Newsletter #6: Livestreaming Inequality

Newsletter #6: sent!
(and archived if you missed it)

Work-wise: writing an article on how data and technology can be used by marginalised communities to strengthen their advocacy work; happily seeing my post on the ethics of algorithms shared far and wide; researching and writing more articles – soon to be published!

Links-wise: livestreaming and citizen media, the cost of racial inequality, the cost of domestic violence, the price of shame, the future of privacy, sketching courtrooms, Salt-N-Pepa and Rihanna’s new single and serious brow game.

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Newsletter #5: Protesting Wrestling

Newsletter #5: sent!
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Work-wise: joining a conference on the ethics of algorithms, writing about the role of algorithms in relation to freedom of expression, human rights and society (and receiving terrific responses to the article!), collaborating to the creation of a template to design a financial transparency strategy – and more to come.

Links-wise: professional female wrestlers fighting for their rights, digital rights, sex workers’ rights, a guide to Internet’s protests, big names, bell hooks, armpits on the subway.

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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.

Continue reading The Ethics of Algorithms: notes, emerging questions and resources

Newsletter #4: Floss And Labour

Newsletter #4: sent!
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Work-wise: joining a great line-up of speakers in a webinar on financial transparency, getting articles cross-posted far and wide, implementing policies in real life and working on a multitude of projects I can’t say more about just yet. So stay tuned!

Links-wise: how offense discourse traps us into inaction, a broken Congress, the radical political history of the photocopier, a new flossing technique and Queen Latifah.

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Newsletter #3: In Your Shoes

Newsletter #3: sent!
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Work-wise: writing about how to design a financial transparency strategy with a role-playing game, being honoured to have articles I wrote cross-posted and more widely engaged with and having excellent conversations about tech capacity building, responsible data and participatory research which will feed upcoming write-ups – stay tuned!

Links-wise: labor pains and workers’ rights, institutional harassment, the fabulous Ruth Bader Ginsburg, how to be a pregnant butch, body hair, Beyoncé.

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

Screen Shot 2015-02-12 at 6.59.19 PMFrom 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.

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

Newsletter #2: Money Moving

Newsletter #2: sent!
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Work-wise: notes from the Follow The Money workshop, co-facilitating work on technology for/ and financial transparency, and upcoming developments powered by the post on responsible data storytelling published on this very blog.

Links-wise: privilege and lack of thereof, racist encounters at the opera, queering the beauty industry, no revolution without reflection, Sleater Kinney, blackness and female mustache.

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

Screen Shot 2015-01-28 at 3.15.47 PMFrom 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.

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

Newsletter #1: First Things First

Newsletter #1: sent!
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Work-wise: notes from the the 2014 Nonprofit Software Development Summit, the start of a collective conversation on responsible data storytelling, and outcome stories from the Community Building track co-curated at Mozilla Festival.

Links-wise: a new civil rights movement, algorithms, feminism, domestic worker workforce, fierce music, weaponized theater. And more.

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Launching a new newsletter! #1 out tomorrow

I’m a very curious person. I like asking people what they’re up to/ working on and discovering more about their interests, and also never stop finding and enjoying great content online.
All these things make me think, also about topics I maybe never thought about before and discover are very important for me to be aware of, enrich and inspire me and sometimes also make me laugh or dance (!)
I also love sharing my favourite findings, and often others seem to like them, so – I’m starting a newsletter!

Delivered to your inbox up to 4 times a month, it’ll be about what I’m working on, writing about & loving from the Internet. Tomorrow I’ll send out the first one and you can subscribe here!

See you there!