The problem:

I have great respect for the US judicial system. It is set up as an adversarial system with endless procedural rules and avenues of appeal, all for the express purpose of ensuring a fair outcome for everyone involved. While no human institution is entirely without fault, and the judicial system is in no way immune to pervasive implicit social effects, I am a firm believer that the US judicial system is one of the best approximations of “fair” that humans have yet constructed.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and in the US judicial system, the cost of this fairness is pretty terrible inefficiency. Those endless avenues of appeal have a bad habit of being somewhat costly, which is the main reason that capital punishment is actually more expensive than life without parole in practice.

Some of this inefficiency is intrinsic to the process. For example, we could expedite decisions by limiting the chances of appeal, but this would directly impact an individual’s ability to seek a fair outcome. Such inefficiencies are probably not worth correcting. But there are other inefficiencies extrinsic to the process with can be corrected in ways that would augment the power of the judiciary to affect justice in the community.

In particular, I would like to focus on one particular extrinsic inefficiency in the judiciary: the inefficiency in connecting individuals experiencing injustice with lawyers and resources to pursue remediation.

The solution:

I propose a new website called WebJD, styled similarly to the ever-popular WebMD. The goal is to provide individuals with access to enough information that they may autonomously decide whether their case has enough merit to warrant talking to a lawyer, thus helping these individuals connect with the help they need.

Pursuant to its goal of connecting people with expertise, the site would be painstakingly constructed to be easy to navigate by non-lawyers. I’m still thinking about the best ways to accomplish this, but since most legal questions among citizens tend to involve the legal relationship between some individual or group and oneself, the primary form of organization would likely be by second party. In other words, a user might begin their search by selecting from a list of {Employer, School, Businesses, Family/Friends, Strangers, City/State Government, Federal Government}.

Within each of these options, users could further refine their search. One hypothetical path might be “City/State Government” -> “Civil actions against citizens” -> “Subpoenas.” The user would then be taken to a Wikipedia-esque page on subpoenas with information about them, requirements, what typically results, etc. The website would feature a zip code-powered Lawyer Finder, and a link to the finder would be prominently displayed on the subpoena page.

None of this is particularly new or ground breaking. What would make WebJD unique is that it would keep track a user’s per-visit history to prioritize page results and information (perhaps with a blossom algorithm? Something similar to Akinator). The goal would be to build up a database of usage history that could be used to intuit things about the particulars of a user’s problem. This would enable WebJD to make relevant information recommendations.

To make this process more intuitive, effective, and transparent, the list of previously viewed pages would be included in a UI element at the top of the screen. If a user visits a page which is not relevant to their problem, they may remove it from this list so that it won’t factor into the recommendations. With a well-constructed algorithm and a deep pool of usage data to draw from, this would hopefully allow WebJD to direct users to information that they need, even if they did not know at the outset that they needed it. Needless to say, WebJD would not store any information other than that required to improve the algorithm.

The only remaining unknown is where WebJD would acquire its data. I will be putting some thought into this, but perhaps something as simple as scraping from Wikipedia (with appropriate attribution, of course) would be enough. As long as it is able to provide user with the information necessary to make informed decisions about when to seek legal counsel, WebJD stands to be effective in its goal.

For my final project I’m working in a platform to monitor municipal elections in Guadalajara, the aim of the project is to concentrate information about the candidates, gathering the history of them, how did they performed in public positions, how much does they were earning in each public position, etc.

One of the main problems that we have in Mexico is that we don’t have “public memory” of our politicians, we see faces and hear names, but we don’t really know what is their history, how does the have worked, did they did it right or wrong, did they get involved in corruption scandals, what where their position in different matters.

Geting all the above in mind is that a group of friends and me started working in a spinoff of CiudadPixel.mx a blog that we have about cities and technology, the new feature of the blog is called “Monitor Electoral” (Electoral monitor // Alpha version) we are getting the information from the mayoral candidates, from the basic info such as their names, to a time line of their lives, getting political issues, educational ones and other interesting information. The next steps are going to be to add some new functions such as get the proposals of each candidate in different subjects, their teams, and what does the media says about them, also to build a table to run comparisons between them, like a fact sheet for comparing cellphones or computers.

