Rise of the Wikis

Further evidence that wiki technology is changing the face of collaboration comes from the non-partisan Council on Foreign Relations, which filed a report on the use of an “Intellipedia” by sixteen intelligence agencies.

Faced with a nimble, adaptive adversary and an unwieldy bureaucracy, the intelligence community hopes that adopting a revolutionary new social networking software behind the popular “Wikipedia” network will help improve its ability to gather and disseminate information. Last month, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, revealed the existence of the intelligence community’s own brand of the “Wiki:” “Intellipedia.” Authorized users from all sixteen intelligence agencies have access not only to read the information posted there, but also to create and edit entries where they see fit. Since its inception in April of this year, Intellipedia has grown to more than 28,000 pages generated by some 3,600 users.

I posted earlier about our use of a wiki to run a small workshop. So far, it has been a success, and we are considering using the wiki to prepare a report on our workshop activities.

“codeshop”

November 3 & 4, 2006, I will chair and my lab QDAP will host a workshop funded by the NSF called “Coding Across the Disciplines: A Project-Based Workshop on Manual Annotation Techniques” in the William Pitt Union at the University of Pittsburgh. The workshop wiki is worth looking at, since it seems to have worked well as a way to distribute the creative work of preparing for the meeting across a wide geographic distibution in an asynchronous manner. People contributed to the wiki where and when they could and in this distributed manner, we created a nice product.

Broadband Divide Versus Net Neutrality

Former FCC Commissioner William Kennard argues in the NYTs that more attention should be focused on the broadband divide.

Any serious discussion of the future of the Internet should start with a basic fact: broadband is transforming every facet of communications, from entertainment and telephone services to delivery of vital services like health care. But this also means that the digital divide, once defined as the chasm separating those who had access to narrowband dial-up Internet and those who didn’t, has become a broadband digital divide.

At the same time, he paints an interesting picture of the policy agenda in Washington DC.

Unfortunately, the current debate in Washington is over “net neutrality” — that is, should network providers be able to charge some companies special fees for faster bandwidth. This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues.

So what is his answer? Kennard advocates for a shift in the way that we fund and use the Universal Service Fund, which currently amounts to a tax on telephone subscribers. However, Kennard discloses he stands to benefit personally if a new model increased investment in firms represented by The Carlyle Group, a global investment behemoth for which he is a Managing Director.

FluWiki

Take a look at this Flu Wiki blog post from the DailyKos. This is the shape of things to come. The Flu Wiki is collaboratively edited public health resource and the “About” page states:

The purpose of the Flu Wiki is to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic. This is a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies. Our goal is to be:

• a reliable source of information, as neutral as possible, about important facts useful for a public health approach to pandemic influenza
• a venue for anticipating the vast range of problems that may arise if a pandemic does occur
• a venue for thinking about implementable solutions to foreseeable problems

Before the present threat of an avian flu pandemic, these tasks were formerly ceded to local, state, national and international public health agencies. But no one, in any health department or government agency, knows all the things needed to cope with an influenza pandemic. The world is filled with competent others who are likely to have credible and useful information about some aspect of each of these tasks. By pooling and sharing our knowledge, we hope to advance both preparation for and the ability to cope with events as they unfold.

Flu Wiki is not meant to be a substitute for planning, preparation and implementation by civil authorities, but instead is a parallel effort that complements, supports and extends those efforts. And while there are a small group of editors who will continue to administer and maintain the Wiki, it is the users of Flu Wiki who will shape its utility and relevance based on the contributions they make. We hope you will find the instructions sufficient to get started. You’ll soon be learning on your own.

I think we will see many more of these “distributed” knowledge models as the centralized model proves ever less able to manage modern complexity.

E-Voting Concerns Revisited

Following on the discussion in the previous post, it appears that concerns about the use of E-Voting machines is now quite widespread. The Sunday New York Times has a prominent piece that opens:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A growing number of state and local officials are getting cold feet about electronic voting technology, and many are making last-minute efforts to limit or reverse the rollout of new machines in the November elections.

The new concerns stem from a 2005 National Research Council report that argues, a little bit ominously, that questions raised by academics “should not be discouraged or suppressed.”

How to Use IT to Steal the Vote

Since we are talking about e-democracy this week, I thought it would make sense to get one of the more disturbing studies on the table. Researchers in the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton report that it takes under one minute to plant malicious software on Diebold voting machines. There full study is available online, along with a chilling if antiseptic video titled “Security Demonstration: Diebold AccuVote-TS Electronic Voting Machine.” From the Executive Summary, the four main conclusions are:

1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.
2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.
3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses — computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre- and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects.
4. While some of these problems can be eliminated by improving Diebold’s software, others cannot be remedied without replacing the machines’ hardware. Changes to election procedures would also be required to ensure security.

We will be watching the full video in class this Thursday.

Digital Divide Persists

A story today published in the Boston Globe reports this sobering disparity:

A total of 54 percent of white students use the Internet at home, compared with 26 percent of Hispanic and 27 percent of black children. Limited access can erode a student’s research on assignments or college scholarships.

Watching my own kids thrive on supervised access to a range of late model lap tops that float around our house, the impact of this disparity is clear. My four year old can click around pre-K alphabet or other skill-building software with relative ease and he has a sense, albeit perhaps a bit disturbing, that successful professionals are joined at the hip to the wirelessly connected laptops.

The press release leading to this story resulted in over 200 new articles. Perhaps early claims for the end of the digital divide were pre-mature.