Worldwide Lexicon: matching up technologies and culture to end the language barrier

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 5

I've reported before on the Worldwide Lexicon, the brainchild of my friend Brian McConnell. His most recent breakthrough, which I blogged about in August, was an impressive Firefox plugin that exploits both human and machine translations on the Web to provide pages you can read in your primary language.

As attractive as the Firefox plug-in can be, it's only the first stage in four that Brian plans toward a computing environment that encourages and leverages human translation. On the browser side, the next logical project is to reproduce the Firefox experience for IE users. Ultimately, he hopes the functionality becomes a standard part of every browser. Even better, he's working on a way to include the functionality on the server side so that it's browser-independent (although that technology would require support in the server software, of course).

And there's even more to come. He lays out his vision in an essay boldly titled The End Of The Language Barrier. The bottom of the article points to an equally important statement written for the World Economic Forum by Ethan Zuckerman, founder of the Global Voices site that extends the reach of weblogs to people in many countries who previously lacked access to such forums.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 23 September 2009

Video Art, Synthetic Biology Futures, Crowdsourced Personality, and an 1890s Startup

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Projections (YouTube) -- the incredible video projection onto an old English manor house by Kiwi Foo Camp alums The Dark Room.
Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? (New Yorker) -- a thoughtful article about the possibilities and cautions of synthetic biology. . “A house pet is a domesticated parasite,” he noted. “ It is evolved to have an interaction with human beings. Same thing with corn”—a crop that didn’t exist until we created it. “Same thing is going to start happening with energy,” he went on. “We are going to start domesticating bacteria to process stuff inside enclosed reactors to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life.”
2. Business Cards and Crowdsourced Personality Assessments -- we scanned images of a person’s business card and asked crowdsourced workers from the Amazon Mechanical Turk channel to write five kind words about the person based on what they saw. I like the idea of being able to crowdsource a quick impartial aesthetic judgement about a design.
3. When Sears Was a Startup (Pete Warden) -- one of the first catalogues from Sears (1897) inspires comparisons to Amazon and other web startups. On a mission with a new business model. They can't stop talking about how they're cutting out the middle men who've been gouging their customers, with pages devoted to messianic rants against the monopolies trying to put them out of business. They contrast their order fulfillment process (dozens of clerks dealing with tens of thousands of orders a day) with the inefficient country stores full of assistants being paid to idly wait for customers, explaining how they can offer such low prices despite the shipping.

Four short links: 16 September 2009

Data Sharing, Health Dashboard, DIY Repairs, Crowdsourcing

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Data Sharing: Empty Archives (Nature) -- asking and answering the question "why don't researchers share their data?"
2. San Francisco Health Visual Dashboard -- Health Matters in San Francisco is a o­ne-stop source of non-biased data and information about community health in the City, and healthy communities in general. It is intended to help planners, policy makers, and community members learn about issues and identify improvements. (via the blog of the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess and titine on delicious)
3. iFixit -- information on Mac, iPhone, etc. repair. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. Crowdflower -- labour as a service. Love the analytics. Don't miss the TechCrunch 50 demo. (via waxy)

The Library of the Commons: Rise of the Infodex

by Mark Sigal | @netgarden | comments: 8

Somewhere between the realm of Personal and Shared media lies the realm of the Universal.

The realm of the universal is the Library of the Commons, a global repository of user-generated and crowd-sourced media and information.

Services that logically nest in the Library include: Amazon, Yelp, YouTube, Craigslist, Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter tweets, Bit.ly items, Scribd docs, Expedia, Google News, Google Maps, TripAdvisor, iTunes, the App Store and any other services and/or information sources that 'just work.'

In other words, these are services that have defined the 'IT' to the point that we can now pretty much take their utility and availability for granted (typically via API access and/or embed codes with some form of customization wizard).

The Genesis of a Library

So how did we get to this place in the story? What gave birth to the Library of the Commons?

No one formally deigned it so, but from the countless me-too services borne of the dotcom and Web 2.0 land rushes, the above-referred services are the ones that cultivated the biggest audiences, grew the richest ecosystems and inspired the deepest engagement levels.

