Securing Your Lawn A neighbor in distress called me this past weekend trying to see if I had a key to our building’s tool shed so he could grab the lawnmower and cut the grass. Evidently he lost his. Although I had no key, I did have was a lock pick kit I acquired from Privacy Camp DC. Lock picking just happened to be one of a few sessions I attended that day and the speaker, Deviant Ollam (yes that is his real name), sold kits for anyone wanting to pursue lock picking as a “hobby”. Dashing off as if I were a Pink Panther gang member, I grabbed my tools and went to town on the lock. My hope was to evade detection, cut the grass, and leave everyone wondering who the grass cutting vigilante was.
Unfortunately after spending fifteen minutes playing with rakes and other lock picking essentials, I realized my skills as jewel thief were going nowhere. So I turned to plan B, which was acquiring bolt cutters and cutting the lock off.
While Deviant’s lock picking session was fun for everyone wanting to try their hand in thievery, it presented Privacy Camp attendees with a lesson in security that is invaluable for anyone working with agencies hosting sensitive data. Break-ins occur quite often, and some go undetected. Early detection of a breach enables organizations to quickly mitigate potential damage and take steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
At the end of the day, my condo association was much better off knowing I had to hack off the lock. They knew there was a break in. They knew they needed to take new security measures. And they knew exactly who was responsible. Thus they would never have to become reliant on a lawn mowing crusader.
Privacy Camp 09 Though learning how to pick a lock was fun, Privacy Camp 09 had a lot more to offer. The underlying theme of the camp was trying to find balance in managing security, privacy and transparency with existing technologies and data. As private and public institutions implement processes that might affect one aspect, concerns are typically raised about how the other two are affected.
Ari Schwartz from Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) kicked off the day by saying a few words about ongoing trends. In his message he mentioned many public agencies are risk averse to employing new technologies due to missteps that have exposed sensitive information in the past. For example, the ramifications of the Social Security Administration’s boondoggle in the nineties that made public people’s personal earnings benefits statement still affect how some organizations adopt online tools.
Following Ari, would-be topic facilitators stepped up to suggest a session they wanted to facilitate. Once the sessions were confirmed, an announcement went out and attendees flocked to a board to see the events of the day. Below are some of the sessions my workmate, Brian Verhoeven and I attended: Digital Signage If you have seen the movie Minority Report, then you may be familiar with some of the innovations in play that can use facial recognition software to match a person’s profile and churn out a digital advertisement within seconds. And the good news, depending if you are a fan of this type of technological marvel, is that they are already in use and many people are none the wiser. What may seem like innocuous digital displays lined up in Times Square and in elevators across the county, are actually equipped with demographic profiling mechanisms that match advertisements to a person’s age, gender and ethnicity.
Harley Geiger of CDT raised the question about private data collection in the public domain and unforeseen uses that could result. In particular, there is no legislation that prevents commercial entities from sharing/selling data to each other. Your profile could potentially be tied to your shopping habits, your passport (RFID) or surveys taken. While some people might love the extra attention, it has many privacy advocates concerned. Principally, there are no policies in place to notify users, and there are no guidelines to protect the data. People essentially are at the mercy of the companies that are stockpiling the data.
Good Locks and Good Privacy So back to the subject of lock picking. When selecting this session, there was an assumption it would focus on online security and how hackers get around firewalls, steal your passwords, etc. Wrong.
Though Deviant Ollam is a skilled hacker, he is also a lock picker hobbyist. And it seemed that lock picking made for a better topic than hacking that day. Deviant, actually showed us the technique to pick physical locks. We were even able to practice on padlocks, desk drawer locks, and the type used in standard household doors.
His presentation would serve as an allegory of a cautionary tale that was oft repeated in Privacy Camp. In the physical word, most criminals take a ‘smash and grab’ approach to stealing. This is actually a good thing. At least you have evidence that someone had broken in to your car, home, or office. Online, however, it is not always clear who is viewing your data.
Privacy vs. Transparency In this session we discussed the difficulties involved with participating in online conversations. How much about yourself do you reveal? If you reveal too much, it may be used against you. If you do not reveal enough, as one participant has experienced, it may be difficult for people to know who you really are.
Some of the take-aways from this session
1. Don’t post anything online that you would not want your mom to read. 2. You don’t want to be a web celebrity because it is too easy for people to tear you apart 3. “The crimes are the same…” [the Internet] “…just decreases the transactional costs”
Government Use of Social Media After the Social Security Administration fiasco, one understands government’s reluctance to dip their feet into the social media pool. But, the new administration’s promotion of transparency in government and the effectiveness of these tools at communicating with the masses have agencies curious on their potential. Some agencies are looking toward using social media tools run by the private sector (e.g. Twitter and Facebook), while others are looking to build their own organically.
