This post was written with Benjamin Mako Hill. It is a summary of a paper just published in American Behavioral Scientist. You can also read the full paper: The remixing dilemma: The trade-off between generativity and originality. It is part of a series of papers I have written with Mako Hill using data from Scratch. You can find the others on my website.

Remix Diagram

Remixing — the reworking and recombination of existing creative artifacts — represents a widespread, important, and controversial form of social creativity online. Proponents of remix culture often speak of remixing in terms of rich ecosystems where creative works are novel and highly generative, however, examples like this can be difficult to find. Although there is a steady stream of media being shared freely on the web, only a tiny fraction of these projects are remixed even once. On top of this, many remixes are not very different from the works they are built upon. Why is some content more attractive to remixers? Why are some projects remixed in deeper and more transformative ways?

We try to shed light on both of these questions using data from Scratch — a large online remixing community. Although we find support for several popular theories, we also present evidence in support of a persistent trade-off that has broad practical and theoretical implications. In what we call the remixing dilemma, we suggest that characteristics of projects that are associated with higher rates of remixing are also associated with simpler and less transformative types of derivatives.

Our study is focused on two interrelated research questions. First, we ask why some projects shared in remixing communities are more or less generative than others. “Generativity” — a term we borrow from Jonathan Zittrain — describes creative works that are likely to inspire follow-on work. Several scholars have offered suggestions for why some creative works might be more generative than others. We focus on three central theories:

1. Projects that are moderately complicated are more generative. The free and open source software motto “release early and release often” suggests that simple projects will offer more obvious opportunities for contribution than more polished projects. That said, projects that are extremely simple (e.g., completely blank slates) may also uninspiring to would-be contributors.
2. Projects by prominent creators are more generative. The reasoning for this claim comes from the suggestion that remixing can act as a form of cultural conversation and that the work of popular creators can act like a common medium or language. People want to remix famous pop stars because people will be more likely to appreciate the remix if they recognize the remixed track.
3. Projects that are remixes themselves are more generative. The reasoning for this final claim comes from the idea that remixing thrives through the accumulation of contributions from groups of people building on each other’s work.

Our second question focuses on the originality of remixes and asks when more or less transformative remixing occurs. For example, highly generative projects may be less exciting if the projects produced based on them are all near-identical copies of antecedent projects. For a series of reasons — including the fact that increased generativity might come by attracting less interested, skilled, or motivated individuals — we suggest that each of the. We call this trade-off the remixing dilemma.

We try to answer both of our research questions using a detailed dataset from Scratch, where young people build, share, and collaborate on interactive animations and video games. The community was built to support users of the Scratch programming environment, a desktop application with functionality similar to Flash created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is designed to allow users to build projects by integrating images, music, sound, and other media with programming code. Scratch is used by more than a million users, most of them under 18 year old.

To test our three theories about generativity, we measure whether or not, as well as how many times, Scratch projects were remixed in a dataset that includes every shared project. Although Scratch is designed as a remixing community, only around one tenth of all Scratch projects are ever remixed. Because more popular projects are remixed more frequently simply because of exposure, we control for the number of times each project is viewed.

Our analysis shows at least some support for all three theories of generativity described above. (1) Projects with moderate amounts of code are remixed more often than either very simple or very complex project. (2) Projects by more prominent creators are more generative. (3) Remixes are more likely to attract remixers than de novo projects.

To test our theory that there is a trade-off between generativity and originality, we build a dataset that includes every Scratch remix and its antecedent. For each pair, we construct a measure of originality by comparing the remix to its antecedent and computing an “edit distance” (a concept we borrow from software engineering) to determine how much the projects differ.

We find strong evidence of a trade-off: (1) Projects of moderate complexity are remixed more lightly than more complicated projects. (2) Projects by more prominent creators tend to be remixed in less transformative ways. (3) Cumulative remixing tends to be associated with shallower and less transformative derivatives. That said, our support for (1) is qualified in that we do not find evidence of the increased originality for the simplest projects as our theory predicted.

