Tune in to the lightning talks via Adobe Connect:
Name: Hackathon
Start Time: 05/14/2011 8:00 AM PDT
Duration: 12:00
URL: http://connectpro71548199.adobeconnect.com/r48286675/

Adobe Connect will be live for the duration of the Hackathon!

Follow the dialog on Twitter!  #hackforegypt, #cloudtostreet

Join with us as we Hack For Egypt!

When: Saturday May 14

Where: Stanford d.School

Who Should Attend:

• coders
• idea people to work with coders
• activists to give context/define needs
• bloggers
• social media people to twitter and fb status
• photographers to capture images
• people to do video capture
• networkers and super-connectors

How do I get involved?

1. Learn about the activists behind Egypt’s revolution
2. Submit an idea we can work on or lend your skills to an existing project
3. Register for the Hackathon

The Backstory

Earlier this year, Egyptians combined technology and political activism to revolutionary effect . After overthrowing a thirty-year dictatorship, they face new challenges to establishing democracy. Can technology help them through the divisive times ahead?

The Unconference and Hackathon for Egypt is an opportunity to find out. On May 14, programmers and engineers will gather at Stanford University to meet with Egyptian activists and discuss applications that could help their cause. Our aim is to build a community that bridges Tahrir Square and Silicon Valley to show what activists equipped with digital tools can achieve.

Bring your computers and we’ll provide the activists and the food. The d. school venue is perfectly designed to let the ideas flow. Come check it out!

Hackathon Schedule

9:30 am Registration and Networking

10:00 am Introductions

• Ben Rowswell, Cloud to Street
  Visit to Revolutionary Cairo: A Laboratory of Political Activism
• Saad Khan, Partner, CMEA Capital
  An Introduction to Hacktivism
• Ahmed Saleh, Co-Founder of Kifaya
  How Egyptian Activists Used Technology to Drive the Revolution

10:30 am Lightning Talks to Outline App Projects (5 minutes each)

• Abdallah Helmy, A Mobile Phone App for Political Mobilization (from Cairo)
• Farhaan Ladhani, A Mesh Network for Egypt
• Nelly Corbel, Web-Training Election Monitors (from Cairo)
• Vivek Srinivasan, Crowdsourcing Constitutional Negotiations
• Ahmed Boguta, Monitoring the Egyptian Parliament (from Cairo)

11:15 am Organize Unconference & Hackathon (facilitated by Dave Nielsen)

• Developers choose an application to work on, or their own related project
• Activists in Cairo available by videoconference until 12:00 pm

12:30 pm Luncheon

1:00 pm Developers announce projects they have chosen to work on

1:30 pm to 5:00 pm:  Hackathon working groups

1:30 pm to 5:00 pm:  Unconference panels

5:00 pm:  Presentation of Progress to Date

5:30 pm:  Next Steps: On to Cairo

• How this community can help Egypt’s democracy activists going forward

6:00 pm:  Hackathon continues

Location:
the d.school @ Stanford (map)
Escondido Mall
Building 550 – Hasso Plattner Institute of Design
Stanford, CA  94305

Directions:
Enter from the alleyway between Escondido Mall and Panama Street between Buildings 540 and 550 (map)

Organizers:

• Sarina Beges, Liberation Technologies, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford
• Joshua Cohen, Professor of political science, philosophy, and law, Liberation Technologies, Stanford
• Saad Khan, Partner, CMEA Capital, Hacktivist 
• Sam King, Code the change
• Mark Nelson, Persuasive Technology Lab, Peace Innovation Lab, Stanford
• Dave Nielsen, CloudCamp
• Margarita Quihuis, Persuasive Technology Lab, Peace Innovation Lab, Stanford
• Ben Rowswell, @cloudtostreet
• Vivek Srinivasan, Liberation Technologies, Freeman Spogli Institute, Stanford
• Terry Winograd, Computer Science Department, Liberation Technologies, d.school, Stanford

Help Us Spread the Word

Spread the word by clicking the following links:

As a follow-up to Peace Dot‘s successful peace.facebook.com page, Stanford Peace Innovation Lab researcher Jane Chesher is calling on friends across political, geographic and religious conflict boundaries to come forward and share their stories through video, photography and narrative.

