Warm greetings from Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, and from our colleagues at Carnegie Mellon and Telecom ParisTech.
After an exciting and successful 2nd prototype of our Peace Innovation Workshop at CMU-SV, we’re extremely happy and excited to announce that we’re doing it again!
What: The third iteration Peace Innovation Workshop/Hackathon (v0.3 beta)
When: 9am–5pm Fri May 11 and Sat May 12, 2012
Where: Room 109/110 at Building 23, Carnegie Mellon University-Silicon Valley, on the NASA Ames Research Campus. Or participate online here via Adobe Connect! (http://goo.gl/LyMQ2) Just log in as a guest
The Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, in partnership with jovoto is launching the first of a series of competitions centered around visualizing peace metrics. jovoto is a unique online platform that delivers creative intelligence through the power of collaboration with the global community. Together, our goal is to inspire creatives (creative people around the world) to help us name, brand and provide visualization tools for this new effort.
Our kickoff competitions are In the Name of Peace and Peace 2.0 the Icon.
In the Name of Peace: The Stanford Peace Innovation Lab wants to know how you all would name these kinds of visualizations – It’s a data map of sorts, but of social, inter-group space, in which geography, group boundaries, and time are just some of the dimensions represented. It’s also like a dashboard or instrument panel to understand peace and conflict better; Or a radar display, to better navigate a social terrain we can only see glimpses of.
Peace 2.0 The Icon: As a second step, the Stanford Peace Innovation Lab is in need of an icon for this research project – a modern symbol of peace the captures our new ability to visualize human interactions.
Peace Innovation Director Margarita Quihuis presented at TEDxMonterey May 2011. Margarita’s TEDxMonterey talk focused on how to create social change by using popular social media tools and BJ Fogg’s framework for changing behavior.
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)
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 ….
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!!
Last Friday, the Peace Innovation Lab created this video for the TEDxSantoDomingo Conference. Here, our director, Margarita Quihuis, explains the goals of this lab and includes a story of how we have seen that technology can promote positive change and peace.
This is the last in a series of articles on Capital Paul K. Chappell.
Peace v War
Paul argues that peace requires many of the same skills as war and is can be an effective replacement for war, if only signs of an upcoming war are caught and the mindset can be reversed. War CAN be prevented. The problem with war, Paul Chappell says, is “War waits until it’s too late.”
War has many warning signs – hopelessness, lack of opportunity, lack of communication, and poverty. By stopping these before they occur with antecedents to peace, war will become a relic of history.
This is the second in a series on Captain Paul K. Chappell.
Technology
Paul says the turning point of his thinking came with what he learned at West Point. The truth about modern warfare is that it is about winning hearts and minds, not killing the most people. Modern technology, such as the Internet, mass media, cell phones and YouTube, has forced war to evolve. Since the hearts and minds can be won through technology, wars are fought on CNN, Fox News and Al Jazeera as much as they are in battle. These technologies can be used to fuel a war, or they can be used to win hearts and minds without the battle.
Peace Dot partner peace.facebook.com is featured in this week’s Time Magazine. Here’s the part we love:
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, is at her most enthusiastic when she’s describing Peace.Facebook.com, part of the website that tracks the number of friendships made each day between members of groups that have historically disagreed, such as Israelis and Palestinians and Sunnis and Shi’ites. “We don’t pretend Facebook’s this profound all the time,” Sandberg says. “But is it harder to shoot at someone who you’ve connected to personally? Yeah. Is it harder to hate when you’ve seen pictures of that person’s kids? We think the answer is yes.”
The Peace Innovation Lab is a new initiative from Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab. Launched in Spring 2010, the PI Lab conducts research in innovation, mass collaboration, persuasive technologies & the potential of social networks to change society for the better.
Warm greetings from Stanford Peace Innovation Lab, and from our colleagues at Carnegie Mellon and Telecom ParisTech.
This is the last in a series of articles on Capital Paul K. Chappell.
Peace Dot partner