“Rebooting NYC: An Urban Tech Agenda for the Next Administration” is an applied research initiative at Cornell Tech dedicated to proactively identifying challenges facing New York City that can be addressed with existing urban technologies. My primary contributions are in the chapter “Always open: Make it easier to engage with the City”.
We published the report in draft form, in the hopes of provoking productive debates and discussions among the multitude of stakeholders that make up New York City. Our hope is that these proposals serve as a guide for the next Mayor and their administration to embrace urban technologies in order to help make New York stronger, fairer, and more resilient.
When COVID-19 sent everyone into lockdown in the early months of 2020, the world abruptly shifted from live events to livestreams. We lost the intimacy of concerts and book readings, but we suddenly gained the accessibility and availability of many more cultural events. I quickly prototyped and worked with the Boston Globe‘s leadership team and a small crew at Bad Idea Factory to build an engaging livestream product. It was an effort to restore the communal viewing experience eroded by binge viewing. LiveGuide presented viewers with a scrolling selection of over 100 curated livestreams and virtual events on a daily basis. The Globe featured LiveGuide on BostonGlobe.com in its Sports and Arts sections, newsletters, and primary nav menu, plus Boston.com. We were able to work with the Globe’s editorial teams to surface the newspaper’s original multimedia content as well as their own daily picks across the Arts, Sports, and local events.
Despite the tech-enabled aggregation, curating LiveGuide’s scrolling grid was a huge amount of work. To augment the Globe’s editorial recommendations, I collected, parsed, and cleaned data from hundreds of streams early each morning. In this role as data custodian, I had a front-row seat to witness real-time livestreaming migrate from tech culture into mainstream culture. Livestreaming was one of many trends that the events of 2020 accelerated, and this will have ripple effects in media creation, consumption, and participation for years to come. For that reason, I wanted to reflect on what I saw as I combed through thousands of livestreams this year (if for no other reason than justifying all those mornings).
In The Master Switch, Tim Wu argues that each new communications medium emerges as a fertile new field for amateur creatives, until proving worthwhile enough for the conglomerates to come in and buy things up, professionalize, and ossify the medium. In 2020, streaming entrepreneurs carefully positioned their entertainment products across several recurring tiers of access: financial backers, anonymous viewers, and chatroom regulars. As increasingly professionalized amateurs in a media-driven society, they provided what the professional media, for all its resources and reach, could not or would not offer. They worked to compete with the TV industry itself, leveraging their advantages (free admission to their content chief among them) to battle for viewer attention with entire production companies sporting huge budgets. The entire livestreaming sector is committed to experimenting with a long tail of topics as well as formats, helping these streamers identify new modes of providing compelling airtime that don’t depend on crew headcount or licensing rights.
During the COVID-19 closures, thousands of brands, cultural institutions, and government bodies joined the fray. They sought to rapidly transition their premium in-person gatherings to virtual events, unveiling awkward virtual conferences and re-broadcasts of archival footage. Each day, I would navigate the cable-access aesthetics of Livestream.com, where anyone on the internet can indulge in the mundane voyeurism of witnessing government and board meetings, home workouts, middle school ceremonies, and private funerals and weddings. Infomercials hawk dubious products and participatory marketing schemes.
Elsewhere, the actors responsible for rampant disinformation warfare on social networks did not miss the opportunities livestreaming presented. Primarily far-right personalities rebuilt their pulpits on streaming and podcast platforms, out of reach of censorious networks, but within reach of millions of viewers and listeners. Their daily litany of verbal acid works into the seams of our cultural fabric to dissolve the stitching. And, judging by the top charts, they do quite well for themselves in the process.
YouTube, despite weathering ongoing criticism for failing to shield its users from misinformation, continued to actively promote state-backed livestreams. Ruptly (the hip re-brand of Russia Today) builds its audience through a wide range of innocuous-seeming news coverage. Only the aggregator begins to piece together the common thread: the network always seems to highlight moments of social division in western nations. What seems at first glance like support of a social justice movement is, more cynically, a foreign country regularly training its Alphabet-supported spotlight on the internal strife of its opponents. China’s news agency features the Chinese ambassador defending their Hong Kong security law in the UK. The US’s sprawling Voice of America network offers the only native language livestreams featured by YouTube for several languages.
Amidst it all, against a backdrop of apocalyptic daily news, true crime podcasts surged in popularity. A daily review of the top 100 podcasts finds true crime programs regularly occupying at least 10 of the rankings.
2020 mercifully came to an end, and it’s hard not to reflect on the fact that a year which saw endlessly creative repackaging of amateur entertainment into web streams, as a matter of pure necessity, ended with the empire striking back, as Disney and WarnerMedia announce once-unfathomable amounts of forthcoming professional entertainment content.
We retired LiveGuide as summer arrived and people were able to move around outdoors again. You can still fork its open source code. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to build such a timely creative product with such a deeply talented team.
I combined political nerdery with digital fabrication nerdery to produce gerrymandered jigsaw puzzles and sold them on Etsy. I laser-cut each state’s political boundaries onto maple plywood to create real wooden jigsaw puzzles. The individual pieces are the gnarly congressional districts designed every decade or so by politicians. States with lots of congressional districts (like California, Texas, and New York) made for pretty difficult puzzles. Even states with fewer districts get tricky to solve in the more populated areas.
The simple act of assembling a puzzle became a lesson in computer-assisted gerrymandering, where politicians use Census results to carve their constituencies into districts that will keep them in power. The puzzles were popular with school civics education programs, where students learned about congressional representation and the decennial redistricting process in a more tactile way. The puzzle pieces are also a great conversation starter for learning about The Great Compromise, whereby the far less populated states receive equal representation in the Senate.
I stopped working on this project when I lost my free access to lasercutters at the Media Lab, but am considering reviving it for educating the public about re-districting processes. Let me know if you’d be interested in buying, distributing, or working on this!
Testimonials:
“That is just about the nerdiest thing I have ever heard of, outside a sci fi convention.”
“Truly a beautiful product and a godsend for a political junkie”
“Extremely well-crafted and beautifully made…and a fantastic idea for a puzzle! The Texas one was a real challenge. It’s a great way to illustrate the craziness of the redistricting process.”
Years before misinformation-fighting apps became a cottage industry, I invented one of the first. While I doing my Master’s at MIT Media Lab, I picked up a product idea I’d been designing for some time to solve my own user need: right-wing conspiracy theories forwarded to me by a close family friend.
LazyTruth was an open source browser extension (and later, email-reply bot) that quickly provided debunks of the viral email hoaxes without the user even having to leave their inbox. Rather than force users to read long, text-heavy factchecking debunks, the goal with LazyTruth was to employ cognitive shortcuts to make fact as accessible as fiction. The goal was to help recipients of viral misinformation easily pull up existing verified information. I succinctly summarized long arguments, employed imagery instead of text, and assertively framed the truth rather than continue repeating falsehoods that were designed to be repeated. Unfortunately, few in the misinformation and factchecking worlds have adopted these practices.
To populate the app, I established partnerships within the fact-checking community: FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes, and cybersecurity firm Sophos. They allowed our research team to scrape their websites, which we then combined into a single misinformation database. Our team then built an open source Google Chrome extension to call the misinformation database by API when users clicked a button, and find partial matches to accommodate self-evolving email chains. Soon, we replaced the need for a browser extension with a server-side script that automatically replied to users when they forwarded us an email chain.
In a world rife with crazy uncles, LazyTruth struck a nerve and was featured all over the internet, including Engadget, New Scientist, BoingBoing, the New York Times, and the print edition (!!) of the Economist, among other places. I learned the valuable lesson that a tidal wave of media attention doesn’t convert well to browser extension installations, as the app only picked up about 7,000 users with all of that press.
We were honored when LazyTruth won UNESCO’s NetExplo award in Paris. I got to visit UNESCO headquarters and present the cognitive psychology behind LazyTruth to an audience of 800 people. My favorite question there was: “What’s your business model?”
We didn’t have one, other than the fact that my research time and undergraduate developer team were funded. There wasn’t anywhere near as much funding for misinformation apps in 2013 as there is today, so I chose to focus on my Master’s thesis, and eventually closed the project to safeguard our users’ inboxes.
Another recurring question I got about LazyTruth was, “This is great for email, but what about social media?” Even in 2012, it was clear that was where misinformation campaigns were moving. My answer at the time, and to this day, is that the social platforms themselves would have to get involved. Just a few years after LazyTruth, I would get to work on the 2016 US presidential election where online disinformation campaigns took center stage, and where the social platforms did next to nothing to prevent foreign interference. That’s another story, though.
