Stefania was in Berlin on Saturday the 19th of September to give a talk at the Futurium museum–the awesome House of Futures.
With a reduced audience due to Covid-19, Stefania discussed risks and opportunities of datafication in conversation with Germany’s most famous science journalist, Ranga Yogeshwar. The event is available on YouTube. Note that the talk is in English with some inserts (e.g., the introduction) in German. Enjoy!
Niels’ work has been covered in an article in the Dutch newsroom NRC last week.
Read his contribution on insights on the culture behind internet infrastructure governance in the article [in DUTCH]:
[original NRC header image by XF&M]
May 27th 2020, As part of the Milano Digital Week, Philip Di Salvo, Daniele Gambetta and Stefania Milan discussed the complex triadic relationship between health, new technologies and privacy: between big data, contact tracing and the pandemic.
Watch the entire conversation here (in Italian)
June 3rd 2020, Stefania presented “from the first pandemic of the datafied society” at the Online Research Seminar series by ZeMKI, University of Bremen
– find talk below –
Only a few months ago, we were able to walk the streets with for the Women’s or climate march. Now streets are empty and activists, except for a few, stay at home. How to demonstrate in the so-called one-and-a-half meter society?
Stefania has been interviewed in an article by the Dutch critical public documentary series Tegenlicht / BackLight concerning protesting online. In light of COVID what does it mean to protest changes – read the full article here (in Dutch).
Author: Jeroen de Vos, header image by Ford Foundation
This blog post will explore the potential of repurposing impact assessment tools as a means to leverage funding problems in Free and Libre Open Source Software by making explicit the role they have in crucial public digital infrastructure. Two key concepts are relevant to help explain this specific exploration, the first of which is Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) and the central role it plays in facilitating a common software infrastructure used by both public and private organisations as well as civil society at large. The second is the notion of impact assessment as a strategy to understand, account for and communicate results of your efforts beyond merely financial numbers.
‘Money talk is kind of a taboo in the F[L]OSS community’, one respondent replied in an interview I most recently conducted at CCC 36C3. The talk he just gave outlined some of the tentative revenue models one could think of to make your software development activities more sustainable – it attracted a larger-than-expected audience with interesting follow-up questions. FLOSS software development very much draws on the internal motivation of developers or a developer community, with recurring questions of sustainability when relying on volunteering time that could be spent differently. And the complexity of this situation cannot be underestimated. The 2016 Ford Foundation report Roads and bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure (Eghbal) contextualizes some of the common problems in the open-source software development – think of for instance the lack of appreciation of invisible labour, the emotional burden of upkeeping a popular project started, or the constant struggle over motivation while being structurally un- or underfunded.
The report draws on the metaphor of FLOSS as infrastructure, since it is readily available to anyone alike, but also in needs maintenance – has its limitations, but works well to illustrate the point. Just like infrastructure supports the flows of ideas, goods and people FLOSS operates on every level of digital infrastructure, whether talking about the NTP protocol synchronizing the internet, GnuPG (an encryption protocol allowing secure communication and data sharing) or MySQL (a database structure which quickly became a go-to standard for information storage and retrieval). Another commonality: as long as the infrastructure functions, its underlying support systems are seemingly invisible. That is, up until the point of failure it is unseen to which extent both private and public goods and services and public or private communication rely on these software packages. Only at failure, it becomes painfully explicit.
The recent well-known example of this escalation taking place is with the so-called Heartbleed bug. The FLOSS OpenSSL package contains the most widely used protocol for encrypting web traffic. Due to a bug creeping into the code somewhere in 2011, attackers could intercept information from connections that should be encrypted – which rendered large parts of online infrastructure unsafe in design, including services like Google, Amazon and many others. The issue raised the attention to the OpenSSL developers’ under-capacity – only one working full time for a salary of only a third to its colleagues in commercial counterparts. This is the point where the impact assessment tools might come into play – rather than relying on controversies to make visible the apparent widespread embedding and dependency on particular pieces of software, why not use impact assessment as a way to understand public relevance?
Conducting impact assessments can help communicate the necessity of maintenance by making visible the embeddedness of FLOSS software packages – whether it is on the level of language, operating system or protocol. To briefly contextualize, impact assessment grew out of changing management needs and has been implemented in the organisation of ‘soft output’ whether it be policymaking or social entrepreneurship. It is an interventionist tool that allows defining qualitative output with subsequent quantitative proxies to help understand the implementation results in relation to the desired output as described in a theory of change. It helps to both evaluate the social, technological, economic, environmental and political value created and subsequently make insightful the extend to which obsoletion would disrupt existing public digital infrastructure.
