Events Archives | Beatrice Martini

Workshop & Report: Future Paths to a Public Interest Internet Infrastructure

The governance of the Internet infrastructure is collectively enacted by the design of technology, the policies of companies, the administrative functions of global standard-setting organizations, national laws and international agreements.

A critical component of this infrastructure are Internet standards, which can affect fundamental rights such as privacy, security, anonymity, freedom of expression and information. Decision-making about the Internet infrastructure is a matter of social policy. To advance the protection of human rights online, there is an urgent need for civil society to get further involved in technical discussions, and for the broader public interest technology ecosystem to develop long term strategies to strengthen the impact of advocacy efforts.

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Allied Media Conference 2015: what, where and let’s connect!

The Allied Media Conference is about to start!

I’ll be involved in co-wrangling a variety of spaces:

Community Technology Network Gathering (Thursday, June 18, 10:00-17:00) #CommTech
Online Identity Health Check-up for Your Organization (Friday, June 19, 9:00-10:30)
Real Rad Care: A Podcast on Intersectional Self-Care (Friday, June 19, 12:45-13:45) #RRCare
Build A Digital Security Culture in Your Work (Sunday, June 21, 13:00-14:30)

Join us in person, get in touch via hashtag – #AMC2015 or the dedicated ones above – and feel welcome to ping me @beatricemartini to talk all things technology, community, justice and rights!

Real Rad Care – co-creating a podcast on intersectional self-care at #AMC2015

The Allied Media Conference is about to start (June 18-21, get ready)!
It’s my first one, I’m very excited about it, and I’m also honoured to join as both participant and session facilitator.

One of the sessions I’ll host (a sneak peek of the other one can be found here) is called Real Rad Care: a podcast on intersectional self-care. The name already says a lot!

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The Ethics of Algorithms: notes, emerging questions and resources

Tweets relating to Ferguson after Michael Brown was shot. Map based on mentions of the city and other related key words. Via The Huffington Post.

Algorithms are ruling an ever-growing portion of our lives.
They are adopted by health insurances to assess our chances to get sick, by airlines to make our flights safer, by social media companies to attract our attention to ads, by governments to predict criminal activity.
They can guess with great accuracy a lot of things about us, such as gender, sexual orientation, race, personality type – and can also be applied to influence our political preferences, control what we do, target what we say and, in extreme cases, limit our freedom.

This is not to say that the computational algorithm model should have an evil reputation. Both algorithms and human judgement can be beneficial, malicious, biased – and even wrong. The main difference between them is that over the years (centuries) we developed a pretty good understanding of how human judgement works, while, when it comes to algorithms, we’re just starting to get to know each other.

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How to design a financial transparency strategy with a role-playing game

From Transparency International‘s Financial Jargon Buster: Illicit Financial Flows.

Grateful thanks to Lucy Chambers for the thoughtful feedback provided on this post.

When we talk about financial transparency, numbers and data are understandably what first comes to mind. But are the platforms and portals collecting all that, the real starting point of our work? And how can we make sure that a particular technology which proved successful for a project whose execution we admire, would actually fit the ecosystem we’re working with?

Sounds like our starting point before kicking off any project should actually be much more lo-fi and hands-on: an offline analysis combining our learnings from the most remarkable case studies with a well-tailored and flexible understanding of the context we’re working with.

The interest in exploring a possible answer to this need got Jean Brice Tetka (Transparency International), Jay Bhalla (Open Institute) and me together in a breakout session during the recent Follow The Money workshop.

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On financial transparency and technology: notes from the Follow The Money workshop

From BudgIT’s Abacha’s Loot – Where are the returned funds?

Financial transparency can make governments, companies, politics and citizens accountable for their actions and help us fighting corruption in our societies. But how can we design frameworks to create and strengthen a transparent ecosystem? How can a multitude of actors with a diversity of professional backgrounds join their forces to learn from each other and build such frameworks?

These were just some of the burning questions fueling the conversations of the over 100 people getting ready to join the Follow The Money workshop taking place in Berlin on January 20-21. Organised by Transparency and Accountability Initiative, the workshop aimed at gathering policy campaigners, NGO leaders, programmers, researchers, funders and activists from all around the world to encourage connections and collaborations between them, as part of a collective action within the Follow The Money network.

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