About the Peace Innovation Lab
The Peace Innovation Lab is a new initiative from Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab. Launched in Spring 2010, the PI Lab is focused on casting a spotlight on how technology and emerging social behaviors and insights are promoting new paths to global peace.
Our steps for creating a peace technology infrastructure include:
- peace technology course at Stanford
- blogging about peace technology examples
- creating direction of peace technology initiatives
- developing an analytics/metrics framework for measuring pro-social behaviors across social media platforms
- developing teaching materials
- preparing to fund trials
- creating network of peace innovation labs
- systematic insights (resources)
More Info/Related Articles:
- HCI For Peace: Peace innovation from Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab
- Facebook Peace Innovation Fan Page
Peace Innovation Course
Offered spring quarter 2008, the course goal was to learn how to invent peace, and then to create resources for others to do the same. Students worked in small teams to run peace innovation trials with Web 2.0 technology. For example, how can YouTube be used to promote greater harmony? How about Flickr? or Google Maps.
More Info:
Peace Dot
Launched in October 2009, PeaceDot’s goal is simple: persuade any individual, organization or corporation with a website to create a peace subdomain that spotlights what they are doing to help promote peace in the world. So far, over 50 sites ranging from Facebook to the Dalai Lama Foundation, SourceForge to CouchSurfing, in multiple languages have created peace dot pages around the world.
For more information:
Peace Metrics
Building on work and insights found from Peace Dot, our goal is to create a common protocol for measuring peace “Touches” across social networking and other sites that have relevant data on social connectivity.
EPIC Global Challenge
EPIC Challenge is a multidisciplinary research collaboration launched by a team from Stanford’s Persuasive Technology and Peace Innovation Labs. The Earth-wide Peace Innovation Collaboration Challenge (aka EPIC Challenge) is an open innovation process designed to measurably reduce “wicked problems.”
CloudtoStreet
In partnership with Freeman Spogli Institute’s Liberation Technologies program, the Cloud to Street project aims to contribute the expertise and networks its members have developed in the fields of international politics and diplomacy, democracy promotion and communications to ensure that the networked power of Egyptian activists wields as much influence in offline political processes as they do online.
HackforEgypt Unconference and Hackathon
On May 14, 2011 programmers and engineers gathered at Stanford University to meet with Egyptian activists and discuss applications that could help their cause. Our aim was to build a community that bridges Tahrir Square and Silicon Valley to show what activists equipped with digital tools can achieve. Activists and programmers submitted and vetted technology projects and converged on four projects for implementation.
Design for Peace
Grassroots efforts such as HCI for Peace have begun to ask the question of how to use computing technologies to promote peace and prevent conflict. From a design thinking perspective, how might products and services be conceived with the intent of promoting emotional well being, guide behaviors around conflict resolution, improve communciations or positively affect some other element of peace?
Liberation Technologies
Leveraging Terry Winograd’s work, we’re especially interested in the emerging ways internet and social technologies are being used to advance various human rights and peace efforts around the world.
Social Peace Apps
Can Facebook social games be used to teach non-violent communication? Can mobile iPhone Apps teach children anti-bullying interventions? Let us know what you’re developing and the results you’re getting from your applications.
Manor Labs – an experiment in mass participation civic engagement
Manor Labs is a study in how technology can condition citizens toward more active participation in identifying, prioritizing and solving local community problems. The Stanford Peace Innovation Lab partnered with the City of Manor, Texas, population 6500, to explore the use of persuasive social and mobile technologies to increase constructive collaboration and participation between citizens and local government. Since inception, the City of Manor has received input from over 800 participants on their ideation platform, evaluated 80 ideas and implemented 5. In addition, the City of Manor has become a recognized leader for municipal innovation in the United States.
Relief 2.0 – community- based disaster response and relief
In Relief 2.0 we take an inside look of an emergent phenomenon – Agile Crisis Response made possible by social and mobile technologies and the resultant crowdsourced efforts that allowed people to remotely provide tangible assistance in disaster relief and recovery through crowdsourced mapping, victim identification, family reunification, logistics and mobile medical records collection. Our empirical research has included field assistance in Haiti, the Haiti Relief 2.0 conference at Stanford, and the coordination of CrisisCamp Chile for the Chilean earthquake and the Entrepreneurial Relief and Disaster Recovery @ CrisisCamp Stanford event.
TEDxHayward May 19 2011
The theme for this year’s TEDxHayward is Peace Innovation where we cast a spotlight on how technology and emerging social behaviors and insights are promoting new paths to global peace.
Peace Innovation Lab Network
The Peace Innovation Lab is becoming a Peace Innovation Lab Network with sites at Cal State University East Bay and Manor Labs in Texas. Interested in launching your own Peace Innovation Lab? Contact us.
Want to Get Involved?
We’re in the process of building our Peace Innovation Lab team.
Requirements:
- Have read and familiar with Persuasive Technology materials, BJ’s book
- Commitment to lead or contribute in a meaningful way in one of the research areas
- Commit to attend 75% of lab meetings (3 out of 4 per month)
- Commit to completion of one or more deliverables for Peace Innovation Conference end of summer 2010
Summer Internship Opportunities
We have a variety of summer internship opportunities aligned with our research and conference efforts. Check out the opportunities here.
Contact Us
Margarita Quihuis, Peace Innovation Lab Director
BJ Fogg, Persuasive Technology Lab Director
