[Bigbang-dev] An Introduction

Wed Aug 31 08:39:10 PDT 2016

Thanks for writing in, Niels!

Just your mention of Liberation Tech gave me a new idea (maybe it's already
occurred to some of you).

There's for example the liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu list where a lot
of people with a particular political tendency post.

Just like the Panama Papers emails, if we have external data sets of email,
that can provide additional contextual information about the political
leanings of the people involved in Internet governance. We can then use
that data to see which political affiliations are being active or
influential.

Niels, very interested to know about the new mailing list for BigBang. I'd
love to move this off of lists.sudoroom.org to something we have more
control over and differently branded.

cheers,
Seb

On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 8:29 AM, Niels ten Oever <niels at article19.org>
wrote:

> 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%20Analysis.ipynb
> > [3]: https://www.w3.org/wiki/Socialwg
> > [4]: http://whgi.wmflabs.org/
> >
> > --
> >   Harsh Gupta
> >   mail at 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 at hargup.in
> >> <mailto: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
> >>     <https://github.com/sbenthall/bigbang/pull/259>
> >>
> >>     --
> >>     Harsh Gupta
> >>     mail at hargup.in <mailto:mail at hargup.in>
> >>     _______________________________________________
> >>     BigBang-dev mailing list
> >>     BigBang-dev at lists.sudoroom.org <mailto:BigBang-dev at lists.
> sudoroom.org>
> >>     https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/bigbang-dev
> >>     <https://sudoroom.org/lists/listinfo/bigbang-dev>
> >>
> >
>
>
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