Tag Archives: conference

Data & Civil Rights: What do we know? What don’t we know?

From algorithmic sentencing to workplace analytics, data is increasingly being used in areas of society that have had longstanding civil rights issues.  This prompts a very real and challenging set of questions: What does the intersection of data and civil rights look like? When can technology be used to enable civil rights? And when are technologies being used in ways that undermine them? For the last 50 years, civil rights has been a legal battle.  But with new technologies shaping society in new ways, perhaps we need to start wondering what the technological battle over civil rights will look like.

To get our heads around what is emerging and where the hard questions lie, the Data & Society Research Institute, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and New America’s Open Technology Institute teamed up to host the first “Data & Civil Rights” conference.  For this event, we brought together diverse constituencies (civil rights leaders, corporate allies, government agencies, philanthropists, and technology researchers) to explore how data and civil rights are increasingly colliding in complicated ways.

In preparation for the conversation, we dove into the literature and see what is known and unknown about the intersection of data and civil rights in six domains: criminal justice, education, employment, finance, health, and housing.  We produced a series of primers that contextualize where we’re at and what questions we need to consider.  And, for the conference, we used these materials to spark a series of small-group moderated conversations.

The conference itself was an invite-only event, with small groups brought together to dive into hard issues around these domains in a workshop-style format.  We felt it was important that we make available our findings and questions.  Today, we’re releasing all of the write-ups from the workshops and breakouts we held, the videos from the level-setting opening, and an executive summary of what we learned.  This event was designed to elicit tensions and push deeper into hard questions. Much is needed for us to move forward in these domains, including empirical evidence, innovation, community organizing, and strategic thinking.  We learned a lot during this process, but we don’t have clear answers about what the future of data and civil rights will or should look like.  Instead, what we learned in this process is how important it is for diverse constituencies to come together to address the challenges and opportunities that face us.

Moving forward, we need your help.  We need to go beyond hype and fear, hope and anxiety, and deepen our collective understanding of technology, civil rights, and social justice. We need to work across sectors to imagine how we can create a more robust society, free of the cancerous nature of inequity. We need to imagine how technology can be used to empower all of us as a society, not just the most privileged individuals.  This means that computer scientists, software engineers, and entrepreneurs must take seriously the costs and consequences of inequity in our society. It means that those working to create a more fair and just society need to understand how technology works.  And it means that all of us need to come together and get creative about building the society that we want to live in.

The material we are releasing today is a baby step, an attempt to scope out the landscape as best we know it so that we can all work together to go further and deeper.  Please help us imagine how we should move forward.  If you have any ideas or feedback, don’t hesitate to contact us at nextsteps at datacivilrights.org

(Image by Mark K.)

ICWSM-13, run by Emre Kiciman

I’m pleased to announce that the CFP for ICWSM-13 is now live.

In late October, it was announced that Ethan Zuckerman and I were running the conference. Due to communication failures and organizational disagreements, we stepped down in mid-November. The wonderful and talented Emre Kiciman from Microsoft Research will be running ICWSM-13 in Boston, Massachusetts. I have nothing but confidence in his ability to run this conference and I look forward to seeing where he takes it. So I hope you submit your awesome work and attend the event!

Given some of the organizational confusion, I want to take a moment to explain why I stepped down from running the event. It was not because I don’t believe in ICWSM – I think that ICWSM is a phenomenal conference. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that I’m the right person to be running the conference in the direction it’s being pushed to go.

Every year that I attended ICWSM, there has been a community meeting where people talk about what they love about the conference and what they’d like to see change. Each year, someone raises the issue about diversifying the conference. ICWSM is one of the few places where computer scientists and social scientists actively listen to one another. It is precisely that combination that makes my heart melt. But it’s also run as a computer science conference which is inaccessible to most social scientists. Each year, when the issue comes up, two sticking points are regularly raised: 1) the computer science publishing model doesn’t work for social scientists; and 2) the cost of computer science conferences is inaccessible for the vast majority of social scientists. Attendees propose numerous ways of addressing each of these issues, but they go unaddressed and the conversation repeats each year.

