natematias

When people in society come together to collectively perform a task — from cleaning up a park to organizing around a cause– the benefits of their cooperation extend far beyond the specific task at hand. People get to know each other, build bonds of trust, argue their understanding of a […]

How can policymakers conduct randomized trials and incorporate them into their policymaking? Over the summer, Oliver Hauser, a PhD student at Harvard, worked at the Behavioural Insights Team in London (@B_I_Tweets), sometimes called the “nudge unit.” Yesterday at the Cooperation Working Group that I co-facilitate with Brian Keegan, Oliver shared […]

Are social computing and data science just tools for the powerful, or can they be used to question power and reshape the structures that influence us? It’s a question I’ve been wondering as I’ve watched civic tech & academic communities idolize the employees and “alums” of big corporations and governments– […]

Last week, Yahoo! announced that Flickr would start selling prints of Creative Commons licensed photos, and that they would only pay some of the photographers. Some commentators, like Jeffrey Zeldman, see it as a breach of good will. Mike Masnick at Techdirt argues that this is a victory for open […]

“Change favors the prepared,” Louis Pasteur once famously noted in a lecture on the nature of scientific observation. The best academic events create moments of highly likely inspiration, and the luckiest ones bring that inspiration into action. That happened for Emily Harburg and me this weekend at CrowdCamp, a two […]