Mom did a very brave thing, considering where and when she lived... She watched a TV documentary about transgender identity... She let it change her thinking. .. turned to me during a commercial break and said, “I think maybe sometimes God makes mistakes.”... never spoke an unkind word about gay, lesbian, or transgender people after that day. For …

“We wanted democracy... but got mobocracy.”... Bots generated one out of every five political messages posted on Twitter in America’s presidential campaign last year... “we need to reform our attention economy.”... groups which had mostly been excluded from the mainstream media... developed the dark arts they would use to further their agendas..…

“fake news”... is grossly inadequate to explain the nature and scale of the problem... is being used by politicians... against the fourth estate and an excuse to censor free speech... There are four distinct motivations ... political, financial, psychological (for personal satisfaction) and social (to reinforce our belonging to communities or “tr…

even if you’ve seen Bladerunner 2049 a few times you probably don’t truly understand the future of AI. But don’t let a lack of knowledge stop you from being seen as an AI industry expert.

There are 17 people on the task force, including diplomats, journalists and computer experts, and it has a mandate to combat misinformation coming out of Russia. One of its tools is a website called EUvsDisinfo.eu, which hosts a database with a selection of the most common lies disseminated by Russian outlets

small experiments aimed at customizing that story selection to the individual reader, based on a variety of signals... where readers are located... the last time a reader visits the site. If,... publishes a particularly enterprising story on a Monday, but a reader doesn’t visit ... after that story has left the homepage ... personalize the user’s…

News Quality Scoring Project ... humans and algorithm to separate “commodity news” from “value-added news” ... based on quantifiable and qualitative signals — like word count, freshness versus evergreen material, quote density, contextualization, and the presence of a byline... human/machine, subjective/objective hybrid as the still-under-constru…

“Governments in Europe have been spending money for years on improving the availability of services online, and uptake was always below expectations... citizens didn’t want to use the online platform. The idea was to digitise a process without improving it.”... there is a much bigger prize ... an opportunity to use the internet as a platform for…

the hashgraph consensus algorithm... much more cost-effective ... 50,000 times the speed, safer ... more efficient ... mathematically fairer than the blockchain.... the future of the internet and decentralized technology. 

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

Resources and first thoughts from my recent ‘EU communities & policy participation’ workshop at the European Week of Regions and Cities (EWRC).

AI is increasingly being used to support public participation in policy. While they offer a lot, they could invisibly skew policy if used carelessly.- 3rd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy 

Did participants in the ‘Future of Europe’ process influence President Juncker’s State of the European Union speech, as promised? Of course not. Rightly.- 2nd post in preparation for my EWRC 2017 workshop on online communities and public participation in policy

Saying goodbye to my oldblog on my old platform’s 10th birthday.

Although curation can save very significant time to those who benefit from it, it positively does not save any time at all to the curators who exercise it. It does to those who benefit from it... it requires the author to find, vet/verify, organize high quality information from multiple sources, and to add value and perspective ... What follows is…

In an era of “wicked problems” why are current leadership behaviours and culture apparently not fit for purpose? ... so many failures in policy and strategic forecasting? Are they human frailties? Or ... systemic?

appointing facilitators to help us make the most of each meeting....more effective, so you (and everyone else) can make the most of your time.more inclusive, because the loudest person won’t dominate the room.more fun. You’re digging into challenges, identifying what can actually get done, and moving on.Here are a couple of typical meeting challen…

This page is to help co-create the fourth U.S. National Action Plan (NAP 4) with input from civil society. This is one opportunity to suggest and/or comment on the NAP 4 framework and ideas presented below. Share your NAP 4 feedback by commenting on a GitHub issue below or propose a new commitment by following the guidance and creating a new issue…

to create a team that is collectively intelligent, you likely need to focus on three specific factors that he and his colleagues have identified in their research...

This is a heavily updated repost of my latest Top3ics newsletter. It’s not a copy/paste repost, because Before you Repost it, ReThink It.

Confirmation bias... such a prevalent feature of human cognition, that until recently a second phenomenon has been hidden in plain sight. Recent research suggests that something called desirability bias may be just as prevalent in our thinking... When future desires and past beliefs are incongruent, desire usually wins out.

This edition focuses on getting the most out of podcasts and so includes a new tweak to my personal content strategy.

the more expensive the service a B2B company provides, the more incomprehensible its website... Do they have nothing of value to provide, and hide behind flowery marketing babble that’s as empty as their offering? ... tell people who you are, what you do, and maybe even why they should be interested. ... not look to dazzle with style over substan…

The open-plan office continues to doggedly spread, despite study after study suggesting it makes employees more miserable, more ill, less friendly and less productive... if a company is determined to inflict this woe on its workers, it should observe some basic rules...:

I was particularly ashamed of the way that the AAA ratings, which were in some sense a mathematical promise of safety, had been actually just lies, mathematical lies... like a weaponized mathematics ... actually people don’t want to know what their actual risk ... mathematics ... was being used ... so that people could go on doing essentially corr…

In the realm of knowledge, monopoly and conformism are inseparable perils. The danger is that these firms will inadvertently use their dominance to squash diversity of opinion and taste. Concentration is followed by homogenization... news media ... have rushed to produce articles that will flourish on those platforms... a duplication of the news…

SocialChallenges.eu is a new, highly interactive platform dedicated to pilot-testing a new approach to stimulating startups, making innovation ecosystems more efficient and solving social and environmental problems. 

While consumers are increasingly prepared to pay for online services, news is seen as less valuable than entertainment apps like Netflix and Spotify, according to a new report... consumers may be more interested in paying for experiences that aggregate multiple news brands and perspectives than for any single brand... the widespread availability …

What separates honest people from not honest people is not necessarily character. It's opportunity... rationally, more people ought to get away with cheating than actually do.... the flip side ... is that people are also unthinkingly dishonest... small slips without really thinking about it ... the brain reacts very strongly to a first act of l…

Habitual googling leads us to mistakenly believe we know more than we actually do ... even when we no longer have access to the internet. The more you use Google, it seems, the smarter you feel without it...