A word to newcomers in this group

Workspaces OpenCare
, ,
1

Hi everyone,

As you might know, this group was recently made public and contains information about the work some of us did to coordinate a Horizon 2020 application writing on care by hackers (see how the idea and mobilization came about).

We have worked, among others, with the Milano city, WeMake space in Milano where @costantino & @zoescope are, LaBRI at University of Bordeaux where @melancon is, and @markomanca’s SCIMPulse foundation in the Netherlands.

If you landed here and this topic interests you, you may go through some of the documentation in this group, and especially read the concept for a summary. Here’s an excerpt:

Based on the Future of care session at LOTE4 (the fourth edition of our annual community

gathering), we propose to envision a system of "care by a community of hackers, armed

with cheap, open source tools". This scenario is not a return to the country doctor: we still get

to enlist sensors and algorithms to alert us if an anomaly comes up. But benefits do not come

from the artifacts, but from the community that builds, programs and deploys them, and that

anybody can be a part of. Imagine a hackerspace for medicine, where doctors, technologists, and

patients come together to design and deploy the system that best serves their local community; it

would be resilient, and it would be trustable, because (a) it would be open source and (b)

everyone is a patient sooner or later, so the doctors and the technologists themselves use what

they build. There are already moves in this direction, like small companies that build medical

sensors for Arduino, and Arduino has decided to fight the Internet of Things, trying to build an

open source version of it (Massimo Banzi’s announcement).

We have very small chances of winning this (up to 3% in my understanding), but if you are working on something related or would like to get involved, tell us. The consortium we put together is committed to looking for other opportunities too, to work on this project anyway, so any backup is needed, and ideas are welcome.

If you are trying to setup a proposal where contents from the application would be useful, talk to us. The proposal is a common resource we have, so you could use at least parts of it.

1 Like
2

Newcomer in need of guidance.

Hi, @Noemi and @Alberto. OpenCare is a great idea. It took some time for me to get it because I have never had time for ‘social media’; I don’t know the jargon and I’m having a difficult time finding my way on the site, have little patience with software problems which leaves me QUITE EMBARASSED as a newcomer.

Where can I put my milions of questions? is there a ‘non techie’ entrance to open care?

Most urgent question at the moment: Is there a tool in the OpenCare platform to get in touch with possible local collaborators for a OpenCare project? We work on a proposal for a project that calls for transversal skills like physiotherapists, legal/financial guidance etc.)

(Time is running and I don’t want to disturb @Costantino 's vacation :slight_smile:

3

Different entrances

Hi @Rune, it seems to me you’re doing great and pretty immersed in the community, so no need to feel embarassed.

Nontechie entrance… not sure I understand this, but let’s see: the way to access all Open Care general introductions to the research project and where you can post any question is this one where you just posted: Opencare research group.

The way to see all the people and projects who joined opencare is through the main menu on the left - OPENCARE PROJECT: go to Challenges and see the list of all contributions. We don’t have a tool to help browsing for locations as platform users tend not to fill in their user profiles. If you need to reach someone working in a certain field quickly then use the Search tool and see what results show up. Looking for physiotherapist I got 1 result of a post where someone interviews a family and kid with a condition that requires that kind of therapy. Christine, the author, can be contacted personally through her profile. Not sure if that’s useful, but you see where I’m going.

If I were you and needed help with getting contacts for a number of things, I would post on opencare research group like you did now and write specifically what I need. Then we can spread the word or someone will offer to make some connections.

Really hope this helps!

4

Most urgent

I suggest you get in touch with @Noemi . We don’t automate this stuff, but we are willing to help anyway.

5

Connection is prerequisite for Networking ?

Thanks  @Noemi and @Alberto. It surprises me that this hasn’t been automated. I would assume that I was first priority for a platform encouraging networking to have a method in place for connecting the dots. After all ‘successful matching, dating and what follows’ are key elements in evolution and finding matching neurons is the principal challenge for (natural) neural networks :wink:

I would propose to work on this one.

1 Like
6

Tried it but saw people can’t be bothered to fill in stuff

Back in the days when we had the first Edgeryders platform we paid more attention to encouraging users to fill in profiles, with no results. Then we dropped some fields in the profiles, then we reenacted “age group” for a specific project upon a client request, and so on. It’s been mostly a tradeoff taking into account resources available, developers time and return on investment. So we end up prioritizing the human approach in which we ask users upon signup to share their stories rather than fill in their profile. We may be wrong of course, and you’re not the first one to propose Edgeryders to facilitate skills matching. If anyone has ideas or knows someone who can implement this, I guess the door is open, but requesting this from @Matthias whom I hear has reached 3000 hours of working/ investing in Edgeryders is probably not an option right now. Let’s see, but thanks for pointing it out Rune.

1 Like
7

Also

This community is too small for algorithms to pay their way. We do not get so many requests to be connected with others, so we can afford the luxury to treat them as an opportunity to get to know people and their projects better.

