Do not feed the troll.
For future prototypes
The enveloppe is not perfect (nothing is ever perfect), but it runs well enough to have giving rise to fabulous content. I am glad that good results were obtained, and that we are able to demonstrate that young people, when offered the space and freedom, make excellent citizen-experts.
Unfortunately, the team ran out of time and resources to bring into play the totems (the animals that represent the personality of each participant). I though that these were a good, unusual feature, that brought originality and freshness to the design.
I like the bright colors and weird, strange rectangle buttons, of an indescriptible yellow-green. I got used to them. Compared to other governmental platforms (that I find plain ugly), I appreciated the efforts made to bring design elements to this platform.
The team ran out of time and resources to do many things. This is a small team, with a very small budget… Given these circumstances, I consider that the platform is doing well.
I would have liked to see more interaction between the participants. A list of participants could have perhaps contributed to generate some interaction.
I found that it is not easy to maintain involvement of participants over a period of eight months.
The content on this platform is very rich, there is a lot of very good mission reports. From the titles only, I find it is not always easy to get an idea of what each mission report is about (other than opening the link and reading the whole mission report). About 2 months ago, I started writing resumes (one short paragraph) of every mission report, but then I got submerged by the growing numbers of mission reports being published every week. But nonetheless, I wrote about 90 resumes. The search engine is really helpful, but I was hoping for pages, or devices, that would allow to highlight the excellent content of this platform.
This is an evolutive platform, and many ideas were proposed by participants, several were actually included by the team as part of projects to be implemented. It usually does not work that way in governments…. They usually have their plan, which is initially prepared, and then execute the plan, without regard to comments or unexpected ideas arising from citizens.
As the Edgeryders experience is coming to an end, it may be that there will neither by time nor resources to absorb new changes to this platform, given that it ends in June 2012.
However, ideas can be used for future prototypes, which will arise in the wake of Edgeryders.…
you’re real
Dear Lyne,
I was writing this mission in front of the sea, inside my car, at 4 am and I thought that your immediate reply was automated. But I was wrong. You’re real 
I think the idea of edgeryders is wonderful and I would like to contribute. I would have liked, as it seems…
Thank you for your answer. I’m going to improve my mission soon.
Davide.
Be the springboard for expansion and adaptation!
If you come up with a couple of improvements that you think you would have time to test before June, I am confident that the executive members of the team will pay attention and consider suggestions, as they did previously.
At first, I must admit that I was intrigued by your mission report title. Listing suggestions of improvements and or additions, could be a good thing for the ‘afterlife’ of this project. We do not know yet exactly in what form this ‘afterlife’ will present itself (or if ‘afterlife’ there will be). It’d be great to apply the Edgeryders prototype to a greater number of Divisions of the Council of Europe.
The Social Cohesion, Research and Early warning Division is responsible for this Edgeryders project.
CoE has activities in:
- Human rights
- Law
- Democracy
- Society
- Media, Communication
- Health
- Culture, cultural heritage, nature
- Education, languages, sports, youth
Good point
Hey Davide,
we had quite a lot of problems initially with Edgeryders, and that led us to disable some of the functions resorting, rather, to a case-by-case troubleshooting. In this case, if you want anything removed, just whistle and we will do it for you. However, in the past couple of months the website has finally stabilized, and we started to roll out new features. Maybe we could reinstate the “delete” link as well. To get an idea of what’s going on, see:
What kind of data would you propose to mine? And to what purpose?
are you worried?
What kind of data would I propose to mine? Well… every kind of data! The aim could be, for exemple: how many times the users wrote the sentence “I won’t pay IMU” at what time and why.
To do what? Crowd knows.
I see Facebook and I know that they sell users’ info to firms. That’s wrong man. They get rich with users’private info. Information is the most important Facebook value. With statistics they can predict the future.
I’ve just read you used open source software to build this website and you’re happy with that. Why do not you open the data of users to users? What can the crowd do? I don’t know. It’s just an idea and you got the mean to do that.
Share and open the data can be a public project to tell the user: man, do you know what firms do with your data? Look at we did… Are you worried? This is privacy. And it does not exist.
mulars
Yes, we will open the data
Open data is part of Edgeryders policy. This is the way it will work:
- raw data will be open: we will do a sort of data dump of mission reports and comments using Views in Drupal. We need to figure out a data structure, though! Not so easy, because information is related through the code base but dispersed alomng the database. For example, some demographic information is stored in nodes called user profiles, that are linked to mission reports and comments because the same user (person) can be author of a user profile and several mission reports and comments.