Here’s the scoop on how you can participate:
Friends Without Borders is calling for WORLD YOUTH PEACE CHAMPIONS to celebrate and grow friending in these countries:

Israel + Palestine

Greece + Turkey

India + Pakistan

Albania + Serbia

Do you have a friend in the opposing conflict country?  If so you could you be our next WORLD PEACE CHAMPION! Please EMAIL your application right away to ….

info@socialinteractiveinc.com

Include your name, city location, age, photo, AND a response to the question “Is world peace possible?”.

If you are chosen as a WORLD PEACE CHAMPION you’ll receive a gift incentive and become a *STAR* in our global video campaign produced in New York City!!

The project is sponsored by the UNESCO Power of Peace Network (http://thepowerofpeacenetwork.com/), and partnered by Facebook Inc (http://peace.facebook.com/) and Stanford University (http://captology.stanford.edu/).

We look forward to speaking with you soon!

Like us on Facebook!

Khan Academy is a one man operation that is transforming how education is delivered in the world.

Khan Academy founder Salman Khan believes that education is a key antecedent to peace:

We strongly believe that ignorance is the root of all conflict and that enlightenment is a fundamental ingredient for peace.

With this in mind, we are measuring our contribution to peace as the minutes of education delivered in the past week.

Khan Academy Peace Metric: 6,307,245 minutes of education delivered world-wide in the past week.

Khan Academy is an exemplary Peace Dot partner because they actively

track and measure the impact of what they do.  By using YouTube’s built in analytics plus their own, Khan Academy can quickly identify what works, what doesn’t and refine their video courses for maximum impact.

If that wasn’t enough, Khan Academy is embracing open source, mass collaboration and open innovation by inviting people to create their own instructional videos, translate existing lessons, create interactive exercise dashboards or coach students anywhere in the world.

Want to help make education truly accessible anywhere in the world?

• Become a coach
• Transcribe or caption videos
• Translate videos
• Contribute videos
• Write code

Dacher Keltner, executive director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, shares insights from the new science of touch: compassionate communication, touch therapies, and proof that “to touch is to give life.”

The social functions of touch include:

• feelings of reward
• reciprocity
• signals safety
• soothes
• releases oxytocin
• promotes cooperation

The results of Touch Therapy are even more significant:

• Increases weight of premature babies by 47%
• Reduces depression in patients with Alzheimers
• Doubles likelihood children will speak in class
• Boosts library use and enjoyment

From a persuasive technology point of view, we wonder if iPhone apps can be created that can create feelings of well being through the multi-touch interface.  Your thoughts?

Martin Hellman

Taking an engineering analysis approach, his conclusion that the risk is unacceptably high makes a lot of sense, and shocked me out of my complacency – The post-Cold War world isn’t that much safer than the Cold War world, given the continued instances where the US/NATO and Russia have come into conflict.  While none of these have made as great waves as the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, the 1995 Norwegian Rocket Incident for the first time caused then-President Yeltsin to begin the procedures for nuclear release.  That’s a pretty close call, opening the Briefcase, ostensibly in a time of peace (while under momentary threat of decapitation strike).

Based on Prof. Hellman’s estimates (and mine, after walking through his logic), of a probable failure at every branch of the decision tree somewhere in the 10-100 year range (using orders of magnitude), the risk is unacceptable.  I would prefer not to die as a result of a series of mistakes that lead to Armageddon.

