Orchid Project

A project to crowdsource the mapping of artwork held at the Tate: https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D62286_9929317_435095

Consumers should be able to decide how much data smart meters surrender about their energy use, says the government: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17663679

DARPA announces a competition to develop next-generation robots capable of saving lives in disaster zones: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17666449

Yoram Bachrach at Microsoft Research Cambridge is doing some interesting work exploring how the strategies of players in simple Facebook games depart from equilibria. You can play the games here: Doubloon Dash https://apps.facebook.com/msrc_doubloon Project Waterloo https://apps.facebook.com/msrwaterloo/

Europcar has added the 100% electric Nissan LEAF to its London fleet and is inviting motorists to test electric vehicles. http://www.newcarnet.co.uk/Nissan_news.html?id=11994

From: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/pressroom/03222012 Responding to President Obama’s call for an “all-of-the-above” strategy to help consumers reduce their energy costs, the Administration announced today that nine major utilities and electricity suppliers will commit to providing more than 15 million households access to data about their own energy use with a simple click of an online “Green Button.”  […]

In addition to Which?’s  The Big Society initiative https://www.whichbigswitch.co.uk/ , the following is directly related to our work in coalition formation (to buy energy collectively for a group of consumer) in agentswitch.  http://groundswell.nonprofitsoapbox.com/index.php  that claims to have already saved $215K by buying electricity for a group of consumers (consisting of companies, organisations and communities) in the US.

A new UK site puts muggings and street violence onto crowdsourced maps, creating a P2P information exchange that can inform decisions about personal safety. Created by nonprofit organization Witness Confident, https://www.streetviolence.org/ first launched for the capital city London. Information about the crime is collected in one place allowing victims to alert the community, appeal for witnesses and thank […]

As some of you might have known, we are running an experiment with CollabMap (www.collabmap.org), a crowdsourcing application for mapping evacuation routes, for the residential areas around the Fawley Oil Refinery near Southampton. The main aim of the exercise is to get a detailed evacuation map for the area, which has not been previously available, […]

I thought I’d share more widely my notes from the talks I visited/found relevant to our work in Orchid (mainly paper title and abstracts) from CSCW2012.  CSCW had a good program, with lots of focus on the social and the co-operative. If you would like to browse the proceedings, they are now online at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2141512&picked=prox&CFID=67074950&CFTOKEN=87385423 […]