Copyright in the EU and the Dark Side of online consultations
Imagine you are in Hamburg for 30C3, the thirtieth annual conference of the legendary Chaos Computer Club – the first and the largest association of hackers in Europe. Uncharacteristically, you are...
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Farming online conversations: assessing moderators impact with panel data...
Online communities have been my Swiss army knife for the best part of a decade. I tend to throw an online community at every problem I face – and that’s not limited to work: even my wedding party was...
View ArticleThe business corporation as a symbiont to a community: Edgeryders crosses a...
Last week Edgeryders LBG, the company I co-founded, closed its first substantial deal. We are going to be working with the United Nations Development Programme, scanning the horizon in three countries...
View ArticleMissing out: why we don’t have an European open data community (yet)
The last weekend of March was SOD14, the second yearly gathering of the Spaghetti Open Data mailing list. The acronym in English may be awkward (it was just too funny to pass on!), but the event was...
View ArticleGod’s network
For a few months now I have been thinking about the Benedictine movement in terms of complex adaptive systems, and to Saint Benedict’s Rule as a protocol. The more I think about it, the more sense it...
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Algorithmic detection of specialization in online conversations
This is a writeup of the Team 1 hackathon at Masters of Networks 2. Participants were: Benjamin Renoust, Khatuna Sandroshvili, Luca Mearelli, Federico Bo, Gaia Marcus, Kei Kreutler, Jonne Catshoek and...
View ArticleOpen data comes of age
If you live in Italy and are curious about your local authority’s pattern of spending and taxing, you are in luck. Since last week, OpenBilanci publishes on the web detailed financial data from all the...
View ArticleYou did WHAT? The Italian revenue agency infringes OpenStreetMap’s copyright
A couple of months ago, Simone Cortesi, deputy president of Wikimedia Italia and the primus inter mappers of Italy’s geohackers, noticed an oddity in the maps of the Revenue Agency’s property market...
View ArticleSetting the agenda: how the open data community entered the radar of European...
On July 17th 2014, addressing the Open Knowledge Fest crowd in Berlin, EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes made the following statement: We want to work with you, and see you work together across borders and...
View ArticleReinventing the family: co-living as a system attractor
Thanks to Vinay Gupta I have come across The Embassy in San Francisco, a co-living space that, judging from its website, feels like some of the cool co-working spaces like The Hub – or is it the other...
View ArticleMaking Edgesense: two online communities at a glance
During the summer, the Wikitalia group worked hard to improve Edgesense, the tool for real-time network analysis we are building as a part of the CATALYST project. As we worked on out “official” test...
View ArticleNetworks, swarms, policy: travels across the weird, dark landscape of 21st...
I used to be an economist. Then in the two-thousands, I started to read about complexity science. I chased an intuition telling me networks are important (it was 2009, I still remember the epiphany...
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Looking for the mathematical signature of engagement policies in online...
(Disclaimer: this is very very preliminary, a far cry from a publishable result. I am doing open notebook science here, in case some genius out there has some useful suggestion!) Evolution of networks...
View ArticleWe Are The Champions: Italian journalist hacks the EU’s Digital Champion...
During the tenure of Commissioner for Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes, the European Union has invented a political appointment called Digital Champion. Champions, one per country, are appointed by national...
View ArticleStriking in the 2010s and the sadness of it all
So, I walked the streets of Brussels today – public transport is down because of La Grève, The Strike. Belgian trade unions are on the warpath because of the new government’s yet-to-be-introduced...
View ArticleWorld without marketing: the hacker utopia of 31C3
31C3 was my first-ever Chaos Communication Congress. If you have never come across it, CCC (or “the Congress” – Wikipedia) is Europe’s largest and most venerable hacker conference, organized since 1984...
View ArticleMasters of Networks 3: designing the future of online debate
Back in the day, the emergence of the global Internet was saluted with joy and hope by lovers of democracy. Many activists saw an opportunity for an electronic agora, endowed with always-on operations...
View ArticleFear and loathing in Matera: the “unMonastery affair” on local media
A few weeks ago, the collaborator of a local TV station discovered some junk in a room of the Casale complex, in Matera. Among them, desks and office chairs; construction materials; empty bottles and...
View ArticleMasters of Networks 3: who is coming and practical info
Masters of Networks 3 (more info) kicks off in a month. We at Wikitalia are hard at work to prepare the data; what can we learn by looking at online communities as networks of interactions? Is there a...
View ArticleDambisa Moyo redux: is Ethiopia’s governance model mimicking China’s?
Since the rise of development economics in the 1960s, the prevailing discourse around development has maintained that liberal democracies tend to grow faster than centralized, authoritarian societies...
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