Tag Archives: globalization

Open and Connected: Impressions from the Social Media Week Hamburg and Paris

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This post has originally been published on futurechallenges.org. The text was written in collaboration with Future Challenges blogger Rayna Stamboliyska. Rayna came up with the idea for this blogpost.

This year, Social Media Week celebrated its fifth birthday. Ten cities all over the world were hosts of this truly global conference. The organizers marked this milestone with a unifyingglobal theme that explored openness in a connected and collaborative world.

Future Challenges first got in contact with Social Media Week last year. The Future Challenges team gave a crowdsourced presentation titled “Big World – Big Challenges: can a big network help?”. Twenty bloggers from our worldwide blogger network contributed to this presentation. That’s just one of the reasons why we at Future Challenges are familiar with the benefits of openness and collaboration – especially across borders.

Social Media Week 2013

Our globalized world forces us to rethink accustomed practices. The organizers of the Social Media Week assert:

Emerging technologies have dramatically changed the way we communicate and engage (with) the world around us. One voice can now ripple to millions, and we can now share our passions openly and across cultural and geographic boundaries. Change is happening everywhere (…). Groups are self organizing to take positive action. Transparency, accountability, information sharing, and collaboration are accelerating progress to levels never seen before.

FutureChallenges.org joined Social Media Week in two European cities: Hamburg (Germany) and Paris (France). Mario Sorgalla reports from Hamburg and Rayna Stamboliyska participated in Paris.

Hamburg

One week and 170 events. You don’t need to be a professional statistician to seee that one person couldn’t possibly attend all the sessions that the organizers of Social Media Week (SMW) Hamburg got going. But this abundance of interesting sessions was a great opportunity for cherry-picking. Which new trends, tools and perspectives did Social Media Week Hamburg offer its participants regarding “Principles for a Collaborative World”?

My personal Social Media Week started with a presentation about corporate blogs. Many, or actually most of, the big corporations are still hesitating to start their own blog. A loss of control is probably the main reason for such reluctance. The classical mindset in Public Relations and Communication departments is that the information flow has to be controlled and directed. Such a mindset necessarily clashes with the attitude that prevails in the blogosphere and on social media channels. However, there are some good examples of big corporations that run their own blogs, like the Daimler blog. Setting up blogs could be of particular interest for transnational corporations. Don’t you think it would be exciting to get to know the faces in different countries behind an anonymous corporation?

Let’s jump to the second day in Hamburg, when the session “A Nerd Toolkit for Journalists” caught my attention. I’m not a journalist and not a nerd (though some people might challenge the latter point) but I’m convinced that data visualizations — the focus of this session — will become ever more important for our globalized world of big data. We learned about some useful visualization tools and got to know the technical basics of visualizations. Did you know that the Guardian provides all the data they use for their visualizations via Google spreadsheets? And why shouldn’t they? They don’t own the data and everybody in any corner of the world can take these data and create something new. This is how globalized data journalism looks like. If you’re interested in the technical basis of data visualizations and you understand German, you should take a look at this summary. You will find some useful notes from the session.

…It’s already Wednesday! My highlight of the day was “Wikipedia in Museums”, an inspiring project that I’ve also discussed on my blog. There is hardly any better example for our global, open and connected information society than Wikipedia. The German Museum für Hamburgische Geschichte (Museum for the History of Hamburg) has collaborated with members of the Wikipedia community in Hamburg in order to publish information and photos about many of the museum’s exhibits on Wikipedia, an endeavour resulting in a rich collection of information for all museum geeks out there. The museum’s visitors can access this information via QR codes that are placed next to the museum signage. I’m sure there will be many more projects like this in other parts of the world.

Paris

For its third edition, SMW in Paris hosted “only” 62 events. But what a tough choice it was, selecting which one to visit, especially when I was also speaking at a few of them. As a number of the organizers are also involved in what I’ll call the collaborative economy, many sessions were converging to the focal point of identifying economic models able to sustain open knowledge in the broadest sense. Here are my top 3 SMW events from the last week!

The first day kicked off with a whole afternoon at Paris’s City Hall. This building is anabsolute jewel in terms of external architecture and the interior totally follows, which makes the venue even more striking as we discuss the ‘digital Parisian’ against a backdrop of 19th century marble chimneys. The goal was to build a bond between the Parisians and their (well, our) city. One of the ways to do so was with the introduction of an app, “Dans ma rue” (translated: “In my street”), inspired by the British ‘Fix my street’. The app aims to provide Parisians with a handy tool to report the status of city works in the neighbourhood. Using the app, anyone can take a photo and geolocate the situation.

The event itself also allowed us to work in groups of 3-5 during an hour around a few other topics. In one group session, we worked on the idea of ‘Paris Answers’, a crowd-sourced Yahoo! Answers-inspired platform which will collect information on various topics related to services proposed by the city. A very interesting debate emerged around the possibility and the rationale behind crowd-funding of public services, an idea that clearly divided the participants. On one hand, some were putting forward the fact that a citizen already pays taxes, so s/he should not be asked an additional effort. From the other hand, why reject such a much more targeted contribution to the city and the neighbourhood? So many answers yet to find…

A session dear to my heart came on Tuesday: “Open & Connected: Research Joins, Too!”. In this session, we addressed vital questions about the economic models that underlie open libraries, open data produced by public institutions, and open labs. I talked a bit about open data and how it can change a person’s everyday life; one can stop being an observer and begin acting upon one’s environment. More specifically, the discussion emphasised the screaming need for opening the data produced by research groups, especially by those that receive public funds. If you read French, I greatly recommend you to allocate a neuron or two to the summary (and in any case, to watch the amazing video, no French speaking required).

