Launches Near for High-Tech State Department, U.N. Human Rights Projects
BERKELEY, Calif. -- The U.S. State Department and the U.N. are ready to launch efforts to harness advanced digital communications for human-rights work, participants said at the Advancing the New Machine conference at the University of California. A U.N. program is opening at the end of the summer in Kampala, Uganda, the first of a series of Pulse Labs planned around the world to bring together researchers and activists from government, academia and nonprofits to use information about changes in the use of communication services for early-warning systems about crises hitting vulnerable populations, said Robert Kirkpatrick, director of the U.N. Global Pulse program.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
The program’s premise is that in a “world of big data and real-time data,” tracking and analyzing changes in the use of mobile and other digital services can arm policymakers to stay on top of “slow-onset crises” and intervene in a timely way, he said. “That’s data that in aggregate could be very useful.”
The method is an extension of the way that public-health authorities monitor behavior patterns in epidemiology, Kirkpatrick said. Analysts would contact trusted local sources “to confirm your hypotheses,” he said. The program has been preparing this year for the launch by applying “the mother of all regression analyses” to data collected the past three years, to find “signals and patterns,” Kirkpatrick said.
The State Department is ready to go ahead in about three weeks with an online community called Opinion Space, which it has been trying out at www.state.gov/opinionspace/, said Ken Goldberg, a professor of new media. He said he and colleagues at the university, working with Alec Ross and Katie Dowd at the department, had developed the application over the past year.
Opinion Space is a public forum for international discussion of matters of interest to the department, from diplomatic efforts and security threats to food production, women’s rights and climate change, Goldberg said. Users post their views in response to questions posed by the department, and new participants qualify to post comments by replying and then responding to five questions. Users can see how their responses compare with those of participants overall, and they gain points based on how much others agree with their positions and rate them as insightful, Goldberg said. The significance of positions, as decided by the community, is shown graphically by the size of points in a constellation representing them, and the system encourages users to take seriously stands that they disagree with, he said.
A competition will reward those found to have presented the best ideas with a trip to a State Department technology conference in Lithuania, Goldberg said.