Two plots of estimated values for prototypical projects. Panel 1 (left) display predicted probabilities of being remixed. Panel 2 (right) display predicted edit distances. Both panels show predicted values for both remixes and de novo projects from 0 to 1,204 blocks (99th percentile).

We feel that our results raise difficult but important challenges, especially for the designers of social media systems. For example, many social media sites track and display user prominence with leaderboards or lists of aggregate views. This technique may lead to increased generativity by emphasizing and highlighting creator prominence. That said, it may also lead to a decrease in originality of the remixes elicited. Our results regarding the relationship of complexity to generativity and originality of remixes suggest that supporting increased complexity, at least for most projects, may have fewer drawbacks.

As supporters and advocates of remixing, we feel that although highly generative works that lead to highly original derivatives may be rare and difficult for system designers to support, understanding remixing dynamics and encouraging these rare projects remain a worthwhile and important goal.

Benjamin Mako Hill, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Microsoft Research

For more, see our full paper, “The remixing dilemma: The trade-off between generativity and originality.” Published in American Behavioral Scientist. 57-5, Pp. 643—663. (Official Link, Pay-Walled ).

Countries like Mexico, where deep-seated classism and abuse of power are part of everyday life, are seeing these societal issues surface through social networks. For example, in 2011, one of the first incidents of this type emerged via a YouTube video.The video showed two seemingly intoxicated young upper class women in Polanco, a posh neighborhood of Mexico City, verbally abusing some police officers–insulting them by calling them “salary men”–while the officers did not do much to defend themselves. Had it not been Polanco or those women, the situation might have been very different for the average Mexican accustomed to police abuse and corruption. The video caused indignation on social media because it highlighted the classism and impunity that is rampant in Mexican society. The event got a lot of attention on Twitter and it became a popular trending topic under the hashtag #LadiesDePolanco. The use of the English word “ladies” was a clear commentary on classism. Upper class Mexican speech often tends to replace Spanish words for English ones (for example, expensive private schools often ask their students to refer to their teachers as “Miss” and “Mister”).

In 2012, another incident with the same features surfaced on social media. This time it was a YouTube video of a middle-aged man beating a concierge at an apartment building in yet another upscale neighborhood of Mexico City called “Las Lomas.” The incident was known as the #GentelmanDeLasLomas. The same year, the daughter of then presidential candidate, Peña Nieto, was involved in a similar incident after retweeting a friend’s message using the word “prole” (from proletariat and a commonly used epithet for poor people) to attack her father’s critics. The incident was perhaps the first major incident in Peña’s campaign.

This weekend yet another incident of this kind came out on social media. This time it involved the daughter of a government official in charge of consumer protection at the Attorney General’s office. Apparently, the young woman used her influence to have inspectors visit and close a restaurant after not having received the treatment she expected. The issue exploded in social media with the hashtag #LadyProfeco (Profeco is the name of the government office her father presides). The young woman and her father were publicly criticized on Twitter, receiving more than 12,000 and 15,000 messages, respectively, on a single day on Twitter. There were more than 42,000 tweets with the hashtag #LadyProfeco.

The government official and his daughter have now publicly apologized; however, the case touches upon another thorny issue in Mexican society: government accountability.  It is unclear whether the case will go any further but it does give give hope that an empowered citizenry might at least make some government officials feel like they are being watched by the people they are supposed to serve, much like what Chinese citizens have begun to exercise their ability to hold officials accountable  through websites like Weibo.

Two main issues remain, however. The first is that the demographics of Twitter, especially in Mexico, are biased towards a more affluent population who already tend to be empowered. The second is that, even when cases like this one occur, they have rarely materialized in formal investigations that have led to structural changes.

