31 Aug
2016
31 Aug
'16
8:29 a.m.
i Harsh,
Sorry to be late! It's quite hectic at the moment. I am Niels and part
of the Datactive research group at the Media Studies Department at the
Univeristy of Amsterdam [0].
I am currently working on analysing the tactics and strategies (action
repertoire) and Internet imaginaires of digital civil society. With
BigBang I am specifically looking at civil society engagement on
Liberation Tech, BestBits, in ICANN and in the IETF.
I am looking at the penetration of human rights language and how it
spreads through communities, how it works, and when it doesn't.
Next to that I am also pretty active in the IETF (hrpc.io) and ICANN
(icannhumanrights.net) as well, and we're spinning up in the IEEE. I'm
doing this mostly with my Head of Digital at Article19 hat on.
With Davide Beraldo and the other people in our research group we want
to further develop BigBang to do this research, which we might also
expand into the Civic Tech communities with out colleague Kersti Wissenbach.
Hope that is a useful high level overview!
Again, sorry to be late!
Cheers,
Niels
[0] https://data-activism.net/
PS Am setting up a new mailinglist for this - more soon!
Niels ten Oever
Head of Digital
Article 19
www.article19.org
PGP fingerprint 8D9F C567 BEE4 A431 56C4
678B 08B5 A0F2 636D 68E9
On 08/22/2016 07:00 AM, Harsh Gupta wrote:
At CIS I analyzed technical alternatives of Encrypted
Media Extensions
(EME) [1] draft specification which were proposed in the discussion on
public-html mailing list of W3C. I analyzed the alternatives on the
strength of content protection, privacy, security, accessibility and
interoperability, which are the major points of debate in the EME
controversy. The report is not there is public yet. I also did a
diversity analysis on the participants of the debate where I found out
that out of 48 participants no one was from Asia, Africa or South
America. The notebook for this analysis has been added to BigBang as an
example [2]. I also spent some time looking at the work of Social Web
working group at W3C [3], though nothing concrete came out of it.
Before this I've also worked on Wikipedia Human Gender Indicators [4], a
project which highlights gender gap in biographies of wikipedia. I've
started getting into the more social/political sides of tech only a year
ago, so I don't have a niche yet. My earlier experiences have been more
software development oriented, including a Google Summer of Code in
SymPy and an internship at Continuum.
[1]: https://hsivonen.fi/eme/
[2]:
https://github.com/sbenthall/bigbang/blob/master/examples/EME%20Diversity%2…
[3]: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg
[4]: http://whgi.wmflabs.org/
--
Harsh Gupta
mail(a)hargup.in
On Fri, Aug 19, 2016, at 04:06 PM, Sebastian Benthall wrote:
Hi Harsh,
Thanks for this introduction and for your contributions so far.
It's great to have you involved in the project.
Niels or Davide would be better able to represent the work going on at
Datactive [1].
I can talk about ideas we've been tossing around at Berkeley's School
of Information [2] and with a contact at the Center for Democracy and
Technology (CDT) [3].
* CDT has confirmed an interest in measuring the effectiveness of
civil society in pushing the public interest agenda in the IETF. One
project we may work on is finding several cases of public interest
related topics, including both advocacy 'successes' and advocacy
'failures', and try to map out how communications played out in each
case. The goal for this project would be ideally be to get strategic
insight into effective organizing around these kinds of issues.
* I have a research interest in the statistical modeling of
communication networks in general. This is related to some of the more
advocacy based research but could also be seen as a study in applied
math. I am hoping to use BigBang to develop some novel modeling and
analysis algorithms for communications metadata.
* An idea that just occurred to me the other day that could be
interest which I haven't discussed with anybody yet.... We could also
look at crossing data from Internet Governance lists with another data
set and see what comes up. I'm thinking specifically the Panama Papers
<https://panamapapers.icij.org/>. It's just possible we could detect
the influence of offshore finance on Internet governance. That would
be quite a find.
Just a few ideas. The project is at this point very open ended. I'd
really like to hear more about the work you did for CIS, if you don't
mind sharing.
All best,
Seb
[1] : https://data-activism.net/
[2] : http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/
[3] : https://cdt.org/
On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 2:27 PM, Harsh Gupta <mail(a)hargup.in
<mailto:mail@hargup.in>> wrote:
Hello BigBang developers,
I'm Harsh Gupta, a fifth year undergrad student at Indian Institute of
Technology Kharagpur, studying Mathematics and Computing. I was an
intern at CIS India [1] this summer and used BigBang to do diversity
analysis on the participants of the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
debate happening at W3C [2]. I met Sebastian at SciPy in July where he
told me about the plans to use to BigBang to analyze ICANN. I'm in
general interested in the social + political dimensions of technology.
Where can I read more details of the research you plan to carry
out, and
what are the ways I can get involved?
I'm hoping to churn out a thesis out the work, a part of which I
need to
submit by the end of this semester.
[1]: http://cis-india.org/
[2]: https://github.com/sbenthall/bigbang/pull/259
<https://github.com/sbenthall/bigbang/pull/259>
--
Harsh Gupta
mail(a)hargup.in <mailto:mail@hargup.in>
_______________________________________________
BigBang-dev mailing list
BigBang-dev(a)lists.sudoroom.org <mailto:BigBang-dev@lists.sudoroom.org>
https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/bigbang-dev
<https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/bigbang-dev>