Other News from Participating Centers

The Open Data Charter Measurement Guide is out now!

This post was jointly written by Ana Brandusescu (Web Foundation) and Danny Lämmerhirt (Open Knowledge International), co-chairs of the Measurement and Accountability Working Group of the Open Data Charter. It was originally published via the Open Data Charter’s Medium account.
 

Contemplating the More-than-Human Commons

Zack Walsh writing for The Arrow:  The Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change claims that reducing emissions by more than 1 percent annually would generate a severe economic crisis, and yet, climate analysts tell us we need to reduce carbon emissions by 5.3 percent annually to limit global warming to 2°C.1 Moreover, there is no evidence that decoupling economic gro

Ausschreibung für eine Stelle als Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin / Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter

Am Institut für Informations-, Telekommunikations- und Medienrecht, Zivilrechtliche Abteilung, ist ab dem
3. September 2018 eine
bis zum 31.12.2020 befristete Stelle als
 
wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin / wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
(Entgeltgruppe 13 TV-L)
 
zu besetzen. Eine Verlängerung der Befristung wird grundsätzlich angestrebt. Die Arbeitszeit beträgt derzeit 19 Std. 55 Min. wöchentlich (Hälfte der regelmäßigen Arbeitszeit).

Legislature 2.0: CrowdLaw and the Future of Lawmaking

With rates of trust in government at all-time lows, the legitimacy and effectiveness of traditional representative models of lawmaking, typically dominated by political party agendas and conducted by professional staff and politicians working behind largely closed doors, are called into question. But technology offers the promise of opening how lawmaking bodies work to new sources of expertise and opinion and making lawmakers accountable to the public more on more than just Election Day.

The Line Between Big Tech and Defense Work

Location

United States

See map: Google Maps

Date published: May 21, 2018Wired"One of the letter’s organizers, Peter Asaro, an associate professor at The New School, says there are no plans for similar letter for Microsoft or Amazon, “as there has not been a similar effort by employees in other companies.”"

‘Too inconvenient’: Trump goes rogue on phone security

Location

United States

See map: Google Maps

Date published: May 21, 2018Politico"“This would be the case of a president overruling literally the most rudimentary advice given by the communications agencies,” said Andrew McLaughlin, who served as deputy chief technology officer under Obama and helped develop the former president’s specialized phone."

AI trust and AI fears: A media debate that could divide society

Article by Vyacheslav Polonski: “Unless you live under a rock, you probably have been inundated with recent news on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). With all the recent breakthroughs, it almost seems like AI can already predict the future.

RightsCon Toronto 2018

RightsCon is organizing the 2018 edition of the event at Beanfield Centre at Exhibition Place, Toronto in Canada. A session on Pervasive Technologies project titled "Cheap and chipper: IP in India’s affordable smartphones" is scheduled on May 17, 5.15 p.m. to 6.15 p.m. in the International Trade and the Commons track. (Room #203B, Beanfield Centre).

Fairness, Transparency and Accountable AI

Amber Sinha participated remotely in the inaugural meeting of Fairness, Transparency and Accountable AI working group of the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence on May 10, 2018. The meeting was held at DeepMind's office in London.
Agenda of the meeting here

Putting women human rights activists on the world map

Birubala Rabha may be a household name in Assam, but her crusade against the practice of witch-hunting in her State has not got the attention it deserves from the nation or the world. Barring a handful of articles in print and online publications, little has been written about her fight that spans over two decades. There is no mention of her on Wikipedia.

More errors in Aadhaar data in Andhra Pradesh than in voter database

As much as eight per cent of Aadhaar data collected in Andhra Pradesh has errors, mostly related to name, address and date of birth, which is more than the errors in the voter ID database. But still, 87% of rural residents approve mandatory linking of the unique ID with various schemes and services.
The article by U Sudhakar Reddy was published in the Times of India on May 18, 2018.

Ordnungspartnerschaft: Polizei Düsseldorf zu Besuch am UKD

„Es freut uns, dass wir der Polizei Düsseldorf, mit der uns schon lange eine enge Zusammenarbeit verbindet, Räumlichkeiten für Ihre Besprechung zur Verfügung stellen konnten“, erklärt Ulrich Dreiner, Leiter der Logistik und verantwortlich für den Sicherheitsdienst am UKD, der das UKD in der Partnerschaft vertritt. „Mittlerweile haben wir viele Projekte an denen wir gemeinsam arbeiten, wie zum Beispiel auch unsere Präventions- und Beratungssprechstunde des Weißen Rings Düsseldorf an jedem zweiten Mittwoch im Monat.

On Dimensions of Citizenship

Introduction by Niall Atkinson, Ann Lui, and Mimi Zeiger to a Special Exhibit and dedicated set of Essays: “We begin by defining citizenship as a cluster of rights, responsibilities, and attachments, and by positing their link to the built environment. Of course architectural examples of this affiliation—formal articulations of inclusion and exclusion—can seem limited and rote. The US-Mexico border wall (“The Wall,” to use common parlance) dominates the cultural imagination.

Inclusive Innovation in Biohacker Spaces: The Role of Systems and Networks

Paper by Jeremy de Beer and Vipal Jain in Technology Innovation Management Review: “The biohacking movement is changing who can innovate in biotechnology. Driven by principles of inclusivity and open science, the biohacking movement encourages sharing and transparency of data, ideas, and resources. As a result, innovation is now happening outside of traditional research labs, in unconventional spaces – do-it-yourself (DIY) biology labs known as “biohacker spaces”.

A global food crisis may be less than a decade away

Our colleague James Quilligan alerted us to this video. Worth paying attention to. Originally published at TED.
From the shownotes to the video

Open data work: understanding open data usage from a practice lens

Paper by Emma Ruijer in the International Review of Administrative Sciences: “During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential has not yet been reached.

The Wisdom of the Network: How Adaptive Networks Promote Collective Intelligence

Paper by Alejandro Noriega-Campero , Abdullah Almaatouq, Peter Krafft, Abdulrahman Alotaibi, Mehdi Moussaid and Alex Pentland: “Social networks continuously change as people create new ties and break existing ones. It is widely noted that our social embedding exerts strong influence on what information we receive, and how we form beliefs and make decisions. However, most studies overlook the dynamic nature of social networks, and its role in fostering adaptive collective intelligence.

Conference: "Peace and Conflicts: Present and Future Challenges"

On the occasion of the founing of a new center for Peace and Conflict Research, the University of Rijeka/ Croatia hosted a conference on this topic. together with Prio, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, and the Center for Peace Studies, Zagreb, the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities was co-organiser of the event.The conference addressed "frozen conflicts", political violence and reconciliation as well as current questions that have the power to divide societies - from gender to migration and the "Balkan Route".

Crowdbreaks: Tracking Health Trends using Public Social Media Data and Crowdsourcing

Paper by Martin Mueller and Marcel Salath: “In the past decade, tracking health trends using social media data has shown great promise, due to a powerful combination of massive adoption of social media around the world, and increasingly potent hardware and software that enables us to work with these new big data streams.

How the Enlightenment Ends

Henry Kissinger in the Atlantic: “…Heretofore, the technological advance that most altered the course of modern history was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, which allowed the search for empirical knowledge to supplant liturgical doctrine, and the Age of Reason to gradually supersede the Age of Religion. Individual insight and scientific knowledge replaced faith as the principal criterion of human consciousness.