Twitter mentions per hour for government official @HumbertoBeniTre

12,000 messages mentioning @HubertoBeniTre

Tweets with #LadyProfeco

42,000 messages mentioning #LadyProfeco

Social media allows people to quickly spread information and, in urban environments, its presence is ubiquitous. However, social media is also noisy, chaotic, and hard to understand for those unfamiliar with, for example, the intricacies of hashtags and social media lingo. It should be no surprise that, regardless of the popularity of social media, people are still using TV and newspapers as their main sources for local information, while social media is just beginning to emerge as a useful information source.  We created Whoo.ly to address this issue.

Whoo.ly reveals the latent neighborhood-specific information that already exists in social media. In our first prototype of the tool, we focused on Twitter posts to derive relevant news, people, and events that are set within a particular locality, often referred to as “hyperlocal information”.

Inspired by the typical journalistic questions, i.e., “what, who, where, and when”, Whoo.ly uses various machine learning algorithms to provide four types of hyperlocal content in a simple web-based interface:

• Active events: events that are trending in the locality.
• Top topics: most frequently mentioned terms and phrases from recent Twitter posts.
• Popular places: most frequently checked-in/mentioned.
• Active people: Twitter users mentioned the most).

We investigated the effectiveness of Whoo.ly as a tool for finding neighborhood information through a user study of 13 residents from three Seattle neighborhoods: Capitol Hill, Wallingford, and Rainey Valley. Participants found Whoo.ly to perform better than Twitter at these particular four tasks related to neighborhood information:

• finding recent events,
• finding local neighborhood reporters,
• finding neighborhood topics, and
• finding potential neighborhood friends.

The overall reaction to the information provided on Whoo.ly was quite positive.. The participants in our study found Whoo.ly easier to use than Twitter and the majority said they would prefer it as a tool for exploring their neighborhoods.

One of the interviewees mentioned:

Whoo.ly was set up specifically with the community in mind. It makes community news/events/issues/people etc. easily accessible.

Participants generally found it easier to complete
neighborhood exploration tasks using Whoo.ly

Whoo.ly was found to be more useful, easy to use,
with a better overview of the users’ neighborhoods, and a
sense of connection to their neighborhood communities.

Tools like Whoo.ly are beginning to uncover the future of computational civic media that we believe will be an important component of the information ecosystem.

For more, see our full paper  Whoo.ly: Facilitating Information Seeking For Hyperlocal Communities Using Social Media to be presented at CHI 2013.

Yuheng Hu, Arizona State University
Shelly D. Farnham, Microsoft Research
Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Microsoft Research

Crossposted from the Follow the Crowd Blog

Twitter message [edited] alerting citizens of drug-related violence.

Tweets per day for each of the four cities

We then examined the people Tweeting. We focused on their level of activity (number of tweets) and notoriety (number of followers). When we did this, we noticed a small number of highly-followed users –media organizations, celebrities, etc.– that had posted  a handful of tweets about the violence in those cities. For example, the account for CNN en Español has more than a million followers but had tweeted only once with the hashtag related to the city of Monterrey. Meanwhile, we observed another small group of people also with a lot of followers but who had contributed a lot of tweets (this group is located towards the top right corner of the plots below). We refer to these people as “curators.”

Twitter activity in four cities showing the follower count and tweets count for each person.

We reached out to several of these curators, and were able to interview some. We learned some of them receive news reports from social media and others from contacts they have across the city. They also mentioned they consider their work to be altruistic in nature, as a form of “community service,” and that they see their work as a response to what they perceive was an abandonment from the media and the government. For example, one curator said:

When I started… the news media, the journalists, and the government were nonexistent, they did not inform on what was happening on the streets…

Another one added:

they forgot they have an obligation with the people… they started hiding information. Then, society started demanding information. This is when social networks took over…

Although traditional journalists regularly serve as curators, both on Twitter and in the mainstream media outlets, the rise of citizen curators suggests that existing outlets are not meeting public need. Both government officials and journalists have idiosyncratically engaged on Twitter, but much of the citizen curators’ success in building an audience stems from their willingness to curate information even when government agencies, journalists, and other media outlets are not, often for fears of reprisals from organized crime.

