ICTlogy

Presentation of the book La Alquimia de las Multitudes. Cómo la web está cambiando el mundo [The Alchemy of Crowds. How the web is changing the world], by Francis Pisani and Dominique Piotet. February 19th, 2009. Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.

The Alchemy of Crowds. How the web is changing the world.
Francis Pisani

A shift his happening from web surfers to web actors.

Wisdom of crowds, among others described by Pierre Lévy: through a process of discussion, we achieve a higher knowledge.

Nicholas Carr states that the web is in this sense emergent, which means that can produce unexpected results. As it and lacks morality, we should be aware of how the Internet evolves so that it doesn’t gets out of control.

One step beyond: from the wisdom of crowds to collective intelligence.

Why the alchemy of crowds? because through alchemy, we can produce gold or lead. We have to benefit and take part into the wonder of the Internet. But we have to be cautious and do not fall intro virtual traps.

We have to develop digital literacy: at schools, at the corporate level, and at the individual level.

The Web 2.0 makes it possible to connect not only pages, but people. And it is the broadband and its “always on” feature that enables this connexion amongst people, to access information, to take part into everything.

Discussion

María Jesús Salido: what’s the difference between the wisdom of crowds and the collective intelligence? A: Henry Jenkins says that collective intelligence implies discussion, debate, consensus. The wisdom of crowds is just a matter of making emerge what everybody knows once they are put together. Two poles: artificial intelligence (create more intelligence) and human intelligence augmentation (improve the existing intelligence). O’Reilly says that Google interprets links as votes, and Walmart buys as votes too: MyBarackObama did alike, and identified links between people as political affinity and shaped their political campaign according to it. Humans act like sensors, and we have to be clever enough to interpret them. The good thing about being able to deal with huge amounts of data is that we can identify patterns and even draw trends, as Google trends does.

Q: Are we digital natives? What can be done about this? A: It is true that youngsters can manage better technology, but it is not clear that they do fully understand what it’s at stake. Does everyone understand the non-neutralities (Castells) of technology? The digital divide is no more about physical access, which is closing, but on how to use the technologies at anyone’s reach, how to benefit from collective intelligence, etc.

Q: What’s the role of mobile phones in the future? A: The web will not be 3.0, because is tettered to mobile telephony: this will be the driver for development and the device from which to leverage all the evolution of the Internet. The proportion now between mobiles and fixed broadband is almost 3 to 1. And many of them run on prepaid cards.

Javier Maján: Will

Ricard Espelt: who are the new influentials? do they know they are influential? A: Networks do not work like institutions. Networks work like swarms (swarming), gathering and dispersing people very quickly, in flash mobs. And networks do not need bosses, but work on the basis to be able to transmit messages, and to bring influence with them.

See also:

• Ricard Espelt‘s chronicle on the event
• La alquímia de las multitudes, de F. Pisani i D. Piotet, by Gemma Urgell

Slides and references for my conference at the 6º Congreso Andaluz de Voluntariado (6th Andalousian Volunteering Congress) in Sevilla (Spain). I thank the invitation of Fran Santolaya, who is, with Isidro Maya, coordinator of e-Voluntas, a referent blog and discussion list about ICTs in nonprofits: online volunteering, ICT4D, etc.

Citation and downloads:

References:

The research (partly) belongs to E-Health and Society: An Empirical Study of Catalonia, at its turn belonging to the Project Internet Catalonia (PIC).

Introduction

Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva

Historically, the concepts of health, healthiness, public health, etc. lack of consensus. The scientific revolution brings a new approach to these concepts, secularizing the way it is dealt with drawing the biomedical model. But social sciences imply a disruption in the building of consensus and a separation from the usual biomedical model, relating it with society, the relationships of power, human structures, etc. Castells goes one step further stating that the informational paradigm, within the Information Society, brings in yet another change: how (specially) the Internet newly interrelates the different authors around the concept of Health.

The thesis wants to identify and characterize these authors and how and why they use the Internet to get informed and interact amongst them.

Hypotheses

• The Internet is a space for information
• Decision taking determines the uses of the Internet for Health related issues
• A new profile arises between the health professionals: the networked health professional

Methodology

Data come from surveys answered by patients, physicians, nurses and chemists.

(Complex) Information is simplified by factor analysis and cluster analysis.

