNQE1GHRSKH4ATMY32JVN - Preview

smartmobs twitter social_media facebook

"
He might get there. He also posted a a group link on the Facebook suggestions page and is considering pushing forward a petition.

A woman in Nebraska who joined the group seemed to realize the youth of its leader and wrote on the group's wall, "THIS ISN'T A FACEBOOK ADMIN PAGE, THIS IS A KID!!!" But she was drowned out by thousands of other posters who didn't seem to mind at all that the group leadership is an eighth-grader.

Jonathan did not start the group, but joined it a day after it was started because he disliked the changes Facebook made. He noticed that the creator of the group, someone he didn't know, had quit. Believing in the cause -- and perhaps sensing an opportunity -- "I just pushed a button to make myself the admin, and that was it," he says. (Smart kid.) Now he's the leader of one of the fastest-growing things online. "I get a lot of friend requests from people I don't know," he laments. "

atcharlotte.blogspot.com/...ads-13-million-protesting.html - Preview

facebook smartmobs

"Presentation: Instedd: Mobile Collaboration for Disaster Response"

mobilehealth.posterous.com/stedd-mobile-collaboration-for - Preview

collaboration mobile_devices smartmobs

Emergency Information Service (EIS) is slated to be a unified communications solution linking citizens, journalists, governments and non-governmental organizations in a seamless flow of timely, accurate and credible information—even when local communication infrastructures are rendered inoperable. This feature will be made possible by utilizing SMS as the communications backbone of the system.

In the event of a crisis, the EIS team would sift, collate, make sense of and verify the myriad of streams of information generated by a large humanitarian intervention. The team would gather information from governments, local media, the military, UN agencies and local NGOs to develop reporting that will be tailored to the specific needs of the affected population and translated into local languages. EIS would work closely with local media to disseminate messages of critical, life saving information.

irevolution.wordpress.com/...g-a-global-system-of-info-webs - Preview

filter sms sensors smartmobs

"Grayson Daughters and Tessa Horehled talk using Twitter hashtags in crisis communication and disaster relief during the Atlanta, Georgia flood of September 2009."

www.youtube.com/watch - Preview

twitter smartmobs comm217 ict

As demonstrations have evolved with the help of text messages and online social networks, so too has the response of law enforcement.

On Thursday, F.B.I. agents descended on a house in Jackson Heights, Queens, and spent 16 hours searching it. The most likely reason for the raid: a man who lived there had helped coordinate communications among protesters at the Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh.

The man, Elliot Madison, 41, a social worker who has described himself as an anarchist, had been arrested in Pittsburgh on Sept. 24 and charged with hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime. The Pennsylvania State Police said he was found in a hotel room with computers and police scanners while using the social-networking site Twitter to spread information about police movements. He has denied wrongdoing.

www.nytimes.com/...05txt.html - Preview

texting smartmobs twitter

Modeled after SETI@home, researchers are hoping the EvoGrid can harness the power of home computers to look for evidence of artificial life created in computer networks.

The EvoGrid aims to use "a large interconnected grid of computers which could plausibly model the pre-biotic chemical environment which was the precursor stage to evolution and life arising on Earth." This would not be life, but as the New York Times puts it, "evidence of self-organizing behavior in computerized simulations that have been constructed to model the first emergence of life in the physical world."

www.livescience.com/...-hunt-for-artificial-life.html - Preview

smartmobs distributed_computation

SMARTMOBS:

While digging through articles and Tweets I found a recent U.S. Air Force publication entitled “New Media And The Air Force” which defines the term “SMARTMOB” as “When users get together for an activity or event as a result of an online connection or network.” (9) Looking further into this I found the original source of the term; former MIT Press author Howard Rheingold wrote a book in 2002 entitled Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution and did a Web video presentation which is posted on MIT’s Web Site. A summary of the book at smartmobs.com gives us a better description of the purpose of a smart mob. It explains the phenomenon as being a technology that was originally adopted to support democracy but can also be used to coordinate terrorist attacks. The 1999 anti-WTO protests nicknamed the “battle of Seattle” are referenced as being one such case when Web sites and cell phones enabled protesters to become more organized and violent.

twitter09.wordpress.com/...case-study-u-s-military - Preview

twitter smartmobs

Now, as an example, let’s say you have some sort of demonstration to get legislation that legalizes marijuana (easy now… just and example). The first thing you as the organizer does is try to rally some support. You make calls, get a website and/or blog and start your outreach to get people to come to the demonstration that support your views.

Now you add Twitter to this mix and this is what happens:

politalkblog.wordpress.com/...roots-political-demonstrations - Preview

twitter smartmobs

The internet, however, has changed the nature of public discourse and Chinese citizens’ relationship with the government. It promotes pluralism in public opinion, which has certainly affected state policies in China. During the recent “Green Dam” internet filtering fiasco, for instance, the state’s overreach in forcing an unpopular policy was met with fierce retaliation from unofficial Chinese media, the online community, and other private actors. As a result, officials last week formally abandoned their effort to impose the installation of filtering software on individual’s computers.

eurasia.foreignpolicy.com/...n_the_internet_to_change_china - Preview

smartmobs public_sphere