Which systems really deserve to be built? Which problems most need to be tackled? Who is best placed to build them? And who decides? We need genuine accountability mechanisms, external to companies and accessible to populations Over the past decade, algorithmic accountability has become an important concern for social scientists, computer scientists, journalists, and lawyers. Exposés have […]
Gordon and Art chat on DO SOMETHING
On Sun, Feb 24, 2019 at 12:27 PM Gordon Kubanek wrote (into a CACOR Google Group): Hello CACOR friends, I can see that the sense that we must DO something is building among us. Here is a thought, which I am sure you have heard before, but with a personal story to add credibility. 10+ […]
Putting the ‘I’ in science
Chris Lintott’s chronicle of the booming citizen-science project Zooniverse is inspirational, finds Michael West. The Crowd and the Cosmos: Adventures in the Zooniverse Chris Lintott Oxford University Press (2019) Citizen science is booming. Today, anyone with a computer or a smartphone can participate in research in astronomy, oceanography, medicine, zoology and beyond. With such studies no longer […]
Work as forming the future, work as art
What if we left behind the mirror metaphor in trying to make sense of the world? What if we closed our eyes for a moment and began to imagine what does not yet exist? What kind of a world we would really want to create? It would mean an approach to sense making in which […]
The British Digital Cooperative: A New Model Public Sector Institution
Commercial platforms cannot prioritise the ideals of a liberal public sphere, much less the principle of popular sovereignty, over the profit motive. Introduction The information technology sector broadly defined is now at the leading edge of the capitalist system. Material production and distribution, enterprise and professional management, finance, insurance and real estate are all increasingly […]