Binomial logit regressions are used to find the determinants of Internet use for health related issues.

Results

Citizens

patients tend to browse the Internet to get information about their diseases or other health related issues, somewhat limited by the lack of personal infrastructures (hardware, connectivity, skills, etc.). This means that patients are empowered by the Internet to decide about their health based on better grounds. Those are the connected citizens. At the other end, we have the disconnected citizens, mainly due to their socio-economic background: income, education… The relationship (not the causality) between connected citizens, better health and higher socio-economic status is evident.

The Health digital divide excludes 40% of the total population.

Interaction does not happen: Internet is out of the equation in the physician-patient relationship.

Physicians

Three types of Internet use: focus towards research, health information dissemination and institutional information.

The network physician: uses the Internet to get information and communicate with their peers, disseminate their research and spread information about their institutions. These are just 5% of the total physicians.

Networked physicians believe that the Internet is good for their patients, but only half of them encourage their patients in browsing the Internet.

Orientation towards research and intensive search and use of international information mostly determines a physician being or not being a networked physician.

Nurses

The networked nurse follows a similar path than the networked physician: focus on research and lowest proportion in relation to the whole population of nurses (4.5%). As the physicians, networked nurses also believe that the Internet is good and empowers their patients.

Chemists

Just like the prior professional profiles, the networked chemist is research and international information focused, and they also believe that the information in the Internet is good for their patients and has a positive impact on them being autonomous.

Conclusions

1. Internet is a space for information, not interaction.
2. The e-patient is determined by access to information and intensive use of the Internet to get information about health.
3. The health e-professional is determined by orientation towards research and access to international information.

Future lines of research

1. What are the determinants of innovation processes in the health system, including its impact on productivity.
2. What are the determinants of the state of health in the framework of the Information Society
3. What are the public policies to improve the health system in the framework of the Information Society,
4. How the biomedical paradigm evolves within the framework of the Information Society

Discussion

Answers to Joan Torrent

There is a lack of available data about the impact of the use of the Internet on the health of the patients. It is, undoubtedly, a future line of research.

The e-patient paradox: the networked patients are the ones — because they are healthier — that benefit less from e-Health.

The public health system tends to use the Internet to inform, while the private health system has a more intensive use of information technologies for management issues (e.g. e-invoicing), though not necessarily related with physician-patient — or interaction — focused applications.

While physicians see the Internet as a gate to access better information, they are also threatened by a potential use of authority in front of their patients. Thus why they are intensive Internet users, but only for information related issues, not for interaction with their patients. On the other hand, chemists have to ensure their customers’ loyalty, so they have more incentives to share information and open new channels of interaction with them, which might explain why they are more eager to encourage their customers/patients to enter the Internet.

Answers to Gustavo Cardoso

It is very likely that both the methodology and the findings of this research can be applied into other economies that are in their transition towards the Information Society, provided their health and social systems are similar.

It seems there is a new health paradigm: the technoscientific health paradigm, where technology plays an important part along with health infrastructures (e.g. hospitals), culture, etc.

Internet does not replace — in the eyes of the patient — the professional: it’s complementary. Actually, patients are fully aware on who’s behind the information on the Internet, and asks for a professional backup of this information to consider it quality information. But the professionals don’t usually feel alike. A further research, indeed, should analyse the actual relationships of power between patients and professionals, and how these relationships change or can change due to the Internet and the information that it makes broadly available.

A technological layer, in combination with an evolving social layer, has enabled Health “getting out of the closet” and being present in all aspects of life, way beyond the walls of the hospital. This is new, and this issue should be addressed seriously in further research about society in general and Health especially.

Answers to Miquel Àngel Mayer

It’s very difficult to define “quality” in the Internet, specially when speaking about websites about Health. Maybe, the focus should be not quality of the information, but the skills of the one that searches and accesses this information. Indeed, the concept of quality is closely related with the authors that issue and access the information, thus why the stress in capacity building, digital skills and, in general, digital literacy.

Internet is becoming not an exogenous, dependent variable of the Health system, but an endogenous, independent one that should be included in the equation of Health studies.

Answers to Eulàlia Hernández

The e-patient, unlike the networked professionals, cluster around patient associations, engaging into interaction amongst them and not restricting themselves only to access to and use of information.

