The role of social media in civic engagement has been a hot topic ever since the Arab Spring brought the role it can play to the attention of the world.  Earlier this year the Pew Research Center produced a report into how social media impacts civic engagement.

It found that 40% of adults used social media as part of a political campaign during the 2012 presidential election.  Interestingly, online engagement was largely found to have been done by the well-educated and affluent amongst us.

I have doubts about the nature of this engagement however.  Whilst attending an event at Facebook earlier in the year, we heard from the Facebook employee responsible for their work with both presidential candidates, and it was telling how it wasn’t really engagement at all.  He spoke almost exclusively about the advertising power of Facebook.  In other words, it was a great platform for talking at voters rather than listening to and engaging with them.

Given the interesting projects being done around the world on participatory democracy it was all a bit disappointing.

Some new research took a deeper look into how social media influences our civil engagement and perhaps explains why Facebook was used just for preaching to the converted.  It explored how different personality types react to social media in a political context.  It found that there were distinct differences between how extraverts and introverts used social media politically.

Extraverted people, whilst open to new experiences, were found to use social media to reduce the heterogeneity of their social network.  In other words, they used social media to engage with people just like them, thus further entrenching their views.

Introverted people by contrast were found to do the opposite, utilising social media to increase the heterogenity of their social network and thus take in a more diverse range of opinions.

Report abstract

“Using original national survey data, we examine how social media use affects individuals’ discussion network heterogeneity and their level of civic engagement. We also investigate the moderating role of personality traits (i.e., extraversion and openness to experiences) in this association. Results support the notion that use of social media contributes to heterogeneity of discussion networks and activities in civic life. More importantly, personality traits such as extraversion and openness to experiences were found to moderate the influence of social media on discussion network heterogeneity and civic participation, indicating that the contributing role of social media in increasing network heterogeneity and civic engagement is greater for introverted and less open individuals.”

So given that Facebook tends to attract the more extraverted type, it’s perhaps not all that surprising that there aren’t too many floating voters lurking about the place. Of course, this doesn’t get away from the failure of many in political life to do real engagement rather than one way communicating, but that’s for another discussion.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year you’ll have no doubt come across MOOCs.  Sites like Coursera, edX and Udacity have made huge waves by providing a platform for some of the finest universities in the world to offer courses online for free.

They’ve proved hugely popular, with many courses attracting over 100,000 enrollments.  Thus far however they haven’t generally offered formal certification at the end of them.  Sure, Coursera have teamed up with Pearson to allow you to take a test at their Vue centres, but they still fall short of an actual degree when it comes to validating your knowledge.

The rise of the MOOCs has had a number of contributory factors, not least of which have been the high cost of tuition at universities.  Coupled with the spread of high speed internet and it’s become possible to offer courses online for reasonably low costs to large numbers of people.

Georgia Institute of Technology have taken this to its natural next stage by offering an online only masters degree in computing.  They’re teaming up with Udacity to power the course, and hope to attract around 10,000 students onto the course, with each paying $7,000.  That is just 1/6 the usual price of the degree.

As a dating brand eHarmony are one of the best.  Whilst others seem to take the shotgun approach to matching you up with a dream partner, eHarmony have been using their semantic algorithms to provide smarter matches for over a decade now.

So it kinda makes sense that they’d be applying that same matching technology to recruitment, right?  They’re looking to provide a deeper exploration of each candidate than can be provided by more traditional recruitment methods such as the humble CV or even your LinkedIn profile.

“It seems like there’s a social problem here that needs fixing, much in the same that when we started with relationship matching, there just seemed to be a problem,” said Grant Langston, eHarmony’s vice president of customer experience.

It’s an interesting approach, and one that seems to be focusing attention as much on cultural alignment as actual abilities.  After all, research has shown that cultural fit is a better indicator of success in a new role than aptitude.

Langston said eHarmony’s advantage may be in eliciting more honest answers to tough questions. For instance, if you want to know how much a job candidate values work-life balance, the candidate is likely to give you the answer “in the way they think you want them to answer it. It’s such an artificial and weird interaction,” Langston said.

Now it’s worth saying that the product is still in development and is not planned for release until the back end of 2014, so there are still many questions left unanswered in terms of just how the product will work.

Will they be able to compete against established players such as Kenexa, who were of course bought by IBM recently, and who also administer tests to determine the suitability of a candidate.  I suppose only time will tell, but it’s certainly a move that’s worth keeping an eye on.

Organisations around the world are striving to become more innovative, whether that’s in producing new products, improving processes, or simply doing things better, innovation is seen as critical to survival in difficult times.

Anyone with an interest in innovation should therefore be following closely the group formed by three innovation heavy weights.  The Innovation Partnership Program has been created by XPrize, Singularity University and Deloitte to get industry together with inventors, scientists and other developers twice a year with the goal of funding new competitions.

It’s a three year project, and the first get together was hosted earlier this year, and saw 60 leaders from the likes of Google and Qualcomm converge to toss around ideas on areas such as 3D printing and crowdsourcing.  Participants are charged $250,000 for a seat at the event, during which it’s hoped that they’ll get in on the ground floor of ideas and innovations.

“IPP is proof of the amazing and productive dialogue that can result when a group of diverse and daring industry leaders, scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, and thought leaders come together to discuss innovative business strategies and exponential technologies,” said Kian Gohar, Executive Director, Innovation Partnership Program. “We are very fortunate to have such great partners that share our passion and commitment to this unique ecosystem where the Fortune 500 meets Silicon Valley.”

The March IPP event was the first in a multi-year series of events where Fortune 500 leaders will meet innovative start-ups and entrepreneurs to expand their partnership ecosystem across Silicon Valley and reach across global markets to connect the most knowledgeable industry leaders and innovators in a highly curated and unprecedented summit.

It’s an interesting approach, but a part of me wonders about the merit of making it so exclusive.  A major trend in discovery, and indeed a central premise behind the XPrize, is that you’re inviting insight from far and wide and literally tapping into the wisdom of the crowd.  It’s a move away from the suggestion that everything needs to be invented in-house by your team of boffins towards the acceptance that innovations often come from diverse sources.  Indeed, only recently GE opened up a large chunk of their patents to Quirky, a community of inventors, in the hope that they can make use of the patents and create products that would not be created internally.

Now it should be said that Quirky were present at the initial IPP event so it is certainly possible that their crowdsourced model of innovation will be tapped into more often, and indeed that more companies will take the GE approach to opening up their intellectual property.  Here’s hoping.

The role of social media during disasters seems to be growing ever larger.  The obvious recent example is during the Boston bombings, where social media was used throughout the event.

A nice example of just how valuable it is has come from a new study into human behaviour during a civil war.  Research conducted by the Flowminder Foundation has used mobile phone data to prove how predictable population movements were during the 2011 civil war in the Ivory Coast.

It found that peoples movements during the crisis could be predicted with 88% accuracy.  This was no one off, as the results matched well with population movement during the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

This matters, because being able to tell how people will respond to an emergency will massively help the aid effort reach them with the assistance they need.

They tracked 1.9 million sim cards for 42 days prior to the earthquake, and for 158 days after the event to get a good picture of population movement during that time.  Their analysis included calculations for the radius of gyration (a measure of the size of trajectories) to estimate how much a subscriber moved, and entropy measures to define the disorder and predictability of an individual’s movements.

Whilst not quite as interesting in an intellectual sense, the infographic below provides a nice overview of how social media is currently being used in disaster response.  It highlights the important role it’s playing, whilst the research highlighted earlier is yet more evidence that this role is only going to grow.