re:publica 18 - Alle Sessions

• Tom Wallis

The gap between the cultures of science and the humanities has grown progressively larger as generations of each side have learned to further disregard the other. Worryingly, a point of view that the humanities have nothing to contribute is infecting Silicon Valley and tech culture at large. A recent Stephen Hawking quote is symptomatic of the problem: “Philosophy is dead”. This should concern us: cultural change is now brought about by people who increasingly shun cultural study, and it is easy to envision a future where those who work in technology are bankrupt in their understanding of the humanities. There is a lot of danger in “disrupting” people’s lives without a solid ability to assess what the disruption might bring about.

Countering Hawking, this talk explores what technology loses out on in this growing philosophical bankruptcy, taking philosophy and computing science as examples. It will cover how cultural studies bring about unique analytical skills, and show that without them the tech industry can be left vulnerable to manipulation, a dangerous threat. This naturally leads to a discussion of the utility of the humanities: some of these analytical skills are adopted in tech implicitly, and there is a definite opportunity to strengthen this part of the industry by changing course and working closer with the humanities. Ultimately though, the talk will demonstrate that a field’s utility alone is not sufficient in measuring its value.

• Lior Zalmanson
• Thomas Gegenhuber

Platforms bring together clients (e.g., consumers) with workers in specific domains. Platform-mediated work thrives on using the Internet to mobilize workers and deploying algorithms to supervise, control, and manage them (i.e., algorithmic management). Typically, the relationship between platforms and workers is market-based: rather hiring them as workers, they are flexible, self-employed freelancers. In this session, we assess the state and the future of labor relations by shedding light on following questions: How do workers operate in environments where AI govern and enforce platform’s policies? How do human workers respond? To give the human worker a voice, we further ask whether and how platforms enable workers to participate and improve their autonomy over work, influence how work-processes are organized or even shape a platform's strategy? 

 Lior Zalmanson from the University of Haifa will present the insights from a recent study on Uber (conducted with Mareike Möhlmann & Ola Henfridsson of Warwick University). In this study, they followed drivers in New York and London and found a wide array of methods drivers use to regain the control and exercise their agency in the face of algorithmic Management. Among those are acts of resistance, switch to alternatives, and even gaming and tricking the system to get back their sense of autonomy. It shows that even in the face of computerized control, workers will attempt to subvert the technology to reclaim their humanity. 
Subsequently, Dr. Thomas Gegenhuber (Leuphana University Lüneburg) will discuss how to give workers voice in platform-mediated work. In his talk, he draws on the results of a study funded by the Hans-Böckler-Foundation (conducted with Markus Ellmer & Claudia Scheba), which explored whether and how six german-based crowdsourcing platforms implement voluntary participation instruments for crowdworkers. The study found that most platforms emphasize informing (e.g., blog) and reporting issues (e.g., chatbox). Some platforms provide the opportunity to discuss issues in a forum or message board; voting is barely relevant. This kind of participation empowers workers to some extent to increase their autonomy, yet, workers have little say in how work is organized, let alone, shaping the overall direction of the platform. Based on these findings, Thomas provides an overview of best-practice participation examples and outlines future directions.

• Nicole Ebber
• Alek Tarkowski
• Kasia Odrozek

In this session, we’d like to work with a wide range of participants from the free and open scene. We are aiming to identify synergies between organizations and networks, to carve out common goals, and discuss forms of collaboration. We welcome everyone who is interested in working together to foster the ties between different Open Movement players.

The session itself will be 60 mins long and – after a brief introduction – be interactive instead of lecture style. In smaller groups, we’ll be discussing three major questions: How do we make the open internet revolution irresistible? How do we build the community of the open? And how, as activists of the free and open web, do we talk to non-technologists about our world? Our goal is to find out how we can create the Big Open - together. We would like to map opportunities, ideas and thoughts for a more collaborative future.

Insights from this session will feed into broader discussions (e.g. at the Creative Commons Global Summit https://summit.creativecommons.org/) and strategy processes (e.g. Wikimedia 2030 http://2030.wikimedia.org) that we will be conducting over the coming months.

• Shalev Moran
• Peter Frase

tba

• Wendy Chun

tbc.

• Olivia Klose

Computer Vision enables computers to obtain a high-level understanding from images and videos by automatically extracting, analysing and understanding useful information. With autonomous driving, visual failure detection or scene understanding, computer vision is becoming one of the focus areas in artificial intelligence (AI) to enable computers to see and perceive like humans.

In this talk we will present our ongoing collaboration with the Royal Holloway - University of London on illegal small scale mines in Ghana. Illegal small-scale mining is a growing industry in many African, Asian and Latin American developing countries. Gold and other precious minerals are extracted in a low-tech, labour-intensive process linked to environmental damages, health hazards and social ills. Additionally, the process provides huge employment and income potential in poverty-stricken communities. Since these small mining operations are mostly illegal, there is virtually no data to analyse their exact impact. This project seeks to fill this void to enable better-informed policy decisions by relevant stakeholders.

We built an image classification model in Keras and scaled the training of the model using Kubernetes on Azure. Once small scale mines were identified, we investigated the impact of those mines on surrounding environments and populations in Python.

supported by BMZ

• Ellen Euler
• Katja Hermes
• Michela Magas
• Markus Schwarzer

Urban planers, city council, technologists and businesses have been discussing the emergent smart city for several years. Cities are to be transformed through networked technologies and the power of big data in order to make them more efficient, more ecological and more socially inclusive with the premise of more citizen engagement and participation.

