The govcom.org foundation, making things visible

From What The Wiki?!

The govcom.org foundation was present at WhatTheHack to give an overview of some of their recent projects. Starting off with a mapping of the Myanmar e-commerce debate (who are the players, the locals or the usual suspects: the big multinationals), a team of four of the many contributors to the govcom.org foundation (consisting of hackers, social scientists and information designers) presented the cases.

The internet penetration map is a recent project for the ZKM exhibition in Karlsruhe, and shows that the internet is not as global as we hackers like to think, there is a lot of ground to cover, a lot of area to be wired (or wifi-ed of course!).

The presentation also featured a video presenting the issuecrawler tool, an online application that is used by scientists world-wide to research interlinking relationships on the web. The case study used to present this tool was the Narmada Dams. The video gives a good overview of the govcom.org method.

Finally, research about how different media segments cover the recent dividing barrier in Israel. The results show that certain terms, reflecting the perspective of looking at the matter, are used by certain segments of the media. This is a great example of how the govcom.org foundation makes things visible.

Finally, an invitation was given to use the issuecrawler or any of the other tools developed by the govcom.org foundation (did we mention that most of the tools are available under GPL, and those that aren't are in progress of becoming so?). Interested parties could visit http://www.govcom.org/ for more info and contact details, whereas those curious about the issuecrawler may visit http://www.issuecrawler.net/ to request an account.

Finally, the isseucrawler was used to map the urls of those present at whatthehack, the results can be found at http://wiki.whatthehack.org/index.php/Who%27s_at_what_the_hack_%28and_what_seems_to_be_the_main_interest%29