Challenges at the intersection of social media and social innovation

Abstract Inspired by recent critical social and economic developments -and their most visible eruptions in the Arab world, Spain and Greece -which demonstrate that there is a relatively low barrier of entrance for individuals and groups to adopt social media for virtually any shared purpose, objective or cause, a "manifesto" has been written by a group of transdisciplinary researchers, activists and practitioners from the fields of ICT and social movements. It promotes the possibility of using social media as a platform to effectively support the processes of social innovation, overcoming its limitations of speed and scale to become an alternative to currently established institutional mechanisms. Such social innovations comprise all new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet current social needs and strengthen civil society. Further, the present paper proposes a framework for research into the elements of socio-technical architectures capable of sustaining large scale social innovations enabled by the availability of social media, considering the "paradigm shift of communication" in a knowledge society and describing key challenges of social innovation initiatives. In this context, the objective of the Manifesto on Social Media for Social Innovation is to propose actions oriented to extract the best of the potential synergies among those two concepts of social innovation and social media

The Power Laws of Violence against Women: Rescaling Research and Policies

BACKGROUND: Violence against Women -despite its perpetuation over centuries and its omnipresence at all social levels- entered into social consciousness and the general agenda of Social Sciences only recently, mainly thanks to feminist research, campaigns, and general social awareness. The present article analyzes in a secondary analysis of German prevalence data on Violence against Women, whether the frequency and severity of Violence against Women can be described with power laws. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Although the investigated distributions all resemble power-law distributions, a rigorous statistical analysis accepts this hypothesis at a significance level of 0.1 only for 1 of 5 cases of the tested frequency distributions and with some restrictions for the severity of physical violence. Lowering the significance level to 0.01 leads to the acceptance of the power-law hypothesis in 2 of the 5 tested frequency distributions and as well for the severity of domestic violence. The rejections might be mainly due to the noise in the data, with biases caused by self-reporting, errors through rounding, desirability response bias, and selection bias. CONCLUSION: Future victimological surveys should be designed explicitly to avoid these deficiencies in the data to be able to clearly answer the question whether Violence against Women follows a power-law pattern. This finding would not only have statistical implications for the processing and presentation of the data, but also groundbreaking consequences on the general understanding of Violence against Women and policy modeling, as the skewed nature of the underlying distributions makes evident that Violence against Women is a highly disparate and unequal social problem. This opens new questions for interdisciplinary research, regarding the interplay between environmental, experimental, and social factors on victimization

Distributions of the severity of violence suffered by women aligned by their frequency.

<p>Distributions of the severity of violence suffered by women aligned by their frequency of accounts in the context of (a) domestic violence by current partner (blue squares) or (b) physical violence during the last 12 months (black circles). Apart from the less frequent items, a good coincidence between frequency of accounts and power laws with exponent 1 (dashed lines) can be observed. Uppercase letters encode the items of domestic violence by current partner (during the entire duration of the relationship) and lowercase letters the items of physical violence (no specific offender) during the last 12 months.</p

Complementary cumulative distribution of the number of reports per women of different forms of violence experienced since the age of 16.

<p>ccdf of the number of reports per woman of physical violence (red squares), partner violence (blue circles), and sexual violence (black triangles) since the age of 16. Adjusted power laws (lines in the corresponding color) have exponents 1.49, 1.47 and 1.57 respectively. The latest data point (<40x) has been placed at x = 80 to continue the logarithmic binning of the previous 2 bins. This has been done purely for illustration and has had no influence in the reported power-law fits nor in the statistical test, as this data bin has been omitted there.</p

Cross table of the overlap between the victims of the different types of violence.

<p>The values indicate the number of women who report having at least one incidence in both of the two corresponding questions.</p

Size of the data-set.

<p>Columns indicate: Type of violence or severity question, the number of women answering the question, and the number of women who report at least one incidence of violence in the corresponding question. The last column gives the percentage of victims with respect to the values of the second column.</p

Results of parameters estimation and the statistical tests of the PL-fits.

<p>The results of the KS test are only valid in the case of the data presented in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0040289#pone-0040289-g004" target="_blank">Figure 4</a> (bottom two rows). The test procedure provided by Clauset et al <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0040289#pone.0040289-Clauset1" target="_blank">[2]</a> is not applicable on rank frequency distributions (nor on power laws with exponent 1). We fixate <i>x_min = 1</i> if not stated otherwise.</p

Complementary cumulative distribution of the number of reports per women of different forms of violence.

<p>Complementary cumulative distribution (ccdf) of the number of reports per women of sexual abuse occurring before their 16^th birthday (blue circles) or sexual violence occurring during the last 12 months (black triangles). Adjusted power laws (dashed lines in the corresponding color) have exponents 1.84 and 1.78.</p

Age distribution of the women pariticipating in the study.

<p>Black bars indicate the number of women per age group participating in the study. The blue line refers to the age distribution of the women, who have reported experiencing at least one violent strike (restricted to the data analyzed in the current study).</p

Complementary cumulative distribution of the number of edits per user, for Democrats (blue circles), Republicans (red squares) and all Wikipedia users (black diamonds).

<p>Inset shows the same data in log-log scale. In the case of all users only users with at least one edit are considered.</p