Collaboration over the Web is still evolving. One way it might be immediately improved is by adding more women to collective intelligence projects and by shutting up the loud mouths. I'm not idly speculating here, those were the findings of a recent study by MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence.

Back to what Kelly wrote. He posits that more previously impossible things will emerge thanks to "large-scale collaboration, or immense collections of information, or global structures, or gigantic real-time social interactions." He continues:

"Just as a tissue is a new, bigger level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures are a new bigger level for individual humans. And in both cases the new level breeds emergence. New behaviors emerge from the new level that were impossible at the lower level. Tissue can do things that cells can't. The collectivist organizations of wikipedia, Linux, the web can do things that industrialized humans could not."

This thinking dovetails nicely with the MIT report. Carnegie Mellon's Anita Woolley explains the findings more in this video:

The implications of all of this for any company doing online business is clear: optimizing groups with more women and more democratic discussion is just as important as casting your crowdsourcing net far and wide. As Aaron Saenz at Singularity Hub put it: "With enough research the crowds of tomorrow may be optimized for the best possible amounts of collective intelligence. Not just huge amounts of thought-power, but efficiently organized huge amounts of thought-power."

It's also something that tech conference organizers should bear in mind. I for one could do with less loud, opinionated people dominating group discussions - as often those people are the least thoughtful.

Kevin Kelly concludes that "humanity is migrating towards its hive mind." Whether or not you agree with that somewhat extreme position, collective intelligence will continue to be a big driver of Web innovation. We just need more women and less loud mouths, don't you think?

Photo credit: I Love Milwaukee

App Inventor was a Google Labs project that was discontinued last week, but Google open-sourced the code. The MIT Center for Mobile Learning's adoption of the code comes as a relief to fans of App Inventor, many of whom worried that no one would step up to carry on its development.

The Center for Mobile Learning will be co-directed by professors Hal Abelson, Eric Klopfer and Mitchel Resnick. Abelson's input helped shape the initial development of Android App Inventor in 2008, aiming "to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world." He says that Resnick's Scratch software, also housed at MIT, was inspiration for the project. App Inventor uses the OpenBlocks framework, another MIT project advised by Klopfer, to visually represent blocks of code, so that App Inventor users can simply build their applications from a menu of modular options.

The center's stated goal is "transforming education and learning through innovation in mobile computing." Android App Inventor was popular among computer science educators because it lowered the barriers to entry for new developers and served as a teaching tool to computer science students. Its new home at MIT will reassure those who feared that this tool would become deprecated after Google stopped development.

"Google incubated App Inventor to the point where it gained critical mass," says Dr. Maggie Johnson, Google's Director of Education and University Relations. "MIT's involvement will both amplify the impact of App Inventor and enrich the research around it. It is a perfect example of how industry and academia can work together effectively."

Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

The indictment (a full copy is here) details Schwartz's purchase of a laptop, which he used to "systematically access and rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR." JSTOR is an online database of academic journals. It provides the full texts of digitized journals, with back issues for some of the most popular ones dating back hundreds of years. A non-profit organization, JSTOR offers its service to primarily academic libraries, who in turn make the content available to their patrons

In a statement today, JSTOR says that last fall and winter it "experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners' content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems."

The indictment details that how Schwartz did just that, from the purchase of the laptop to the creation of ghost accounts on the MIT network, to the break-in of a wiring closet where Swartz had his equipment stored.

Why He Did It

Why would Aaron Swartz want 4 million academic journal articles? Blogger Jason Kottke says "it's not too difficult to guess," and points to Swartz's earlier efforts to download and distribute files from Pacer the government-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records system. When Pacer was opened to a limited number of libraries, Swartz among others, the New York Times reported, tried to "download as many court documents as they could, and send them to him for republication on the Web, where Google could get to them."

It's not clear if this is what Swartz had in mind by copying the JSTOR database: "liberating," if you will, the journal articles for more open consumption. But in its statement, JSTOR says that it had already reached an agreement with Swartz and had "received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed."

Whatever the intention, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts makes clear the government's position: "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." Even though it appears as though JSTOR was not interested in pressing charges (it has declined to comment specifically about that), the government has leveled some serious felony charges against Swartz.

But rest assured scholars everywhere, even though Swartz allegedly "stole" 4 million journal articles, they're still all available in JSTOR.

In court in Boston today, Swartz plead not-guilty on all counts. His next court date is set for September 9.

Image credits: Flickr user Oneras

"Our goal is to build the ultimate game creation experience, one that democratizes the game creation process by eliminating all technical barriers, leaving one's imagination as the limiting factor," says Stencyl co-founder Jonathan Chung.

And like Scratch, this means that Stencyl could be a great tool for placing game creation in the hands of some of gaming's biggest fans: kids. "Teaching kids how to code is a hard problem because the rules of syntax and other similar intricacies get in the way of learning the core concepts of learning how to think logically," says Chung. "I believe that kids, even younger ones, have the ability to think logically. As we've seen in our beta program, using a visual programming environment like Stencyl or MIT Scratch, breaks down barriers and allows kids to grasp those fundamentals and build sophisticated games on their own."

