The group was pleasantly diverse, even while a lot of people already seemed to know one another. The day was divided into an information introduction and discussion from 12-2 (which started at 12:30 due to technical difficulties), and a slightly more structured discussion from 2-5. We started the second portion by breaking into three groups to think of questions for the two “panels,” the first on the methodologies and practices of hackathons, and the second on the civic role of hackathons. We put the questions on post it notes, along with themes gleaned from the Meet Up invite (disaster capitalism, hackathons as civic spaces, etc). We then regrouped to discuss the topics, sometimes turning to the post it notes for reference.

Topics:

Hackathons, Pedagogy, and Development

Some participants were interested in hackathons as teaching tools or instances, and felt that there is an implicit pedagogy already present, but wanted to look into making that aspect explicit.

Civics

There were two different definitions of “civic.” One was apolitical, and saw hackathons as something to weak civic (i.e. urban) infrastructure. That view was not as popular as the other expressed, which is that civic refers to activism from the civilian level.

The idea that hackathons should produce tools useful for change lead to the idea of problem-specific events, where an issue, based on community members’ or activists’ stated needs and problems, vs “cool toys” that need uses.

Part of this discussion was a data commons, where data isn’t just broadcasted, but platforms can be added to via crowdsourced data (like citizen science model).

This lead to discussions about public vs protected data and access, and the sometimes lack of good data policy in hackathons because of their ad hoc nature.

What are hackathons for

Stemming from the commitment for creating change, we spoke a lot about what hackathons could actually “do” for activists and change– compared to just making visualizations about injustice, etc, how can they work to deal with injustice itself.

- One idea was that creating data is a political act in itself- what gets counted and how data is used can be activist

- there were some ideas about making reusable abstract best practices rather than specific tools (the case study was Occupy Sandy and what to do to prepare for the next disaster– since we have no idea in advance as to the particular conditions–will there be electricity, will canvassers know google docs– a general overview of what ought to be included in a canvas data collection survey would be better than an app or template that is less flexible).

The idea that hackathons are more about togetherness and less about community– more about weak bonds and the diversity and creativity they engender, versus strong bonds like an ongoing working group might have. These weak bonds are seen as a boon to a hackathon ethos.

Best practices of collaboration in heterogeneous spaces, including but not limited to hackathons:

- have organized interactions and roles (i.e., speed dating for getting different people into conversations)

- have a translator/boundary person who can represent two (or more) different groups (such as tech people vs project people), translate between them, etc

- state or come up with ground rules: structure, etiquette, schedule, expectation etc, ahead of time so everyone is on same page

- have teach-ins, skill shares, or other structured pedagogy during or before the hackathon– this can help with the tech skill bottle neck that often happens

- do work in smaller break out groups/working groups

- be issue/problem driven for shared problem, ethos or methods

- have people working together for a purpose, together– working methods matter more in a heterogenous group

Resources that Came up:

• Kicking Corporate Booty (resources for change)
• Socrata –open data guide
• GWOB.org (geeks without borders- geeks for humanitarian efforts)
• Civic media lab at MIT
• Hack and Jill best practices
• Hack day manifesto (best practices)
• peoples Skype (General Assembly app)
• femnettech
• Data Anywhere (data commons)

-
Max Liboiron
Dept of Media, Culture and Communication
Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing
New York University

The hackathon is an interesting phenomenon in the way that people have organized around technology development and social issues. Closely related to the concept of open data, the sort of collaboration that goes on at a hackathon is often structured around themes in the public interest, whether that’s open government, disaster relief, or community-minded apps and technology solutions. Our Hackathon Yackathon was designed to invite hackathon organizers, participants and those interested in such events to look at them with a critical eye, asking the sort of meta-questions that would impede hacakthon’s goals if raised during such events.  We provided a means for people to submit topics and came up with a rough agenda beforehand, but the more intimate nature of this hackathon (focused around conceptual work and ideation) with a smaller crowd meant conversation flowed more organically through the entire group – instead of splitting into our breakout sessions as planned, we started with smaller groups that came together for our first “panel,” which flowed into the next and focused on two main themes: Hackathon methodologies, tools and outcomes, and the tension between civic hacking and data activism. We were fortunate to have a diverse set of perspectives and motivations at the event - VJ Um Amel and Willow Brugh joined us via GoogleHangout and we had a fairly casual conversation with well-thought out input from all the participants.

