Completing the circle on journalists and public participation

Journalists, politicians, and foundations are all tinkering with forms of amateur input: inviting bloggers to major events, quoting popular online sites in newspapers, etc. But Capital News Connection has really jumped in full-tilt with Ask Your Lawmaker. A creative combination of public input and ratings with professionals who have their boots on the ground in the US Capitol building, Ask Your Lawmaker is a case study in progress concerning how to get experts and the public to work together.

I heard a talk from CNC founder and executive director Melinda Wittstock this evening at the Ethos Roundtable, a forum for non-profits in Eastern Massachusetts. CNC gets consulting input from Ethos Roundtable organizer Deborah Elizabeth Finn, and Wittstock came looking for volunteer help with such matters as developing a Facebook or iPhone application. As Wittstock said, Ask Your Lawmaker is still working on how to complete the circle of public input, feedback, and outreach.

Step one is the simple form (on the web site's "Ask A Question" tab) for submitting a question to any Congressman or Senator of your choice. Step two is the simple voting mechanism, reminiscent of the pre-inauguration Change.gov site.

At this point, the journalists working for CNC--who have years of experience at leading media sites--take over. They don't merely choose the highest-rated questions. Sometimes a question shouldn't have to wait around and gather votes because the topic is hot. The reporters use their judgment in combination with votes to pick timely and provocative questions, and sometimes direct a question to a more appropriate lawmaker (such as the sponsor of a bill or the head of a committee).

The next step invokes the power of professional journalism. CNC sends its reporters into the Capitol and congressional office buildings daily. Although they have regular routines with their typical journalists' questions, they throw in citizen questions where appropriate and tell the lawmaker how many people voted for each question. Wittstock mentioned that it's very hard for a congressperson to dismiss a question that came from a constituent, especially one that got a lot of votes.

Videos are very hard to make in the Capitol, unfortunately, because filming is severely restricted there by law and the lawmakers are understandably leery of allowing themselves to be filmed any place at any time.

The next step goes from real-time back to the web site, along with conventional radio stations. Questions and answers are taped and transcribed so they can be offered as both audio and text. CNC has contracts with a number of PBS stations who work public questions into regular news broadcasts.

Podcasts and texts are posted on the web site and served through an RSS feed, but you can also follow https://twitter.com/askyourlawmaker">AskYourLawmaker on Twitter or search for hashtag #ayl. (Right now they're discussing the talk I attended.) This can bring the answers back to those who asked the questions.

Ask Your Lawmaker also offers a feed that visitors can add to their own web sites, and an iframe for each individual report, suitable for embedding.

Most powerful at all, citizens' questions can change policies. Lobbyists harangue lawmakers day after day, but sometimes they're more impressed by a simple question revealing a deep-seated need in their communities. They have been heard walking away from journalist interviews saying to their staff, "Brief me about that issue."

All very impressive for an effort that's so provisional, the journalists run the web site themselves. Several weak points remain before the circle is complete.

• Ask Your Lawmaker doesn't get enough publicity. It may or may not be mentioned on the radio station that reports its results. Hardly any listeners, I wager, realize that questions were generated by ordinary citizens, much less realize that anyone can ask a question.
• The site needs a way to accept questions through SMS. Attendees at this evening's talk speculated about the power of accepting questions for US lawmakers from victims of wars or globalization policies around the globe.
• The site doesn't exploit the potential for social networking to let questioners promote the site. Someone whose question is chosen should be informed when the answer is posted or broadcast on the radio, and should be encouraged to invite her friends and fellow workers to view the answer.

CNC is looking for ways to complete the circle--and will gladly accept volunteer help, as I mentioned--but they're doing a lot in the meantime to firm up their appeal and raise funds. They plan to allow cobranding and to let sites select the length and subject matter of the material they post, just as they now serve up very customized reports to the radio stations they serve. They may start accepting advertising, and they're looking for fun contests that will publicize their work.

Ask Your Lawmaker demonstrates a unique solution to a situation whered for amateur input can augment expert practice and expertise can augment what the public has to offer. In this regard, Ask Your Lawmaker is worth comparing to the landmark Peer-to-Patent project and to two commercial ventures I analyzed a few months ago, uTest and TopCoder. The opportunity for a virtuous cycle of public input, professional processing, and listener loyalty--especially in a field whose death has been predicted by many--puts Ask Your Lawmaker into an intriguing category of its own.