This practice of civic media curation is not without controversy. First, some of the curators we talked with reported working up to 15 hours a day on Twitter, and being quite upset when others “steal” their tweets. They raised several issues of validation of information. On the other hand, several journalists have raised skepticism about the potential for social media to spread fear and misinformation. Indeed, the fear of inaccurate information spreading has prompted some government agencies to clamp down on citizen curators. What’s more, some citizen curators have been targeted by drug cartels, while others have been accused of collaborating with them, giving further arguments to the problems of shifting from crowdsourcing news reporting to actually crowdsourcing crime reporting.

Social media has become quite visible across the globe for helping people deal with crises like floods, earthquakes, and terrorism. As social medial designers grapple with these challenges, one intervention becomes apparent: there is a significant need for developing technical strategies to assess trust without revealing identity information. Most identity schemes focus on assessing whether or not someone is who they say they are. Indeed, Twitter has implemented “verified” identities. Verification, while valuable for certain types of interaction, is not necessarily what the curators need. While verification may be a decent proxy, all they and their readers really need to know is whether or not the information that is being presented is credible.

For more, see our full paper  to be presented at CSCW 2013, The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare, authored by Andrés Monroy-Hernández, danah boyd, Munmun De Choudhury, Scott Counts.

Cross-posted at the Crowd Research Blog

Example of a remix in the Scratch online community, and the project it is based off. The orange arrows indicate pieces which were present in the original and reused in the remix

We know that that increased collaboration often leads to higher quality products. For example, studies of Wikipedia have suggested that vandalism is detected and removed within minutes, and that high quality articles in Wikipedia, by several measures, tend to be produced by more collaboration. That said, we also know that collaborative work is not always better — for example, that brainstorming results in less good ideas when done in groups. We attempt to answer this broad question, asked many times before, in the context of remixing: Which is the better description, “the wisdom of crowds” or “too many cooks spoil the broth”? That, fundamentally, forms our paper’s first research question: Are remixes, on average, higher quality than single-authored works?

A number of critics of peer production, and some fans, have suggested that mass collaboration on the Internet might work much better for certain kinds of works. The argument is that free software and Wikipedia can be built by a crowd because they are functional. But more creative works — like music, a novel, or a drawing — might benefit less, or even be hurt by, participation by a crowd. Our second research question tries to get at this possibility: Are code-intensive remixes, higher quality than media-intensive remixes?

We try to answers to these questions using a detailed dataset from Scratch – a large online remixing community where young people build, share, and collaborate on interactive animations and video games. The community was built to support users of the Scratch programming environment: a desktop application with functionality similar to Flash created by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. Scratch is designed to allow users to build projects by integrating images, music, sound and other media with programming code. Scratch is used by more than a million, mostly young, users.

Measuring quality is tricky and we acknowledge that there are many ways to do it. In the paper, we rely most heavily a measure of peer ratings in Scratch called loveits — very similar to “likes” on Facebook. We find similar results with several other metrics and we control for the number of views a project receives.

In answering our first research question, we find that remixes are, on average, rated as being of lower quality than works of single authorship. This finding was surprising to us but holds up across a number of alternative tests and robustness checks.

In answering our second question, we find rough support for the common wisdom that remixing tends to be more effective for functional works than for artistic media. The more code-intensive a project is, on average, the closer the gap is between a remix and a work of single authorship. But the more media-intensive a project is, the bigger the gap. You can see the relationships that our model predicts in the graph below.

Two plots of estimated values for prototypical projects showing the predicted number of loveits using our estimates. In the left panel, the x-axis varies number of blocks while holding media intensity at the sample median. The right panel varies the number of media elements while holding the number of blocks at the sample median. Ranges for each are from 0 to the 90th percentile.

Both of us are supporters and advocates of remixing. As a result, we were initially a little troubled by our result in this paper. We think the finding suggests an important limit to the broadest claims of the benefit of collaboration in remixing and peer production.