One of the goals of the platform is to evolve to be open source and gain more people who are interested in participating, the idea is to be able to growth the platform to different kind of candidate not just for mayoral candidates. On the other hand this is also the beginning to build a politicians data base, where we could look up, we see some interesting opportunities in having this “public memory” where we could look back in elections campaign to have accountability on the politicians.

We have been talking about the social component of the platform, how could we get the people to engage with the site, how could we empower them? Those are two of the main questions we are trying to figure it out.

This post is about our final project proposals.

Firstly, I´d like to return to something that was stated in the last week´s readings: that the roots of PD (Participatory Design) were in the 60s, with the growth of the “Norwegian Industrial Democracy Project” (ref: ASARO). And then you´ll see what this has to do with my final project proposal.

Design, in its essence (if one can use that term), is participatory. Taking the user into account is in the heart of this activity, of this field of knowledge. From an engineering point of view, perhaps, that thought may be relatively new. But from the perspective of design as a manifestation of human creativity, it already embraces this principle itself, intrinsically. In Bauhaus (founded in 1919), for example, which is considered a landmark of design activity, there was already a transdisciplinary approach to design and an approach that put real users at the center of the process, considering their real needs. Ergonomics, which existed at Bauhaus, is an example of this thinking.

(See also this paper, that shows episodes of collective inventions since tre 1850s).

Still regarding the notion of participatory design: in a country which is ´in development´ such as Brazil, the notion of designing in an empirical way is quite culturally pervasive: due to the fact that people don´t have everything readily at hand, people are necessarily required to establish a relationship with the means (the means as the environment and the means of accomplishing their designs), without the burden of an environmental rigidity (in terms of what is considered a ´best practice´), since everything is still under construction and deconstruction. In this regard, there are scholars who study the ´gambiarra´ (a sort of ´ugly hack´) as a contemporary utilitarian improvisation in its socioeconomic context. Vilém Flusser also discusses about designing in an empirical way in his book “Philosophy of Design”, using as example the first lever invented.

What it has to do with my proposal: during my studies, design methodologies that were presented to me were very linear, and in a way that should give as much control as possible to the project manager: 1- outlining the problem; 2- accumulation of data; 3- incubation + ideation; 4- production and verification, or, altertatively: analytical phase, creative phase and implementation phase. In practice, I realized that those methodologies were like a utopia: the actual design process was never straight and clean in that way proscribed – even considering the iterations anticipated in these methods – , nor did the manager ever have such a degree of control over the process.

Indeed, the more control, the less openness to the unexpected, to the emergence of languages, that can occur at various levels: the emergence of a new behavior, of a novel cultural expression (since my main references are projects that involve citizens in their spaces); the emergence of a visual, audiovisual and / or interactive pattern (standard?); the incorporation of the unpredictable to the system itself; or the redesign of a sequence of actions in the project development, in order to adapt to new inputs (user interaction, incorporation of content from users, who thereby become co-creators), among others.

(these emergent behaviors, patterns, events – in one word: languages – , might also come from some kind of machine learning. I´m still working on this topic, but it won´t be the focus here).

Actually, processes of creation don´t begin from a well-defined problem: the design problem is constantly redefined in the process, with the entry of new information. Contemporary objects present themselves as complex objects (in the sense that remain open to other functions, to other appropriations by users, uses unforeseen in the initial project).

This is in contrast with an environment that avoids the noise and closes its doors to the unexpected, before AND after the ´product´ is launched (the term ´product´ is understood here as a process in constant evolution, not as an end point).

Focusing on the theme of the proposal: with the growth of collaborative projects, the unexpected has increasingly begun to be understood not as a failure (or noise) of the process, but as something that should be embraced as an opportunity to expand the product´s possibilities. Design solutions became provisional, not final. This approach has an element of opening and it is precisely the nature of this openness that I want to investigate.

From my humble view – as someone who works in design within the market context, and as a teacher – the design process is a living organism, akin to living systems. As a teacher, every time I was required to suggest readings about design methodologies for students, I always had to indicate these traditional concepts, seemingly perfect, as if design processes were in fact developed that way. In fact, I don´t think this is how they work.

ROZENFELD, H.; et al., 2006.