Last summer, Ethan Zuckerman and I were asked if we wanted to co-host ICWSM. Ethan was very open to the idea and I said that I’d only do it under two conditions: 1) I could put in place special issues for journals to entice social scientists who don’t normally attend computer science conferences; and 2) I could work with Ethan to drastically reduce the cost of the conference to make it viable for social scientists and for those who didn’t have large grants. From the getgo, I stated that I wanted to see the cost get down to $400 for industry attendees; $200 for faculty attendees; $100 for students. This is a pretty radical proposal for a computer science conference, even though its still higher than most social science conferences of similar size.

The steering committee told me that this would be viable if I could get a journal to agree and if I could figure out how to reduce the event costs enough to make that pricing scheme viable. I decided to put my time where my mouth was and do everything I could to build a conference that could fully integrate computer scientists and social scientists from diverse fields to have a shared conversation.

Ethan and I began the process of choosing dates with AAAI, the computer science organization that backed the conference. This ended up taking months, causing consternation on all sides. As soon as the dates were chosen, it was announced that Ethan and I were running the conference, even before I was aware that the decision had been made or what the terms would be. While trying to deal with a hurricane in my city, I raced around to build a conference committee, confirm special issues with the journals that I approached, and put together a CFP so that we could get the call out. I sent the proposed call to the representative at AAAI. That’s when all hell broke out.

Unbeknownst to me, the steering committee never cleared my requirements with AAAI. AAAI was violently opposed to having other publishers involved with ICWSM in any formal way. They made it very clear that not only could I not use special issues to entice attendees, but I could not advertise specific journals or otherwise make any promises of publishing with other venues. The best that they could do would be to allow people to only publish an extended abstract in AAAI so that the social scientists could then submit their papers elsewhere.

I was stunned, especially given that I had clearly stated this as a requirement when I began this process. I wrote to the steering committee and was told that we could keep negotiating after the CFP came out. I started to realize that there were massive communication failures going on. I said that in order to move forward, I needed a commitment on the registration costs. I was told that it wasn’t possible to do this yet and that I should just keep going forward. I said that it was unfair to ask me to let go of the prerequisites I gave for running the conference. AAAI, seemingly unaware of these conversations, came back with a proposal that made it clear that no matter how much I reduced the costs of the conference on my end, there was no way to reduce the fees enough to make the conference broadly accessible.

In the end, I found that there was such extensive miscommunication that the gulf between what I had stated upfront as being key to me running the conference was miles away from what AAAI would find acceptable. Both of us felt as though we were contorting ourselves to make this work and it left both of us very bitter and unable to work with one another. I decided that I could not run a conference that wasn’t accessible to many of the core parts of my research community just to please other parts of the research community. I felt trapped and realized that it would be better to walk away than to let go of my principles.

Because I believe deeply in ICWSM, I did not want to leave the conference in a lurch. In walking away, I recommended that the steering committee turn the conference over to Emre Kiciman, a collaborator and friend who I greatly admire. He’s deeply committed to engaging social scientists, but is also comfortable running a conference that is structured as a computer science conference. He’s a phenomenal scholar and a truly gentle human being. Plus he’s deeply passionate about ICWSM and the ICWSM community. And what he’s looking to achieve with the conference is far less radical than what I had proposed.

I still love ICWSM and I still believe in it as a conference. I think that it’s a fabulous place for computer scientists to be exposed to computational social science. And I think that it’s fantastic for social scientists who are willing to take risks and who have the resources to engage with computer scientists. I still hope that the conference will become a core site for meaningful interdisciplinary dialogue. Unfortunately, what I learned is that there are serious organizational impediments to making the conference truly accessible at this time. Perhaps in the future. But for now, it’s going to be a computer science conference where social scientists are welcome.