For me, a key outcome was the sense of the hackathon as a method that has many different iterations and is not beholden to a particular ethos or inherent quality – it focuses on not merely volunteerism, but invested participation, which can be cooped by commercial interests as “cheap labor.” This was something we could all agree on, however, the ideological divide between the hackathon as a model of cooperation versus competition was something that also reflected schisms between hackathons organized to contribute to municipal and governmental goals, versus those which are more activist in spirit and intent.

Another interesting point which I wish we could have devoted more time to is the divide between big data and observable community results. Hackathons draw from a spectrum of skill sets by encouraging participation from people who know how to do more than just code. However, they are not always inclusive – for the activist and even the civic mode, it can be difficult to involve people who can’t just build something on a computer in a day or two. In addition, there’s a need to address the agenda and viability of data (is it alive or dead, and who creates it for what purpose?). One possible answer we thought of was to incorporate some of the methods from citizen science, and to organize hacakthons in a series, where data collection methods are planed and tools are created, then people are trained and can go out to build the dataset themselves, and return to work on it at future events. This way, people of varying skill levels have greater agency, participation and investment in the project as it develops.

This is also important, because as VJ said, “People in the West fetishize data to the detriment of its content” – it may be convenient for us to build tools that are practical and feasible, but do they really solve any questions we need answers to? Are we building things that people need, or just making a wasted effort for the sake of the exercise?

On a final note, there needs to be a set of reusable tools that can be adapted from one hackathon to the next. There may not be a universal set of “best practices” for hacakthons across the board, but there are some outputs (experience) that can be applied, and documenting them is difficult. The “case study” and working groups approach OccupyData has taken is useful, but hackathons in general suffer from a lack of institutional memory and high frequency that dilutes their effectiveness. I’d argue that the most important output of a hackathon is the community that develops as people experiment with each other from one event to the next, but if a hackathon is a platform for building a concrete product rather than concepts, there needs to be more structure to their organization. Unfortunately, this diminishes the agency and representation of participants… the hackathon is a tool itself, a way of organizing, that is contextual and suited towards unique purposes depending on the organizers and the participants. The variety of options between those purposes and motivations reveal the tensions that exist when we try to think of the hackathon as having a singular format and structure, and organizers must try to align the way the event is held with their motivational values.

(reposted from MrLiterati.com)