At IDEO, for example, design involves three fields of activities: inspiration, ideation and implementation (BROWN, 2010). I have the impression that this process still appears as a sequence and not as a living organism. Of course I need to study more, to be able to say.

The process outlined below may serve a clue, the role of the designer in this figure may be replaced by regular users, or communities, or even combined with some kind of artificial intelligence:

Generative Design – Onformative Studio

Here at the Media Lab, the apparent absence of a super pre-defined work methodology for all projects (or even: the variety of existing methods) suggests a huge opening.

So, I want to investigate this opening element as a means of revising the traditional design concepts nowadays. The field of practice is already aware about these issues, perhaps theories are slow to catch up. Of course there are authors with different conceptions of creation (mainly in the arts) as a much more flexible process. I hope to meet more authors with this line of thinking, especially in the field of Design (focused on interactive artifacts).

I wonder: what is the design of this process (a live process) like? What are its dynamics? And I recognize that when one tries to grasp it, one loses its pulse. Any explicit representation would destroy its pulse wave. Any truly useful interpretation could not be fit into a defined structure.

However, I´m not interested in philosophizing if it´s not practical. Philosophy is practical. The world demands action. This is why I became involved with the ZL Vortex project. Design serves to that: to contribute to the technological and cultural development and well-being of humanity within its environment.

Translations from the project blog can be found here.

Starting from the definition of the ZL Vórtice project problem (although it will be redefined “N” times during the project), the next step is to conduct a study of similar projects, along with the collection of information for the project. Map Kibera, NGO 2.0 and Promise Tracker are good reference projects for ZL Vórtice. Below, in brief, is how I plan to conduct the studies:

• Seemingly contradictory characteristics of a project used as a reference will be problematized in a complex view: the elements / components that favor the openness of the system will be described, as well as elements that do not, such as their adaptability and self-organization, or even possible constraints, not necessarily related to technology;

• Technologies used for the development of the project will be investigated. This investigation will explore questions like: to what extent can the project be considered as a reprogrammable system, in co-evolution with other involved systems, such as social, cultural and aesthetic systems;

• I will investigate whether the productions (projects used as references), as systems, respond to user interactions in an inventive way.

I would really appreciate suggestions of readings from colleagues, especially when it comes to the approach I outline here, focused on this opening of the system, considering design methodology as a living system.

Adeline Gil – adelineg@mit.edu / adeline@quicadesign.com.br

One of the oldest services that governments have provided their citizens is the construction and maintenance of roads. To make life better for those who use roads, some of the most modern governments have begun using state of the art technology to notify drivers of their status, enabling them to plan around things like construction or traffic-causing accidents. One such high-tech solution can be seen below:

Source: http://www.dot.state.oh.us/Divisions/Operations/Traffic/FAQs/PublishingImages/HAR_sign.jpg

AM radio, a state of the art technology invented in 1900, is used by departments of transportation in many forward-thinking states to help drivers navigate treacherous traffic conditions. We can all think of multiple times in our lives where those helpful flashing lights have encouraged us to tune in on our AM radios for some time-saving advice. Another state of the art solution provided more commonly by governments is shown here:

Source: http://s3.freefoto.com/images/41/15/41_15_13_web.jpg

Ok, you get the point. Government solutions to non-critical problems with their services (and even some critical ones) tend to be outdated, unreliable and generally unhelpful. They hardly solve the problem at all.

Waze is a Tel-Aviv based startup that was founded in 2008 with the goal of reliably providing traffic and road condition information in the absence of successful government solutions. They succeeded. Waze built a GPS navigation app which allows users to submit reports of everything from accidents to construction to police speed traps. They even partnered with Google and FEMA in the wake of Hurricane Sandy to allow reporting of gas stations that had fuel. Acquired by Google in June 2013 for $966M, Waze has over 36 million users who have shared over 90 million reports in over 110 countries [1].

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Waze_3.5_Screen.png#mediaviewer/File:Waze_3.5_Screen.png

When we evaluate Waze critically, we find that it is highly generative, data-centric and slightly encouraging of openness. It is highly generative because Waze’s users produce most of the valuable content on the platform with Waze simply enabling them to do so. The more users on the Waze platform, the more valuable it becomes for everyone else. It is data-centric because the data on Waze’s platform is their primary asset and the primary value-add for users. Waze is slightly encouraging of openness because it distributes information that used to be locked up in the minds of construction workers, emergency responders or individuals stuck in traffic to a larger group of people.