While Twitter and Facebook have better reach than home grown communities, they also have issues government needs to overcome. For starters, FOIA rules have no bearing on what is released on privately owned web sites. Thus government data could disappear.
Additionally, there are challenges in establishing a presence on privately owned sites. How will government attain the type of following Ashton Kutcher has on Twitter? Who is going to want to risk sharing college party pics with the Department of Homeland Security? How do government employees converse openly on these tools without getting their employer in trouble?
While there were many questions asked and few definitive answers, the Federal Web Managers Council is at work drafting guidelines to address many of these issues. Presumably a policy is coming in the near term.
End of the Day Privacy Camp either left people paranoid or interested in breaking in to their building’s tool shed. I personally am curious to see how government engages in social media in the next two years. As mentioned above, there are some hurdles it will need to overcome, but government can no longer afford to bunker down.
Pew Trusts has two new job openings for the web communications team at the Pew Environment Group.
"PEG" is ramping up its organization and its efforts - and so this should be an exciting time to work there! PEG focuses on addressing three major environmental problems- climate change, wilderness and biodiversity loss, and degradation of ocean environments and marine fisheries.
The positions are "Senior Web Associate" for online advocacy, and for communications:
A couple of weeks ago a group of Seattle global health data experts met at the Seattle Biomedical Research Institute to continue a conversation we started earlier this year on global health data. This session we focused on issues of health data collection--represented by the form shown here, which is a brand-new data collection instrument from Kenya (brought to the group by PATH's David Lubinski). This form is emblematic of the profound challenges in gathering accurate, reliable, consistent data at the field level. A quick glance makes it clear that the not-entirely-standard definitions of the diseases listed, and the data collection process implied (often a matter of guesswork and intuition), may introduce some uncertainty into the reliability of the data that results. The conversation touched on various dimensions of the data-collection issue:
The challenge of cultural assumptions embedded in standard health surveys (what is "jogging", exactly? how do you evaluate the health significance of "one glass of rice wine per day" in China vs. Japan?). Betsy Rolland of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center's Asia Cohort Consortium, a group tasked with wrangling and consolidating data from half a dozen Asian countries, is wrestling with these issues every day in her work.
The impact of donor expectations on data collection. Health systems in developing world countries will, understandably enough, do whatever it takes to help donors determine the outcomes of their giving--but often doesn't translate into systematic, consistent data collection that best meets the needs of the entire system.
The issues are not limited to the developing world. Finland has an excellent health data system, but many developed-world countries struggle with health data too--even in Seattle, a leader in advanced medical research and practices, getting good data from the University of Washington Medical Center to the Department of Public Health, just a few blocks away, is a non-trivial task.
OK, these are hard problems to solve. But we talked about solutions as well:
Jason Parker of the Gates Foundation told us about techniques Google is using to overcome issues of accuracy by dramatically increasing the quantity of data being analyzed. (We agreed that getting representation from commercial organizations like Google and Amazon at our Global Health Data meetings could well provide useful insights into the problems we wrestle with.)
Sherrilynne Fuller of the UW's Center for Public Health Informatics observed that a typical attitude to these daunting data infrastructure problems is "let's deal with that tomorrow and do fun stuff now." To encourage investigation at the level of *system* rather than the isolated individual issues that get funders' attention, she proposes building a simplified conceptual model for health data that will help students, funders, and researchers--and the general public, too--gain greater insight into systemic data collection issues and solutions.
David Lubinski of PATH, fresh from a series of recent trips to Africa and bringing a wealth of insights (for example, if a local clinic has drugs, the word spreads like wildfire and people come; no drugs, no people), is working on an exciting new health data management project that takes a "less is more" approach: identify a few key significant data points (for example, asking a clinic "how many patients were admitted?", "what were they admitted for?", "who's paying for their treatment?") and develop an end-to-end system that manages those key points all the way from collection through regional, national, and international aggregation to analysis.
We ended this time in a similar place to our first meeting in February: here we are in Seattle, a relatively small, convivial town with a strong global health tradition, a desire to collaborate, and a ton of excellent coffee shops--shouldn't we keep working together to help bring some of these possibilities to fruition? We'll continue to explore that key question in a couple of months when we meet again.