Wolfram Alpha a Google Killer? Not... Supposed... To... Be

I'm getting tired of reading about whether Alpha is a Google-killer. I've seen Stephen Wolfram's presentations a couple of times; he's quite careful to say that it isn't. There's a fundamental difference that many people out there are just missing. Google is a search engine. Alpha looks like a search engine, but it isn't; it's all about curated data, and the analysis of that data.

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Clothing as Conversation (Twitter Tees on Threadless)

Threadless just announced their Twitter Tees on Threadless program. What a great idea. Submit or nominate tweets, community votes, best make it onto shirts.

From the two shirts they sent me in advance, I can see only one trick they are missing: the author of the tweet is on the label rather than on the shirt. As I found myself saying to the Washington Post, "every new medium has the potential to be an art form." And as the Post added, "If Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde were still alive, they would probably all be on Twitter."

Part of the gift of aphorisms is remembering who said them. It matters that it was @biz who said “It's the messaging system that we didn’t know we needed until we had it.”

There's also a nice serial purchase opportunity. If this threadless/twitter program takes off, I see potential for a whole line of clothing by people whose tweets I admire. I'd totally subscribe to the @sacca collection.

This whole idea of fashion and social media seems to be coming up these days. Just yesterday, I had a great conversation with Chris Lindland, founder of Cordarounds, the short-run clothing design firm that started with horizontal corduroy (cordarounds), has moved into cool concepts like "bike to work pants", and crowdsources its marketing photography by inviting customers to send in pictures of themselves in the clothing they buy. Here's Chris:

Every clothing idea I release is designed to stoke some amount of Internet chatter. Where haute couture is inspired by art and hip couture is inspired by street culture, my products are inspired by Web communication. This conversational approach has been a necessity since the get-go, as I've never had the mighty monetary sledgehammer clothiers use to create product awareness.

While I'm sure that reads like Web 2.0 common sense to O'Reilly readers, it's a new approach for folks in clothing design.

Crowdsourced fashion design is the narrow end of the wedge. T-shirts are easy. But expect this trend to transform manufacturing as a whole over the next few years.

Captivity of the Commons

This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27.

In January 2002 DARPA launched the Information Awareness Office. The mission was to, “ imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness (emphasis added)” The notion of a government agency achieving total information awareness was too Orwellian to ignore. Under criticism that this “awareness” could quickly migrate to a mass surveillance system the program was defunded.

Fast-forward to last week and my near-purchase of Libbey Duratuff Gibralter Glasses (the perfect bourbon glass one might speculate). Over the course of the next few days I was peppered with exact-match ads for Libbey Duratuff glassware on several other websites; A small example of information awareness at work.

Personal data is the currency of Web 2.0. Knowing what we watch, buy, click, own, what we think, intend and ultimately do confers competitive advantage. Facebook possesses your social graph, your personal interests and your full profile (age, location, relationship status etc.) not to mention your daily (or hourly) answer to their persistent question, “what’s on your mind?”. Reviewing the “25 Surprising Things Google Knows About You” should give anyone pause. And it’s not just the Web 2.0 set. Credit Card Companies, Telcos, Insurance , Pharma… all are collecting vast stores of personal data. If you watch the trendline it is moving toward more data and more analytic capability - not less.

So why is it that we seem to have more comfort when the capacity for total information awareness lies with corporations as opposed to government? Experience shows that there is a very thin barrier between the two. To wit, the release of thousands of phone records to the U.S. government - and, conveniently, government immunity for those same corporations after the breach. Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft have all been accused of cooperating with the Chinese government to aid censorship and repression of free speech. What happens if/when we encounter the next version of the Bush administration that sees no problem abrogating civil rights in pursuit of “evildoers”?

What's more, when we deliver our personal information over to corporations we are giving this data over to an institution that is amoral. Companies are not yet structured to deliver moral or ethical results - they are encouraged to grow and deliver “shareholder value” (read money) which is a numb and narrow measure of value. Do I want my data to be managed by an amoral institution?

To be clear - I want the convenience and miracles that modern technology brings. I love the Internet and I am willing to give over lots of data in the trade. But I want two fundamental protections:

First, change the corporation. The structure of the corporation continues to be driven by 20th century hard goals of efficiency and scale - not by more complex measures of environmental sustainability, value creation and the commonweal. These are simply not adequately factored into any structural, organizational, incentive or taxation systems of business today. Profit and profit motive are fine - but hiding social and environmental costs is no longer acceptable. I want to deal with institutions capable of morality. This is no small task - but if we can build the Internet….

