The term benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) is popular in the open source world1, mainly as a way to acknowledge the importance of the person leading a particular project into early success and giving that person absolute rule.
But there are no benevolent dictators. Recent developments in the Wordpress world brought me back to my TYPO3 days of long ago.
Will DeepSeek be a game changer like ChatGPT was? The benefits and the public release of their models could level the playing field, as Mike Pound of the University of Nottingham argues in this Computerphile video. But will it be able to challenge the current quasi-monopoly, and democratise AI? And how accurate are the DeepSeek claims anyway?
On Thursday, the Rebooting democracy in the age of AI lecture series will continue with a conversation on AI for participatory planning, looking at the UrbanistaAI platform: a way to visually co-create the use of urban spaces.
Previous lectures in the series have featured great presentations and conversations at the forefront of AI for civic use, exploring ways it may impact democratic society, and how it may be governed.
This session may look a bit more on planning how to use AI-based tools in concrete processes. It will be great input to combine with our own experiences developing a platform for citizen dialogues.
Jon Stewart On The False Promises of AI (The Daily Show 2024-04-02)
In The Daily Show, Jon Stewart debunks the false promises of “AI for Good”, and interviews chair of the FTC Lina Khan on oversight of AI companies and algorithms.
I finally had a chance to interact with the OpenAI chat bot. I’ll happily use it as my co-worker for general consultancy work: it seems to do an excellent job in summarising the main narrative! 🙂
Inspired by Mike Gifford, I asked a couple of my own questions about the IATI Standard.
Over the last weeks, I started exploring XBRL, the eXtensible Business Reporting Language. Its purpose is “ to improve the accountability and transparency of business performance globally, by providing the open data exchange standard for business reporting.”
There are clear parallels with IATI, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, the open data exchange standard for development and aid activities I have been working on.
In essence, the data collectors benefit more than the data publishers in both cases: what can we learn?
Time to get back into the habit of capturing things on my website… First up: my calendar watch list and some events.
I’ve been keeping an “Open Dev” calendar with events related to open development and online civic space (data, standards, ethics, digital rights, and so on). I’m broadening the scope a bit to include more technical events as well. It’s “Rolf’s events watch list” now.
It’s heart-warming to get emails from people who read one of my blog posts of over a decade ago, and took the effort to write to me that their product is missing, or that they have a nice post about something too.
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Could you mention it in your article as an extra and fresh resource? It will give your readers some more useful information plus it should help you get even more engagement with your post.
A win-win!
But wait, why is there an “unsubscibe” link under your message?
For completeness, I copied my post from the Data4Development site:
The State of Open Data (Davies et al., 2019)1 is an extensive report about “all things open data”. Chapter 5 deals with open data for development assistance and humanitarian action, and highlights the crucial chicken-and-egg problem we see as well:
Been a bit too busy to write, but still “pushing” interesting items in the news feeds I follow. Here are some highlights from recent months: