Open and Closed Systems

Mengqing Liu & Francesca Lyn

Background

Michael Nielsen PhD in physics, University of Queensland One of the pioneers of quantum computation The author of more than fifty scientific paper Open Source Science - Science and Sharing

Current project: Reinventing Discovery (Book) The book describes a major shift now occurring in

how scientific discoveries are made, a shift driven by online tools for collaboration and sharing of scientific information.

Lecture: The Google Technology Stack

Open Architecture Democracy

Edit War on Wikipedia: wording

Book: The culture of Wikipedia What is openness? Chaos and order (See here)

Mathworks programming contest

Both Wikipedia and Mathworks use open source patterns of development Open source: Generally, open source refers to

software products that are freely available and offered by development communities online. They come with no warranty but are usually very well tested by development groups.

Comparison between Wikipedia and Mathworks

Q: Why Wikipedia and Mathworks differ?

A: It depends on whether the quality of the results can be objectively scored. “In Mathworks competition there is an absolute,

objective measure of success that’s immediately available—the score.”

“In Wikipedia, no such objective signal of quality is available.”

Therefore, “agreement doesn’t scale”.

Common good and Consensus

What is common good? John Rawls defined the common good as "certain

general conditions that are...equally to everyone's advantage”

The Catholic religious traditiondefined it as "the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.”

Example of common good An accessible and affordable public health care

system, and effective system of public safety and security, peace among the nations of the world, a just legal and political system, and unpolluted natural environment, and a flourishing economic system.

Common good and Consensus

Establishing and maintaining the common good require the cooperative efforts of some, often of many, people.

Barrier: Different people have different ideas about what is worthwhile or what constitutes "the good life for human beings", differences that have increased during the last few decades as the voices of more and more previously silenced groups, such as women and minorities, have been heard.

How to reach consensus?

OEIS

What is OEIS? A freely available online database of integer

sequences, created and maintained by N. J. A. Sloane, a researcher from AT&T lab

See the introduction film of OEIS

Target audience: both professional mathematicians and amateur

Michael Nielsen: I guess the OEIS has always been sort of like a wiki, in a very slow and manual way.

Is it comparable for collaboration in scientific world and in humanity/sociology world?

Open editing of policy documents

Policyworks:where millions of people could help rewrite policy, integrating the best ideas from an extraordinarily cognitively diverse group of people

How it works “You make an edit, it’s send to a randomly selected

jury of your peers… They’re invited to score your contribution, and perhaps offer feedback.”

Barriers Who is going to be responsible for the final

decision? How to rank the results? How to prevent abuse of power?

Current application

Google Moderator It is a Google service that uses crowdsourcing to

rank user-submitted questions, suggestions and ideas. The service allows the management of feedback from a large number of people, who can vote for the top questions that they think should be posed and ask their own. The service aims to ensure that every question is considered, lets the audience see others' questions, and helps the moderator of a team or event address the questions that the audience most cares about.

How to use it? See here

IdeaScale

Reflection: Deliberative Democracy

Deliberative Democracy

Open source and Deliberative democracy Similarity: Collective participation/efforts,

collaboration

Application of deliberative democracy: deliberation on the Biobank in community

Reliability

Background

Steven Berlin Johnson

undergraduate degree in semiotics from Brown, graduate degree in English Literature from Columbia

Distinguished Writer in Residence at the New York University Department of Journalism

Has written 7 published books

Perhaps best known for Everything Bad is Good for You

Latest book is Where Good Ideas Come From, he is on a book tour now to promote it.

Where Good Ideas Come From

Subtitled “the natural history of innovation”, Johnson's newest book is about the environment that spurs innovation

Youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

“The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book: Two Paths for the Future of Text”

The Commonplace Book

Collection and response is at the heart of both blogging and commonplace books

New forms of value are created as the commonplace book becomes a record of the creative process and insight into the person assembling the book

Commonplace books become powerful tools for learning

What does the contemporary commonplace book look like?

The Problem of the Glass Box

Ipad applications that do not let you copy and paste selections are part of the problem Johnson identifies

“We can try to put a protective layer of glass on the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other.”

How can we accommodate the free exchange of ideas while still maintaining copyright/intellectual property laws?

Propublica.org

Non-profit news corporation based out of New York City

Specializes in investigative journalism

In 2010 it became the first online news source to win a Pulitzer Prize

Anyone can republish their stories

Steal our Stories

- Propublica bills itself as open-source news

- Not only can you republish their stories, they allow you to use their tools & data

- journalist-programmers can design new applications using their data to share with the world

Evernote

http://www.evernote.com/

- a suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving

- a note can be text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten note

- supports a number of operating system platforms

Ideological Segregation Online & Offline

Study was done by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M.Shapiro, both of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business

They took methodologies that have been used to identify racial segregation and tracked how people of different political views moved around the web

Study was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research

Conclusion was that they found no evidence that the web is becoming more segregated over time