the open web
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Max Klein defines himself on his blog as a ‘Mathematician-Programmer, Wikimedia-Enthusiast, Burner-Yogi’ who believes in ‘liberty through wikis and logic’. I interviewed him a few weeks ago when he was in the UK for Wikimania 2014. He then wrote up some of his answers so that we could share with it others. Max is a long-time volunteer of
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First published on ethnographymatters.net. Last month on Ethnography Matters, we started a monthly thematic focus where each of the EM contributing editors would elicit posts about a particular theme. I kicked us off with the theme entitled ‘The Openness Edition’ where we investigated what openness means for the ethnographic community. I ended up editing some
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First posted at the Google Policy blog. With all the hype around “Big Data” lately, you may be inclined to shrug it off as a business fad. But there is more to it than a buzzword. Data science is emerging as a new field, changing the ways that companies get to know their customers, governments
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Patrick Meier just wrote a post explaining why the term he coined, “bounded crowdsourcing” is ‘important for crisis mapping and beyond’. He likens “bounded crowdsourcing” to “snowball sampling”, where a few trusted individuals invite other individuals who they ‘fully trust and can vouch for… And so on and so forth at an exponential rate if
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It’s that time of the year again. Creative Commons and Wikipedia are working towards their fundraising goals for the coming year and asking users to donate to support the cause. I spent the last five years working on building a global perspective on the commons and will probably spend the next working out what I
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_MG_6689, originally uploaded by btmoss. Went to the Mozilla Firefox birthday party in SF last night with DR and Dan Perkel. Loads of fun.
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My article on the city of Johannesburg’s closed GIS data policies is now available at brainstormmag.co.za. Also this month is a story that I wrote on technology incubators titled ‘Technology incubators: how successful are they really?‘
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Friends Jess Hemerly and David Evan Harris have asked Simon Dingle and I (from SA, at least) to be judges in this awesome competition/community initiative from BoingBoing, Sun and the Institute for the Future where they work. As always, the devil is in the detail, and I really love the details of this competition –
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Gil Hockman has started a rad project called ‘the joburg‘ – an open calendar for events happening in Johannesburg. It’s a total community-driven, non-commercial project – factors which I think will make it grow exponentially in the future. According to Gil, The way it works is a follows: Google have a very cunning online setup
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Great news from Tectonic about the Independent Electoral Commission’s website now being open to non-IE users. Congrats to everyone who made this happen. The hundreds of emails, blog posts and complaints to the South African Human Rights Commission has done the trick. I love the comment by Friedel Wolff from translate.org.za below: Writing a feature on
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