Team
Extension development, fuzzy matching, and DOM by Justin Nowell
Extension development and fuzzy matching by David Kim
“Delivering kernels of truth right to your inbox.”
“A great way to make us all even lazier more efficient when it comes to debunking some of the wilder rumors”
“Once a user clears the first (and only) hurdle — installing it as a Chrome extension — the plugin does all the work. The gap between the consumption of misinformation and the correction is reduced to nearly zero.”
“An inbox plugin that analyzes political e-mails and then autocomposes a fact-based response, saving Internet users the trouble of rounding up facts”
“And, Voila, Something That Will Finally Stop Your Crazy Uncle From Sending You More Cracked Forwards”
“Do you still get those, “child stuck in a well, send money” chain emails from family members or friends? They’re annoying to say the least, and chances are you usually just ignore them. However, if you’d like to educate those who send them, LazyTruth is a Chrome extension for Gmail that checks the facts, and replies with the truth.”
“Oh this is great: LazyTruth, a Gmail plugin that uncovers false claims in forwarded emails”
“Companies are developing programs, such as Truthy, TEASE and the wonderfully named LazyTruth, that help people to assess the credibility of online information.”
Seen also in: BoingBoing, TechPresident, The Daily Beast, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, The Verge, TechGlimpse, PC Pro, Canada.com, PSFK, and Yahoo! Finance.
I’m inspired by the many creative ways people find to help in crisis situations, and dedicated my MIT Master’s Thesis to facilitating that behavior. The categorization of pro-social uses of technology in this thesis became the genesis of my contributions to the Civic Tech Field Guide. Though this platform was a finalist for the Humanitarian Innovation Challenge, managing large influxes of volunteers to benefit from their wide-ranging skills remains an unsolved challenge.
Participatory Aid
People are using information and communication technologies (like the internet) to help each other in times of crisis (natural or man-made). This trend is the evolution of a concept known as “mutual aid”, introduced by Russian polymath Peter Kropotkin in 1902 in his argument that our natural sociable inclinations towards cooperation and mutual support are underserved by capitalism’s exclusive focus on the self-interested individual. My own reaction is to the bureaucracy’s underserving of informal and public-led solutions.
The practice of mutual aid has been greatly accelerated and extended by the internet’s global reach. I introduce the term “participatory aid” to describe the new reality where people all over the planet can participate in providing aid in various forms to their fellow humans. In many of these cases, that aid is mediated at least partially by technology, rather than exclusively by formal aid groups.
Formal aid groups like the UN and Red Cross are facing disintermediation not entirely unlike we’ve seen in the music, travel, and news industries. Members of the public are increasingly turning towards direct sources in crises rather than large, bureaucratic intermediaries. Information is increasingly likely to originate from people on the ground in those places rather than news companies, and there is a rich and growing number of ways to help, as well.
You are more than your bank account
The advent of broadcast media brought with it new responsibilities to empathize with people experiencing disaster all over the world. For most of the 20th century, the public was invited to demonstrate their sympathy via financial donations to formal aid organizations, who would, in turn, help those in need (think telethons). This broadcast model of aid works well for martialing large numbers of donors, IF a crisis is deemed significant enough to broadcast it to the audience. Many crises do not reach this threshold, and therefore do not receive the public or private relief support that often follows broadcast attention.
People are using the internet to help in creative ways in times of crisis. There are pros and cons to this development, to be celebrated and mitigated. Briefly, the pool of people who can help in some way is now orders of magnitude larger than it was previously, and the value of those peoples’ contributions is no longer limited to the financial value of their bank accounts. People have consistently proven capable of creative solutions and able to respond to a wider range of human needs than formal needs assessment methodologies accommodate.
On the flip side, not every way to help online is as effective as providing additional funding to professional crisis responders. There is already a graveyard of hackathon projects that never truly helped anyone (especially those with no connection or feedback loop from anyone in the field). The expansion of the range of crisis responders can lead to fragmentation of resources and duplication of efforts, although anyone managing the thousands of traditional NGOs that descended upon Haiti following the earthquake there will tell you that the same problem exists offline. It is my hope that open data standards and improved coordination between projects can mitigate some of these issues.