The success of Scratch doesn't just come from that visual programming element or from having an easy-to-use toolset. Rather it's a result of a great community around the project as well. Stencyl has also modeled itself on Scratch in this way with its "StencylForce," its own game development community. This will allow users to get support and ideas from one another, as well as share and download openly-licensed resources.

Currently, the game creation tool lets users build Flash games for Mac and PC, but the company plans to roll out support for iOS over the summer. It has a much larger roadmap as well, with plans for an iTunes-like marketplace - for games and for the games' building blocks - as well.

Stencyl's game creation software is currently free and works on Mac, Windows, and Ubuntu.

"Normally (non-governmental organizations) organizations import foreign labor into Haiti due to the difficulty of finding local talent -- a problem we are trying to combat."

A Resume for the Developing World

Here's how it works.

1. A displaced, unemployed Haitian calls the toll-free number (courtesy of Digicel): 5656 in Haiti, or +509 37031042 from abroad
2. Creole (Haitian French) speakers, in Haiti and abroad, call in and translate those messages into English and other languages
3. NGOs search the database for local laborers who can fill their open positions

Those phoning in are prompted to tell stories that illustrate their experiences. The prompts have been recorded by Haitian radio personality Bob Lemoine and the tool is being advertised with PSAs on Haitian radio, said Zinman.

"We have structured the interaction to help people tell what we think are relevant stories from their life that translate into employable skills. We first start by asking the basics--name, gender, education level (to proxy for literacy), can you work at night, and are you physically strong and healthy. Then we ask about their experiences with a wide range of skills. We frame the skill questions with examples to cue them and disambiguate. We ask about first-aid, construction, languages, child care, laundry, sewing, cleaning, repair, and transportation."

For those approaching the site, either as a job seeker, translator or NGO, it is simple and straightforward, as well as graphically arresting. For the NGOs, it helps them minimize labor costs, also a benefit for donors. For those effected by a crisis, not only does it help the NGO serving them to become more efficient, but it gives them extra access to the means to keep themselves and their family safe and fed, work.

The Chicken and the Egg

Konbit spent a good portion of last year approaching NGOs with the help of consultant Angela Dean at D&A Development Solutions.

"We spoke to the UN Development Program, Clinton Foundation, Partners-In-Health, Peace Dividend Trust, at the State Department, and more. Everyone was the same--they thought the project sounded great and to let them know when it was deployed. We wanted more concrete feedback on how to cater the system to their interests, but they were so overloaded already and they didn't know if this was pure vaporware considering the timing. So we discovered the answer to the chicken & egg is egg."

Now, after beta-testing the system in Miami, the egg has hatched in Haiti.

To hear some of the phoned-in audio resumes, click here and select Haitian Creole as the language. If you speak it, here's where you can also contribute to the translation effort.

The project is open source and the code is available on Konbit's Bitbucket page. The hope is that this process can be rolled out to each new crisis requiring in-country labor.

First, however, the chick will have to grow into a hen and lay eggs of its own. To facilitate that, the Konbit folks intend to approach the NGOs who were skeptical the first time out again in January. If the NGOs see the power of the system, it may wind up materially adding to the list of things a competent NGO can do when they've got the people they're supposed to be serving helping them do so.

There has been no mechanism for instruction for and no interaction among MIT OCW students. Until now.

At the beginning of this academic year, MIT OpenCourseWare and OpenStudy joined forces in order to provide an interactive environment for those studying certain MIT courses. OpenStudy, a social study network that originated at Georgia Tech and Emory University, allows users to work collaboratively and to answer one another's questions.

Steve Carson, MIT OpenCourseWare's External Relations Director, told ReadWriteWeb that MIT tried to have a BBS several years ago to foster discussions about courses, but that there were never really enough traffic for any one course. And it's this experience, perhaps that made the pilot program for the OCW OpenStudy groups only tackle three MIT courses: Introduction to Computer Science, Single Variable Calculus, and Chinese I.

The response, says Carson, has been "extraordinary." There are now 3000 students participating in the CS study group, 2400 in the calculus study group, and 800 in the Chinese one.

More Students, More Courses

And seeing this response, MIT and OpenStudy have added more study groups - there are study groups for ten courses now - which in just a couple of week's time, have elicited enrollment from hundreds of students.

According to Phil Hill, OpenStudy's CEO, "Our goal is to bring a more social learning experience to students on MIT OpenCourseWare by ensuring they don't have to study alone. Seeing so many of them now working together from all corners of the globe is a great first step." And this global element is important, adds Carson, noting that participants will almost always find someone online in the study groups.

Carson says that the response points to new ways for the MIT OpenCourseWare program to expand as it's clear OCW learners are interested not just in the availability of the course materials but in a community in which to share and discuss the ideas they're learning.

"That is simply not under consideration," says Steve Carson, MIT OpenCourseWare's External Relations Director. After all, there are some 250 sites that mirror MIT OpenCourseWare and over 10 million copies of course packages have been downloaded. The information is already out there. And the mission of the program remains the same: "open sharing of MIT teaching materials with educators, students, and self-learners around the world."