Second. We need a right to privacy that matches the 21st century reality. As a friend of mine likes to say, “privacy is now a responsibility - not a right.” While it is pithy (and perhaps true), the reason we grant rights - and laws to enforce those rights in society is the simple fact that people do not generally have the wherewithal to protect themselves from large, institutional interests. In the same way that regulatory structures are needed to keep a financial system in balance (alas even the Ayn Rand acolyte Greenspan finally agrees with this truism), we need new rights and regulations governing the use of our personal data - and simple sets of controls over who has access to it.

The true work of the 21st century lies not in refining our technology - this we will achieve without any political will. The work lies in re-imagining our institutions.

MapstractionAPI Sandbox: For Trying Out Multiple Providers

For their workshops on Mapping APIs today Evan Henshaw and Andrew Turner created the Mapstraction API Sandbox on Google App Engine. Mapstraction (Radar post)is a Javascript framework that abstracts many different mapping APIs. The sandbox is no different. It will let you play with code samples from Microsoft's, Google's, Yahoo's, Mapquest's and OpenStreetMap's APIS (and many others for a total of 11 major providers). The Sandbox also has hooks into data services such as geocoders and Geonames.

Websites depend on their mapping providers (like Google or Yahoo). However the API calls are proprietary so the sites are unable to easily switch between providers. Mapstraction provides a very easy way to do that if a provider was down or the TOS changed. Mapstraction is in use by several companies including Reuters and Swivel. If you're not sure if Mapstraction will work for you check their Features page.

Four short links: 19 May 2009

Recession Map, Gaming Psychology, Charging For Unwanted Content, and Two Great Projects

1. Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession's Stories (AP) -- The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish I had one for New Zealand.
2. Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom (Wired) -- Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early. Not only a lesson for creators of user-generated content sites, but also for students of human nature: if you provide a number, some people will act to maximize that number come what may. See also friend counts on social networks. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
3. San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content -- congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it's this. This business model didn't fail in 1998 because there weren't enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.
4. Two Groundbreaking Open Source Projects -- two open source projects that are developing software in very different ways (one with centralised authority, one more distributed), large (60k and 200k+ LOC), in some cases teaching people to code from scratch, with a wonderful vibe and solid outputs. I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program. {The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas-in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.} There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves. It makes me realize how much of the macho meritocracy "it's just about how GOOD YOU ARE" individual-excellence cocks-out culture in programming in general and open source in particular isn't about what's necessary to make good programs and good programmers, it's what's necessary to make great egos feel good about themselves.

More Geo-Games: Ship Simulator on Google Earth

At Google I/O 2008 the Google Earth API was released. It brought Google Earth's 3D capabilities to the web (with the help of browser extensions). Since that release they've started supporting Macs. One really nice part of the Google Earth API is the ability to create games in the 3D world. One of the sample apps was the game Milk Truck. Since the release there have been some games, but now the day before Where 2.0 there's a new one that been released.

Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog just posted about Ships, a new ship simulation plugin that uses the API (Frank's movie review). It's one of the Plugins he's going to dissect in his Google Earth workshop at Where 2.0 tomorrow (use whr09rdr for 20% off that last-minute registration).

PlanetInAction.com has released the first version of a fantastic free simulation game which leverages the browser-based Google Earth plugin as the primary graphics engine. The game is called "Ships" and lets you take the helm on ships - barges, cargo ships, container ships, and even a cruise ship (the QE 2). Everything is in 3D, you can drive the ships anywhere in the world, there are sound effects, physical modeling, and realistic visual effects that makes this a wonder to behold. Not only that, but the author - Paul van Dinther - has created some great camera tools to make it easier for people to follow the action and see the sights. This is the best example of the Google Earth API I've seen to date.
Ships uses the Google Earth API, Flash 8.0, and Javascript. He also used Soundmanager 2 for sound effects, and SketchUp for the 3D models. Not everything is physically modeled (the anchor doesn't stop the boat).