Last but not least, I’d like to end this retrospective with a very short mention of the Open Hardware session. We had Open Source Software decades ago, now the time has come to have all the nerds united and geek out with Open Hardware. Actually, this is partly misleading, as anyone can hack: I leave you to the fabulous ‘Fabrique–Hacktion’ initiative (French & English) which will convince you that everyone can be creative and that wonderful things can be achieved when we work in an open, connected way.

Borders in a Borderless World

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You know the story: We live in a flat, globalized and increasingly borderless world. The global economy is interwoven to a degree that may have been unimaginable a few decades before. However, it’s not a borderless world for many of the world’s refugees. Due to dire circumstances at home many people wish to emigrate from their countries. At the end of the year 2010 the UNHCR counted more than 15 million refugees worldwide (and even more are internally displaced people).  Many countries are trying hard to keep their borders shut for these refugees. Think of the fence that seperates the United States from Mexico. Think of the Southern European countries that try to prevent refugees from entering the European Union or think of pictures from the boat people that try to get from Southeast Asian countries to Australian shores.

If you are searching for answers you should immediately stop reading this blogpost. I’m writing these lines not because I’d like to announce solutions but rather because I myself am searching for some answers. Perhaps you can help?

I was motivated to write this blogpost when I saw this video on The Guardian’s website. It is a short portray on a Somali refugee who went to Libya. Then again he had to flee to Tunisia because of the heavy fightings in Libya last year.

Now this is, unfortunately, a story that we know although I doubt that the majority of us can understand what kind of hardships these refugees suffer from. But what I ask myself is what will happen if the number of refugees will constantly increase? There are predicitons that by the year 2050 there could be between 150 million and 1 billion climate refugees. How will the world’s nations face this challenge? So far, it seems like they plan to fence off their territories.

Border fence between India and Bangladesh

Border fence between India and Bangladesh. Photo taken from lepetitNicolas on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

One of the most vulnerable countries when it comes to climate change is Bangladesh. It is a densely populated country and one fifth of the country could be flooded by the end of the century. As a result, millions of Bangladeshi people could be affected and they could opt for escaping to India. In the 1980s India started to build a fence along its border with Bangladesh. The fence stretches out over 2000km.  But will climate refugees who lost their homes and their land be deterred from a fence? What would India do in this case? How will other countries react in case millions of refugees would like to cross their borders? Will we experience that a borderless world holds only true for goods and capital but not for human beings? And do industrialized countries who are mainly responsible for climate change have the moral duty to accommodate millions of climate refugees? What do you think?

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ADDENDUM

On the day I published this blogpost I asked people from India via Twitter whether they know anything about debates in India regarding the border fence and the consequences for future climate refugees from Bangladesh. Here is what my FutureChallenges.org colleague Anuja Upadhyay replied:

No …haven’t heard on future climate refugees being talked about. But on the border fencing is claimed to be necessary … to prevent illegal narcotics, cattle smuggling, illegal migration, cross border human trafficking from Bangladesh. The killing of the 15 year old  to be bride from Bangladesh who was trying to cross the border and other violence by BSF(border security force) soldiers (from  India) was highlighted by indian mediahttp://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/article2826161.ece?css=print; http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/04/indias_border_bangladesh but a lot more by Bangladeshi and foreign media.

Last year when the Home Minister P. Chidambaran went to Dacca he promised that the BSF would not use non -lethal weapons when patrolling. it is said that firing incidents have come down by 70%. Bangladesh home minister Shahara Khatun’s visit to India in from 23-25 Feb this year. Here’s a link to both minister addressing the media after their talks http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2928357.ece. there are a lot of other issues too  between Bangladesh and India like extradition  treaty between the countries,Teeta river water issue( u can google it up if you want)

Of course climate change and environmental degradation in bangladesh will be a push factor for migration …but I haven’t seen it discusses so much .since I am not an expert I can find out as I am planning to  meet some one( expert working in these  areas)  for a write up on disasters/climate change  and  new democracy.

Land Grabs: Stories from Tanzania

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On futurechallenges.org we are currently featuring the article The Great Land Rush which deals with land grabbing. A few months ago I have never heard of this but the deeper you get into this topic the angrier you can get. Yesterday, I stumbled upon these first-hand accounts from Tanzania (they are taken from ActionAid’s website). In 2006 the company Sun Biofuels took the land of some farmers in order to plant crops that are used to produce biofuels. Today, many people in the district are lacking the soil to plant their own crops:

The company even refuses access for people who want to get to the graveyards of their friends and families:

To be clear: I don’t want to condemn all land investments by foreign companies. It would be a lenghty discussion whether they are rather positive or negative. This is not simply a black or white story. But it is true that all too often farmers do not get enough compensation, that the companies are paying too less to the governments for the land they are using, that indigenous people are not involved and so forth.

It is really striking to see that an initiative like that one of the European Union to increase the share of bioethanol in petrol to 10 percent can have worldwide consequences. Many of the land grabs nowadays take place because modern industrialized countries are demanding more ethanol as biofuel. Land that could be used to grow crops is instead being used to fuel the cars in industrialized countries. Food security in poor regions of the world is thus directly affected by these actions. Furthermore, much water is needed to produce bio-ethanol in the form of fuel made from corn. This puts some countries and regions that are already suffering from water shortages under increased water stress. We have to learn that decisions that are taken on a national or a multinational level (like the EU) can have global consequences. This fact has to be taken into account.