I’m confident in Emre and I think that the conference committee brings a lot of knowledge from different disciplines and will do a fantastic job of making sure that interdisciplinary scholarship is cherished. I also love the broader community that submits fascinating work and I hope that they/you will continue to do so. I just couldn’t, in good conscience, run the conference in the way that I was expected to run it. My only hope is that my efforts to move the dial may help down the line.

“Teen Sexting and Its Impact on the Tech Industry” (my RWW talk)

In a cultural context where Congressman Anthony Weiner foolishly published salacious content on Twitter, it’s hard to ignore sexting as a cultural phenomenon. Countless adults send sexually explicit content to one another, either as acts of flirtation or more explicit sex acts. And yet, when teenagers do so, new issues emerge. Teen sexting gets complicated, especially when images or videos are involved, because it butts up against child pornography laws. Unfortunately, teens have been arrested on child pornography charges for taking or sharing images of themselves or their peers.

Teen sexting isn’t just an issue for parents, teens, and the law; it’s also a challenge for the tech industry. Because technology companies are required by law to work diligently to combat child pornography, sexting creates new challenges for them. In this talk for the Read Write Web 2WAY conference, I outline some of the challenges that the tech industry faces with respect to teen sexting. I also invite those in the tech industry to engage about this issue, either out of goodwill, monetary interest, or fear of legal liability.

“Teen Sexting and Its Impact on the Tech Industry”

“Networked Privacy” (my PDF talk)

Our contemporary ideas about privacy are often shaped by legal discourse that emphasizes the notion of “individual harm.” Furthermore, when we think about privacy in online contexts, the American neoliberal frame and the techno-libertarian frame once again force us to really think about the individual. In my talk at Personal Democracy Forum this year, I decided to address some of the issues of “networked privacy” precisely because I think that we need to start thinking about how privacy fits into a social context. Even with respect to the individual frame, what others say/do about us affects our privacy. And yet, more importantly, all of the issues of privacy end up having a broader set of social implications.

Anyhow, I’m very much at the beginning of thinking through these ideas, but in the meantime, I took a first pass at PDF. A crib of the talk that I gave at the conference is available here: “Networked Privacy”

Photo Credit: Collin Key

Call for Papers: Digital Media & Learning Conference

Interested in Digital Media & Learning? Well, the 2011 Digital Media & Learning Conference is looking for some interesting talks, papers, and sessions. They’ve just launched the call for proposals. (I’m on the conference committee.)

The Digital Media and Learning Conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub at University of California, Irvine. The conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, and practice.

The second conference will be held between March 3-5, 2011 at the Hilton Long Beach Conference and Meeting Center in Long Beach, California. The theme will be “Designing Learning Futures”. The Conference Chair will be Katie Salen. The conference committee includes Kimberly Austin, danah boyd, Sheryl Grant, Mark Surman, Trebor Scholz and S. Craig Watkins. Keynote presentations will be given by Alice Taylor and Muki Hansteen-Izora. We are also planning a book exhibit and technology demos.

“Do you See What I See?: Visibility of Practices through Social Media”

Knowing that I was going to speak at two different events within a week of one another to distinctly different audiences needing to hear a similar message, I decided to craft one talk for both Supernova and Le Web. This talk is one of my more serious talks, looking at problematic practices in social media and inviting the audience to do something about it. Fundamentally, it’s a talk about visibility… about our ability to see what’s happening in the world thanks to the Internet. And about our needs to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in.

As always, I’ve made my crib available:

“Do you See What I See?: Visibility of Practices through Social Media”

If you’d prefer to listen to what I actually said (since I’m terrible at sticking to the crib), you might want to check out the video from Le Web or the video from Supernova (with the beautifully complementary talk by Adam Greenfield). Enjoy!

spectacle at Web2.0 Expo… from my perspective

Last week, I gave a talk at Web2.0 Expo. From my perspective, I did a dreadful job at delivering my message. Yet, the context around my talk sparked a broad conversation about the implications of turning the backchannel into part of the frontchannel. In the last week, I’ve seen all sorts of blog posts and tweets and news articles about what went down. At this point, the sting has worn off and I feel that it would be responsible to offer my own perspective of what happened.