—— Rough Notes

• Intros
  • Bryan
  • Max – Superstorm Research Lab.org
    • government vs grassroots
    • space time differences
    • catagorized, short term model for governmental work vs the long term less categorized approach of the community
    • long term picture, more open idea of space, less categorization, better able to infiltrate space
    • jenny - hackathon as data and as a physical engagement
  • Meghan - OccupyRhetoric
  • Evan - Grad student at Cuny
    • really interested in the power that measuring things can have
    • data mining, data hype - criminal justice
    • democratizing capital and information skills
    • information workers who were laid off and never work again
    • no good system to retrain people and apply those skills
  • Christo reviewing occupypops
    • data as having a life of its own and how to foster spaces like this and improve the grounds for outcomes that support action and activists
  • Nitin - breaking the walls between academia and activists
    • hackathon as a mode of participatory research
  • Suzanne - data scientist, using data to improve outcomes
    • data has potential to do that in many contexts
    • too many hackathons
    • nothing substantial comes out of a one or two day project
    • occupydata – ongoing working groups
    • hackathon as a test bed -
    • digitizing street media manual
    • streetmedichandbook.net
    • kicking corporate booty – indiegogo – create some models
  • Ashley – Code for America
    • brigade – work on code, write white papers, organizing technical volunteers or developers – building an open source community
    • (volunteers vs participants) – hackathon models problem, creates a noncooperative privatized project – against the goals of civic technology community
    • don’t treat software as dialogue when you’re competing with others – moving towards a working group or an assistive community
  • Varied Comments
    • openhatch – free software foundation boston – Deb Nicholson – help developers make their first commits to a public, open source project
    • StackOverflow – 50 page doc on how to ask a question
    • Rhelp R assholes
    • structure of incentives that are problematic, new york is a “startup” city, economic development linked to big apps, want to create private products that make jobs – civic infrastructure and digital infrastructure has no resources to maintain it and is out of date, yet they’re throwing tons of money have people compete on using
    • if you can’t fix a hackathon, whats a better method?
    • Ricardo Dominguez
    • FreeCultureFoundation -complications of
    • Hardt & Negri – Declarations
    • Delivering something to activist groups is something that we haven’t always done successful
    • restricting the benefits projects have to groups you’re not fond of, or make sure that its incredibly useful for activists, campaigners, grassroots types in general, know that their aims and methods might be very different than what you are expecting
    • fad at the moment – new way of visualizing media
    • headlines and articles in traditional media re easy to show the volume of, can measure more easily with fewer sources, but social media means you also have to deal with interactions between reporting an event, tenor of the coverage, and trying to identify what really drove the story
    • tension between manual curation and automated “big data” stuff
    • Natural Language Processing for curating some of it
    • not wanting to document clicktivists
    • seeing how the story fragments vs seeing how it forms
    • problems of the question vs what you can do to address it
    • “unconferences are for people who don’t have tech skills”
    • competition vs cooperation
    • publiclab
    • what you measure is a form of politics
    • opposite MOOC Massively Offline Education something
•  —— PANEL STARTS
  • VJ talking about hackathons with Sasha at MIT
  • How can we use these tools in academia and scholarship – when do you use something for pedagogy or for civic engagement
  • Suzanne talking about twitter and clustering and visual patterns - DataAnywhere
  •  - Need for people to start collecting data (not creating it but deciding what to collect) - 
  • we assuming that the public dataset is complete - bottom up vs top down data
  • changing the data model to include fields that aren’t part of legislative concerns
  • ability to affect the data determines whether or not it’s actually open
  • socrata – being able to see problems with differences between public data sets over the same information
  • data regulation vs public data
  • Chris: canvasing and data collection as activism itself
  • structurally government doesn’t care bout certain types of data – making those trends and its relevance apparent to authority
  • Ashley:what is a reusable tool that can come out of a hackathon?
  • Chris: should be low-tech – paper – framework for thinking, rather than a tool
  • VJ: outputs of hackathons are not tools, but visualizations and reports. – hi fi lowfi, people need to know skills themselves, resources and stuff, and that comes out of a hackathon as well – too many hackathons, not enough (institutional memory)
  • Christo: having a teach in inside a hacakthon is a good thing
  • …
  • tension between leadership, organizing and participation/representation
  • …
  • Questions: Data has an agenda
  • taarifa.org
  • max – research group formed organically
  • aggressive ground truthing threatened the group -
  • community based vs non community based – on behalf of a community or with multiple stakeholders who are mutually exclusive
  • VJ – Perspective of Egyptians/Arab/Syrians - People in the west fetishize data to the detriment of its content 
  • online data is superficial and detached from historical and cultural analysis
  • how can we incorporate that information in any analysis
  • Ashley: this is a homogenous group – mutual aid a lot of people here are of like mind, but trying to leverage populations to create “great things” unilaterally create great things – models of cooperation aren’t going to work as well
  • outside of an academic sphere you see more competitive models because you can map people’s goal generation to the model
  • government big data darpa stuff, or a civic urgency
  • Wilow the only way that government can interact with citizens is through the competitive model
  • Nitin question of scale?
  • Willow / Ashley competition doesn’t scale… both problematic
  • Willow Locality is important
  • Max you can’t unilateral leverage a heterogenous group – thats why advertising exists. So everything gets scaled
  • Nitin do hackathons function better when there’re homogenous or if it’s heterogenous
  • VJ heterogenous skill sets but homogenous culture
  • nitin agreement on the ethos, but disagreement on some of the perspectives – made it interesting
  • carl ensuring that the output of that existing group is useful and voluminous, we don’t have to do all things to all people, just produce a template that others with similar “spiritual” goals of horizontalness and stuff for others
  • Ashley what are those methods
  • Carl having fewer lines that you can draw around who’s in charge (?)
  • nitin can data or knowledge be the output – repositories?
  • VJ having an open repository seems basic and important, but what if it gets googlesque.. and how do you get people together to share it and explain it
  • nitin best thing we’ve been able to do is case studies, then teach ins in future hackathons
  • VJ whose your audience – people who are afraid of technology, (low skill sets?) activism or tech turns them away.
  • making the archive accessible – journalists
  • Ashley – the hackathons that just want to show people something one person thinks is cool drives others away… not the lack of work, but a level of separation that decreases productivity… community building is great, but making something is most important
  • problems of having an idea and just getting people there to work on it… again, agency
  • Willow original hackathons were about a sprint of work… now you have education, collaboration, problems come from where people shove all these things into one space
  • need a translator, etiquette
  • need to be more people in the space who can discuss it
  • importance of “baby steps” people trying things differently seeing in different modes and such
  • chris – totally different creatures depending on size
  • people who came and just said – “tell me what to do” (dependent on the ethos)
  • nitin – hackathons aren’t one singular beast, they are platforms for different action agendas
  • ethics of censorship in the commons
  • VJ eastern sense of using your body, vs western idea of anonymity and fear
  • willow – always question why you are gathering data, because that itself is a risk – surveying also makes people alienated and quiet – trust networks, never give anyone a password to a database you don’t trust, and you probably can’t do it at a hackathon
  • hackdaymanifesto.com
  •  need for education is huge / education is really hard tho
  • agenda for what we as a group wanted to do in the long term
  • AmplifyGood – enabling small businesses to get social marketing PR stuff – learn and do days
  • making a data commons superstormresearch
  • “narcism of small difference makes so many silos”
  • align goals and share resources – is that a totalizing approach?
  • rethink the framework of hacakthons from a feminist perspective and how we know each other and see each other via the body
  • VJ Mm Emma –  VJUMEM.com Laila r-shief.org