- secondary data wil be open too. By this I mean, for example, the mission reports and comments as annotated by our ethnographers. They use a software called WEFT, and we will put up for download WEFT files. Same thing for the network analysis layer: we will have some sort of .net pajek file on top of the raw data.
- however, we will anonymize names and handles, and of course we wil not share emails, which are really the only personal data collected by Edgeryders.
Cool!
You’re so fast!!!
And… who am I? I’m going to update my profile, but I can say that I am an European Citizen fed up with the big firms that accumulate large amount of money creating poverty. I’m looking for who I am (that’s why I’m in edgeryders), but I need to emancipate myself from money and oil.
Regards.
You as in “voi”, not you as in “tu”
What I mean is: who do you refer to as “we” in “Look what we’ve done”? Where should I look?
Yes, I am pretty fast. And so is the wonderful Edgeryders team and community. Zowie!
TOR
I think I’ve forgotten two quotes. The correct message is the following:
Share and open the data can be a public project to tell the user: “man, do you know what firms do with your data? Look at we did… Are you worried? This is privacy. And it does not exist.”
In other words, edgeryders (“we”) can mine the data and discover something unexpected analysing the content of all the submitted missions, for exemple: 84% of the users think we need local currency instead of Euro and 70% of these users are rich, educated and never travel. For this reason edgeryders could ask for the income of every single user and their political beliefs. I’m ready to say how much money I get or which is my favourite politician, but you know who I am and it’s not fine for me. I can give this info anonymously. With TOR for exemple.
Edgeryders could create a new section where people can say everything anonymously and give an ID, a password, a secret question and stop!"
I gotta go. Speak soon.
Fast as Road Runner…!
This agility has been an added value to this project, from the start, because moving quickly, among others, eased the adaptation and inclusion of ideas from participants.
Moving fast has many benefits. It allowed to achieve results quickly too. Do more with less.
What are we running into here?
Dear Alberto,
this will be a somewhat critical comment, so be prepared 
Nothing personal though of course, and I also try to be as constructive as possible. There might also be some misunderstandings, esp. you might want to provide more information about the nature of these “ethnographic annotations” you mentioned. Hope we can find a good solution for everybody. I still like the Edgeryders project and its potential for bringing change in Europe, yet I was quite … surprised, to say the least, to find out about the actual mode of research and data handling. In my view, Edgeryders raises some very novel issues of how to handle data dumps that include semantic data that’s manually annotated to open content.
I can’t pinpoint it exactly so far, but I’d say that it’s a conflict between open content and open data. The two are not the same. Data is ordered, orchestrated, annotated content, stuff from which new data can be derived by automated means. There have been hardly issues about that difference so far (to my knowledge) … but Edgeryders is on the cutting edge of that with this ethno software thingy and by providing open data dumps of CC-BY licenced material which was semantically annotated afterwards. So we better look at these issues now before it’s too late …
The core of the problem is that a raw, open data style dump of the ethno-annotated Edgeryders content is far from everything happening with Creative Commons licenced content usually. (I’d even say it’s far from everything the licence creators had in mind; else there might be a CC-BY-NM (“no mining”) licence perhaps.) Such a dump enables unforseen uses. The Edgeryders data is special data, as it comes from social interactions, so naturally allows to easily identify most of the people who contributed (even when there are no names anymore; but people often refer to their projects etc., as is natural in social talk and encouraged on Edgeryders, so just use Google). It is even more special because of the added ethno annotations (whatever these are). Ethno annotations and personal identification might allow malign uses never imagined when writing the content. Examples? “Find me all people who did post in Spanish at least once, whose political ideas are considered anticapitalist and commons oriented and who mention any affiliation with a Spain based organization and who consider themselves as leader types.” (Cf. the Edgeryders tribal signs …). Might come in handy as preemptive measure against Occupy style movements in Spain this year … see what they had in mind already. The Edgeryders user base is too small for that, but … you get the idea.