That said, we also reject the blind repetition of the mantra that collaboration is always better — for every definition of “better,” and for every type of work. We think it’s crucial to learn and understand the limitations and challenges associated with remixing and we’re optimistic that this work can influence the design of social media and collaboration systems to help remixing and peer production thrive.

For more, see our full paper to be presented at CSCW 2013, The Cost of Collaboration for Code and Art: Evidence from Remixing co-authored by Benjamin Mako Hill and Andrés Monroy-Hernández.

Cross-posted at the Crowd Research Blog

1. Jiménez was arrested and released for being part of a protest on September 15. Two days later he and his fellow activists held a press conference denouncing police repression.
2. Subsequently, Jiménez reported being followed and fearing for his safety.
3. Apparently, the bodies of two of his colleagues at CICESE were found in the past few weeks, something that he interpreted as a warning. I was only able to find this news article about the apparent homicide of one of his colleagues on September 14.
4. In an interview, Aleph’s father mentioned that he feared the authorities are behind.

The CICESE research center has released a statement asking for the prompt resolution of the case.

The last time he was seen was on September 20. The family seems to have set up a Facebook Page and a Twitter account to help spread the news and find more information.

This is one of the images circulating:

What: #YoSoy132: Mexico’s Networked Social Movement

When: Thursday September 20 at 5:00 PM

Where: Microsoft Conference Center (Barton Room) located at One Memorial Drive, First Floor, Cambridge, MA

Photo: (c) Omar Torres/AFP/Getty

Abstract

The role of social media in movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street has been much discussed, and such “hashtagged” social movements continue to appear in multiple latitudes. The panelists will discuss the development of the #YoSoy132 movement, “I am 132″ in English, an ongoing student-led activist group that fights for democracy and against media bias in an apparent attempt to impose the next president of Mexico during the recent 2012 general election. The movement embodies the collision between centralized traditional media and distributed social media, and reveals the limitations of social media in reaching beyond those who are already networked. The panelists include a member of the #YoSoy132 and researchers investigating networked social movements.

Bios

Sasha Costanza-Chock is a researcher and mediamaker who works on civic media, the political economy of communication, and collaborative design for media justice and communication rights. He is Assistant Professor of Civic Media at MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, Co-PI of the Center for Civic Media, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Sasha has been a part of the Independent Media Center network, the Allied Media Conference, and VozMob, among other projects. For more info see http://schock.cc. Twitter: @schock

Antonio Attolini Murra is a student at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México majoring in political science and international relations and the spokesperson of his university’s Local Assembly in the student movement #YoSoy132. He has participated in several conferences about transnational organized crime and political reforms in Mexico. In 2011, he was elected Secretary General of his university’s Model of United Nations. He writes in his school’s newspaper, specialized publications, and online news portals such as Animal Político and ADN Político. Antonio is an avid social media user and blogs at http://antonioattolini.blogspot.com Twitter: @antonioattolini

Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a social computing researcher at Microsoft Research and an affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research focuses on the design and study of social media systems that support collaboration for creative expression and civic engagement. His current research looks at the use of social media in crises, such as in the Mexican Drug War. Andrés’ work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, and Wired. Andrés holds a PhD and a Masters from the MIT Media Lab, and a Bachelor’s from Tecnológico de Monterrey. For more info see: http://andresmh.com. Twitter: @andresmh

Arrival Guidance

Upon arrival at One Memorial Drive, kindly approach the Lobby Floor Security Desk; identity yourself, show your picture ID and sign the Building Visitor Log.

Cross-posted at the Social Media Collective Blog

Networked technologies have facilitated two forms of social production: remixing and crowdsourcing. Remixing has been typically associated with creative, expressive, and unconstrained work such as the creation of video mashups or funny image macros that we often see on social media websites. Crowdsourcing, on the other hand, has been associated with large-scale mechanical work, like labeling images or transcribing audio, performed as microtasks on services like Amazon Mechanical Turk. So the stereotype is that remixing is playful, creative, expressive, but undirected and often chaotic, while crowdsourcing is useful to achieve actual work but it is monotonous, and requires (small) financial incentives.