Hackathons are everywhere. They are often hosted by companies, governments, and community groups to attract talented programmers to work on a software project for slices of pizza. They are exciting, production-oriented environments to solve problems.

This symposium or rather, yackathon, is an opportunity to bring together the ideas, the outcomes, and the problems of hackathons into critical perspective. What is the politics and the potential of the now ubiquitous hackathon? Can it effectively support political action and civic engagement? What other methods of self-organized research and development can we learn from?

In other words, this will be a hackathon on hackathons.  Similar to regular hackathons, participation and topics for discussion are open. Organizers and participants of any hackathon are invited to join for our afternoon discussion.

Schedule

12:00 – 2:00 PM

To start, we will have casual, informal sharing of methods and outcomes from previous hackathons we’ve each either organized or participated in. Feel free to come and let us know about the best (or worst) hackathon you’ve been to, what came out of it… Some things to think about:

• Why you are involved in hackathons?
• What have been some outcomes? Personal, group vs. issue-oriented
• Was everyone satisfied with the outcome? What you take away from the experience?
• Challenges of hackthons and sustaining communities of interest
• Hacking as play, learning vs. civic engagement?

2:00 – Welcome

Introductions from organizers, describing the agenda, starting the Google Hangout space, etc

2:15 – Panel Discussion – Hackathons Methodologies, Tools + Practices

3:00 – Coffee Break

3:15 – Panel Discussion – Hacking as Civic Engagement

4:00 – Hack a Better Hackathon. Discuss, Show & Tell

Are there themes, issues, questions, hackathon outcomes that you or your collective would like to share and discuss? Please post your topic ideas below and rate, comment the posted topics that interest you most. Feel free to post multiple topics.

When & Where?

Sunday, April 28th between 12pm and 5 @ The New School- Lang Center, Wollman Hall, (65 W 11th St).

Coming?

Feel free to let us know you’re coming by confirming on our Meetup group.

Submitted Topics

• by Max Liboiron The group was pleasantly diverse, even while a lot of people already seemed to know one another. The day was divided into an information introduction and discussion from 12-2 (which started at 12:30 due to technical difficulties), and a slightly more structured discussion from 2-5. We started the second portion by breaking into three groups to think of questions for the two "panels," the first on the methodologies and practices of hackathons, and the second on the civic role of hackathons. We put the questions on post it notes, along with themes gleaned from the Meet Up invite (disaster capitalism, hackathons as civic spaces, etc). We then regrouped to discuss the topics, sometimes turning to the post it notes for reference.  

  Topics:

  Hackathons, Pedagogy, and Development Some participants were interested in hackathons as teaching tools or instances, and felt that there is an implicit pedagogy already present, but wanted to look into making that aspect explicit.   Civics There were two different definitions of "civic." One was apolitical, and saw hackathons as something to weak civic (i.e. urban) infrastructure. That view was not as popular as the other expressed, which is that civic refers to activism from the civilian level. The idea that hackathons should produce tools useful for change lead to the idea of problem-specific events, where an issue, based on community members' or activists' stated needs and problems, vs "cool toys" that need uses. Part of this discussion was a data commons, where data isn't just broadcasted, but platforms can be added to via crowdsourced data (like citizen science model). This lead to discussions about public vs protected data and access, and the sometimes lack of good data policy in hackathons because of their ad hoc nature.   What are hackathons for Stemming from the commitment for creating change, we spoke a lot about what hackathons could actually "do" for activists and change-- compared to just making visualizations about injustice, etc, how can they work to deal with injustice itself. - One idea was that creating data is a political act in itself- what gets counted and how data is used can be activist - there were some ideas about making reusable abstract best practices rather than specific tools (the case study was Occupy Sandy and what to do to prepare for the next disaster-- since we have no idea in advance as to the particular conditions--will there be electricity, will canvassers know google docs-- a general overview of what ought to be included in a canvas data collection survey would be better than an app or template that is less flexible). The idea that hackathons are more about togetherness and less about community-- more about weak bonds and the diversity and creativity they engender, versus strong bonds like an ongoing working group might have. These weak bonds are seen as a boon to a hackathon ethos.   Best practices of collaboration in heterogeneous spaces, including but not limited to hackathons: - have organized interactions and roles (i.e., speed dating for getting different people into conversations) - have a translator/boundary person who can represent two (or more) different groups (such as tech people vs project people), translate between them, etc - state or come up with ground rules: structure, etiquette, schedule, expectation etc, ahead of time so everyone is on same page - have teach-ins, skill shares, or other structured pedagogy during or before the hackathon-- this can help with the tech skill bottle neck that often happens - do work in smaller break out groups/working groups - be issue/problem driven for shared problem, ethos or methods - have people working together for a purpose, together-- working methods matter more in a heterogenous group Resources that Came up:
  • Kicking Corporate Booty (resources for change)
  • Socrata --open data guide
  • GWOB.org (geeks without borders- geeks for humanitarian efforts)
  • Civic media lab at MIT
  • Hack and Jill best practices
  • Hack day manifesto (best practices)
  • peoples Skype (General Assembly app)
  • femnettech
  • Data Anywhere (data commons)
  - Max Liboiron Dept of Media, Culture and Communication Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing New York University Comment (0)
• Yackathon yickety yack hack hackathon nonsense and other stuff by Edward Lear. Comment (0)
• Yackathon about yackathons and other strategies on hacking Comment (0)
• Reasons why activists and civic hackers should avoid the Facebook tease at all costs. Comment (1)
• Civic hacking as a research methodology. Comment (0)
• How can hackathon spaces/tech spaces in general be more mindful of intersectionality and difference? Comment (0)
• reconciling the interest of platform developers and scial activists Comment (0)
• Disaster capitalism: how to measure the scope and impact on local communities, and vulnerable populations. Comment (0)
• Specifications, standards, and functions for a People's data commons. Comment (0)
• What are some ideas or best practices for running a successful hackathon? Comment (0)
• Is civic hacking activism? Comment (0)
• What are the political, methodological, and outcome differences between corporate, civic, and activist hackathons? Comment (0)
• Recap outcomes from previous hackathons. Comment (3)
• Update the introduction for occupydata posted in the discussion list. Comment (0)

—

Add a Topic

If you’re up for working on an ongoing project such as OccuPAR, Occupy Sandy data, or anything else, then find your way over to Brooklyn.  Our (incredible) friends at the Alpha One Labs will open up their makerspace starting at 7PM.  There’s a possibility for starting earlier, so we’ll share any new news.

Research question

We wanted to test whether a desire to participate in activism was associated with increased participation in activism and whether this relationship was mediated by external stresses.

+-----------------+                   +-----------------+
| Interest in     |                   | Participation   |
| participating   |   ------------>   | in activism     |
| in activism     |                   |                 |
+-----------------+        / \        +-----------------+
                            | 

                   +-----------------+
                   | External stress |
                   | (Barriers to    |
                   | participation)  |
                   +-----------------+

When we discuss “interest in participation”, we are referring to more fundamental drivers in considering whether to participate, such as agreement with the goals of the activism or belief that the activism will be effective.

“External stresses” are secondary, exogenous considerations that might prevent participants from participating in activism that they would support in concept. For example, one strong external stress would be working multiple jobs.

The questionnaire

A questionnaire was developed using critical participatory action research* as the methodological approach. It was based on the collective experiences of the researchers as CUNY students. Several pilot surveys were distributed on CUNY campuses and at the Free University, an activist event in Madison Square Park that occurred on May 1, 2012. This enabled researchers to revise and build the survey based on feedback from students. Insight from CUNY students was essential in the construction of the survey. Distribution of the final version of the survey began May 1, 2012 and continued until September 16, 2012. Surveys were collected on CUNY campuses, in classrooms, at CUNY activist events, and online.

* Torre, M. E. and Fine, M. (2011), A Wrinkle in Time: Tracing a Legacy of Public Science through Community Self-Surveys and Participatory Action Research. Journal of Social Issues, 67: 106–121. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2010.01686.x

Questionnaire distribution

Researchers made contact on various CUNY campuses with professors who might be willing to distribute surveys to students during class time. An effort was made to ensure that the various types of CUNY campuses were included in the study (i.e. community colleges, senior colleges, etc) as well as various types of classes (day classes, night classes, and summer classes). If professors responded positively, a time was arranged during class when researchers could distribute surveys.