In Darwinian terms, these are the survivors, whose structures and workflows have been defined and refined by time/experience.

As such, they are generally well thought out, holistic and integrated, but more to the point, have large, engaged user bases.

Thus, the Commons presents a riddle. Almost as if inspired by Herman Hesse's 'The Glass Bead Game', the riddle is this.

If all of these services yield a smorgasbord of best practices, why not systematically emulate them so as to...FEDERATE them?

Put another way, what if a time came when people ceased trying to perennially re-create the wheel, and instead, started to 'decompose' these services; to empty their function sets from whatever nesting they were contained within; and to re-apply them into new contexts supported by a now federated data flow proxied within the Cloud.

Couldn't the composite feature set be exposed switchboard-style to enable any number of custom services and client apps?

To put some meat on the conceptual skeleton, consider the following exercise that I recently did:

A decomposition of Craigslist and TripAdvisor yields deep profiles that are accessorized and interconnected via context traversal flows, such as categorization routines, places, events, airfares, posts, pages, ratings, discussion threads, offers, jobs, businesses, products and personal listings.

Craigslist offers up 36 different sub-types of items For Sale; Services represent another 19 sub-types; Jobs 41 more; Discussions, another 72. And so it goes (including Housing, Personals and Community) across 175+ geo-locales.

TripAdvisor is an instance of this model that overlays a set of time-tested workflows specific to the relatively complex task of planning a vacation.

These workflows make it easy to match a travel plan to specific tastes, requirements and budget - regardless of the information traversal path you pursued to being ready to get pricing on desired travel dates.

Could these same workflows be re-purposed for researching and then purchasing other similarly complex products or services?

I will come back to that thought, in a moment.

The Rise of the Infodex

What is de-composed, can be re-assembled, and thus begins the Infodex.

The Infodex is a kind of next-generation Rolodex, with aspirations to grow into a real-time marketplace.

What exactly is the Infodex? It is comprised of three parts.

Part one is a listing tool for linking to content, creating a metadata wrapper around media items and encapsulating the above-referenced services (i.e., Yelp, YouTube, WIkipedia) into listing containers that define and expose the methods that one can interface to the media item (framework integrity stuff).

Part two is an indexing engine so that, once simple rules are defined, your media libraries and the information in the listings themselves becomes 'self-organizing.'

Named picture types (globes, animals, historic or famous images), for example, could be a federation of multiple picture services (Flickr, Photobucket, Getty Images) and 'discovered' pictures from past queries.

Looked at from this perspective, the goal, in part, is to establish a cloud-based, crowd-sourced Dewey Decimal System built around the outcome of facilitating better searching, compositing, cross-indexing, sharing, archiving, and analytics functions for specific media and information 'types.'

Part three of the Infodex is a unified runtime player that is congruent with the information flows of the mobile broadband age; namely, iPhone, Twitter, Facebook and Web (Javascript/Flash embeds/Adobe AIR) based viewing/playback environments.

One simple example of a basic type of function that might be propagated across all of these environments is the Three Item Topical List (e.g., Top Three Favorites or Three Most Related Items). Define once, propagate everywhere.

A core assumption of the model is that both the media player and the service integration layers are open-sourced. This ensures that the user experience is uniformly good across all of these services, and pushes proprietary-ness higher up the stack, thus raising the floor for all comers.

A final thought. Google became Google by indexing the web. Couldn't the next generation extend this approach by being federated, crowd-sourced and context-specific (i.e., media, information and service aware)?

Are their obvious best practices for The Commons? Obvious gotchas? What about the Infodex?

Related Posts:

1. Pattern Recognition: Makers, Marketplaces and the Library of the Commons


2. Envisioning the Social Map-lication


3. The Mobile Broadband Era: It's About Messages, Mobility and The Cloud

World Wide Lexicon Toolbar changes the reading experience for the other 99% of web pages

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 8

Brian McConnell's latest coding effort, World Wide Lexicon Toolbar, meets my criterion for a piece of critical infrastructure: after two days with it I can't get along without it, and I plan to avoid any browser that doesn't have it installed.