Without going too much into detail it needs mentioning that impact assessment already made its introduction as part of reporting deliverables to funders where relevant. Part of this exercise, however, is to instrumentalize impact assessment not only for (private) reporting by projects already funded but for (public) communicating FLOSS impact especially for projects without the necessary revenue streams in place. Needless to say, this output is only one of the steps in the process of making crucial FLOSS more sustainable but an important one, assessment output might help tapping into public or private sponsorship, establishing new collaborations with governments, educators and businesses alike, and venture into other new and exciting funding models.
This piece is meant as a conversation starter, do you already know of existing strategies to help communicate FLOSS output, are you involved in creating alternative business models for for-good public data infrastructure – ideas and comments welcome. Email: jeroen@data-activism.net
As for a short disclaimer I have been working with social enterprises developing market research and impact-first business models, I have been mulling over the crossover between social entrepreneurship and (FLOSS) activism, in their common struggle for sustainability, relying on informal networks or communities of action and trying to make a social change either from within or from the outside. This blog post is an attempt to think together social entrepreneurship and data activism through the use of a use-case: impact assessment for FLOSS.
References:
Eghbal, N. (2016). Roads and bridges: The unseen labor behind our digital infrastructure. Ford Foundation.
Today, Lonneke is at KCL to present in Jonathan Gray’s data activism course. The talk is about researching data activism “behind the scenes”: concepts, methods and how to handle research data.
After the talk, the students will investigate air pollution data activist projects.
Image: “Air Quality Egg” by Smart Citizens.
On 1-2 February, Stefania will attend the 2.Dh5 Festival in Utrecht, the Netherlands. She will give a presentation on “Surveillance capiralism and the future of data activism” , with a Q&A section (date and time will be announced on the 2.Dh5 Festival website).
About the presentation:
Surveillance capitalism is grounded on the transformation of human actions, interactions and emotions into data points which can be quantified, analysed and monetised. It accelerates the crisis of liberal democracies, and changes the role of information and technology in the constitution of our societies. People may react by fighting the aggressive intermediation of the industry, including social media platforms, and the snooping of the state, for example through “smart city” projects. Others may leverage the possibilities for transformative collective action harboured by big data. This talk explores how citizens, social change activists, and variably skilled users engage with datafication looking at emerging practices of “data activism”. It takes stock of the main tendencies we observe on the field, and surveys emerging areas such as algorithmic activism and device activism.
Davide Beraldo will be in Lugano, Switzerland, to present a paper on ‘Algorithms as Online Discourse. Exploring topic modeling and network analysis to study algorithmic imaginaries’, co-authored with Massimo Airoldi (Lifestyle Research Center, (EMLYON Business School). The paper is a contribution to the ‘Rethinking Digital Myths. Mediation, narratives and mythopoiesis in the digital age’ workshop hosted at the Università della Svizzera Italiana.
On 25 January 2020, Stefania will attend the workshop “Contesto urbano. Strumenti e pratiche per deostruire il Modello Milano” organised by OffTopic Lab in Milan, Italy. She will participate in the rountable “La città ambigua: presente e futuro della metropoli tra decoro, sorveglianza, greenwashing (The ambiguous city: present and future of the metropolis between decoration, surveillance, greenwashing)” from 15.00 to 18.00.
On Thursday 23 Janurary 2020, Stefania will attend the 13th International Conference of CPDP in Brussels, Belgium. She will speak in the panel ‘Online privacy, algorithmic bias, targeted political advertising — an interdisciplinary conversation’ organized by Mozilla. She will join on stage with other speakers: Fanny Hidvegi (Access Now); Matt Rogerson (The Guardian); and Sarah Bird (Mozilla).
Panel Desciption:
With an increasing degree of automation in the systems responsible for content delivery, advertisement platforms and content recommender systems alike are filtering, weighting, and ranking a continuous feed of potential items to provide a tailored experience to each individual based on their personal preferences and past behaviour. The complexity of such systems introduces a sophisticated (and almost totally opaque) new layer to peoples’ ability to access information. Automated decisions drastically impact our access to information and relationship with content serving and journalistic platforms. In many cases, the definition of success for such systems is not based on individual or societal well-being, but rather on some variation of engagement or revenue. A common belief motivating the design and optimization of these algorithms is that more (private) information about an individual equates to a better experience and more valuable advertisement via increasingly specific programmatic micro-targeting. This panel will present a multidisciplinary investigation of the interaction between data collection, the algorithmic nature of content recommendation systems, the commercial forces at play for such platforms and the individual and societal consequences of their prevalence.