First, context. Web2.0 Expo is an expensive conference filled with all sorts of webby types, entrepreneurs, and business folks interested in technological development. It’s a conference known for great talks by high profile people. Most of the talks are pretty conversational in nature – there are plenty of staged interviews and casual presentations.

Because of the high profile nature of Web2.0 Expo, I decided to write a brand new talk. Personally, I love the challenge and I get bored of giving the same talk over and over and over again. Of course, the stump speech is much more fluid, much more guaranteed. But new talks force folks to think differently and guarantee that I target those who hear me talk often and those who have never seen me talk before.

A week before the conference, I received word from the organizers that I was not going to have my laptop on stage with me. The dirty secret is that I actually read a lot of my talks but the audience doesn’t actually realize this because scanning between my computer and the audience is usually pretty easy. So it doesn’t look like I’m reading. But without a laptop on stage, I have to rely on paper. I pushed back, asked to get my notes on the screen in front of me, but was told that this wasn’t going to be possible. I was told that I was going to have a podium. So I resigned to having a podium. Again, as an academic, I’ve learned to read from podiums without folks fully realizing that I am reading.

When I showed up at the conference, I realized that the setup was different than I imagined. The podium was not angled, meaning that the paper would lie flat, making it harder to read and get away with it. Not good. But I figured that I knew the talk well enough to not sweat it.

I only learned about the Twitter feed shortly before my talk. I didn’t know whether or not it was filtered. I also didn’t get to see the talks by the previous speakers so I didn’t know anything about what was going up on the screen.

When I walked out on stage, I was also in for a new shock: the lights were painfully bright. The only person I could see in the “audience” was James Duncan Davidson who was taking photographs. Otherwise, it was complete white-out. Taken aback by this, my talk started out rough.

Now, normally, I get into a flow with my talks after about 2 minutes. The first two minutes are usually painfully rushed and have no rhythm as I work out my nerves, but then I start to flow. I’ve adjusted to this over the years by giving myself 2 minutes of fluff text to begin with, content that sets the stage but can be ignored. And then once I’m into a talk, I gel with the audience. But this assumes one critical thing: that I can see the audience. I’m used to audiences who are staring at their laptops, but I’m not used to being completely blinded.

Well, I started out rough, but I was also totally off-kilter. And then, within the first two minutes, I started hearing rumblings. And then laughter. The sounds were completely irrelevant to what I was saying and I was devastated. I immediately knew that I had lost the audience. Rather than getting into flow and becoming an entertainer, I retreated into myself. I basically decided to read the entire speech instead of deliver it. I counted for the time when I could get off stage. I was reading aloud while thinking all sorts of terrible thoughts about myself and my failures. I wasn’t even interested in my talk. All I wanted was to get it over with. I didn’t know what was going on but I kept hearing sounds that made it very clear that something was happening behind me that was the focus of everyone’s attention. The more people rumbled, the worse my headspace got and the worse my talk became. I fed on the response I got from the audience in the worst possible way. Rather than the audience pushing me to become a better speaker, it was pushing me to get worse. I hated the audience. I hated myself. I hated the situation. I wanted off. And so I talked through my talk, finishing greater than 2 minutes ahead of schedule because all I wanted was to be finished. And then I felt guilty so I made shit up for a whole minute and left the stage with 1 minute to spare.

I walked off stage and immediately went to Brady and asked what on earth was happening. And he gave me a brief rundown. The Twitter stream was initially upset that I was talking too fast. My first response to this was: OMG, seriously? That was it? Cuz that’s not how I read the situation on stage. So rather than getting through to me that I should slow down, I was hearing the audience as saying that I sucked. And responding the exact opposite way the audience wanted me to. This pushed the audience to actually start critiquing me in the way that I was imagining it was. And as Brady went on, he said that it started to get really rude so they pulled it to figure out what to do. But this distracted the audience and explains one set of outbursts that I didn’t understand from the stage. And then they put it back up and people immediately started swearing. More outbursts and laughter. The Twitter stream had become the center of attention, not the speaker. Not me.