Brian is a highly adaptive programmer. With roots in the telecom industry and several start-ups on his resume, he also wrote Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations for O'Reilly. The World Wide Lexicon project he's been working on for the past several years is again something totally different.

Install the add-on (currently experimental) in Firefox 3.5 or higher and visit a page in some language other than your default. Before your eyes, headings and text change into your native language. You can get similar effects by submitting the page to a popular translator such as Google (which is one of the tools used behind the scenes by the WWL toolbar), but the instantaneous effect of the toolbar makes you feel closer to the people whose sites you visit around the world.

There are several languages that I know well enough to get the gist of a page, but where I miss some of the details and get frustrated by gaps in my vocabulary. Therefore, I set the WWL toolbar to "Bilingual view," so each block element of the original text is shown together with its translation. The bilingual view is considerably less attractive, because it swells the size of each block element, but I can tell already that it will improve my language skills quickly.

WWL is designed for volunteer translations. If it becomes more popular, people will submit translations that are much more accurate than the machine-generated ones the WWL must fall back on currently.

What's the process behind this new dimension to web browsing? McConnell let me in on some of the magic.

Volunteer translations

McConnell invented WWL several years ago with the core notion of encouraging people to translate web pages they thought should get a wider audience. When he first told me about the idea, I was skeptical that he would get many volunteers. But then I heard of other volunteer translation efforts. For instance, there's a whole subculture of people who write subtitles for popular Hollywood films. This runs afoul of copyright law, of course (and so do the copies of movies they're attached to, probably) but they show the lengths to which crowdsourcing has progressed in the translation area.

FLOSS Manuals, a project I do volunteer work for, also finds dozens of people willing to translate its open source documentation.

McConnell's first set of tools were designed to facilitate on-the-fly translations. Web designers could enhance their web sites by downloading from the WWL site some JavaScript that made each text element on the page editable. (I blogged about this in December 2007.) The paste-in displayed a little pencil icon, signaling to viewers that they could do instant translations. All they would have to do was click on an element, and a text box would pop up where they could enter their translation. The web site would then register the translation with the central WWL site.

World Wide Lexicon API

The WWL API covers the entire life cycle of a translation: registering a translation, rating translations for quality, searching for a translation of a particular page into a particular language, and retrieving a translation. Queries can specify a minimum rating.

Toolbar

The latest achievement of the WWL project is the toolbar officially released yesterday. It determines the user's native language through settings in the browser. When each page is visited, the toolbar uses the domain name and various tests on the text to make a guess about its language.

The toolbar then issues an API query to see whether any human translations exist. If so, it displays the translations with a light yellow or green background.

If no one has made a human translation (which is usually the case so far) the toolbar resorts to well-known machine translation services. It can make use of Google Translate, Apertium, and Moses, each of which offers an API, and will also query Babelfish when its API is ready. Machine translations are displayed with a light blue or grey background.

The progressive translation used by the toolbar is also interesting. It starts with the first 10 or 20 elements, then translates heading tags (<H1>, etc.), then the larger texts, and ultimately every element on a page. (I displayed one page that embedded a Google ad, and the translator recognized and translated that text too.) McConnell is working on making the various translations run in parallel. Because translation changes the sizes of elements, the toolbar makes various accommodations to display the page as attractively as it can.

In short, WWL is a cool combination of mash-ups, existing services, crowdsourcing, and Ajax. I'm sure that in a year's time I'll think back to its appearance today and be shocked at how primitive it was. But it will remain a transformative tool for me.

Four short links: 17 August 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. How Twitter Works in Theory (Kevin Marks) -- very nice summary about the conceptual properties of Twitter that let it work. Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you're looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you're declaring an emotion and expecting a human response. This is what leads to unintentionally ironic newspaper columns bemoaning public banality, because they miss that while you don't care what random strangers feel about their lunch, you do if its your friend on holiday in Pompeii.
2. Army To Test Wiki-Style Changes to The 7 Manuals -- In early July the Army will conduct a 90-day online test using seven existing manuals that every soldier, from private to general officer, will have the opportunity to read and modify in a “wiki”-style environment. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. MobWrite -- converts forms and web applications into collaborative environments. Create a simple single-user system, add one line of JavaScript, and instantly get a collaborative system. (via Simon Willison)
4. Open Data Standards Don't Apply To The Military -- It’s that last particular point that should be the most disturbing to the administration. Apparently all geospatial data being developed and utilized by the USAFA would be unusable without a sole software vendor. This causes concern over broader interoperability with other agencies and organizations, access to important national information, and archivability and retrievability. Expose of the single-source "standard" vendor lockin in US military geosoftware and geodata. (via johnmscott on Twitter)