How to Help Using Tech
One of the more celebrated methods of recent years is the practice of crisismapping. Following a disaster, crowdsourced mapping platforms like Ushahidi are populated with geocoded data by globally distributed online volunteers like Volunteer Standby Taskforce. The teams collect, translate, verify, analyze, and plot data points to improve the situational awareness (the “what’s going on where”) of formal emergency managers and organizations.
Of course, participatory aid is not limited to producing crisis maps to benefit formal aid organizations, and I argue we shouldn’t limit our understanding of the space to this one early example. Countless professions have shifted to support the digitization of labor, so many of our jobs can (and are) conducted online (pro bono networks like Taproot Foundation and Catchafire are important inspirations to consider). Over time, technology has continued to expand the range of actions an individual can accomplish from anywhere in the world.
Case Library of New Ways to Help
To support this argument, I collected a case library of nearly one hundred ways members of the public can help communities in crisis (as well as the formal aid organizations working on behalf of these communities). You can read about it in the thesis, or you can get a sense of it here.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the many ways people can help using technology, and abstracted from these many cases 9 general categories to organize the library. They are to your left.
Framework
From the many examples in the case library, I abstracted a framework to help define and think about participatory aid projects:
Participatory aid can consist of projects that help existing formal aid groups (like a crisis map created at the request of such an institution) or projects that seek to help the affected population directly (like the Sandy Co-working Map, which listed donations of commercial real estate by and for the people of New York). This is a spectrum, because there are many projects which seek to help the affected population as well as the professionals mediating their aid.
Likewise, there is a spectrum between microwork, which often gets called ‘crowdsourcing’, and far less discrete tasks, like designing an entirely new software project or launching an entirely new public initiative like Occupy Sandy. In my research, I noticed that even some of those in the participatory aid space a limited view of its possibilities, and consider crowdsourced microwork at the behest of existing state actors (quadrant IV) to be the ideal application of technological innovation in crisis response. This is an exciting area, but there’s equally great work being done elsewhere. We can create and execute much deeper, more complicated solutions than helping sort thousands of tweets to extract actionable information. (See Ethan Zuckerman’s discussion of thick vs. thin engagement, which I borrow).
Participatory Aid Marketplace
Because I was at the Media Lab, I was charged with building a piece of technology in addition to producing the written thesis. After conducting interviews with a wide range of leaders in the participatory aid space (and reading a crazy wide range of documents), it emerged that coordination of efforts was a major and unsolved need. Volunteers are interested in what they can do to help, and prefer to use their professional skills if volunteering (versus making a donation). Leaders of semi-formal volunteer organizations like those that make up the Digital Humanitarians Network seek common check-in forms to easily alert one another (and the world) to their deployments. The individuals within formal aid organizations (like UN-OCHA) who are working to better integrate participatory aid with formal aid also stand to benefit from improved coordination and aggregation of participatory aid projects.
So, with a team of MIT undergrads (Patrick Marx, Eann Tuann, and Yi-shiuan Tung), I co-designed and built a website to aggregate participatory aid projects. The goals of the site are:
to index active participatory aid projects by crisis to provide an overview of public response
to match skilled volunteers with projects seeking their help
to host the case library of previous examples of peer aid, tagged by the needs they addressed, in the hopes of inspiring future projects
to do all of this in as user-friendly, open, and distributable ways as possible (including early support for a couple of emerging aid data standards)
A design mockup of the functional Drupal site
The site provides administrators of participatory aid projects with a simple form to list their project. This form populates the active project views as well as the case library, and links projects to common crisis needs and general buckets of volunteer skills. It can also automatically distribute the content to existing coordination fora like Google Groups or RSS readers.
Volunteers can participate in the site with full-fledged profiles, skills<->project matching, and specific LinkedIn skills importing. The more likely use case consists of short, anonymous visits to quickly identify meaningful ways to help in the crises people care about.
The skills selection and importing prototype
THANKS
Thanks for reading this.
Also, while I’ve worked for years to use the web to organize people to create change in the world, my background isn’t in humanitarian aid or crisis response. My ability to rapidly understand this space and consume massive amounts of information (written and social) was directly correlated with the kindness and enthusiasm of people like Willow Brugh, Luis Capelo, Natalie Chang, all of my interview subjects, all of the kind survey respondents, and of course my readers, Ethan Zuckerman, Joi Ito, and Patrick Meier. My colleagues, the staff and fellow grad students of the Center for Civic Media, shared their intellectual firepower at every turn.