Crowdsoucing Creativity: “Mixsourcing”

The space between remixing and crowdsourcing has partially been explored. For example, one could argue that Wikipedia exists in a unique space in between these two ideas as it relies on some, albeit small, degree of human creativity, requires no financial incentives, and leverages large numbers of contributors who are encouraged to tweak one another’s submissions. However, Wikipedia’s texts are mainly functional, purposely devoid of any personal expressiveness, and constrained by the task at hand.

On the more creative end of the spectrum, artists have explored the use of crowdsourcing, such as the Johnny Cash Project and the Sheep Market, and researchers have evaluated the uses of creative crowdsourcing for design. We wondered then, if there is a way to create a generic platform to perform creative and artistic work in a more directed, crowdsourcing-like way, some kind of “bounded creativity,” which we called “mixsourcing.”

The mixsourcing of a “Moonicorn”

We decided to play with this idea of mixsourcing through an exercise that involved giving people a creative, yet directed task. The exercise consisted first in creating a novel piece of content, an image, to serve as a creative seed and then ask specific people, using plain old e-mail, to turn it into something else, i.e., to remix it. The task was specifically crafted for each individual based on their interests, which we knew through pre-existing personal relationships with them.

The seed content used in this first exercise was an image, hand-drawn by one of the researchers, showing of a unicorn with a moon as a head. We sent the email to a group of friends, appealing to their social relationship as a group and with one of the researchers; each person was offered a task: an invitation to turn the “moonicorn” into something based on what we knew they were good at:

“Hello my dear friends! [...] I’m writing to see if you can help me with my summer project [...] I gave you all top secret assignments below. If you can help, it would mean so so so so so much to me. You don’t have to spend a ton of time on it. And I’ll throw a boozy thanks-you party next week when I’m in town. I couldn’t ask for a better lump of friends. Much love from the west coast.

This is my moonicorn:

Jables: please create a moonicorn cocktail recipe.

Celia: please create an iPhone video documenting the rare, nut-eating moonicorn, played by @Ian

[...]

Jables not only created his moonicorn cocktail, he also prepared one, took a picture of it, and emailed a make-believe recipe to accompany the beverage:

The Sanguine Moonicorn

6oz Fresh Moonicorn Blood.

1oz Pure Moonicorn Tears [hold for virgins]

Topped with Moonicorn Sweetbreads, Moonicorn Gonad, Moon Cheese, and an olive.

Cleansed by fire and served over ice, with a Moonicorn Jerky Moon Dagger.

Celia and Ian also completed their collaborative task and produced a short video. Similarly, we received remixes in the form of a fiction article, a felt toy, and a music mix. Here is a collage of all the remixes people produced:

The moonicorn experiment was quite successful, as more than half of the people actually completed their remix. A lot of them spent quite a bit of time on it and were very keen on narrating their creative process as much as they were in sharing their finished work.

Subsequently, we decided to recreate a similar exercise on a larger scale. This failed, however. We used a school mailing list and a group on Facebook, but both failed to attract many participants. The message in both cases did not include personalized tasks and the groups included many strangers. Hence, we hypothesized that there were three key attributes for the success of the first experiment:

1. Pre-existing personal relationships.
2. Well-crafted, personalized tasks directed at specific individuals, compared to the diffusion of responsibilities, well-described in the social psychology literature.
3. Detailed tasks. The messages to broader group were to open putting a burden of choosing on the remixers.

Turn This Into That

Using the insights gained from the previous exercises, we began to envision a mixsourcing platform to enable people to create and participate in remixing exchanges like the moonicorn one.

We called the platform “Turn This Into That,” as it describes the system’s premise.

To convey the spirit of the social relationships that we thought were instrumental to the success of the first exercise, we decided to build the system on a postcard metaphor.

People can send postcards challenging one another to turn something into something else, and the responses themselves can also be thought of as postcards. Furthermore, given the interest people showed in talking about their process the submissions provide space and encouragement for people to address the whys and the hows of their challenges and their remixes. Also, the challenges are specific in terms of what the remix should be, a photo for example, yet it leaves the choice of what to do up to the remixer.