Four short links: 3 August 2009

Mathematics Collaboration, Risk, Visualisation, and SemWeb

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Enabling Massively Parallel Mathematics Collaboration -- Jon Udell writes about Mike Adams whose WordPress plugin to grok LaTeX formatting of math has enabled a new scale of mathematics collaboration.
2. 2845 Ways to Spin The Risk -- introduction to the ways in which our perception of risk (and numbers in general) can be distorted by how it is presented. (via titine on Twitter)
3. Logstalgia -- OpenGL app to visualize Apache log files.
4. 4Store -- "scalable RDF storage". 4store was designed by Steve Harris and developed at Garlik to underpin their Semantic Web applications. It has been providing the base platform for around 3 years. At times holding and running queries over databases of 15GT, supporting a Web application used by thousands of people. (via joshua on Delicious)

Four short links: 27 July 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Ignite OSCON -- 56m of video from Ignite OSCON. They're all great, but Dan Meyer remains the highlight for me.
2. gheat -- a maptile server in Python, delivering heatmaps to be superimposed on Google Maps. Handy for visualization fiends.
3. CaDNAno -- open source software for design of 3-dimensional DNA origami. One of George Church's projects. I love the combination of math, biology, and whimsy in open-source giftwrap. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. CommentPress -- an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. I'm taking a greater interest in tools that channel and focus participation rather than simply providing "edit this page". (via gov2.net.au's issues paper)

Four short links: 6 July 2009

iPhone Maps, Tooth Milling, Scratch Updated, Newspapers for All

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. Offline Mapping App for iPhone -- carry Open Street Maps maps with you even when you're not in 3G/wifi range. (via Elisabeth)
2. My dentist used an in-office CAD & CNC mill to produce a new tooth for me today (Nat Friedman) -- hello, future!
3. New version of Scratch released -- Scratch is an excellent way to teach kids how to program (I've had success with lots of 7 and 8 year olds). The new version includes keyboard entry, webcams, and support for Lego WeDo. The user interface has also been changed to work on a Netbook's 800x600 screen. Kudos to the Scratch team! (via scratchteam on Twitter)
4. Newspaper Club - a Work in Progress -- blog for the Newspaper Club project. "We're building a service to help people make their own newspapers. This is the blog where we're alarmingly honest about where it's all going wrong." I can't figure out whether this is a brilliant decentralisation move that will disrupt the newspaper industry, or a paper form of steampunk. (via Simon Willison)

Four short links: 24 June 2009

Open Source Kids, Crowdsourcing Lessons, Flickr Secrets, Hadoop Spatial Joins

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. The Digital Open -- The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers.
2. Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian's Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment -- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. How to lure them? By making it feel like a game. "Any time that you’re trying to get people to give you stuff, to do stuff for you, the most important thing is that people know that what they’re doing is having an effect," Willison said. "It’s kind of a fundamental tenet of social software. … If you’re not giving people the ‘I rock’ vibe, you’re not getting people to stick around." (via migurski on delicious)
3. 10+ Deploys/Day: Dev & Ops Cooperation at Flickr -- John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's talk from Velocity. You tell any mainstream company in the world "10 deploys/day" and you'll be met with disbelief.
4. Reproducing Spatial Joins using Hadoop and EC2 -- bit by bit the techniques for emulating important operations from trad databases are being discovered and shared in the new database scene. (via straup on delicious)

Four short links: 22 June 2009

Decaying Friendships, Crowdsourced Cars, Aussie Gov 2.0, Zoomable Presentations

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years -- to put it another way, the half-life of friendship is 7 years. (via zephoria on delicious)
2. Crowdsourced Car Design -- an interesting approach, and I can imagine it being described as "threadless for cars". (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce -- The Aussies are getting their Gov 2.0 on. Check out Senator Kate Lundy's Public Sphere event today got a lot of Twitter action.
4. Prezi -- sexy zoomable presentation creator. Keynote meets Ken Burns Effect on PCP. Nifty look from a Budapest-based startup.

