[Bigbang-dev] An Introduction

[Sebastian Benthall]

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 at 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
>
> --
>   Harsh Gupta
>   mail at hargup.in
> _______________________________________________
> BigBang-dev mailing list
> BigBang-dev at lists.sudoroom.org
> https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/bigbang-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://sudoroom.org/pipermail/bigbang-dev/attachments/20160819/0ee4089d/attachment.html>