Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact

Explores current methodologies for assessing social issue documentary films by combining strategic design and evaluation of multiplatform outreach and impact, including documentaries' role in network- and field-building. Includes six case studies

Searching for superspreaders of information in real-world social media

A number of predictors have been suggested to detect the most influential spreaders of information in online social media across various domains such as Twitter or Facebook. In particular, degree, PageRank, k-core and other centralities have been adopted to rank the spreading capability of users in information dissemination media. So far, validation of the proposed predictors has been done by simulating the spreading dynamics rather than following real information flow in social networks. Consequently, only model-dependent contradictory results have been achieved so far for the best predictor. Here, we address this issue directly. We search for influential spreaders by following the real spreading dynamics in a wide range of networks. We find that the widely-used degree and PageRank fail in ranking users' influence. We find that the best spreaders are consistently located in the k-core across dissimilar social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal and scientific publishing in the American Physical Society. Furthermore, when the complete global network structure is unavailable, we find that the sum of the nearest neighbors' degree is a reliable local proxy for user's influence. Our analysis provides practical instructions for optimal design of strategies for "viral" information dissemination in relevant applications.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Mobilizing Resources for the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People: Challenges and Opportunities

Funding for work to advance the human rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) issues across the globe is surprisingly scarce. Approximately $10 million USD was spent in total on LGBT issues in the Global South and East in 2005, compared to$336 million to support 48 LGBT rights organizations based only in the United States in the same year. Ninety-three percent of funders who do not currently support LGBT human rights work in the Global South and East acknowledge the human rights community's responsibility to help advance it. This report is intended to help mobilize additional funding for LGBT human rights work by identifying obstacles to increased funding among human rights funders, exploring the implications of those obstacles and surfacing approaches to mitigate or overcome them

A social capital framework to assess ICTs mediated empowerment of environmental community organizations in Western Australia

The potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in empowering generally under-resourced community organizations has increasingly been acknowledged in recent years. While organizational empowerment refers to the capability to fulfil its mission by overcoming resource-scarcities, measuring the contribution of ICTs towards organizational empowerment remains an exigent task. Two different theories, ‘resource dependence’ and ‘social networks’ provide a framework to examine how harnessing social capital leads to organizational empowerment. It is in this context that this work-in-progress paper will explore the implications of ICTs adoption on organizational social capital as a proxy indicator of ICTs mediated empowerment. Based on survey responses from 81 Environmental Community Organizations (ECOs) in Western Australia, the findings indicate: (a) the capability to maintain social capital is strongly correlated with the capability to acquire human and financial capital; (b) the trend of access to ICTs (more than one-tenth ECOs not having an access to the Internet) as well as ICTs adoption (less than one-third and one-tenth ECOs hosting websites and posting blogs respectively) is generally weak; and (c) ICTs tend to benefit ECOs already with higher social capital. Apart from illustrating the usefulness of a social capital framework to gauge ICTs mediated empowerment, the findings also exposed the extent of organizational divide amongst ECOs. This paper therefore acknowledges that access to and adoption of ICTs without the necessary skills and support mechanisms will impede empowerment and suggests ways to make ICTs mediated empowerment genuine

Mobilizing Resources for the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) People: Challenges and Opportunities

Based on a survey of funders, identifies barriers to increased funding for global LGBT human rights work and the implications. Outlines strategies including peer-to-peer networking, capacity-building for intermediaries, and tapping bilateral aid agencies

Consensus in the Presence of Multiple Opinion Leaders: Effect of Bounded Confidence

The problem of analyzing the performance of networked agents exchanging evidence in a dynamic network has recently grown in importance. This problem has relevance in signal and data fusion network applications and in studying opinion and consensus dynamics in social networks. Due to its capability of handling a wider variety of uncertainties and ambiguities associated with evidence, we use the framework of Dempster-Shafer (DS) theory to capture the opinion of an agent. We then examine the consensus among agents in dynamic networks in which an agent can utilize either a cautious or receptive updating strategy. In particular, we examine the case of bounded confidence updating where an agent exchanges its opinion only with neighboring nodes possessing 'similar' evidence. In a fusion network, this captures the case in which nodes only update their state based on evidence consistent with the node's own evidence. In opinion dynamics, this captures the notions of Social Judgment Theory (SJT) in which agents update their opinions only with other agents possessing opinions closer to their own. Focusing on the two special DS theoretic cases where an agent state is modeled as a Dirichlet body of evidence and a probability mass function (p.m.f.), we utilize results from matrix theory, graph theory, and networks to prove the existence of consensus agent states in several time-varying network cases of interest. For example, we show the existence of a consensus in which a subset of network nodes achieves a consensus that is adopted by follower network nodes. Of particular interest is the case of multiple opinion leaders, where we show that the agents do not reach a consensus in general, but rather converge to 'opinion clusters'. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the main results.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing Over Networks, to appea

Citizens’ Consultations on Europe: French Citizens’ Panel October 25 to 27, 2018, Paris Review report

The following document analyses the French Citizens’ Panel, held in the context of Citizens’ Consultations on Europe. The report first presents the project, by stressing the method used to select the participants, then it takes into account the feedback of the participants as part of the evaluation and finally it gives some guidelines to think about the lessons to be learnt from this first French Citizens’ Panel