Surveys were distributed to children’s studies classes at Brooklyn College, sociology classes at Hunter College, psychology classes at LaGuardia, research methods classes at the CUNY Graduate Center, classes at Medgar Evers college, and classes at the School of Professional Studies. A researcher was present in each classroom to oversee the completion of surveys and collect them. Researchers gave participants a short description of the survey, indicating that researchers were CUNY students interested in studying activism on CUNY campuses. Anonymity of participants was assured. Consent from participants was obtained verbally and they were given about ten minutes to complete the survey. One professor provided students with a link to fill out the survey online.

The remaining surveys were distributed during activist events, including the Free University at Madison Square Park on May 1st, 2012. The Free University was an event where workshops and classes were set up by student activists in a public space (Madison Square Park) and open to the public. Many CUNY students attended the event, and some took the time to fill out the survey. Surveys were also collected at the CUNY Graduate Center general assembly, which is a student activist event where students meet to discuss issues and organize. Surveys were also distributed in the Hunter College cafeteria and student lounge, as well as at a student speak-out activist event to students who were willing to complete them. In these cases, researchers gave participants ten minutes to complete the survey and acquired verbal consent.

When researchers obtained a substantial number of surveys from a diverse group of CUNY campuses, data collection ceased. A code book for the survey was created, and all researchers participated in data entry, and eventually compiled all entered data into one Excel spreadsheet.

Representativeness of the questionnaire

This sample consisted of 304 current students attending various CUNY campuses. The survey was distributed on a total of twelve CUNY campuses, mostly from Hunter College (29% of sample), Brooklyn College (19%), Medgar Evers College (16%), Laguardia Community College (13%), and the Graduate Center (10%). The remaining CUNY schools include the School of Professional Studies (5%), Baruch College (1.6%), John Jay College of Criminal Justice (.7%), Borough of Manhattan Community College (.3%), City College of New York (.3%), Lehman College (.3%), and Queens College (.3%). Several participants did not provide their campus name (5%). Students were pursuing various degrees, most commonly a Bachelors degree (60%), followed by Associates (13%), Doctorate (10%), Masters (5%), Certificate (1%), or Non-degree seeking students (1%), and 11% were unknown.

When asked for their gender, the majority of participants identified as female (67.4%), while 27% were male, 2% were queer, and 3% did not include their answer in this portion of the survey. Official records state that CUNY students are 58% female and 42% male (CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, 2011), although it should be noted they do not include alternative gender categories. It also states that 28.2% of CUNY students are age 25 or older. The ages of this sample ranged from 18 to 58, with 50% of participants between the ages of 21 and 29. The average age of this sample was 26.5.

Based on all this, the sample seems fairly representative of the CUNY student body.

Approach

Preferably, we would have had each participant answer the same questions about her level of interest of participation (such as whether she agrees with the movement’s views or whether she think the movement will have positive impact) and her external stresses (like working overtime) and her level of participation. The questionnaire wasn’t quite like this, so we had to adapt the questions somewhat.

The questionnaire asked one question about level of participation to all participants (question 8).

8 Have you ever attended an event on Occupy CUNY/ activism for higher education (e.g., a march, a talk, a general assembly/GA)?

• Yes, and I want to participate again because ________
• Yes, but I do not want to participate again because ________
• No, and I will not participate because ________
• No. I would like to participate but ________

The questions about interest in participation (question 7) and about external stress (question 4) were arranged such that people answered different questions depending on whether they had previously participated in OccupyCUNY, which is quite related to their level of participation in activism.

3 Are you participating in activism that addresses issues in higher education?

• Yes (go to 4a and 4b)
• No (go to 4c)

4a If Yes, what motivates you? ________

4b If yes, what enables you to participate?

• Financial resources
• Job security
• Childcare
• Sense of belonging/community
• Training in activism skills
• Having a flexible schedule
• Support from family, friends, peers, partners
• Encouragement at work and union
• Access to ongoing sources of info
• Encouragement at school (e.g., Class credits, teacher support, teacher allows me to miss class, inclusion in my academic research)
• Other concrete things like _______

4c If no, what prevents you from participating?

• Lack of financial resources
• Job insecurity
• No childcare
• Inflexible schedule/No time
• No support from family, friends, peers, partners
• Institutional discouragement/limitations at work and union
• No access to ongoing sources of info
• Institutional discouragement/limitations at school
• Surveillance
• Police violence/threat
• Consequence of arrests
• Other _______

Question 4 is above, and question 7 is below.