Yes, I cried. Yes, I left Web2.0 Expo devastated. I hate giving a bad talk but I also felt like I was being laughed at. People tried to smooth it over, to tell me that I was OK, that it wouldn’t matter, that they liked the talk. But no amount of niceness from friends or strangers could make up for the 20 minutes in which I was misinterpreting the audience and berating myself. Nothing the audience could say could make up for what I was thinking about myself while on stage. So I went for a massage. And I spent 90 minutes trying to tell myself that I am a lovable creature. And when that wasn’t working, I told myself to suck it up and deal. I knew that if I could convince myself to look like everything was OK that eventually I would believe it. Or at least that it would all go away.

Being on stage involves raw emotions. I have never gotten over the rawness of it all. I no longer vomit before every talk (although I used to) but my stomach does try to do the macarena. Or, more likely, the ridiculous dance done by 80s hair bands as they thrash about. I can’t eat before I give a talk. And I visit the bathroom a bazillion times. Even when I’m brilliant on stage, I’m nervous as hell. But it’s also emotionally and physically exhausting. I walk off the stage high as a kite and then, two hours later, crash. Giving talks drains me. It’s brutal to try to publicly convey information, to be the center of attention. I much much much prefer to be the one observing than the one speaking. But I feel like giving talks is important. So I speak. But it ain’t easy. And so when I walk off a stage not feeling invigorated, all I get is the raw drain, the gut-wrenching, nauseating feeling of pure misery. 20 minutes of being punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, and the shameful sensations one gets when one is forced to watch a Lars von Trier film. That’s how I felt at Web2.0 Expo.

So…. the Backchannel?

Now that you’ve been forced to read my inner neuroses on public display, let’s talk about making the backchannel the frontchannel. First off, let’s be clear: I could not and did not see the Twitter stream from stage. Nothing was conveyed to me until the end. The stream was not a way for the audience to communicate to the speaker, but for the audience to communicate with itself. Lots of folks have talked about making the stream available to the speaker. Have any of you seen ustream? This is filled with “speakers” reading the stream and it’s very choppy. There’s no way that a speaker can simultaneously consume a stream and convey a message. Sure, a message every 30 seconds or so, no problem. But a stream? No way. And certainly not a long message… and, on stage, 140 characters is long.

Let me highlight a comment that Dan from HonestlyKid.net left on my blog earlier this week:

It seems that the more subtle the speaker’s point, the more impatient and nasty the audience became. While it’s easy enough to blame the new tech in the room for this shoddy behavior, I’m not sure we’re seeing anything new at all here. It certainly didn’t feel new to me from where I sat. Consider the recent Town Hall meetings around health care – substantive discussions of important issues were subsumed in cat calls and shouted rumors.

That said, having participated in this bad behavior, I noticed something else about the way it felt to put something on that wall. The twitterwall subverted twitter’s more symmetric conversation model of communication. Posting to the wall was like creating and sharing a public secret about the speaker (a little like political grafiti except it wasn’t anonymous).

The wall made a spectacle of the crowd’s impatience and anxiety feeding on the speaker’s inability to respond. That spectacle united us not as a single group receiving challenging ideas from a thoughtful orator but as quite separate individuals struggling to listen, read, respond, and make sense of the event. We moved from web conference to twitter circus.

I think that Dan nailed it. I think that the backchannel is perfectly reasonable as a frontchannel when the speaker is trying to entertain, but when the goal is to convey something with depth, it encourages people to be impatient and frustrated, to feed on the speaker. There’s a least common denominator element to it. I was not at Web2.0 Expo to entertain, but to inform. Yes, I can be an entertaining informant, but there’s a huge gap between the kind of information that Baratunde tries to convey in his comedic format and what I’m trying to convey in a more standard one. And there’s no doubt I packed too much information into a 20 minute talk, but my role is fundamentally to challenge audiences to think. That’s the whole point of bringing a scholar to the stage. But if the audience doesn’t want to be challenged, they tune out or walk out. Yet, with a Twitter stream, they have a third option: they can take over.