Answers to Ferran Sanz

There are dire problems in most researchers about Internet uses: how to define the population, how to define the actual use, how to define authorship, how to define jurisdiction, etc. These problems make it difficult to state with statistical significance some findings that might be perfectly valid for the sample.

Bibliography

For a complete listing of references for the PhD Dissertation, please see The definitive references’ collection of my thesis.

NOTE: summa cum laude. Congats!!

Extended information

Thesis defense: The Internet, Health and Network Society, by Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva.

Notes on Howard Rheingold‘s seminar at the Open University of Catalonia.

Online Social Networks
Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold

Online Social Networks — a more comprehensive term than virtual communities — enable people to co-operate. Social networks have always existed, but now they’re empowered, enhanced by ICTs, so communities of practice can form.

Online communities: promote social capital, support lifelong teaching and learning, connect people and build relationships, grow a searchable communitye memory (knowledge sharing).

Participatory media (e.g. blogs, wikis, mobile phones with cameras) have totally changed the landscape, enabling broad participation by making it easy to share any kind of media (image, video, text, software…). Media allow learning, sharing, debate…

New media require media literacy: understand the media, know how to send and receive, then be able to produce.

Social Cyberspaces Connect People

People join through affinities and shared interests, that can be social, practical, interest-based, technical…

So, you have to start with a plan, a plan that includes social, marketing and technical infrastructure. You have to think on how to attract people towards the network, but then think alson on how to make them come back.

Marketing is essential: build it and they won’t come if it does not fill an important need (they’re too busy); start with enthusiasts (if there’s any, just don’t start); build a critical mass with enthusiasts first, then let the others join; start small, learn, redesign, grow organically: follow an iterative redesigning.

Civility is essential; online facilitation is a skill and a body of knowledge; weed, feed, transplant: gardening, not architecture; encourage emergent leadership, regardless on who you said that was in charge.

Debate

César Córcoles: how institutions can face the changes that social networks bring (e.g. teachers).
Howard Rheingold (HR): the actual teaching model (Paulo Freire’s “banking model”) is inadequate for online social networks. The responsibility of the reputation of the “text” (the basis of actual teaching models) has shifted from the editor, or the teacher, towards the consumer: it’s now up to you to determine the reputation of what you’re reading, as the offer is huge. Participatory media, nevertheless, is absolutely compatible with students being more active in teaching, as some pedagogical theories have been stating in the last years.

Oriol Miralbell: how do we manage leadership in big online social networks? Can it be both distributed and centralized?
HR: It’s not either or. Indeed, power and authority are quite different things. Communities, individuals, are normally reluctant to take authority when a reputed person is participating in the community: authority comes naturally, and is provided by the rest of the participants.

Oriol Miralbell: experts or teaching experts?
HR: Teaching skills are the key. If there is a trade-off between being an expert in a field and a good teacher, you might prefer the good teacher, as they will be leading the group towards debate and knowledge sharing in better ways.

Francisco Lupiáñez: how do deal with complex processes (bureaucracy?) when there’s an urgent need for flexibility?
HR: Online, ironically, allows more direct communication with the student, which is really time consuming. So, planning and, more important, seeing how what you are going to build scales is crucial. To be able to scale up, bringing the students agency, and let themselves discover than you discovering for them is one of the most important changes of mindset required to build a successful social community.

César Córcoles: isn’t this kind of working putting more stress on students (switch from passive to active attitudes)?
HR: Is it a problem of stress management… or attention management? Focuss on questions, issues that matter.

Joe Hopkins: how does the work with the wiki works?
HR: I don’t expect them to delete. Context is a must for anything added to the wiki. And if given the opportunity, students will end up finding out things that the teacher did not know… in any kind of media support: text, video, etc. Have to give the students ownership of their participation.

Ismael Peña-López: what are the minimum skills required to engage someone on an online social network?
HR: Collaborative working is new to the students right now, it’s a new way of thinking. The students already live on Facebook, they manage their digital identities, but they might not really be aware on how this impacts their lives. And we have to teach them too these issues: to distinguish between the “know hows” and the “know ho nots”.

Ismael Peña-López: is there a minimum threshold of digital awareness to be achieved before being able to positively contribute into an online social network?
HR: Yes, of course, there are. There’s a set of rhetorics to be learnt to be able to engage in a virtual community. And blogs are a perfect gateway towards this understanding on how things work in the digital world. The ability to link.