Launched in 2002, the MIT site provides open access to the core academic content - syllabi, lecture notes, problem sets and solutions, exams, reading lists, and even a selection of video lectures - from more than MIT 2,000 courses, presenting almost the school's entire curriculum.

Initially aimed at collaboration within academia, the materials have been accessed by over 70 million visitors from all over the world, 43% of whom are "independent learners," that is those who aren't educators or enrolled students.

Who Pays for "Information for Public Good"?

Although there is no paywall in store for the program, Carson does say that MIT OCW has to be mindful of budgetary issues. The program cost $3.7 million to run last year. The site now features a prominent "Donate Now" button. Carson says that small donations - around the $50 level - comprised about $220,000 in the program's revenues last year, and the program hopes to hit $500,000 this fiscal year.

Likening MIT OpenCourseWare to the "information for public good" services of NPR and PBS, Carson says that the program will seek funding from both charitable organizations, as well as corporate underwriters. Currently the program is considering advertising on the website, something Carson thinks will appeal to organizations who want to be in front of a global audience of well-educated people.

As Carson notes, there are many pieces in building a sustainable OpenCourseWare ecosystem - developing learning activities around the courseware and rethinking how accreditation and certification work, for example - so funding the programs that put academic materials online is only a part of that.

MIT scientists announced this week that they have created a new kind of fiber capable of detecting and emitting sound. "Throughout their history a key premise has remained essentially unchanged," the research team wrote in Nature Materials, "fibres are static devices, incapable of controllably changing their properties over a wide range of frequencies."

Professor Yoel Fink and team says they've upended that history and have developed a process for making fiber that can act like a microphone or a speaker. As with any new type of sensor, the platform possibilities are intriguing - the degree of personal intimacy (pants with patience, shirts that sass you back) makes this particularly potent.

We wrote this Spring about 10 Smart Clothes You'll Be Wearing Soon, but Fink's creation may be the smartest of the smart clothes bunch.

All this instrumentation of personal items and objects is going to require some serious deliberation over privacy policies and standards. If my clothes are listening to me, I want to be very sure I know to whom they are repeating what they hear. That conversation has barely begun.

Fink's research was supported by MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). So you can be sure that consumer privacy rights are somewhere on everyone's agenda. Scientists, of course, are only in charge of creating clothes that can hear - not deciding when they should listen.

Photo: Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT/Greg Hren

MIT says that the objective of these visualizations was to determine how a city performs during a special event or a sudden emergency.

One of the findings of this data is that the Inauguration was a multi-day event for many - there were marked increases in mobile phone activity on the Sunday preceding the Tuesday inauguration and mobile phone activity only returned to normal levels on the Thursday following the event.

The following version of The City features an animated map of the United States:

The World visualization shows phone data from international visitors who were present at President Obama's inaugeration. There were people from 138 countries, over half of all the countries in the world. The top countries represented were Canada, Great Britain, France, and Puerto Rico. Those countries all had a fivefold increase in call activity compared with a normal day. In the U.S., the top calling states were also the country's most populous: California, Florida, New York, and Texas.

How Can This Data Be Used?

These are all pretty 'info porn' graphics but, as we've questioned before with MIT SENSEable City Lab, what actual use are these visualizations?

Up till now, MIT claims, it has been "difficult to monitor urban dynamics in real time." Traditional methods have been head counts, surveys, aerial inspection, and satellite image analysis, but they are "costly and slow to produce quantitative results." The key to the approach demonstrated above is "to process existing information in real time from the telecommunications infrastructure."

Real-time: that's a term we're hearing an awful lot of this year. In the case of MIT SENSEable City Lab, real-time data is largely obtained via mobile phone networks - which MIT regards as "a nervous system for the city" and which can therefore provide useful information and services to people.

MIT says that the real-time feedback loop from mobile phone data "has the potential to influence many urban functions and can help local authorities, service providers, businesses, and citizens themselves to improve the economic, social, and environmental sustainability of the places they inhabit."

After installing a small Firefox plugin, Facette adds two icons to your status bar - one for bookmarking new pages and one for accessing your bookmarks. The Facette site itself presents both the standard, tag-based view of your bookmarks and Facette's own, more structured data. Because Facette sits on top of Delicious, all your Facette bookmarks are automatically also available on your default Delicious page. Indeed, Facette works by creating a number of new tags in your Delicious library.

Being a research project, Facette is still a little bit rough around the edges, but it looks like a great way to keep your Delicious library more organized - especially when you are using Delicious to keep track of a larger research project. If you decide to use Facette, the developers also request that you sign up for a user study on the homepage, though this is completely optional.

We will post the audio from the show at the end, but we hope you join us LIVE on Calliflower or Facebook.

Here are the details of our guests in this show:

• Sridhar Vembu, CEO, Zoho
• Raju Vegesna, Evangelist, Zoho
• Martin May, co-founder, BrightKite
• Brady Becker, co-founder, BrightKite

UPDATE: the audio is available now.

Download MP3