Currently, the system in the US is, as far as I can tell, configured in the same paradigm as it was during the Cold War – designed to facilitate a massive response to Warsaw Pact aggression (either a first strike or precipitating incident, such as escalation of conventional war).  As a result of the Norwegian Rocket Incident of 1995 incident shows, presumably the Russian system is still functioning in the same way.  So even though we’re no longer the “sworn enemies” of Carl Sagan’s metaphor, we are still “standing waist deep in gasoline” and holding the matches.  This isn’t a good place to be standing.  This isn’t even an appropriate posture anymore, but the design of technical systems (missile silo launch command centers, ballistic missile submarines on patrol) and the maintenance of cold-war policies lend themselves to this posture.  There is still a lingering distrust that the old adversary might suddenly attack, which seems particularly ludicrous.  But moving through the branches of a treed structure does present an unsettling possibility following a path to, or past, the brink.  While tensions are not as high as they were in 1962, it is possible things could run away.  As much as I doubt that Obama or anyone in this administration would attribute even the obliteration of Washington to Russia without a radar track originating in the Motherland, the counterstrike could still be executed, within the requisite 30 minutes or less demanded by ICBM flight times.  Standing outside the room where Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev are meeting in Canada right now are officers with satellite communications devices that represent the first links in the nuclear release chain.  I wonder what those officers joke about.

I doubt in the near future Obama, Medvedev, Cameron, Sarkozy, or Jiabao would drop the hammer, or be in a position to consider it, even in a crisis which invokes NATO article V (an attack on one member is an attack against all).  Although there have been recent conflicts between Russia and Estonia (a NATO member), and the ongoing conflict between Russia and Georgia may be a point of contention between East and West, these don’t appear to be serious enough to cause general alarm.  Or maybe it’s just out of mind by virtue of not being on CNN.

Even between India and Pakistan, it would seem that for the foreseeable future nuclear exchange is unlikely, but this may change if climate change or environmental degradation causes stress on water supplies or other strategic resources.  A conflict over Kashmir could escalate to the point of general war, and possibly nuclear war.  It is conceivable that a stolen nuclear device in detonated in India could set off an exchange between Pakistan and India, but it seems unlikely to set off a global conflagration.

It is possible that if Iran were to gain nuclear capability, elements may not be deterred by MAD—faced off against a nuclear armed Israel, a limited exchange is possible, but one would hope cooler heads will continue to prevail.  And if the worst comes, the war would be limited (if one could consider any exchange limited) by Iran’s presumably small arsenal.  Israel may have a significant nuclear arsenal, but as a nation not party to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, their program remains shrouded in the deepest secrecy.

While several times during the cold war (and after) accidents threatened to unleash a full-scale exchange, one would hope that this posture is no longer maintained.  If Obama or Medvedev were awakened, I would hope he would roll over and say “go back to sleep, this has to be some kind of mistake.”  But he would have the power to get up and order a retaliatory strike, and in the decision window of less than 30 minutes, it could all go to hell fast.

So I’ll agree with Prof. Hellman that the maintenance of a hair trigger posture is insane and insanely dangerous, and we need to move towards a nuclear free world, or his global cap of 1000 warheads not on hair-trigger alert, described as “acceptable risk”.  In all seriousness, the immediate launch posture is unnecessary, as is the sheer number of warheads available for immediate use and in storage.  It is far too easy for one to be sold or stolen, and used by an entity not deterred by MAD (such as al Qaeda).  It is unlikely that an attack by a non-governmental entity would precipitate a retaliatory attack – who would we respond against?  And how?

Still too risky over a 100 year timeframe, the persuasive technology lab/peace innovation lab has some work to do to help http://nuclearrisk.org get some traction.

The article cites three new studies that suggest that video games cannot only promote violence and aggressive behavior, but also altruistic behavior. The studies looked at how pro-social video games affected the amount that kids helped other people in reality. All three studies presented correlations between the content of the game and the behaviors the study participants exhibited in reality. The full article appears here: http://www.enotalone.com/article/19734.html.

After being introduced to the idea of pro-social video games, we here at the lab decided to further explore the correlations between human behaviors and video games. In looking at this topic we looked at pro-social video games and also violent games to see how they affected human behavior.