Google Earth and its API are ripe for this type of game play. Google maps is the UI for the PS3's Last Guy (Radar post). However, after seeing creations like this I am going to hold out for Last Guy on Google Earth. While I'm asking the internet for things, I'd love to see a Katamari Damacy on the 3D plugin. In the meantime I'll have to make due with these Frank-Taylor-endorsed Satellite Debris Simulator and Paragliding games.

We still haven't seen the 3D API rear its head on Google's own site -- I/O 2009 is next week, perhaps there? I think that when that occurs more users will download the extensions and sites will have an incentive to implement the API and there will be a chance of me getting Katamari Damacy.

The Question Concerning Social Technology

I am an evangelist of social media and an active participant: on Linked In (business), MySpace (music) and Facebook (increasingly my online identity), I blog on several sites and I am a daily user of Twitter. I also make my living speaking to companies about the value and operating principles of these more open, participatory technologies.

I have read the proponents that abound (Why I Love Twitter, Groundswell, Here Comes Everybody etc.) and found much to agree with. I have read the detractors (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” …, Facebook Addiction is Real etc.…) and found little to agree with.

So over the course of the next few days I will post a series of questions on the value and function of social media (a.k.a. social technologies). I will not be arguing that social technologies are a bane or should be stopped. I don’t believe the former is true and I believe the latter is impossible… I will not be arguing against technology. Rather, I will raise questions about the potential abuse of social technologies and the steps we might take to remedy them. The more discussion this prompts within the Radar community the better. I will also be leading a webcast on May 27 at 10AM Pacific to discuss these topics in detail.

This is the first of these posts: The Evangelist Fallacy, Social Media and The New Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment swept through Europe in the eighteenth century, upending the notion of a divine right (religious and monarchic) to rule over the population. Its tenets centered upon the idea that humans were capable of reason and could seek governance that accorded individuals liberty and some semblance of equality. Western society still embraces principles and speaks the language of "freedom," "democracy," and civil rights born during The Enlightenment.

There is another side of the historical record. While the public dialogue of The Enlightenment was centered on freedom, equality and human progress, institutions of the age were rapidly developing sophisticated means of control over individual movement and action; from highly structured factory work and military regimentation (the true birthplace of modern management theory), to isolating deviant segments of society (the birth of prisons, debtor’s prisons and asylums) and an emphasis on police surveillance and the “dossier” to track behavior. In fact many of the same political and social theorists of Enlightenment (Montesquieu, Bentham etc.) were the architects of detailed studies on how to subject individuals to institutional control. These tactical manuevers were often cloaked in the more lofty rhetoric of The Englightement.

This is not an isolated reading of history. Knowledge is almost always being produced in service of power - not as a liberating force from it and there is always a gap between what a society proclaims about it’s goals and aims - and the functional outcomes of its institutional policies and procedures (the “War on Drugs” being a quintessential modern example).

The idea of social technologies as a liberating force echoes the Enlightenment language and, just as with the original, there are good reasons to view this discourse with some skepticism. This knowledge about the value and meaning of social technologies comes from industry champions (Cisco’s Human Network), industry analysts and corporate consultants. This discourse is good for business - I know because I speak regularly on the topic in boardrooms and at conferences. Proponents have a personal stake in seeing the positive side of the equation (and there is a positive side) and encourage participation as a means of personal empowerment (“the customer is now in charge” “the end of command and control hierarchy” etc.).

Social media is cloaked in this language of liberation while the corporate sponsors (Facebook, Google et al ) are progressing towards ever more refined and effective means of manipulating individual behavior (behavioral targeting of ads, recommendation systems, reputation management systems etc.). As with the enlightenment the tactics of control are shielded by a rhetoric of emancipation. Let's not forget that the output of all of this social participation is massive dossiers on individual behavior (your social network profiles, photos, location, status updates, searches etc.) and social activity.

How do these corporations intend to use these vast records of our behavior? The next post, Captivity of the Commons will explore the risks associated with personal data being collected at the behest of corporations whose main motivation is not in service of “customer empowerment” but on the traditional goals of manipulating behavior to grow their share of wallet.

Ignite Google IO Line-Up; 5 Passes to Give Away

I will be hosting an Ignite at Google IO on 5/27 from 4:15-5:15 at Moscone. I did an open call for speakers and I'm happy to announce the following will be joining me onstage:

Leo Dirac - Transhumanism Morality
Why only geeks and hippies can save the world.

