1. Click to edit Master subtitle style
Open and Closed Systems
Mengqing Liu & Francesca Lyn

2. Background
 Michael Nielsen
 PhD in physics, University of Queensland
 One of the pioneers of quantum computation
 The author of more than fifty scientific paper
 Open Source Science - Science and Sharing
 Current project: Reinventing Discovery (Book)
 The book describes a major shift now occurring in how scientific
discoveries are made, a shift driven by online tools for
collaboration and sharing of scientific information.
 Lecture: The Google Technology Stack

3. Open Architecture Democracy
 Edit War on Wikipedia: wording
 Book: The culture of Wikipedia
 What is openness?
 Chaos and order (See here)
 Mathworks programming contest
 Both Wikipedia and Mathworks use open source patterns of
development
 Open source: Generally, open source refers to software
products that are freely available and offered by development
communities online. They come with no warranty but are
usually very well tested by development groups.

4. Comparison betweenWikipedia and
Mathworks
 Q: Why Wikipedia and Mathworks differ?
 A: It depends on whether the quality of the results can be
objectively scored.
 “In Mathworks competition there is an absolute, objective
measure of success that’s immediately available—the score.”
 “In Wikipedia, no such objective signal of quality is available.”
 Therefore, “agreement doesn’t scale”.

5. Common good and Consensus
 What is common good?
 John Rawls defined the common good as "certain general
conditions that are...equally to everyone's advantage”
 The Catholic religious traditiondefined it as "the sum of those
conditions of social life which allow social groups and their
individual members relatively thorough and ready access to
their own fulfillment.”
 Example of common good
 An accessible and affordable public health care system, and
effective system of public safety and security, peace among the
nations of the world, a just legal and political system, and
unpolluted natural environment, and a flourishing economic
system.

6. Common good and Consensus
 Establishing and maintaining the common good require the
cooperative efforts of some, often of many, people.
 Barrier: Different people have different ideas about what is
worthwhile or what constitutes "the good life for human
beings", differences that have increased during the last few
decades as the voices of more and more previously silenced
groups, such as women and minorities, have been heard.
 How to reach consensus?

7. OEIS
 What is OEIS?
 A freely available online database of integer sequences, created
and maintained by N. J. A. Sloane, a researcher from AT&T lab
 See the introduction film of OEIS
 Target audience: both professional mathematicians and
amateur
 Michael Nielsen: I guess the OEIS has always been sort of like
a wiki, in a very slow and manual way.
 Is it comparable for collaboration in scientific world and in
humanity/sociology world?

8. Open editing of policy documents
 Policyworks:where millions of people could help rewrite
policy, integrating the best ideas from an extraordinarily
cognitively diverse group of people
 How it works
 “You make an edit, it’s send to a randomly selected jury of your
peers… They’re invited to score your contribution, and perhaps
offer feedback.”
 Barriers
 Who is going to be responsible for the final decision?
 How to rank the results?
 How to prevent abuse of power?

9. Current application
 Google Moderator
 It is a Google service that uses crowdsourcing to rank user-
submitted questions, suggestions and ideas. The service allows
the management of feedback from a large number of people,
who can vote for the top questions that they think should be
posed and ask their own. The service aims to ensure that every
question is considered, lets the audience see others' questions,
and helps the moderator of a team or event address the
questions that the audience most cares about.
 How to use it? See here
 IdeaScale

10. Reflection: Deliberative Democracy
 Deliberative Democracy
 Open source and Deliberative democracy
 Similarity: Collective participation/efforts, collaboration
 Application of deliberative democracy:
deliberation on the Biobank in community
 Reliability

11. Background
 Steven Berlin Johnson
 undergraduate degree in semiotics from Brown, graduate
degree in English Literature from Columbia
 Distinguished Writer in Residence at the New York University
Department of Journalism
 Has written 7 published books
 Perhaps best known for Everything Bad is Good for You
 Latest book is Where Good Ideas Come From, he is on a book
tour now to promote it.

12. Where Good Ideas Come From

Subtitled “the natural history of innovation”, Johnson's
newest book is about the environment that spurs innovation

Youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU

13. “The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book:
Two Paths for the Future ofText”

14. The Commonplace Book
 Collection and response is at the heart of both blogging and
commonplace books
 New forms of value are created as the commonplace book
becomes a record of the creative process and insight into the
person assembling the book
 Commonplace books become powerful tools for learning

15. What does the contemporary commonplace
book look like?

16. The Problem of the Glass Box
 Ipad applications that do not let you copy and paste
selections are part of the problem Johnson identifies
 “We can try to put a protective layer of glass on the words, or
we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when
words are allowed to network with each other.”
 How can we accommodate the free exchange of ideas while
still maintaining copyright/intellectual property laws?

17. Propublica.org
 Non-profit news corporation based out of New York City
 Specializes in investigative journalism
 In 2010 it became the first online news source to win a
Pulitzer Prize
 Anyone can republish their stories

18. Steal our Stories
- Propublica bills itself as open-source news
- Not only can you republish their stories, they allow you to use
their tools & data
- journalist-programmers can design new applications using
their data to share with the world

19. Evernote

http://www.evernote.com/
- a suite of software and services designed for notetaking and
archiving
- a note can be text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a
photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten note
- supports a number of operating system platforms

20. Ideological Segregation Online &
Offline
 Study was done by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M.Shapiro,
both of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
 They took methodologies that have been used to identify
racial segregation and tracked how people of different
political views moved around the web
 Study was published in the National Bureau of Economic
Research
 Conclusion was that they found no evidence that the web is
becoming more segregated over time