Five years ago, CNN and 24-hour news channels and personal blogs captured US citizen dissent at the 2004 Presidential election results (or lack thereof). In 2008 TwitterVoteReport attempted to provide real-time election monitoring as US citizens posted voting experiences to their Twitter feeds. Concurrently the Obama campaign leveraged every social media tool in the book to engage US citizens, empower them with ways they could help, and ultimately contributed to winning the next presidency.
Right now the world is watching the next level of emergent social media and citizen engagement. Twitter and social media hacktivists are once again changing the landscape. In Iran. The power of these tools (and their ability to reach millions) is explicitly demonstrated in the defiant behavior of Iranians, dissatisfied with the recent election results. What's more fascinating to this social media geek, is that through cooperation from hackers and content generators, this social-media based revolution is happening from within a closed society.
As @zittrain expressed on their Twitterstream, “Qualities that make Twitter seem inane & half-baked are what make it so powerful.” The same goes for the rest of the tools in the Iranian citizen's arsenal. The very openness and flexibility of purpose is exactly what's powering this type of engagement.
Here's just a taste of the thousands of pages being leveraged in this fight:
Clive Thompson's article in the latest Wired on "The Future of Reading" is a compelling read. And I found especially interesting his mentioning of "what bibliophiles call book discovery."
He talks about the benefits of both putting book content online *and* also allowing people to engage/comment/mashup the text.
This would massively improve what bibliophiles call book discovery. You're far more likely to hear about a book if a friend has highlighted a couple brilliant sentences in a Facebook update—and if you hear about it, you're far more likely to buy it in print. Yes, in print: The few authors who have experimented with giving away digital copies (mostly in sci-fi) have found that they end up selling more print copies, because their books are discovered by more people.
This also applies well to what a lot of our clients who are focused on accomplishing - trying to have their policy analysis content reach the widest possible audiences and have the largest possible impact. In this context I'd say "idea discovery", or "policy discovery" is enhanced by having that content get picked up and commented on, cut-n-pasted into blog posts, snippets linked to from course curricula, woven into other people's work, etc.
How to do well with "ideas discovery"? I'd say the use of XML to make content as linkable and mashable as possible is great - but may be a bit out of reach just now.
So in the short run, I'd say put policy analysis and policy content...
-into web pages as in-line text (searchable and cut-n-paste-able)
-in logical sections/pieces so discrete (groups of) ideas can be linked to
-with feature for people to comment on the text
-with those sorta annoying little icons for "sharing" with Digg, StubbledUpon, etc.
-with social media tie-ins woven in, such as for FaceBook (looking for ideas on how best to do thi?)
-with author comments/answers about the analysis on a blog, with commenting enabled
-onto content sharing sites like Scribd , Slideshare, YouTube, Flickr
-with content in editable format (ie a wiki) to allow real user engagement...
Next week, I'm pleased to be participating on a panel as part of an intriguing event called "Breaking with Business As Usual - An MDG Strategic Conference". It is being led by a group I've recently learned about called MIDEGO - Global Partnerships Reaching Global Health Care Goals, based here in D.C.
I like the concept of the conference: Accelerating the Millennium Development Goals
It is an all-day event next Friday June 19, 2009 in Burke, VA, and registration is still open. Registration by Monday June 15th is encouraged, but you may register through the seek.
"The MDG Strategic conference is intended for anyone interested in advancing global public health and environmental sustainability. The conference will feature keynote speakers including Jack Bryant, Sonia Sachs, Donna Barry and others, as well as panelists from both the private and public sector (World Bank, ABT Associates, UNC, GWU, John Snow International, Chemonics, Africare, PAHO and more).
Come be part of the movement to accelerate the Millennium Development Goals!"
I will be speaking on an Education panel about how online technologies can be used to strengthen programs and efforts to reach the MDGs. The day's events look very interesting. Hope to see some of you there!
The upcoming Twitter discussion I blogged about on June 1 (see below) took place last Wednesday, here's my top impressions:
First, you can see the full transcript here, posted by the event sponsor Ashoka. Its nice to have a transcript packaged, though you can also see it all by searching Twitter on hash tag #SocEntChat.
Foremost for me, the result of the two-hour live chat with about 30 people was two or three new insights to challenge and refine my previous thinking -- which is great. Putting a substantive comment out to a bunch of interested people and getting their immediate feedback is provocative and useful. The fact that every Twitter comment is limited to 140 characters makes everyone cut to the main point quickly, which is nice. And because the conversation is fast moving, you don't really have to respond to comments that are less engaging!