Michael Driscoll - Hacking Big Data with the Force of Open Source
The world is streaming billions of data points per minute. This is Big Data - capital B, capital D. But capturing data isn't enough. We need tools to make sense of it, to help us better understand -- and predict -- what we click and consume. We want to make hypotheses about the world. And to test hypotheses, we need statistics. We need R.

Pamela Fox - My Dad, the Computer Scientist: Growing up Geek

Tim Ferriss - The Case for Just Enough: Minimalism Metrics
Looking at how removing options and elements gets better conversions, etc., looking at screenshots of start-ups I'm working with and real numbers. Some humor (I hope) and fun, both philosophical and tactical.

Nitin Borwankar - Law of Gravity for Scaling
Why did Twitter have scaling problems? I spent 6 months thinking deeply about this and derived a simple formula that a high school student would understand. It demonstrates where the center of gravity is moving in the "Next Web" and why this aggregation of CPU's is even bigger than Google's. And oh yes it explains how to build a service that scales to 100 million CPU's.

Kevin Marks - Why are we bigoted about Social networks?

Andrew Hatton - Coding against Cholera
I'll examine what IT life is like on the front line with Oxfam, a humanitarian agency, and how good code can make a real difference to people's lives in all sorts of ways..some of them surprising..

Robin Sloan - How to Predict the Future
OK, back in 2004 I made a video called "EPIC 2014," predicting the future of media (and Google). It turned out to be 100% CORRECT. No, just kidding. But it made a lot of people think, which is really the point of talking about the future. Turns out there's a whole professional discipline of future forecasting. And there are certain ways you can think about the future that will give you better odds of being right than others.

Kathy Sierra - Become Awesome

Everyone who submitted a talk has a pass already so I am left with 5 free ones to give away. Google will be releasing a lot of products and APIs in the next two weeks between Where 2.0 and Google I/O. Put your wishlist in the comments by Wednesday morning. My top 5 will get the passes.

Velocity Preview - The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number at Microsoft

The psychology of engineering user experiences on the web can be difficult. How much rich content can you place up on a page before the load time drives away your visitors? Get the answer wrong, and you can end up with a ghost town; get it right and you're a star. Eric Schurman knows this well, since he is responsible for just those kind of trade-off decisions on some of Microsoft's highest traffic pages. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference in June, and he recently talked with us about how Microsoft tests different user experiences on small groups of visitors.

James Turner: Why don't you start by describing what your gig at Microsoft is now and what your career path has been there?

Eric Schurman: I'm a principal dev lead for Live Search, what used to be MSN Search. And I started at Microsoft back in the late 90s working in Microsoft's Press organization, where we actually were developing training software that would emulate new Microsoft products, but didn't require those products to be on a user's machine. So, for example, if you had an organization that was running Windows 95, we would have a training system for Windows 98 that would emulate a bunch of the functionality of Windows 98 so that you could deploy it to your people. They could train their people on how to use Windows 98 before they actually deployed it.

I then moved on to the Microsoft Press website, where I became the dev lead for it. I made a few other moves and ended up going to Microsoft.com, where I ran the download center, the Microsoft.com homepage, the product catalog, and a bunch of other places from a dev perspective.

I then moved to what was then MSN Search, back in about 2005, and was there through the MSN to Live transition. At the time, I wasn't working on performance; I was just working on the Live Search application. And it became very obvious that we had some major performance problems. Performance has always been one of my really strong interests, so I took on addressing a lot of those. And when we addressed them, we had very significant improvements in our business metrics. That really surfaced how important performance was to the organization, and I moved into a role where I was really focusing just on performance. I've been in that role now for about two years.

JT: You've worked on at least three very different parts of the Microsoft website. The homepage has lots of hits, fairly static. The download page is a lot of data for long periods of time. Live Search is high volume, but there's also a lot of backend on that. In what ways do you need to architect them differently? And where can you reuse the same lessons?

ES:: That's a great question. On the web, you've got different concerns on what you have for client apps. The main things that tend to impact end-user perceived performance on the web are often things about how you've designed your application from a network perspective. So how many different HTTP get requests are you making? How are those get requests structured? So, for example, are they serialized? Did you have a JavaScript file that then gets returned to the browser that requests another JavaScript file and another JavaScript file and then some content and then it finally gets rendered? So the number of assets that you request, that's going to be something that's important no matter what product your doing.