BTW, algorithmic matching of people on “interests” and “skills” does not work all that well in any context. When was the last time an algorithm introduced you to a business (or science) partner? The only matching that works is in people looking for sexual or romantic patterns, and that is based on (a) very fast visual cortex processing (“ooh, she’s hot!”) and (b) very careful “filling in stuff”, as @Noemi mentions.

8

Now it’s getting interesting

but we should move to a separate disussion,

@Alberto says that "matching of people on “interests” and “skills” " is difficult.

I think google adds is doing a good job on (violating my privacy) proposing chips, 3D printers, tech companies that within my interrest. When my non-techie wife does a similar search google manage to figure that out and proposes totally different things. LinkedIn manages somewhat to link to people ‘potentially of my interrest too’

Correct me if I’m wrong but, I though that was exactly what your ‘ethnographic networking theories’ were all about. Intelligent connection of the ‘neurons’. Information could be extracted from what people writes (not only in the small opencare community, which is supposed to grow exponentially, but maybe in a wider context), what topics they are responding to and who they connect with.

The artificial intelligence would figure out a number of searchable characteristics of people and would be far superior to just relying on data from CV like forms. I believe your competencies are what you like to do not what your formal education has made you (carpenter, psycologist, engineer, doctor, etc)

P.S. if this moves on I would like the admin to move the posts to a new discussion thread.

9

Nope

No, you are wrong. We believe participation is only valid if people know they are participating. We do ethnography, but we do it on carefully thought-through statements, which ideally encode first hand experience. No data mining needed or wanted.

This is because, in looking for collectively intelligent solutions, we engage what Kahneman calls System 2. We want to be slow, careful, rational, deliberative, aware of our own cognitive biases. This requires individuals to make a consciuos effort, and the community to constantly support and reinforce that effort.

Google ads, on the other hand, are ads. They do not want you to think. The more you act according to gut feeling, the easier you are to manipulate into buying stuff you don’t want. So yes, AI matching works, but at the cost of reducing humans to desire machines, roadkill in the global market. We do not stand on that side.

A comparison I like to make is this. When you sit in the café with your friends, you, like everyone else, might like to occasionaly indulge in trolling, gossip and negativity (“they are all corrupt in this country!”), But if you are asked to render witness onto parliament, you will put on your best clothes and probably say very different things. You will sound noble, selfless and constructive. Both versions of you are authentic, but it is important to present the right version in the right situation. Edgeryders is more like parliament: it is a space where we want to give people the opportunity to show the best in them.

(and this is before you even take into account scale. Google works, with bazillion of data and a couple billion users. Edgeryders would not.)

1 Like
10

Roger that

Thanks @Alberto, sorry that this conversation is astray from ‘Welcome to newcomers’ topic. If possible please clean up and remove it to somewhere more appropriate.

11

No worries

It’s happened before. And that alone gives me pause: you see how deeply ingrained this big data/surveillance-as-a-business-model is ingrained? We just assume this is how we do things now!

12

Crosslanguage information

Is or can translation of articles be automated?

say the article:https://edgeryders.eu/en/wehandu-maker-space-for-developing-solutions-for-cases-of-motor

I see that the link contains an /en/ assuming an english version.

How can we create a, say, italian version?

@Noemi,@Alberto ?

13

Edgesense data from the profiles?

Wouldn’t that provide a casual sort of matchup that coudl be useful?  Might encourage people to say more about themselves.  I don’t think it detracts from the parliment aspect (good analogy, btw).

14

Me, I would personally like that.

I see your point @johncoate. If Edgeryders was designed to do quick matching, we’d probably have missed out on a lot of what makes us community. But now having more experience and arguably effective ways of engaging people to be at their best, as Alberto nicely put it, we could use nice add-ons - with a big “USE WITH CARE” warning -in that they don’t replace networking, but could help newcomers and us community builders in building relationships and reducing the manual and cognitive effort just a little bit.

15

GIGO problem

“Garbage in, garbage out”.

I would not trust those data. People do not really keep profiles up-to-date.

Semantic networks are a better bet. Once we have some orderly SSN data, we can link people to ethno codes via content authored. For example, user John authored post “Communities from offline to online” that has been associated the codes “community”, “facilitation” and “conflict management”. You could then ask the SSN questions like “give me everyone who has at least 3 codes in common with John”. @melancon is working on this, and we should have an implementation on opencare data in a few months.

We will not be able to do this on the whole of the Edgeryders conversation, not in the short and medium run. At 1,000 participants and over 20,000 comments it is too expensive to code entirely. But opencare is a significant subset: we already have 150 unique participants, with some 230 long-form posts and challenge responses and over 1,600 comments. In the long run, we could use machine learning: the human coded sections of the conversation double up as training data for classifiers. Once the classifiers have evolved, we can have them code the rest of Edgeryders. Maybe. More thoughts on this here.

16

Sure

that would work.  And it’s true about profiles if people don’t update them.