Yet one of the critical places where Waze scores extremely poorly is in the domain of preserving privacy and individual liberties. Waze’s demise in this category, like many modern internet companies, stems from their privacy policy regarding the information they collect on you. Before we go into that, we must begin with what specific information Waze collects:

• “Detailed location and route information to create a detailed location history of all of the journeys you have made while using the Application”
• “All of the phone numbers which are stored on your device’s phone book” (if you opt into the ‘find friends feature’)
• Search queries within the Waze app [2]

Of course it is in Waze’s best interest to collect all of this information. They can use it to improve their own services, get a better understanding of their users and support their company financially through directed advertising. None of this is particularly onerous or damaging to individual liberties (at least in my opinion). Developing a better service is in all stakeholders best interest and a private company needs a strong business model to sustain the services it provides.

Where Waze strays away from protecting civil liberties is when it comes to how they are allowed use your data. One particularly onerous sections of their privacy policy and its implications are outlined below:

Waze will share your personal information with others without your consent “to comply with any applicable law and assist law enforcement agencies under any applicable law, when Waze has a good faith belief that Waze’s cooperation with the law enforcement agencies is legally mandated or meets the applicable legal standards and procedures,” [2]

Remember, if you are an active Waze user then Waze has a personal history of most places you’ve driven, places you are thinking about going and your live location if you have the app open. Operating on the assumption that governments always apply laws justly, this is not a problem. Unfortunately history has shown us that this assumption is frequently incorrect. And in that case, Waze provides these governments with a(nother) tool to track the exact whereabouts of Waze users of interest. As a digital trends article on the subject put it, “Anything you share with Waze can be used against you in a court of law,” [3].

Waze has also started negotiating deals with governments of places like Rio De Jeneiro and Florida to share data bi-directionally with departments of transportation [4]. While this is great for improving the services of both parties, it is a bad sign for user privacy that Waze is using private user data as a bargaining chip for better access to data from governments.

Since Waze scores so poorly in the privacy category, it begs the question: can such a platform exist that does better? Could a platform modeled after Benkler’s nonmarket peer-production concepts provide as effective of a service without compromising on privacy? While this is clearly an open question that deserves a deeper analysis, I believe that it can and it is a service that I would love to see in the world. Until then, it appears that as a privacy-concerned person I’m stuck tuning into my AM radio for my traffic information.

References:

First of all, I would like to remember some key points in Benkler’s work. He understands that the collaboration between individuals in the common space (or networked public sphere, in some assumptions) can result in public goods. This is a generous idea, but it is also real and economic-based, as he demonstrated rigorously in his book. The Benkler’s perspective recognizes that human beings generally act motived by capital or material gains, but at same time he believes that human beings act by psychological and sociological gratification.

Benkler identifies some criticisms addressed to collaboration in online platforms, but he argues that the Internet is revolutionary compared to mass media. There is some limitations in the internet landscape, but this media is the most open ever. Anyone can engage in complex and huge projects, with small or big contributions according to skills and motivation, which can result in meaningful goods to everyone.

Remembering the collaboration conception in this terms is important, because this approach is more demanding than collaboration in private workplace. In this view, collaboration is more than to do something with someone, it is do something with someone else oriented to common interest.

Colab – https://colab.interlegis.leg.br/ci/

Once we quote some important topics of the Benkler’s view, I would like to report two cases of collaboration which are trying to address challenges inside the public sector. First, Colab is a platform to Brazilian public servants discuss common problems and exchange codes. The platform is open and everyone may participate. Using this platform to exchange solutions, the governmental team spends less time and money, as strongly recommended by Tim O’Reilly.

But the collaboration inside the government is not just a good strategy because it save resources, but also because diversity of skills and perspective improve the quality of the web pages and others applications. Notwithstanding the platform be used by Brazilian coders, Colab is open to everyone everywhere. Who wants to create something like the Brazilian projects may uses the codes for free.