Four short links: 17 June 2009

Word Mining, Open Ideas, Power Meter BotNet, and Realtime Web Traffic Tracking

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. NY Times Mines Its Data To Identify Words That Readers Find Abstruse -- the feature that lets you highlight a word on a NY Times web page and get more information about it is something that irritates me. I'm fascinated by the analysis of their data: boggling that sumptuary is less perplexing than solipsistic. Louche (#3 on the list) has been my favourite word for two years, by the way, since I heard Dylan Moran toss it out in that uniquely facile way the Irish have with words. I think Irish citizens get this incredible competence with the English language for free, along with staggering house prices and beer you can walk on.
2. Open Ideas -- Alex Payne's blog of Concepts in the public domain, awaiting collaboration and appropriation.
3. Buggy 'smart meters' open door to power-grid botnet (The Register) -- Paul Graham said that we've found what we get when we cross a television with a computer: a computer. Similarly, intelligent power meters are computers, computers that apparently haven't been well-secured. To prove his point, Davis and his IOActive colleagues designed a worm that self-propagates across a large number of one manufacturer's smart meter. Once infected, the device is under the control of the malware developers in much the way infected PCs are under the spell of bot herders. Attackers can then send instructions that cause its software to turn power on or off and reveal power usage or sensitive system configuration settings.
4. Chartbeat -- the sexiest web analytics ever. It gives realtime count of users, whether they're reading or writing (based on whether focus is in a form element), where they're from, mentions on Twitter, and more and more and more. This is a different form of analytics than Google Analytics, which tells you trends and historical access. Love this for the pure sex appeal of a heads-up dashboard that can tell you exactly how many people are on your site and exactly what they're doing. (via Artur)

Four short links: 2 June 2009

Fonts, Medicine, Healthcare, Project Natal

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. TypeKit -- Jeff Veen's new startup, making typography on the web fail to suck. Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. While it’s technically quite easy to link to fonts, it’s legally more nuanced. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.
2. Talking With Jamie Heywood About PatientsLikeMe (Jon Udell) -- the creator of patientslikeme, a site that provides people with serious conditions a chance to report on the efficacy of their treatment, their unique symptoms, and (if they wish) to connect with the researchers in the drug companies who made the treatments. It's a new closure for the feedback loop of medical research.
3. The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care. (New Yorker) -- the lesson is that you tolerate bad ethics, bad business, bad behaviour at your own risk because the rogue you tolerate may become the anchor tenant for a mall of villainy you'll find very hard to dismiss.
4. Microsoft Announces Project Natal -- full-body motion capture for XBox 360, as game controller. I'm keen to see whether having nothing in your hand is as satisfying as having something to hold. Kudos to MSFT for bringing research to market as mainstream entertainment.

Four short links: 22 May 2009

Villainous Javascript, Funding the Arts, Peak Web, and Crowdsourced Quality Control at a Museum

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Hiding Dirty Deeds: "Encrypted" Client-Side Code -- obfuscated Javascript from a Facebook phishing site, deconstructed and reconstructed, parsed and glossed for understanding. It reminds me of the best obfuscated Perl: Latin, string substitution, runtime and compile-time semantics ... a work of evil art. (via waxy)
2. Kickstarter -- artistic commercial version of PledgeBank. You say "I want to do [X] by Y and it takes $Z" and people can donate to your goal. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
3. Peak Web (Chris Heathcote) -- My biggest problem is that people always perceive the near-past, present and near-future as having the most technological change, and the speed of decline of the old new media feels wrong. I am, however, thinking that there’s something true in one reading of the graph: we may be at or past Peak Web.
4. Crowdsourcing the Cleanup with Freeze Tag -- The Awe-Worthy Brooklyn Museum, like all cultural institutions, have more objects than they can add metadata to. They let users provide metadata through tagging, but all crowdsourcing projects permit vandals. Their solution: crowdsource the cleanup. My only question is whether this will become a game between vandals and janitors. Brooklyn Museum is noteworthy for their insanely great use of the web, check them out and please support them if you like what you see.