The problem with a public-facing Twitter stream in events like this is that it FORCES the audience to pay attention the backchannel. So even audience members who want to focus on the content get distracted. Most folks can’t multitask that well. And even if I had been slower and less dense, my talks are notoriously too content-filled to make multi-tasking possible for the multi-tasking challenged. This is precisely why I use very simplistic slides that evokes images for the visual types in the room without adding another layer of content. But the Twitter stream fundamentally adds another layer of content that the audience can’t ignore, that I can’t control. And that I cannot even see.

Now, I’m AOK with not having complete control of the audience during a talk, but it requires a fundamentally different kind of talk. That was not what I prepared for at all. Had I known about the Twitter stream, I would’ve given a more pop-y talk that would’ve bored anyone who has heard me speak before and provided maybe 3-4 nuggets of information for folks to chew on. It would’ve been funny and quotable but it wouldn’t have been content-wise memorable. Perhaps that would’ve made more sense? Realistically though, those kinds of talks bore me at this point. So I probably would’ve opted not to give a talk at all. Perhaps I’m not the kind of speaker you want if you want a Twitter stream? But regardless, what I do know is that certain kinds of talks do not lend themselves to that kind of dynamic. I would *NEVER* have given my talk on race and class in such a setting. I shudder to think about how the racist language people used when I gave that talk would’ve been perceived on the big screen.

Speaking of which… what’s with the folks who think it’s cool to objectify speakers and talk about them as sexual objects? The worst part of backchannels for me is being forced to remember that there are always guys out there who simply see me as a fuckable object. Sure, writing crass crap on public whiteboards is funny… if you’re 12. But why why why spend thousands of dollars to publicly objectify women just because you can? This is the part that makes me angry.

Now, I don’t mind being critiqued. I think that being a public figure automatically involves that. I’ve developed a pretty thick skin over the years, but there are still things that get to me. And the situation at Web2.0 Expo was one of those. Part of the problem for me is that, as a speaker, I work hard to try to create a conversation with the audience. When it’s not possible or when I do a poor job, it sucks. But it also really sucks to just be the talking head as everyone else is having a conversation literally behind your back. It makes you feel like a marionette. And frankly, if that’s what public speaking is going to be like, I’m out.

I don’t want to be objectified when I’m speaking – either as a talking head or a sexual toy. I want to inspire, to invite you to think, to spark creative thoughts in your head. At Web2.0 Expo, I failed. And I failed publicly. I’m still licking my wounds. But I can take the fall. I can’t take the idea that this is the future.

So I have a favor to ask… I am going to be giving a bunch of public speaking performances at web conferences in the next couple of months: Supernova and Le Web in December, SXSW in March, WWW in April. I will do my darndest to give new, thought-provoking talks that will leave your brain buzzing. I will try really really hard to speak slowly. But in return, please come with some respect. Please treat me like a person, not an object. Come to talk with me, not about me. I’m ready and willing to listen, but I need you to be as well. And if you don’t want to listen, fine, don’t. But please don’t distract your neighbors with crude remarks. Let’s make public speaking and public listening an art form. Maybe that’s too much to ask for, but really, I need to feel like it’s worth it again.

For those looking for the text of my Web2.0 Expo talk, it’s here: “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media.”

Handheld Learning in London


I’m heading to London on Sunday to speak at Handheld Learning 2008 with a bunch of other cool smart thinking types. I’ve been remiss in posting this because I’ve been totally focused on my dissertation but I’m looking forward to this event and I think that some of you (especially all y’all Londoners) might enjoy it. w00t!!

Update: The video of my talk can be found here.