Oriol Miralbell: IT tinkering a need? or digital natives already know everything?
HR: digital natives master some tools, but they do not know at all about the whole rest (i.e. 99% might use Wikipedia, 1% might know they can edit it). And this might change… but it might not if we don’t address it within the education system, integrating the training of this skills in the syllabus.

Rosa Borge: virtual communities a need? or can smart mobs be a better option?
HR: We don’t really know yet. Smart mobs are ephemeral and happen after a particular event. Do they stay? Do they turn into a crystallized movement? Doesn’t look like it. This does not mean that smart mobs do not achieve results, but they are on the shortest run… and when there’s more impact than that, it’s because there was an actual movement behind.

Max Senges: quality, control and scalability is a Bermuda Triangle that is difficult to manage. How to mitigate or give away control while keeping the institution happy? How to scale up? HR: Giving up control is not bringing anarchy in, is just defining the boundaries of the project, which is quite different. Peer evaluation is also a way of not exactly giving control away, but distributing it. Meritocracy might be a good option to both keep some kind of rules (not real control, but keeping rules) and also being able to scale the model bit by bit, by shifting some responsibility (and authority) to the “best” students. e-Porfolios, self-reflection, self-evaluation is a very powerful tool too, as it raises motivation, self-management, ownership of your own contributions, self- and third party assessment.

Oriol Miralbell: How to learn to be an online mentor? Should we first learn some particular dynamics before online teaching? How to keep authority?
HR: Tell the students: you’re going to be able to teach this course. This triggers leaders and really engages them, and makes leadership emerge, as the possibility/chance to be the teachers is real.

Notes from the course Network Society: Social Changes, Organizations and Citizens, Barcelona, 15-17 October, 2008.

(ideas and comments from the audience at random — bundled under subjects and attributed when possible: Q noting an unidentified participant)

Participation and Engagement

Carol Darr: The importance of enhanced participation by means of web 2.0 applications.

Enrique Dans: To reflect on how events can be taken to a new stage by overcoming geographical and chronological barriers, extending the debate beyond the four walls or the conference room, beyond the scheduled dates of the programme.

Ethan Zuckerman: Do not focus on technology, but on engagement and participation.

Q: The Internet, a discovery/invention or a technological approach to an existing background? Where’s the limit of the Network Society? Can we evolve into a connected network where is people — not computers — what we physically connect, and thus create a single entity?

Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubi: the possibility to report reality from within the reality, closer to it than mass media. And the challenge to connect the offline and the online worlds, avoiding to create two different agoras.

Felipe González Gil: the Network requires constant exposition and constant competitiveness. Is this a masculine model?

Felipe González Gil: if creativity, engagement, the person behind, is what really matters, what’s the difference between a pencil and a digital camera?

Ismael Peña-López: it is not about having computers connected, but people; it is not about having some people connected to their community, but to connect communities in the “global village”; and it is not about being connected to communicate with the World, but to be connected to policy-making, to decision-taking, to the ones that matter (to us) emotionally and economically.

Getting people on the Network Society

Carlos Domingo & Genís Roca: the need to fill this gap (between the online and the offline) with some stewards that bridge both worlds, by not staying back in the web 1.0, not leaping forward the web 2.0, but trying to shift towards a web 1.5. Genís Roca stresses the fact that it is economic crisis the ones that somehow “validate” new economic and ideological models. Carlos Domingo goes back to the “goodness” of crises to “clean” old structures.

Ricard Ruiz de Querol: two different kind of unconnected people. The disconnected ones at the bottom, because they lack infrastructures or how to afford them; the disconnected ones at the top, because they lack the awareness to do it.

Doris Obermair: asking Yochai Benkler whether the problem of ICT usage was a generation related one, he answered that no, that as far as we’re running comfortable lives, there is no need to change. Only if we face a crisis we’ve got incentives to change our status quo.

Marc López: there are more people connected (to the Internet) than we might think. The question is how to reach/find them.

Q: we should set aside all the web 2.0 jargon so to avoid creating the geek vs. non-geek worlds.

Antoni Gutierrez-Rubi: to achieve the change, we have to act at the grassroots level, but also directly at the policy-making and decision-taking level.

Net Neutrality

Xavi Capdevila: the importance to get people connected, but not depending on firms, platforms, what they say or what they think or what they do.