The reason why this issue does not evolve normally with CC-BY licenced content is that usually, no person has the time to do these ethno annotations and to provide the data in a nice, structured database for download. The moment that natural language understanding by computers arrives, or that forensic linguistics matures, this will be all different and we will need to develop new open content licences, and linguistic obfuscation software. But for now, Edgeryders is pretty much alone with this issue.
Please don’t get me wrong: I am not against open content. Not at all, I am an avid fan of all things open. I have several thousand pages of stuff on my page, all licenced CC-BY. And I’ve never had a problem. But that’s because (1) I can avoid most potential problems by being in control of the data, requesting attribution to a pseudonym, and taking them down or even moving the site when needed, (2) the data is not structured and nobody has the time to structure / annotate it, so it’s pretty forseeable what will be done with this data and what not. I don’t release structured data about me in any way on the Internet; so for example, I have only very very basic and / or wrong stuff in my Facebook profile, I use ad blocking and track-me-not software on the web, I don’t indicate my interests to Facebook by clicking any “Like” for a corporate page etc… But I’ve no issue at all with releasing unstructured open content, as it is for human use only, not fit for automated processing. (Normally, until this present issue with Edgeryders where the structure / semantic annotations will be added afterwards by a third party.)
This type of managing my content is in line with my personal “privacy policy” that I settled on after quite a bit of consideration. There are three levels in it: content that I allow search engines to connect to my real-world identity, content that I allow law enforcement to do so, and content that I allow nobody to do so. (Note that this level three is completely empty and I don’t need it currently; but I know the toolchain, and people under repressive regimes need it right now.) Content that I have complete control of (like on an own website) is on level one. Edgeryders content is at level two.
However my privacy policy seems to have a hole in it, and I realize it only now because of the Edgeryders project. There has to be a new level (between 1 and 2) for content that I allow curious members of the public or of the research community to connect to my real-world identity by means of manual work. Did not run into this before - it was a complete no-issue so far … . Content in this new level would be something where I am still happy if people connect it to my real-world identity by “spying” on me (or in other use cases, doing research on me). I doubt that Edgeryders would’ve made it into this level.
This data handling issue leads to another, and I think there has to be a clearer position here. On the one hand, Edgeryders is a playful platform that promotes social interaction in a cohesive community. There is also this upcoming conference, and we’re treated as subjects with ideas and opinions to contribute there. Such a social setting naturally means that people talk about stuff and give hints to personal facts that they would not be happy to find again as structured data in a public database where you can run all kinds of queries on. On the other hand, just that seems to happen. By means of this ethno-annotation thing, we as users are treated in quite objectified manner, no longer as subjects, as peers. But if we are supposed to be in a lab setting for scientific observation, it would be better to introduce people right away to that idea when they sign up (just “used for research” is quite vague). There will be people who are available for this, esp. when adding anonymization tech to the platform. Or even simpler, do the ethno annotation in all the forums etc. where the Edgeryders topics have been discussed already. So in all I’d propose to either let us be subjects or objects, but this mixed state is the strangest online environment that I have been in so far. Does not feel good.
Some practical proposals to discuss:
- Clearly indicate what uses you will authorize for the open data dump of the open content entered into the Edgeryders site. Esp. please point out in the site's Legals what this ethno annotation software is that you use and what it can do and what people can potentially do with the data created that way.
- Discuss if you really want to do this "open textbook science" approach for the Edgeryders project, that is, providing a full, ethno annotated database dump for the research of others. See the above converns about people being still easily identifiable even with names removed.
- Give us a two week "content freeze" period near the end of the project, to look through the data we provided and to delete or adapt everything we don't want to be retrievable as structured data. This means that all content has to be editable, including comments that have replies.
- Make a user's profile page restrictively licenced by the author. The one place without a right to reuse the info on there, so we could easily share more personal info on there without worrying what will become out of it. Such a change seems needed to retain the social-network type character of Edgeryders, actually the basis of its success. Users must be able to share personal information without worrying what might become of it.
- Provide an option to the user to allow and disallow search engines to retrieve the info on the profile page. (This esp. has to include the profile image because mind you, face recognition is deployed already.)
- Provide a field in the user profile to identify just how CC-BY attribution should happen on reuse. The CC-BY licence mandates that the author can say how he wants to be attributed to, and I usually request that people attribute to my pseudonymous name when sharing things CC-BY. (That way, I can still break the link to my person by removing the source site where I published the material.)
