On the pace of change from an interview with investigative journalist Inga Springe:

"It might take maybe five years for something to happen, like I've been reporting about corrupt custom service guy for five year, and nothing changed. He was only promoted, because governing politicians were supporting him. But then, political situation changed, and there were all the evidence for the new government actually to use against this corrupt guy. And then, there was criminal investigation, and he was convicted. Sometimes it takes a lot of time, but still these 'aha!' moments, this is the one which really drives me. And when you publish, and you can see some impact. It always depends how much time it will take. But that's the next thing, which also is very, like, satisfying."

So much work is planting seeds. It can take years, even decades for radical ideas to one day seem inevitable, for lost causes to become common sense, impossible cases become moot.

Popular culture is blown by many winds: trends, talent, tradition, technology, treasure... But I haven't seen much on the influence of public policy. Three interesting data points that crossed my radar recently:

• Tanz Tanz Revolution: A brief history of the rise of techno music in East and West Berlin as urban policy after the fall of the wall literally makes space for German big dance parties to bloom.
  
  
• How Japanese technology shaped dance music: The favourable exchange rate in the '70s and '80s was a kickstart for Japanese electronics gaining a foothold in the global market.
  
  
• How the 1996 Telecommunicaitons Act killed rock and roll: Clear Channel takes advantage of loosening restrictions on radio station ownership, and soon dominates and neuters rock radio.

I knew about the role of printing and English coffee houses in germinating the seeds of the British Enlightenment, but today I learned about the 1662 Licensing Act "An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses."

The Act expired in 1695, which allowed unlicensed printing presses to flourish, reduced the price of printing, eliminated government censorship, and opened the UK to books printed abroad.

Feels like the regulatory context is too often left out of our histories of innovation.

Brushing up on some accessibility and listening to the new 13 Letters podcast, I ran into this moving story from an interview with Haben Girma, a lawyer and the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School:

"Enchanted Hills, for those who don't know, is a camp for the blind in Napa, ran by the LightHouse, and many kids who are blind go to schools where they're the only blind student, or maybe they're one of two or three. I attended mainstream public schools. There were other blind students, probably, blind minority. Camp was an opportunity for one week each year, where our blindness was no big deal. At camp, it was cool to be blind. In that environment, you could focus on building up your other skills and developing community pride.

One of my stories in my book is about how I learned from a blind dance instructor that I can also do salsa, swing, merengue, and other ballroom dances. When I started out, I was shocked, how would a blind person teach a dance class? The counselors essentially said, "Go and try it and find out." It's a huge revelation for kids to meet successful confident blind adults and learn from them. Camp was an opportunity for us to do them.

I started learning dance at Enchanted Hills Camp from a blind dance instructor. She showed me the movements, the steps. Then, when I went to college, I tried going to dances. I realized it's really hard to find someone to dance with when you can't see him. What do you do? Do you stop going to the dances? For a while, I wasn't sure what to do. Then I came up with a plan. My plan was when I dance with someone at the end of the dance, ask them, "Can you introduce me to another dancer?" Then they'll introduce me to a dancer, I'll have another dance. At the end of the dance, I'll ask, "Can you introduce me to another dancer?"

When I'm dancing, I don't feel disabled. I'm fully connected with the person I'm dancing with, with the music, with the whole community. I love having that moment, where I'm fully connected and I don't have to worry about accommodations or communication. It all flows easily. When I dance, I can't hear the beat in the music, I can't see any other dances, but I can feel the rhythm and beat through the hands and shoulders of the people I'm dancing with. I focus on partner dances because there's not a physical connection through hands and shoulders when you're dancing."

I don't have a working definition of accessibility that I use, but I think this is a beautiful start.

From Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice:

"Design is key to our collective liberation, but most design processes today reproduce inequalities structured by what Black feminist scholars call the matrix of domination. Intersecting inequalities are manifest at all levels of the design process. This paper builds upon the Design Justice Principles, developed by an emerging network of designers and community organizers, to propose a working definition of design justice: Design justice is a eld of theory and practice that is concerned with how the design of objects and systems influences the distribution of risks, harms, and benefits among various groups of people. Design justice focuses on the ways that design reproduces, is reproduced by, and/or challenges the matrix of domination (white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism). Design justice is also a growing social movement that aims to ensure a more equitable distribution of design's benefits and burdens; fair and meaningful participation in design decisions; and recognition of community based design traditions, knowledge, and practices."

This is a great start.

Update, March 2020: Sasha turned this into a book! Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need

Update, August 2020: The book is now online.

On becoming Klan (1982) (via)

“[Dr. Chalmers] testified that the Klan had four basic components. One is what he called ‘one hundred percent Americanism.’ The Klan is as old as apple pie in the United States, and has always been what they called in the old days a ‘native American party.’ I’m not speaking of Native Americans as we ordinarily think of them… Their notion was that no one but whites from Northern Europe should be here on these shores. The Klan is a continuation of that ideology.

A second component is moral conformity, which I spoke of earlier. Third, the notion of fraternity, of brotherhood. And finally, and most important to us at any rate, is the notion of violent action. They do something about the problems.

Most of the rank-and-file Klansmen, at least the ones I encountered in Chattanooga, were poor, uneducated, working-class whites. And the Klan gave them something to be proud of; it gave them a perspective, a purpose. And that’s the attraction the Klan has for white working-class America. And unless you all can develop some other method, or some other means of expression, you won’t be able to defeat the Klan.”

On becoming ISIS (2017) (via)

“The motivation for people to join violent extremist groups in Syria and Iraq remains more personal than political… [ISIS propaganda] appeals to those who seek a new beginning rather than revenge for past acts. A search for belonging, purpose, adventure, and friendship, appear to remain the main reasons for people to join the Islamic State.…

Our results suggest that it is not so much the lack of material resources that is important for terrorism but rather the lack of economic opportunities: Countries that restrict economic freedom experience more terrorism.… While unemployment on its own does not impact radicalization, unemployment… leads to a greater probability of radicalization.…

The validation of the influence of friendship in motivating individuals to become [foreign terrorist fighters] supports the ‘bunch of guys’ theory of terrorism put forward by the psychologist Marc Sageman, who argues that the decision to join a terrorist group ‘was based on pre–existing friendship’ ties and ‘that the evolving group of future perpetrators seemed more akin to’ such networks ‘than a formal terrorist cell, with well–defined hierarchy and division of labour.’ This theory has led some observers to call for a ‘social network approach to terrorism’”

On becoming MS13 in the Americas (2018) (via)

“The MS13 is a social organization first, and a criminal organization second. The MS13 is a complex phenomenon. The gang is not about generating revenue as much as it is about creating a collective identity that is constructed and reinforced by shared, often criminal experiences, especially acts of violence and expressions of social control. The MS13 draws on a mythic notion of community, a team concept, and an ideology based on its bloody fight with its chief rival, the Barrio 18 (18th Street) gang, to sustain a huge, loosely organized social and criminal organization.…

In conversations, gang members make clear that it is centered on the notion of community, which they loosely refer to as ‘el barrio.’

El barrio encompasses the best and the worst of the gang, an expression of its bipolar personality that is the defining characteristic of this group. El barrio is a physical space. It has borders, and the gang marks those borders with graffiti and other public symbols. It posts its members at the edges of these borders to ensure others do not encroach on its space, and members protect this space with their lives, if necessary. It draws revenue from this territory and, in some cases, builds social and political ties with its residents, even while it is victimizing them.

But el barrio is also psychological. What seems to bind all these groups is that they are looking for a sense of place: a space where they can get protection and nurturing - both positive and negative; a space where others are supportive of one another; a space it can call its own, henceforth its near constant references and symbols that beckon the homeland. That space is what they call el barrio.”

Update, August 22, 2021: this Twitter thread from a former Islamist echoes this theme as well.

Toolkit Now Available

Using data visualization can improve the effectiveness of human rights work that involves data. In particular, combining data and visuals in the promotion of human rights enables advocates to harness the power of both statistics and narrative. Visualizing data can facilitate audiences' understanding of abuses and motivate people to take action. When used as a tool in human rights research, it can help investigators identify patterns and see the connections among individual rights violations.

To introduce researchers to topics and principles of data visualization for human rights, we developed a toolkit that can be used on its own or as a data visualization workshop activity. The kit contains 6 chapters that take practitioners step by step through the following:

• Human rights and related data resources
• Data types and collection methods
• Questions to interrogate human rights issues with data and visualization
• Some common chart types
• Data collection and visualization hazards
• Tips for improving data visualization

Each chapter is set out succinctly as a bite-sized summary of a larger data visualization topic. It is our hope that the kit will speak to students as well as human rights experts, and that it rewards both casual browsing and careful review. The chapters can stand alone or be used as a sequence of steps in a workshop aimed at preparing rights practitioners for informed and strategic use of data visualization.