Warning sign of peak web

Completing the circle on journalists and public participation

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 3

Journalists, politicians, and foundations are all tinkering with forms of amateur input: inviting bloggers to major events, quoting popular online sites in newspapers, etc. But Capital News Connection has really jumped in full-tilt with Ask Your Lawmaker. A creative combination of public input and ratings with professionals who have their boots on the ground in the US Capitol building, Ask Your Lawmaker is a case study in progress concerning how to get experts and the public to work together.

I heard a talk from CNC founder and executive director Melinda Wittstock this evening at the Ethos Roundtable, a forum for non-profits in Eastern Massachusetts. CNC gets consulting input from Ethos Roundtable organizer Deborah Elizabeth Finn, and Wittstock came looking for volunteer help with such matters as developing a Facebook or iPhone application. As Wittstock said, Ask Your Lawmaker is still working on how to complete the circle of public input, feedback, and outreach.

Step one is the simple form (on the web site's "Ask A Question" tab) for submitting a question to any Congressman or Senator of your choice. Step two is the simple voting mechanism, reminiscent of the pre-inauguration Change.gov site.

At this point, the journalists working for CNC--who have years of experience at leading media sites--take over. They don't merely choose the highest-rated questions. Sometimes a question shouldn't have to wait around and gather votes because the topic is hot. The reporters use their judgment in combination with votes to pick timely and provocative questions, and sometimes direct a question to a more appropriate lawmaker (such as the sponsor of a bill or the head of a committee).

The next step invokes the power of professional journalism. CNC sends its reporters into the Capitol and congressional office buildings daily. Although they have regular routines with their typical journalists' questions, they throw in citizen questions where appropriate and tell the lawmaker how many people voted for each question. Wittstock mentioned that it's very hard for a congressperson to dismiss a question that came from a constituent, especially one that got a lot of votes.

Videos are very hard to make in the Capitol, unfortunately, because filming is severely restricted there by law and the lawmakers are understandably leery of allowing themselves to be filmed any place at any time.

The next step goes from real-time back to the web site, along with conventional radio stations. Questions and answers are taped and transcribed so they can be offered as both audio and text. CNC has contracts with a number of PBS stations who work public questions into regular news broadcasts.

Podcasts and texts are posted on the web site and served through an RSS feed, but you can also follow AskYourLawmaker on Twitter or search for hashtag #ayl. (Right now they're discussing the talk I attended.) This can bring the answers back to those who asked the questions.

Ask Your Lawmaker also offers a feed that visitors can add to their own web sites, and an iframe for each individual report, suitable for embedding.

Most powerful at all, citizens' questions can change policies. Lobbyists harangue lawmakers day after day, but sometimes they're more impressed by a simple question revealing a deep-seated need in their communities. They have been heard walking away from journalist interviews saying to their staff, "Brief me about that issue."

All very impressive for an effort that's so provisional, the journalists run the web site themselves. Several weak points remain before the circle is complete.

• Ask Your Lawmaker doesn't get enough publicity. It may or may not be mentioned on the radio station that reports its results. Hardly any listeners, I wager, realize that questions were generated by ordinary citizens, much less realize that anyone can ask a question.
• The site needs a way to accept questions through SMS. Attendees at this evening's talk speculated about the power of accepting questions for US lawmakers from victims of wars or globalization policies around the globe.
• The site doesn't exploit the potential for social networking to let questioners promote the site. Someone whose question is chosen should be informed when the answer is posted or broadcast on the radio, and should be encouraged to invite her friends and fellow workers to view the answer.

CNC is looking for ways to complete the circle--and will gladly accept volunteer help, as I mentioned--but they're doing a lot in the meantime to firm up their appeal and raise funds. They plan to allow cobranding and to let sites select the length and subject matter of the material they post, just as they now serve up very customized reports to the radio stations they serve. They may start accepting advertising, and they're looking for fun contests that will publicize their work.