Glasgow, Adelaide, Sevilla or Mannheim are music cities according to UNESCO. Nashville, Melbourne and Berlin are also cities of music, without carrying an official title. However, their objectives are very similar: How can the strategic development of a city support the creation of economic, ecologic and social value with regard to the music industry, the creative industries, their spaces and places, infrastructures, businesses and scenes and thus make the city more livable. What are the perils in merging these two concepts?

What is a smart music city? How could public transport immediately react to the needs of audiences? What could urban planers and citizens learn if they knew what music people stream in different neighborhoods? How could an urban guidance system work not only visually but also sonically?

In this panel, experts from urban development and urban planning will discuss with experts from the cultural and creative industries and technology developers. Together, they are hoping to identify central aspects of smart music cities, discuss possible fields of application and ponder how implementation processes might look like.

Mit Unterstützung der Gesellschaft für Musikwirtschafts- und Musikkulturforschung e.V.

• Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou
• Jenny Molloy
• Tarek Omar
• Lucy Patterson

In this session, we will focus on hardware and software solutions, tools and services, resources and projects that adopt the Open Source approach and have one goal: to increase the access to scientific research. We present initiatives and visionaries putting this into action in different regional contexts who will discuss their insights, practical knowledge and experience. What can science learn from hacker culture, which methods and principles can be shared? What impact would this kind of junction have on individual academics? How can digital tools help the global scientific community to promote the growth of knowledge worldwide?

Part of the panel are The Gathering for Open Science Hardware, a community of developers and scientists who support the growth of knowledge through global access to hardware for science; openeuroscience.com, a network for Open Science projects; the Open Research Lab for Emerging Technologies, as well as the mobile lab approach developed by the Cairo Hackerspace.

• Marcus Ewald
• Nina-Luisa Siedler
• Sebnem Rusitschka
• John Calian

Nachdem sich  2017 das mediale Interesse an Blockchain vor allem auf die enormen Wertzuwächse von Cryptowährungen bezog, sehen wir inzwischen ein wachsendes Interesse für weitere Anwendungsbereiche:

Das Bewusstsein für Blockchain basierte Innovationen reicht bis hinein in den aktuellen Koalitionsvertrag zwischen CDU/CSU und SPD, in dem der Begriff ganze sieben Mal vorkommt. Die prominente Platzierung der Technologie im Koalitionsvertrag hat mit Sicherheit viele Gründe. Die vom Bundesverband Blockchain geleistete Aufklärungsarbeit spielte dabei aber mit Sicherheit eine wichtige Rolle.

Der Verband hat sich auf dem Verständnis gegründet, dass "Blockchain und ähnliche, auf Kryptografie basierende dezentrale Technologien die grundlegenden infrastrukturellen Innovationen darstellen, um eine digitale Ökonomie auf demokratischen Strukturen in Deutschland Wirklichkeit werden zu lassen. Der Staat hat dabei die Aufgabe, die Rahmenbedingungen für innovative Gesellschafts- und Geschäftsmodelle, die auf Blockchain-Technologie gründen, zu schaffen.”

Um dieses Ziel zu erreichen setzt sich der Bundesverband durch seine ehrenamtliche Arbeit auf vielen Ebenen und über Branchen hinweg für eine Erprobung und Nutzung der Blockchain Technologie ein. Die PanelistInnen sind in unterschiedlichen Bereichen zu Blockchain und Distributed Ledger Technologie aktiv und bringen Ihre praktische Erfahrung im Bundesverband ein. Sie werden Ihre Gedanken zur gesellschaftlichen Relevanz von Blockchain, zu Sicherheitsaspekten und Initital Coin Offerings diskutieren und damit einen Einblick in die Chancen und Risiken der Technologie für Deutschland und Europa geben. Im Anschluss wird die Diskussion für Fragen aus dem Publikum geöffnet.

supported by T-Labs

• Katika Kühnreich

In 2014 China's Communist Party (CP) published a “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System (2014-2020)”. The CP announced the system to be mandatory for every Chinese person in 2020. It is no theoretical babbling about something happening in a far future: The CP started experimenting with such social credit systems (SCS) in different regions soon after, allowed the private development of such systems, and was cited to become world leader of SCS. While the official goal of the SCS is to level economic development and to bring harmony, sincerity and trust to the whole country, the question is what the “side effects” might be.

Starting with a review of the current state of social credit systems (SCS) in China, examples of their functions and examples of consequences of their existence will be provided. This information will be embedded into a short walk through the People's Republic's Internet landscape, its big players, and the CP's digital policies. In the following this will be set it in relation to current ideological turns and the CP's announcement to become the world leader in SCS.
China's SCS is seen as an extreme example of a tendency that has developed in most industrialized countries. It displays what can be drawn from the huge amount of information provided by us via ICTs and so-called “social media”. And it can show possible consequences of the combination of big data and nearly endless storage on one hand and evaluation by algorithms on the other. From the point of view that this aspect of digitalization is not a problem of the Chinese but for all of us, it will lead to the question how critical thinking and dissenting actions can develop in a reality that is constantly rating behavior to create a score that will be defining vast parts of our life. Ending in a discussion on possibilities of big data based social rating, cybernetics, and social control and modes of dissent and resistance.