speaking – Page 5 – Erhardt Graeff

Civic Media: Communities Making Change

13 September 2015Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Description

From http://www.nextlibrary.net/page/erhardt-graeff-nextlibrary-innovation-keynote

Civic Media encompasses a broad array of tools, practices, content, and communities that foster or enhance civic engagement. While civic media has always existed, it has recently flourished and been transformed thanks to technologies like smartphones and social media.

At its heart, civic media is best understood as a social phenomenon empowered by technology. Civic media reaches and engages a diverse audience, inviting all to create, share, remix, and share again. Young people are creating memes as political speech, as naturally as they might share a photo of their last meal. Developers are volunteering to build humanitarian software after disasters, enjoying the thrill of solving a hard problem and producing something that matters. And libraries, working at the nexus of information and public interest, are creating spaces in which communities can make change.

“Civic Media: Communities Making Change” will explore prominent examples of civic media; how tools, practices, content, and communities can be designed to be more civic; and the roles libraries can, and already are, playing in making civic media.

Slides

Making Drones Civic

12 June 2015Erhardt Graeff

Link to Conference Paper

graeff-matias_makingdronescivic_isa2015

Abstract

Can drones be fully accepted as civic technologies? Are there values embodied by drones that undermine their ability to perform in a civic capacity? What design principles might make drones more civic? Where does responsibility lie between civil society actors, drone designers, and policymakers in pursuing this goal while balancing privacy, security, and innovation? Although drones have several proposed civic use cases, particularly involving practices described as monitorial citizenship, drones are different from other civic technologies. Civic technologies are about shifting power away from corrupt actors and toward virtuous actors. And a motivating concept and ethic for civic technologies, whether used for interacting with governments or against them, is participatory practice. If we aspire to a definition of civic action that is fundamentally participatory and we hope for our civic technologies to embody that value of participatory practice, we must investigate whether drones can be fully accepted as civic technologies. This paper will address these questions and issues, problematizing the use of drones for civic purposes by defining a set of values and design principles for civic technologies and by showing where drones may play a role, situating contemporary cases among relevant political and ethical questions.

Crowdsourcing as Reflective Political Practice

26 September 2014Erhardt Graeff

Link

http://ipp.oii.ox.ac.uk/2014/programme-2014/track-c-political-engagement/building-community/erhardt-graeff-crowdsourcing-as

Abstract

Many platforms for civic engagement, whether online or offline, are inconvenient and disconnected from the source of issues they are meant to address. They require that citizens leave the places they normally inhabit physically or virtually and commit to a separate space and set of processes. Town hall meetings are still a key point of engagement, occurring during specific times and in specific places. Online forums function similarly, in that deliberation occurs within profile-based websites for which you need to sign up and regularly return. This paper responds to the design challenge and research question: How do you address barriers to “minimum effective engagement” in community projects, and ensure that all citizens can have their voice heard on how to improve their local communities?

In order to raise levels of participation in community projects and expand the range of voices heard in governmental decision-making, there is a need for civic technology that is lightweight and compelling enough to enjoy continued use and to promote civic learning. In this paper, I develop a theoretical basis for effective citizenship through crowdsourcing monitorial activity by finding connections between several theories of citizenship and learning, which point to this activity fostering civic learning through reflective political practice.

Using a needs assessment of Boston-area municipalities, I reinforce my argument and concretize a set of design goals for a new socio-technical system to foster local civic learning and engagement around issues like urban planning. In the end, I respond to the research challenge and design goals by introducing a prototype for a location-based survey platform for Android smartphones called Action Path, and discuss early-stage user feedback and future work.

Governing the Ungovernable

12 September 2014Erhardt Graeff

Announcement

http://www.tprcweb.com/tprc42-friday-panel-sessions/

Description

Laws, norms, policies, and institutions have failed to keep up with advances in artificial intelligence. Popularly, we still think of governance of these systems using quotes and metaphors from science fiction authors. The public awareness of the sophistication and capabilities of current systems are also skewed, often in extremes: predicting robot warfare and mind control or suffering complete naivete.

The reality is that intelligent systems are embedded in more and more everyday products and services. The so-called “internet of things” represents a kind of ubiquitous computing that anticipates our needs and provides us information or adjusts the room temperature based on usage patterns. Smarter algorithms power seemingly neutral services like Google’s search engine or Facebook’s news feed.

This panel brings together domain experts researching the impact of intelligent systems in a variety of arenas including household products, civics, and cyberwarfare. The panel will explore gaps in our existing framework of regulation around these technologies, identify challenges common to the deployment of different intelligent systems in a broad range of contexts, and suggest a common set of research goals to advance the cause of effective governance, mapping out the role different constituencies can play in this effort.

The Civic Media Research Path

8 August 2014Erhardt Graeff