Thread by @draganakaurin

Sharing some slides from my talk this week at @OxfordMediaLaw on mapping information flows in communities for responsible and sustainable tech interventions. A short & colorful thread🧵👇🏼
#OxMediaPol

2. Too often we see successful tech interventions & deployments reduced to oversimplified narratives in media, promising us that the next big thing will solve everything (cue the blockchain jokes) entirely ignoring social underpinnings.

3. We can’t talk about connectivity solutions without first understanding how people experience these technologies through existing social networks: who they trust, who has influence in the community, who they communicate with, and to whom they are accountable to.

4. Start by literally mapping the flow of information in a community. Make sure you have a diverse group of informants, addressing cross-cutting issues like ability, literacy, ethnicity, gender, age, edu, etc.

5. Next, identify who has influence and decision-making ability in the community to see what power structures exist (elders, elected officials, social media influencers, religious leaders..)

6. Map the channels of communication. How do people hear of critical information? How do they seek out specific info within a community? One way to do this is to focus on single news events, doing one sketch for each— like a visual representation of a game of telephone ☎️

7. Add a layer of accountability structures. Who is accountable to whom in the community? (⚠️this won’t necessarily follow the same pattern as lines of communication)

8. These sketches will start to take shape, and will help identify which tools might be appropriate to use. They likely won’t look as clean as the ones below, but let’s look at a few common info flow patterns through the same (artificial) data set 👀

9. A branched info flow (below) tends to be more secure because of fewer node connections, in both top-down and bottom-up information sharing. Popular in revolutions like the pyramid-like FNL structure in the Algerian Revolution, or phone trees used to organize EDSA II protests.

10. A similar system is a decentralized branched info flow, how social media was used to micro-disseminate announcements in the early days of Arab Spring organizing in Cairo.

11. Here is a centralized info flow, like the crowdsourced Ushahidi Haiti deployment (below) where informants share data with one source, but are accountable to each other. This obviously isn’t great for infosec, or for organizing protests 😕

12. A distributed info flow system like this one is a closed loop, where everyone can share information. Trust and proximity are really important here. This could easily be a sketch of a neighborhood or apartment building dwellers...

13. ...which is why it would make sense to build a mesh network on top of an existing social structure like this one. Neighbors can share internet access and communicate directly even if there are telcom interruptions in an emergency (see Red Hook Initiative)

14. There are many other data points one can add, these are just basics for better understanding communities that we work with and support, and a starting point when looking for solutions (technical or otherwise)

Le fin.