Chris Csikszentmihalyi, Cornell University (USA)

Chris Csikszentmihalyi is Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University. Previously, he was European Research Area Chair and Scientific Head at M-ITI in Madeira,Portugal. He founded and directed the MIT Center for Future Civic Media (C4) as well as the Information Culture group at the MIT Media Lab, creating communication technologies for cultural and political applications. He currently serves on the board of the Datactive ERC project at the University of Amsterdam and the EPSRC Center for Doctoral Training in Digital Civics at the University of Newcastle.

Abstract

Small Platforms to Leverage Data from Below

While it is true that we live in a world of data, unfortunately most of it is gathered by large platform companies and can't be used by citizens in ways that help them. In past work on sustainability and extraction, Chris Csikszentmihalyi found that the government kept data on narrow areas where it needed to enforce particular aspects of industry, but in many cases this data was 1) compromised by "regulatory capture," and 2) of more relevance to industry than to citizen health and well-being. With this insight, Chris and his team created “spin off” enterprises that helped activists generate new forms of data. The three organizations that were perhaps most successful (and have been all running now for 10+ years) were publiclab.org, sourcemap.com, and littlesis.org.

In this conversation, Chris will examine his current work on helping these and other groups better understand how to create small, self-sustaining mission-led enterprises to do this kind of public interest technology work. He will discuss several different practical examples, focusing on different organizations create, use, and leverage data for progressive politics.

Chair: Heitor Alvelos (FBAUP)

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