The discussion quickly became multi-channeled in substance, but single-channeled on Twitter -- so you had to follow pretty closely to who was responding to which previous comment. I find the transcript less interesting than the real-time discussion was, when I was intently watching the comments and responding to those that caught my interest. With more people participating this might have gotten really confusing, though the moderator helped by marching us through a sequential set of discussion questions.
It was difficult to respond quickly enough -- periodically, by the time I formulated my 140 character response, the conversation had moved on. But unlike in-person and many other events, you don't have to worry about interrupting anyone else since it is multiple conversations in parallel, you do get to keep on expressing your line of thinking even while others go off on different tracks!
Some interesting questions and comments have continued to come in to Twitter after the formal discussion, so the Twitter format offers a way for people to continue the conversation.
The Twitter discussion was substantive, and generated interest in our work amongst participants. I also gained about 10 more personal Twitter followers, so far, and others seem to be finding the discussion stream. I have not found any blog or other coverage of the this discussion.
Technology: tricky despite my preparation. Twitter's search service, which many people use to stream the discussion, hiccupped at the exact time of the event. It all came back online a few minutes later. Nobody seemed to mind, but we don't know if we lost participants in the process. This highlights the ongoing tension between using 3rd-party web services which are often innovative and full featured and free (or nearly so), but out of your control, versus proprietary or your own tools which you might control more but innovate less and pay a bunch more money for.
Feel free to add comments or contact me about the merits of Twitter-based discussions, or about our substantive discussion about environmental entrepreneurs.
Original Blog Entry (posted June 1st)
This Wednesday I'll be a guest presenter in a two-hour Twitter-based discussion of environmental issues and social entrepreneurship (Twitter @strelneck). This follows on three recent press events with newspapers, radio and bloggers on similar topics, so it will be interesting to compare the Twitter results and my experience from these different media channels. You can watch or participate in the Twitter discussion, Wednesday June 3, 4pm-6pm EST.
This might be a decent case study for anyone without much experience in these venues who is thinking of using Twitter to focus attention around a policy issue. Although I use Twitter personally, I have never participated in an organized Twitter-based discussion before, so find myself thinking through how to prepare. Top of my mind are these issues:
I am preparing three main talking points to anchor my comments, as I do with all press events.
I wonder if this Twitter discussion will get picked up or elaborated by bloggers or others.
I am spending more time than I anticipated tinkering to make sure I understand how the technology works, so I do not make a mistake in the middle of the discussions. Am learning a lot in the process.
I am concerned (from ignorance!) about how my steam of Tweets on Wednesday will impact my other Twitter followers who aren't part of the discussion, since they'll see my comments coming through but out of context.
I wonder who else will start following me on Twitter as a result – each time I Tweet about a new topic, additional people start following my stream.
After Wednesday, I'll post results and my impressions here too. Wish me luck!
National Rebuilding Day is the annual signature event of Rebuilding Together, the leading national nonprofit working to preserve affordable home ownership by bringing volunteers and communities together to rehabilitate the homes of low-income homeowners.
While much of the US media has focused on the recent release of Roxana Saberi after being falsely accused of spying in Iran, other cases similar remain unresolved. Silva Haratounian was working in Iran on behalf of the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), which focuses on international education, academic research, professional training and technical assistance. Silva was working on a project to improve child and maternal health in the country, when she was arrested by Iranian authorities and charged with participating in an effort to overthrow the Iranian government through a ''velvet revolution." On Jan. 19, 2009, she was sentenced to three years in jail. Haratounian's attorneys are now in the last phase of her appeal, as reported by the Huffington Post.
Haratounian's family has set up a web site and invited the public to sign an appeal to Iran’s government using your voice to help Silva regain her freedom.
We'll learn how different federal agencies are blogging, holding online meetings, using social media, and implementing social networks to accomplish their missions. Below is the list of confirmed speakers, and a mystery guest might make a surprise appearance as well :>)
- Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist: Opening Remarks
- Darren Krape, State Department: Social Media for Public Diplomacy
- Daniel Luxenbery and Sanjay Koyani, FDA: Gov 2.0 and Peanut Product Recall
- Marcus Peacock, formerly EPA: The Art of Blogging for the Feds
- Stacey Young, USAID: Online Events for Microenterprise Collaboration
Presenters will discuss what they've achieved, how they did it, what they learned, and what they wish they had known beforehand. As usual, the presentations will be concise and targeted. Following the presenations, I'll moderate a lively group discussion about what works, what doesn't, and how to get started. It should be a great session.
For the second year in a row, Forum One participated in Rebuilding Together Alexandria's National Rebuilding Day.