The kit is available online at visualizingrights.org/kit and can also be downloaded as a series of PDF booklets.

Our project is the result of a research collaboration between the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University, and was funded with a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These data visualization guidelines were authored by John Emerson and Margaret Satterthwaite with help from contributors Brianne Cuffe, Sidra Mahfooz, and Deirdre Dlugoleski, and input from Enrico Bertini, Oded Nov, and NGO colleagues and participants in the Responsible Data Forum.

Reading this essay by Jeff Jarvis on the future of newspapers (which encourages, among other things, radical experimentation as community-centric service delivery internet start-ups) I ran into this useful hierarchy of knowledge:

1. knowledge of the tool and what it can provide,
2. ability to spec requirements with a developer or expert,
3. ability to adapt what has been developed without screwing it up,
4. ability to make the thing,
5. expertise or the ability to teach the tool or skill.

I'm in the midst of wrapping up a series of booklets on data visualization and these are handy. While it would be great to get everyone up to stage 4 or 5, practitioners at each of these stages require a different type of information and instruction. I'm hoping folks will at least move up one level.

“Instead of always thinking that we need to make an app to 'solve' some problem, there are often really strong existing community processes. Wherever community is targeted by oppression, there are often strategies of resistance. The question is how a design can amplify some of those powerful existing projects, or frameworks, or approaches that are coming out of community organizing models.”
— Sasha Costanza-Chock, via NiemanLab

Below, a visualization of use of force complaints against NYPD officers to the Civilian Complaint Review Board in 2016, via:

Flashlight as club: 6

Gun fired: 10

Gun as club: 12

Continue reading "NYPD Use of Force Complaints" »

The Internet Movie Database is shutting down its message boards. Acquired by Amazon in 1998, ongoing expense of community management and backend maintenance no longer justified itself to the bean counters. Sending it off, Colin Strickland recalls the harrowing days leading up to launch of a rewrite of the software behind the boards in 2001. While the technical details are of nostalgic, nerdy interest (mod_perl!) this passage on the message board community stands apart:

"I watched people fight and friend. Saw a few romances and a marriage or two emerge from the regulars. I read, and occasionally got involved, against my better judgement, in fascinating and productive conversations. I still bump into people IN REAL LIFE who reminisce about the boards and are to this day impressed with me when I tell them I had a big hand in their genesis. I once spent an evening in a darkened restaurant patio overwhelmed to tears as a kind man explained to me his young daughter, hospital-bound and dying of cancer, had used the Harry Potter IMDb boards as her main social life in her last year, and how much that had meant to him and her. Stories like that are just a profound privilege to have had even the most tangential involvement in."

For all the social and technical challenges of online communities at scale, the amazing impacts of these cultural corners, niches, and cupboards still make the web great.

I built a thing: text your US postal address to (520) 200-2223 and get a text back with your state & federal legislative rep phone numbers.

— John Emerson (@backspace) November 20, 2016

I built an SMS bot! Here’s the story: I’ve been looking at bots for advocacy and have been keeping a short list of inspiring SMS projects including TXTMob, Crises Text Line, mRelief, Planned Parenthood’s Teen Q&A line, and others. I’ve poked around the Twilio API. And then came this message on the Progressive Exchange email list:

Subject: ISO "find your elected officials" by text

I have to think this exists -- is there a simple "text KEYWORD to THIS NUMBER" that will return the names and phone numbers of your elected officials? Congress and state?

Jesse

Turns out it does not exist — so I wired it up and announced it on the list. The response has been super positive.

Continue reading "LobbyPhone" »

Violence Is Mine, September 26, 2014:

"[Hito Steyerl's] video In Free Fall (2010) in particular demonstrates how sites of apparent digital illusion are tied to the real world. She traces a specific Boeing passenger plane that had been sold to the Israeli air force in the 1970s, where it took part in hostage rescue missions against the PLO, to a junkyard where it was bought by a special effects team. It is, in fact, the plane in Speed that Keanu Reeves blows up. What was left of the plane after the movie's filming was then sold to China to make DVDs. The spectacular violence of Speed, which viewers can revel in as consequence-free entertainment, proves to be part of a wider material network of real violence and the precarization of labor."