Practically speaking, we aimed for this platform to merely be the embodiment of a mechanism to provide creative sparks, playfulness, and interactions among people without actually having to deal with the complexities of creating tools or even repositories for the content itself. Our system would rely completely on the social media ecosystem for all that, and Turn This Into That would create the linkages.

Before implementing the actual system we built a semi-functional prototype, and we would like to invite you to use it and give us feedback.

—-

Turn This into That is a project by FUSE Lab‘s intern Sarah Hallacher, in collaboration with Jenny Rodenhouse and Andrés Monroy-Hernández.

Cross-posted at FUSE Labs blog

First we approached these questions by setting up a task that we thought people could improve through mentoring: slide design. We asked Mechnical Turkers to help us improve the design of a set of three slides (which we purposely created to look really ugly). We provided Turkers with a set of guidelines for well-designed slides that included tips on color, graphics, text, etc. We then gave each Turker a slide to improve.

The control group received the guidelines but no mentorship. The group with mentorship in addition of receiving the guidelines also received an offer to chat with an “expert” at any given point. The expert was accessible through a chat window next to the slide. We then asked a different group of Turkers to evaluate the quality of the slides. We then compared the ratings of the baseline slides we provided them with those created by the Turkers in each of the two groups. As we expected, the mentorship condition led to higher quality slides. However, we also realized how time-consuming the mentorship process was. More work needs to be done to assess if the cost of mentorship is worth it from a purely economical perspective.

This was my first time playing with Mechanical Turk, but I got to learn from people with a lot of experience with these platforms. The team included: Bjoern Hartmann, Edith Law, Kurt Luther, Kurtis Heimerl, Lixiu Yu, Philipp Gutheim, and Sanjay Kairam.

The idea of training a workforce that often treated as machines was an interesting one. It raises all sorts of interesting issues with regards to the ethics of crowd work and the responsibilities of crowd employers. This was actually part of the topic that another team tackled during the workshop.

The newspaper El Economista got in touch with Anonymous and reported that the collective accepted having hacked into López’s financial accounts and not finding any transactions that would indicate any wrong-doings:

“[T]the collective broke into the computer systems linked to payments or any kind of money transactions, or political influence, stored in the digital files of AMLO [the candidate's initials] and his colleagues, and found nothing incriminating him, so the collective is still looking.”

The statement received a fair amount of attention beyond the Twitter-sphere, reaching influential political blogs, Reddit, and mainstream media.

Beyond the supposed lack of evidence against this particular politician, or whether Anonymous actually hacked into his accounts, there are a few aspects of this story that I find particularly interesting.

First, the weak evidence presented by Anonymous might indicate a substantial amount of symbolic capital accumulated by this group. For example, they could have released evidence of their breaking into the candidate’s accounts, however, all the did was release a statement on Twitter. In the sciences, negative results are almost never reported, and more generally, the lack of evidence for something does not prove or disprove anything. So why did they get media coverage? One possible explanation is that Anonymous, after a long (for Internet standards) history of hacktivism has accumulated the necessary credibility to pull this off. Do they have enough symbolic capital to achieve this in a country with stronger institutions? What would have happened if they had issued a similar statement about one of US presidential candidate?

Second, a clear question to ask is: why this candidate? One possible answer is that they decided to publicly vet and, in a way, endorse this candidate by using the tools they have. It is hard to know if there a direct link between Anonymous Hispano and the rest of Anonymous, but it would be interesting to see if this signals a direct incursion on mainstream politics in the future.

Third, does this represent a move from public shaming to public endorsement? For the most part, Anonymous’ hacktivism has focused on public shaming by “doxing” government officials and corporations.  I think this might be the first time Anonymous changes their method, which is perhaps closer to the role of governmental transparency organizations. It was interesting that none of the reactions I read raised any questions about the ethics of hacking into politicians’ accounts.