What is the Commons Worth? Estimating the Value of Wikimedia Imagery by Observing Downstream Use

The Wikimedia Commons (WC) is a peer-produced repository of freely licensed images, videos, sounds and interactive media, containing more than 45 million files. This paper attempts to quantify the societal value of the WC by tracking the downstream use of images found on the platform. We take a random sample of 10,000 images from WC and apply an automated reverse-image search to each, recording when and where they are used ‘in the wild’. We detect 54,758 down- stream uses of the initial sample and we characterise these at the level of generic and country-code top-level domains (TLDs). We analyse the impact of specific variables on the odds that an image is used. The random sampling technique enables us to estimate overall value of all images contained on the platform. Drawing on the method employed by Heald et al (2015), we find a potential contribution of USD $28.9 billion from downstream use of Wikimedia Commons images over the lifetime of the project

The Software Heritage Graph Dataset: Large-scale Analysis of Public Software Development History

International audienceSoftware Heritage is the largest existing public archive of software source code and accompanying development history. It spans more than five billion unique source code files and one billion unique commits , coming from more than 80 million software projects. These software artifacts were retrieved from major collaborative development platforms (e.g., GitHub, GitLab) and package repositories (e.g., PyPI, Debian, NPM), and stored in a uniform representation linking together source code files, directories, commits, and full snapshots of version control systems (VCS) repositories as observed by Software Heritage during periodic crawls. This dataset is unique in terms of accessibility and scale, and allows to explore a number of research questions on the long tail of public software development, instead of solely focusing on "most starred" repositories as it often happens

Software Provenance Tracking at the Scale of Public Source Code

International audienceWe study the possibilities to track provenance of software source code artifacts within the largest publicly accessible corpus of publicly available source code, the Software Heritage archive, with over 4 billions unique source code files and 1 billion commits capturing their development histories across 50 million software projects. We perform a systematic and generic estimate of the replication factor across the different layers of this corpus, analysing how much the same artifacts (e.g., SLOC, files or commits) appear in different contexts (e.g., files, commits or source code repositories). We observe a combinatorial explosion in the number of identical source code files across different commits. To discuss the implication of these findings, we benchmark different data models for capturing software provenance information at this scale, and we identify a viable solution, based on the properties of isochrone subgraphs, that is deployable on commodity hardware, is incremental and appears to be maintainable for the foreseeable future. Using these properties, we quantify, at a scale never achieved previously, the growth rate of original, i.e. never-seen-before, source code files and commits, and find it to be exponential over a period of more than 40 years

Educational Technology and Related Education Conferences for June to December 2015

The 33rd edition of the conference list covers selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until December 2015 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from January 2016 onward. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next

Circumspect Users: Older Adults’ as Critical Adopters and Resistors of Technology

While HCI research has often addressed the needs of older adults, they are often framed as being sceptical of digital technologies. We argue that while many older adults are circumspect users of digital technology, they bring rich and critical perspectives on the role of technology in society that are grounded in lived experiences across their life courses. We report on 20 technology life story interviews conducted with retirees over the age of 60. Our analysis shows how experiences of technology across their life courses significantly undermined participants’ sense of competency, independence, resilience, agency and control. Dissonances between what our participants valued and the perceived values of technology have led them to become critical adopters of technology, and resist its intrusion into certain aspects of their lives. We discuss how the critical perspectives of older adults and the value dissonances they experience are valuable for designing future digital technologies