- Show a link to this attribution requirement details on every piece of content throughout the Edgeryders website.
Merits a separate discussion
Matthias, thanks for this. This is a really interesting issue, and I think it merits a separate discussion. I suggest you copy-paste all of the above into a new mission report, where others that might be interested can find it more easily. There is really no appropriate mission for this kind of meta level, I suppose this is the best:
http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int/caring-commons/spotlight-internet-common-resource
Let me tell you how much I appreciate this kind of input. If this was the beginning of the project I would like to hire you!
Edgeryders and Fb
Hi Alberto,
we’re speaking about data handling and I’ve just noticed that, when I save a page in Edgeryders, there’s a sort of transfert of something to Facebook. Could you give me more info about that? Thanks.
Nope
I don’t see anything of the kind. If you log in through Facebook Connect there is of course some transfer, because FB handles your profile (Edgeryders does not have your email).
Heartfelt thank you
Alberto, many thanks for your understanding! Great to work with you.
(Also thanks for the retrospect job offer … and yes, I would have accepted. Would’ve been my first offer of meaningful activity as an employee 
)
For all others, the discussion on this issue now moves to its own mission report:
Hello Matthias,
with the
Hello Matthias,
with the following words you got the point.
“But if we are supposed to be in a lab setting for scientific observation, it would be better to introduce people right away to that idea when they sign up (just “used for research” is quite vague).”
I’ll try and explain what I mean.
I don’t want to revolutionize Edgeryders because it’s doing the right job and I didn’t know that my mission could be taken so seriously.
I see Facebook and Google and I only imagine what they do with our data. They get loads of money only data mining, but they do it secretly. And I don’t like it. It’s a business like closed software:
closed software Vs. open source
Facebook and Google Vs. open data mining
Data are their wealth and I would like to find an alternative. Maybe we have to anonymize our info for this experiment, but it’s worth.
What will we do with the input data? We can do what big data miners do! And share the results, share the knowledge.
Davide
Yes, a lab!
Hello Matthias,
with the following words you got the point.
“But if we are supposed to be in a lab setting for scientific observation, it would be better to introduce people right away to that idea when they sign up (just “used for research” is quite vague).”
I’ll try and explain what I mean.
I don’t want to revolutionize Edgeryders because it’s doing the right job and I didn’t know that my mission could be taken so seriously.
I see Facebook and Google and I only imagine what they do with our data. They get loads of money only data mining, but they do it secretly. And I don’t like it. It’s a business like closed software:
closed software Vs. open source
Facebook and Google Vs. open data mining
Data are their wealth and I would like to find an alternative. Maybe we have to anonymize our info for this experiment, but it’s worth.
What will we do with the input data? We can do what big data miners do! And share the results, share the knowledge.
Davide
You’re Innovative, but also be careful
Davide, me thinks I now get the idea you have in mind. Mining my / our own data in an open way would indeed be interesting! However, there’s one beneficial side-effect of all this secrecy around corporate data mining: no need to really, properly anonymize the data.
I’d say that nobody knows how to properly anonymize it all. Remember that case where Google released some archive with pseudonymized search queries some years ago? Some days and people had identified the first one who was behind a row of search queries: an old woman, and she confirmed this were her queries. Google pulled that package, and never offered something like it since … . (Sorry I have no source for that … I looked, but could not find it on the web for now).
So dumping all Edgeryders data (and even with these semantic annotations!) into the open is like obtaining a dump of Facebook’s user data or similar … . Properly anonymizing would be the way to go in the long term, but that’s unchartered territory for now that I’d not like to tackle in the limited scope of the Edgeryders project. Given the frequent references to personal projects in the Edgeryders data, anonymizing is pretty darn complicated …
If you didn’t find it already, I re-started this privacy discussion in its own mission report, as proposed by Alberto. It’s here: “What can happen to your Edgeryders data … and you”.
Davide, me thinks I now get
Davide, me thinks I now get the idea you have in mind. […]
You’re so funny! And nope, you didn’t.
I’d say that nobody knows how to properly anonymize it all. Remember that case […]
If I remember well they identified the IP address… and I think we need to anonymize the connection.
If you didn’t find it already […]
I’ve already read it: I am a fan of you ('mboccallupo!).
mulars