Ushahidi: Crowdsourcing for Peace Mapping

Lynda Gratton at the London Business School gave one of the best Keynote speeches that I’ve heard all year. Her talk was a tour de force on how to catalyze innovation and one of her core recommendations really hit home for me: “If you really want to be at the cutting edge of innovation, then [...]

Digital Activism and the Puffy Clouds of Anecdote Heaven

Evgeny replied in style to my way-too-long response to his piece in Prospect on: “Why Dictators Love the Web.” At least someone read my entire post, thanks Evgeny! As I wrote in my first response, the great thing about Evgeny is that “he’ll test your logic and poke (nay, drill) as many trenches as he [...]

Why Dictators Love the Web or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Say So What?!

Prospect Magazine’s latest issue figures an excellent piece by my witty colleague Evgeny Morozov. Entitled “Why Dictators Love the Web,” the article is as an important contribution to the study of digital activism.
As many in this field know, Evgeny is one of the lone analog voices countering the digital “Internet = Democracy” hype that pervades [...]

Twitter vs. Tyrants: Education and Security

My colleague Chris Doten asked me to suggest panelists for this congressional briefing on the role of new media in authoritarian states. I blogged about the opening remarks of each panelist here. But the key issues really came to fore during the Q/A session.
These issues addressed Ushahidi and data validation, security and education. This blog [...]

Twitter vs. Tyrants: Ushahidi and Data Verification

My colleague Chris Doten asked me to suggest panelists for this congressional briefing on the role of new media in authoritarian states. I blogged about the opening remarks of each panelist here. But the key issues really came to fore during the Q/A session.
These issues addressed Ushahidi, data validation, security and education. This blog post [...]

Twitter vs. Tyrants: Remarks by NDI

My colleague Chris Doten asked me to suggest panelists for this congressional briefing on the role of new media in authoritarian states. Here are the highlights from Chris Spence’s opening remarks along with my critiques:

[T]he introduction of new media and other technologies should not be seen as a  panacea for democratic development nor goal [...]

Twitter vs. Tyrants: Summary of Congressional Briefing

My colleague Chris Doten sent me the following email on September 25th:
Hey Patrick-
I’m currently working for the US Helsinki Commission, which as you probably know is a semi-congressional human rights watchdog. They’ve asked me to put a briefing together on the role of new media technology in democratization – very exciting opportunity for me, and [...]

Evolving a Global System of Info Webs

I’ve already blogged about what an ecosystem approach to conflict early warning and response entails. But I have done so with a country focus rather than thinking globally. This blog post applies a global perspective to the ecosystem approach given the proliferation of new platforms with global scalability.
Perhaps the most apt analogy here is [...]

Cymatic Insights for Crisis Mapping

I just came across Evan Grant’s fascinating TED 2009 talk on “Making Sound Visible through Cymatics.” Cymatics describes the process of visualizing sound. Sound waves create vibrations—patterns—that can be visualized on the surface of a plate covered with sand as depicted below.

In his talk, Evan demonstrates how different sound frequencies create distinctly different geometric sand [...]

Accurate Crowdsourcing for Human Rights

This is a short video of the presentation I will be giving at the Leir Conference on The Next Generation of Human Rights. My talk focuses on the use of digital technologies to leverage the crowdsourcing and crowdfeeding of human rights information. I draw on Ushahidi’s Swift River initiative to describe how crowdsourced information can [...]