7a Overall, how do you feel about Occupy CUNY/ activism for higher education? Check only one.

• Positive
• Negative
• Ambivalent/ mixed feelings
• I don’t know much about it
• I don’t have an opinion

7b I feel positive about Occupy CUNY/ activism for higher education because: (Check all that apply.)

• It opens a dialog about privatization of public higher education
• It is led by students for students
• I feel a part of a movement
• It represents common issues faced by the majority of the population
• It uses a democratic process
• It uses nonviolent methods
• It uses direct action
• Other (please specify) ________

7c I feel negative about Occupy CUNY/ activism for higher education because: (Check all that apply.)

• It is not effective
• It does not deal with issues that concern me
• It is unfocused, and does not have a coherent message
• It is disruptive to classes
• Other (please specify) ________

We thus had to separate the analysis by whether people had previously participated in OccupyCUNY.

There wasn’t much separation by level of participation within the people who said they had participated. (There wer 64 people in the higher group and 7 in the lower group.) Thus, we only conducted the analysis for the respondents who said they had not participated in OccupyCUNY. This led to a reversed framing of the relationship described above.

+-----------------+                   +-----------------+
| Negative atti-  |                   | Decisiveness    |
| tude towards    |   ------------>   | about not       |
| activism        |                   | participating   |
+-----------------+        / \        +-----------------+
  (question 7c)             |            (question 8)

                   +-----------------+
                   | External stress |
                   | (Barriers to    |
                   | participation)  |
                   +-----------------+
                      (question 4c)

Variables

The questionnaire requested that question 4c only be answered by people who had answered with one of the two “No” responses to question 8, so we used only the subset of the data for which question 8 was one of these no responses. We thus had a binary participation variable, no.never, which was true if the participant said she would never participate and false if she said that she had not participated but would like to.

For both questions 4c and 7c, almost people checked either zero or one box. For simplicity, we simply checked whether at least one of the respective groups of check marks was checked. Thus, our external stress variable, has.external.stress, was true if at least one of question 4c’s boxes was checked and false if none was checked. Similarly, our variable for negative perception of activism, has.negative.perception, was true if at least one of 7c’s boxes was checked and false if none were.

We chose variable names that start with the word “has” so that it would be less confusing to talk about, but both groups obviously have both external stresses and some negative perception of activism; if these names bother you, mentally switch the “has” to “has more”.

Analysis

For our sample, here are the proportions of people within each of the four groups who said “never” (rather than “no, … but”).

has.external.stress has.negative.perception p.no.never
                Yes                     Yes        40%
                Yes                      No      32.4%
                 No                     Yes      55.6%
                 No                      No       5.7%

Logistic regression

We fit two logistic regressions and compared them with a likelihood ratio test. As a null model, we fit the simple logistic regression of no.never as a function of has.negative perception, ignorant of has.external.stress.

Call:
glm(formula = no.never ~ has.negative.perception, family = "binomial", 
    data = o)

Deviance Residuals: 
   Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max  
-1.047  -0.774  -0.774   1.314   1.644  

Coefficients:
                        Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
(Intercept)               -1.053      0.191   -5.51  3.5e-08 ***
has.negative.perception    0.737      0.317    2.33     0.02 *  
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1 

(Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)

    Null deviance: 256.03  on 206  degrees of freedom
Residual deviance: 250.67  on 205  degrees of freedom
AIC: 254.7

Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 4

The has.negative.perception coefficient is significantly different from zero, indicating that negative perception is associated with participation.

Then we fit a logistic regression for the full relationship described above, which adds the has.external.stress term.

Call:
glm(formula = no.never ~ has.external.stress * has.negative.perception, 
    family = "binomial", data = o)

Deviance Residuals: 
   Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max  
-1.274  -0.885  -0.885   1.354   2.393  

Coefficients:
                                            Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)    
(Intercept)                                   -2.803      0.728   -3.85  0.00012 ***
has.external.stress                            2.068      0.757    2.73  0.00627 ** 
has.negative.perception                        3.027      0.990    3.06  0.00224 ** 
has.external.stress:has.negative.perception   -2.697      1.048   -2.57  0.01007 *  
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1 

(Dispersion parameter for binomial family taken to be 1)

    Null deviance: 256.03  on 206  degrees of freedom
Residual deviance: 237.79  on 203  degrees of freedom
AIC: 245.8

Number of Fisher Scoring iterations: 5

All of the non-intercept coefficients significantly different from zero, indicating that negative perception and external stress, separately, are both associated with participation and that the associations are different when combined. Specifically, someone with just negative perception or external stress has higher odds of saying “never” than someone with neither, but the odds are somewhere in between for someone who has both negative perception and external stress.