Research and analysis on the Network Society

Tom Steinberg: two can types of research can be done. (1) Do things and reflect ex post, (2) wait until we come out with a universal truth. We should focus on hands on research, identify the benefits (and the drawbacks) and diffuse them to other communities so that projects can be replicated, adapted or just created from the experience of others.

Ethan Zuckerman: the difference between what will happen and what has happened (or is happening). Wondering about the future is great, but understanding the past and the present might even be better.

Elena Sanz: The need of a multidisciplinary approach to debate and try to understand the challenges of the Network Society.

Jaume Gatell: The Net, by providing so much knowledge to everyone, has enabled more and better communication between people. This also empowers people to engage in the analysis of what the Network Society implies. And it also implies a cultural change so necessary to be aware of the changes and how to look at them.

More info

Sunstein, C. R. (2001). Republic.com. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Notes from the course Network Society: Social Changes, Organizations and Citizens, Barcelona, 15-17 October, 2008.

How do social change organizations innovate?
Ethan Zuckerman, Harvard Berkman Center

Social organizations do not innovate, do it badly, or just do it slowly. Quite usually, the assumption is to be unrealistic about the power of technology to enable social change.

Facing a blank canvas gives you the idea that everything is possible. But good art is about constraint. And if you don’t know your constraints, figure them out.

• Innovation comes from constraint

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail saying does not apply to innovation: innovation is about hacking the hammer and making it better.

Von Hippel (see “more info” below): Lead user theory: users innovate all over the time.

Learning from extreme uses, hostile environments. Africa is a good place to test technology, as the environment is roughest. What works in Africa, works everywhere (AfriGadget, about African innovation).

Some examples of innovation from constraints: the Zeer Pot, the Solar Stove. The problem sometimes is not innovation in processes, but innovation in culture. Then innovation has to be reinvented, hence the solar stove becomes the Jiko:

• Don’t fight culture
• Embrace market mechanisms
• Innovate on existing platforms

Innovation is using the ordinary in extraordinary ways: the Malawi Windmill. Innovation is about hacking existing technology. And the technology that now is spread on Africa is mobile phones: technological innovation in Africa will necessarily be related with hacking mobile phones. Mobile phones have already changed the way sub-Saharan Africans see and do things: TradeNet, to get agricultural information; M-Pesa, to transfer money and make payments; Ushahidi, crowdsourcing crisis information; reporting the 2008 Zimbabwe presidential election to report electoral rigging.

Incremental infrastructure: e.g. a mobile phone antenna that also is a vertical axis power windmill.

• Problems are not always obvious from afar
• What you have matters more that what you lack
• Infrastructure can beget infrastructure

Ethan Zuckerman’s ICT4D Innovation test

1. Does the innovation comes from constraint?
2. Does it fight culture?
3. Does it embrace market mechanisms?
4. Does it innovate on existing platforms?
5. Does it come from close observation of the target environment?
6. Does it focus more on what you have more that what you lack?
7. Is it based on a “infrastructure begets infrastructure” basis?

Example 1: the OLPC project fails on 1, 3, 5, 6 and maybe 7, only passing on 2 and 4.

Example 2: Kiva passes on 1-4, fails on 5, and not sure whether it passes or fails on 6-7

Example 3: Gobal Voices passes on 1, 4 and 7; fails on 5-6; not sure about 2-3.

Social innovation never comes from a blank canvas. Comes from understanding the needs of all parties. Caveat: sometimes constraints leverage innovation, but are also a limitation for an innovation to go beyond itself.

Q&A

Ricard Ruiz de Querol: How to adapt the innovation based on constraints scheme to e.g. the digital divide in Spain? A: We should be aware whether there is a real digital divide or just a geeky will (unselfish, indeed) for everyone to be a digital native, when those people maybe already got what they needed. So, pushing people towards forced uses might be dysfunctional.

Carlos Domingo: But do we always have to bend to culture and stick to the past? A: It depends whether you’re talking short run or long run. In the long run, you want to figure out how to make culture smoothly evolve; in the short run, fighting culture just will enact an opposition reaction.

Personal reflections

Innovation as a darwinist evolution: no mutations, but adaptive non-disruptive changes based on what best performs on a specific environment.

More info

Von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge: MIT Press