There are other things, like how much script do you have on the page, how much CSS you have on the page, how much actual content are your rendering to the page, etcetera. There are tricks that you can use like combining many different graphics into a single tiled image and sending that down to the browser. It's much faster to send one image to the browser than, say, 20 images. Even if you end up sending the same overall graphics, but combined into one, it's still must faster to send it as one request.

There are also different data volume concerns. They're also different from a business perspective. A lot of what we were sending out from the download center was extremely time critical. We would have an update go out, and we needed to make sure that update was going to be available anywhere in the world within a certain time frame, which required us to handle very high bandwidth, and a very high volume of requests coming into the site that were transferring lots of bits. So that required something totally different than something like the Microsoft.com homepage.

It's also interesting looking at the volume of traffic and how that traffic reflects real users. So, for example, one of the problems that you end up with on both the Microsoft homepage and Live Search is that we have a huge number of bots that are trying to hit the system, lots of people trying to do SEO work are trying to hit search engines to gather information about their site, about competitor sites, about all sorts of things. On the Microsoft.com homepage, it's always under distributed denial of service attacks. It's not a question of how frequently does it happen; it's just what is the rate right now? Also, the Microsoft.com homepage has historically had such a high up-time rate that it's actually hit by a lot of hardware devices simply to check for connectivity to the internet. And so you'd want to treat a request from that kind of "user" very differently from a request that's coming from a real user.

So that's kind of a long, rambling answer to your question. Do you have any areas that you want me to drill in or maybe talk about something else?

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Four short links: 18 May 2009

Scientists, Scammers, Satellites, and Safe Havens

1. Scientists Without Borders -- "Mobilizing Science, Improving Lives". mobilize and coordinate science-based activities that improve quality of life in the developing world. The research community, aid agencies, NGOs, public-private partnerships, and a wide variety of other institutions are already promoting areas such as global health, agricultural progress, and environmental well-being, but current communication gaps restrict their power. Organizations and individuals do not always know about one another's endeavors, needs, or availability, which limits the ability to forge meaningful connections and harness resources. This situation is especially striking in light of the growing realization that integrated rather than focused approaches are crucial for addressing key challenges such as extreme poverty and the glaring health problems that accompany it. See also Geeks Without Borders, but is there anyone running a program that sends geeks into the field where they're needed? I know a lot of open source folks who have been volunteering around the world in poor nations, but I haven't found a site that coordinates this. Can anyone point me to such a thing?
2. The Psychology of Being Scammed -- UK government report into the psychology of scammers' victims. Lots of insights into successful scams (parallels drawn to finance or startups left as exercise to reader) and some counter-intuitive findings like Scam victims often have better than average background knowledge in the area of the scam content. For example, it seems that people with experience of playing legitimate prize draws and lotteries are more likely to fall for a scam in this area than people with less knowledge and experience in this field. This also applies to those with some knowledge of investments. Such knowledge can increase rather than decrease the risk of becoming a victim. (via Mind Hacks)
3. GPS Accuracy Could Start Dropping In 2010 (Tidbits) -- the Air Force has had difficulty launching new satellites. The GAO has calculated - using reliability curves for each operational satellite - that the probability of keeping a 24-satellite constellation in orbit drops below 95 percent in 2010, and could drop as low as 80 percent in 2011 and 2012. (via geowanking)
4. Open Database Alliance -- an attempt to provide a safe home for MySQL given the Oracle acquisition of Sun. [...] a vendor-neutral consortium designed to become the industry hub for the MySQL open source database, including MySQL and derivative code, binaries, training, support, and other enhancements for the MySQL community and partner ecosystem. The Open Database Alliance will comprise a collection of companies working together to provide the software, support and services for MariaDB, an enterprise-grade, community-developed branch of MySQL.

Being a Suggested User Leads to Thousands of Twitter Followers

Ever since Twitter started suggesting accounts to new users, it was clear that those on the suggested users list were gaining thousands of followers. Setting aside the fact that number of followers is a poor gauge of influence (see our Twitter report for details), I wanted to know how many followers a suggested account gains by appearing on the list.

I took the set of accounts that were added to the suggested users list during the last two months, recorded their number of followers the day before they made the list (Initial # of followers), and tracked what happened a week, 2 weeks, and a month later. From an initial set of just over a hundred accounts, I was able to gather sufficient data (using Twitterholic and Twittercounter) on 80+ suggested users.

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