One idea that spans out of the pro-social video game studies is the idea of video games as behavioral training devices. This has already been explored on the tactical side by the military. Earlier this year, Foreign Policy magazine looked at military video games (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/22/meet_the_sims_and_shoot_them?page=full). As part of a program to improve recruitment and training in the Army, the U.S. Military created America’s Army, a video game that presents the player with many different situations ranging from cultural sensitivity to urban warfare and combat. From these situations in the game, the idea is that the soldiers may have “logged” some hours of experience before actually being deployed – even if they are virtual experiences. Although America’s Army is the official U.S. military game, there are many other games that see to imitate warfare, the most notable of which is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in which players join a U.S. special operations team that deals with conflict in a variety of areas and must utilize machine pistols and Predator strikes.

Looking at this evidence of behavioral training, we talked to Chris Bennett about the potential for altruistic behavioral training. Can we subconsciously train people to be more cooperative and altruistic without their knowing? He cited two games, MyEmpire and FrontierVille, both of which rely on crowdsourcing for resources and materials, and collaboration with other people in order to succeed in the game.

After looking at all the evidence of behavior with relation to games, the pro-social games provide a strong motivation to shift video game content. It could change the way society interacts. At the same time, we must look at the societal questions of how people played before video games – which was often through games that imitated war and fighting anyways – and how to create positive learning video games without making them, in a favorite kid word, “lame.”

interact in a more realistically human way than simply by text through email or chat and photos on Facebook by using the 3D Avatars that imitate human behavior. As a participant in our lab’s Peace Dot project, they created a Peace Dot page for IMVU where they display the number of hugs and the number of gifts given in the last 24 hours, as well as a set of images that members of the community created to represent how they see peace. The images range from two hippies with peace signs wearing tie-dye to a woman with her child. Within the network, members can design their own world. They can create their own stuff or buy other people’s designs. It is an entire separate community that exchanges ideas and goods across cultures.

Beyond just looking at the page that IMVU decided to display for how they see their site as creating peace, we decided to look at empathy as an aspect of creating peace and how it is increased or diminished by the Internet.

One of the big ways that the Peace Innovation Lab has tried to look at tackling the often daunting concept of “peace” is through “antecedents to peace,” (http://margaritaquihuis.posterous.com/antecedents-to-peace-mind-map) or things that contribute to peace but are more concrete and directly achievable. In the case of IMVU, it falls under the peace antecedent of individual development. Within individual development it mainly develops emotional intelligence. One of the most important aspects of emotional intelligence is empathy. It is a major contributor to peace and compassion across all cultures.

In the case of the Internet, there seem to be arguments both for and against whether the Internet increases empathy. In trying to increase empathy within the  IMVU community, the company has researched many different aspects of human interaction. They have looked at how to make the users have real visceral reactions when observing the avatar interactions. Examples of this include looking at amounts of eye contact and avatar appearance. IMVU has developed avatars to use the right amount of eye contact to keep people feeling comfortable and has found that the avatars have to look unrealistic enough that people are not distracted by the realism of the avatar and can just experience the interactions. This has been successful because people using the program have had such visceral reactions as cringing, smiling, laughing and feeling uplifted based on interacting over the avatar platform.

When discussing the idea of empathy and the Internet with an IMVU employee, he discussed an idea that seems to agree with concepts our lab has already developed. He said he feels like the Internet increases empathy in breadth but not depth. It is possible with the Internet to know and empathize with more things across the entire web, but possibly not to the same depth that real interactions produce. Part of this could be a result of the fact that too much information can be overwhelming and actually make it harder to go deeper.

IMVU may not be as good as reality, but it is close and does count for some value and connection. For some people, a community like IMVU may be a step in the wrong direction socially, as it is may take away from real human interactions. However, for others it could be an important transitional step to more human interactions and emotional development. Thus, the Internet is a double-edged sword with regards to empathy and social interactions.

Enjoy!