Secondly, I want to talk about Poplus, a platform founded by MySociety and CiudadanoInteligente.org, define themselves as “an international community of activists, citizens and developers” that intend to create “standardized, internationalized, interoperable, open-source components, to make it easier to build websites that empower citizens, no matter where you are based”.

Poplus – http://poplus.org/

The simple and helpful idea is to offer codes of applications that can be used by governs to engage citizens. Once civic media has frequently the same functions, they created at least five modules which may be adapted to specific needs (see here). So everyone may reuse codes written by someone else, thus resources have been saved. The access to code is open and everyone may join the Poplus Google Group to ask informations and report its experience.

To conclude this post, I want to remember some O’Reilly tips: open standards and open development of solutions have an extraordinary power to engage citizens in searching solutions to public problems. People worldwide can work together collaboratively to help to strengthen the relation between governments and citizens.

What’s the safest speed to travel on a freeway? If you guessed the speed limit, you’re probably wrong! There is pretty strong evidence to suggest that the safest speed to travel is the speed the other cars are traveling. ( http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/06/texas_85_mile_per_hour_speed_limit_do_higher_speed_limits_cause_more_accidents_.html )

However, the cheapest speed to travel is definitely at or below the speed limit, because of aggressive police speed ticketing. For instance, Hampton, Florida (and a couple other small towns) had formed a notoriously corrupt police force where there was a department so large there was a police officer for every 25 residents. This police force performed one task, ticketing people speeding on the highway passing through, neglecting to keep drugs out of the community or perform other tasks. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/09/us/hampton-florida-corruption/).  Although the town faced many other oddities and corruptions that make it a less than stellar example, traffic & parking tickets have a bad reputation of existing solely to fund police departments, especially when civil asset seizure is also considered (http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/10/11/cash-seizures-fuel-police-spending/) (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/02/kaley_v_united_states_terrible_supreme_court_decision_lets_the_government.html).

Enter Waze, collaborative community based traffic mapping system which addresses the lack of oversight of police. Waze allows users to let other users know where police are monitoring, so that drivers can be alert and not get caught ‘driving unsafely’. Not so subtly, the following image appears on Waze’s website:

Naturally, this isn’t too popular with police. It’s curious to see what arguments & strategies are used:

LAPD Police Chief argued that Waze endangers officers by letting would-be criminals track their locations. http://www.cnbc.com/id/102373083# . However, many critique law enforcement for defending an important source of revenue https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150126/08232429821/law-enforcement-wants-google-to-cripple-waze-because-it-lets-mean-old-public-stalk-police-officers.shtml. At Waze, however, the argument tends that knowing a police officer is around increases road safety as people are more likely to drive safely http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/08/opinion/navarrette-waze-speed-traps/ .

With this context, let’s discuss how Waze is and isn’t a networked public sphere.

Firstly, Waze is a community which does produce a shared common good. This is commons based production, but due to the central authority over the information, I think it fails to fully meet Benkler’s peer standard. However, much of the economics of peer production still applies. There are not only different types of users who will either use, not use, or use & add to the data but also car pooling groups, which may use Waze differently (perhaps shotgun resumes its role in defending from bandits).

This is a network which greatly helps individual liberty by helping users to avoid police interference. Although in its nascence, technology like Waze can be deployed to monitor police in other situations. For instance, Sukey was used and built to help UCL protestors avoid police kettling (a controversial crowd control tactic). In this case, the technology fits more into Benkler’s views on internet communities — Sukey facilitates a meatspace interaction, but leans heavily on the virtual space to ensure the freedoms of such groups.

In the Waze network, data is of utmost import. The data created, however, is centralized on Google servers. This means that it will serve google purposes, ie, knowing that people slow down near police markers Waze may choose to show police markers near google billboards, or play other tricks, such as inaccurately reporting police presence at the request of a local department.

Overall, I don’t think that Waze is an idealized Networked Public Sphere, but I do think that it serves an important role: it get’s people collaborating to solve a problem, and using internet technology to perform the collaboration. If Sukey is any guide it is that when specific, more serious, issues arise turning to a collaborative model will be natural, and we have the design techniques & software to be able to roll such a system out quickly and in an ad-hoc manner.