Ask Your Lawmaker demonstrates a unique solution to a situation whered for amateur input can augment expert practice and expertise can augment what the public has to offer. In this regard, Ask Your Lawmaker is worth comparing to the landmark Peer-to-Patent project and to two commercial ventures I analyzed a few months ago, uTest and TopCoder. The opportunity for a virtuous cycle of public input, professional processing, and listener loyalty--especially in a field whose death has been predicted by many--puts Ask Your Lawmaker into an intriguing category of its own.

Four short links: 8 May 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. Citizen Journalism and Civic Reporting -- Gawker rebuts the nonsense that reporters will be the only people at council meetings: as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as "gadflies" — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived. I know my local newspaper only paraphrases council press releases, they rarely actually attend the meetings. (via waxy)
2. Keeping Score (Rowan Simpson) -- It makes me wonder what other things we dismiss as being too simple to be useful. Inspired by Atul Gawande's books, which I highly recommend.
3. The Extraordinaries -- micro-volunteer opportunities on the mobile phone. (Think of it as Mobile Turk) Another way to harness our great cognitive surplus.
4. Visualization in Sports -- roundup of the use of computer graphics and visualization in sports. Sports is competitive, lucrative, and quite fast-paced. I love to see sport and business learning from each other. (via tomc on delicious)

Stimuluswatch.org; The Falling Cost and Accelerated Speed of Group Action

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 33

Stimuluswatch.org is a great example of how easy it is today for people to, as Clay Shirky says, “organize without organizations.” Stimuluswatch.org began after Jerry Brito attended a mayor’s Conference and posted this request:

"Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising. Let’s help him “prioritize” so the projects so that we “get the most bang for the buck” and identify those that are old school “pork coming out of Congress”. We can do this through good clean fun crowdsourcing. Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each project into a wiki-page or other mechanism where local citizens can comment on whether the project is actually needed or whether it’s a boondoggle? How can we create an app that will let citizens separate the wheat from the pork and then sort for Congress and the new administration the project in descending order or relevancy?

Several developers read the post and got to work.  Stimuluswatch went live on February 2nd with all the features Brito had requested. Last Friday alone there were 20,000 unique hits to the site. Total time to complete, seven weeks including holidays. Total cost - about $40 in monthly hosting fees.

I caught up with two of the developers behind the effort, Peter Snyder (via phone) and Kevin Dwyer (via email). The story they told me exemplifies how the web enables some remarkably fast group action. Here is how Kevin tells it - and pay attention to how many references there are to some form of open source, web service, or plug-and-play functionality that the team used to get this done.

“After reading Jerry's original blog post about the US Conference of Mayors report, I quickly wrote some python code to grab (screen scrape) all of the projects from their web site and put them into a sqlite database. The lxml module was awesome for this. Brian Mount took it and remastered the database into a MySQL database. Peter Snyder then popped up and offered to build the web site using a PHP based system called CodeIgniter. It lives up to its name (and Pete is awesome) because he had a fairly complex site up in no time. Now that we had a great base for the site, Jerry wrote copy and worked up some CSS/HTML which gives the site a great look and feel. Jerry also helped us integrate disqus and tumblr, which definitely helped reduce the number of wheels we had to reinvent. I experimented with several wiki backends and settled on MediaWiki. Using a perl module, I created wiki stubs for each of the projects to give users a bit of a framework for recording any facts they researched about each project, as well as listing points in favor and against. The whole thing now runs on an Amazon EC2 image.

Peter also pointed out that in the short time since launch, users themselves have helped cleanse errors in the data that was pulled from the mayor’s database and already begun filling out details on these local projects; including showering great disdain on the “doorbells” project.

None of these people knew each other previously. They were brought together by blog post into a common effort. They used open source tools in rapid development. They plugged in off the shelf online social technologies (disqus, tumblr and mediawiki) to create a forum to discuss these local projects. They achieved this in seven weeks. In fact, according to Peter, “the real effort here was more like two weeks”.

It will be interesting to see how stimuluswatch.org performs as a place to allow transparency and citizen involvement in civic projects.  As we the public wait for www.recovery.gov to launch, perhaps we should just be asking them to give us the data. We can do the rest.