Finally, we compared the two with a likelihood ratio test.

Likelihood ratio test for MLE method 
Chi-squared 2 d.f. =  12.88 , P value =  0.001594 

The likelihood ratio test finds that the data are significantly more likely given the full model than the null model, suggesting, again, that external stress significantly mediates the relationship between negative perception and participation in activism.

Ordinary least squares

We repeated this analysis with ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions, swapping the likelihood ratio test for an F test. Logistic regression is more appropriate for these data because they have a binary response, but the OLS results are similar and may be easier for some people to understand.

Call:
lm(formula = no.never ~ has.negative.perception, data = o)

Residuals:
   Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max 
-0.422 -0.259 -0.259  0.578  0.741 

Coefficients:
                        Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)               0.2587     0.0383    6.75  1.5e-10 ***
has.negative.perception   0.1631     0.0689    2.37    0.019 *  
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1 

Residual standard error: 0.458 on 205 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.0266, Adjusted R-squared: 0.0219 
F-statistic:  5.6 on 1 and 205 DF,  p-value: 0.0188 

Call:
lm(formula = no.never ~ has.external.stress * has.negative.perception, 
    data = o)

Residuals:
   Min     1Q Median     3Q    Max 
-0.556 -0.324 -0.324  0.600  0.943 

Coefficients:
                                            Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)   
(Intercept)                                   0.0571     0.0759    0.75   0.4526   
has.external.stress                           0.2669     0.0874    3.06   0.0026 **
has.negative.perception                       0.4984     0.1679    2.97   0.0034 **
has.external.stress:has.negative.perception  -0.4225     0.1836   -2.30   0.0224 * 
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1 

Residual standard error: 0.449 on 203 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.0734, Adjusted R-squared: 0.0598 
F-statistic: 5.36 on 3 and 203 DF,  p-value: 0.00142 

Analysis of Variance Table

Model 1: no.never ~ has.negative.perception
Model 2: no.never ~ has.external.stress * has.negative.perception
  Res.Df RSS Df Sum of Sq    F Pr(>F)   
1    205  43                            
2    203  41  2      2.07 5.13 0.0067 **
---
Signif. codes:  0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1 

Not experimental

We intuitively suspect a particular direction of causality and have fit models that suggest that direction, but the questionnaire gives us no formal idea about the direction of causality; for example, it could be that the choice never to participate leads to overstatement of reasons against participation and of external stresses.

Conclusion

External stresses mediate an association between negative perception of activism and a decision never to participate in Occupy CUNY. For interpreting the direction of this relationship, the following plot is helpful.

Negative perception makes people more likely to say they will “never” participate, regardless of the level of external stress, and having external stress makes this difference larger.

Ideas for future study

It would be nice to pin down our nebulous concepts of external stress and negative perception. Rather than qualifying the sorts of stresses and perceptions, we simply ignored which boxes people checked for questions 4c and 7c. It may be informative to see how the particular box that was checked relates to the question 8 result or other results.

We could also test the same relationship with the larger and more general Occupy Research General Survey. It contains questions similar to the ones from the OccuPAR questionnaire that we used as indicators of external stress, perception of activism and participation in activism, but it has more responses from a wider movement.

Relevance

The conclusion of this study can be applied to the marketing surrounding activism. Aside from trying to influence people’s perception of the value of activism, marketing should consider activists’ external stresses.

People who are trying to recruit and sustain activists should focus on people with fewer external stresses or should provide support to current and potential activists who have more external stresses.

People who are trying to suppress activism should focus on people with more external stresses or should try to make the lives of potential and current activists more stressful.

The research team

The research team was initially composed of twelve individuals, including four CUNY undergraduate students, seven CUNY graduate students, and one alumnus. Most individuals on the research team had previous experience as student activists addressing issues at CUNY schools. The group met consistently from February, 2012 to May, 2012 in order to develop a survey designed to find the supports and barriers to student activism on CUNY campuses. During this time, one undergraduate student and one graduate student dropped out of the study. The research team had ten members when the survey was finalized: Sarah Zeller-Berkman, Keiko Matsuura, Alexis Halkovic, Jen Tang, Patrick Sweeney, Do Lee, Caro Muñoz-Proto, Akemi Nishida, Farhana Miah, and Mimiko Watanabe. Tom joined this team at the OccupyData hacakathon on March 1 to assist in the present analysis.

Source code and other documentation are here, as is the questionnaire.

Physically collecting, digitizing, and sanitizing the various data sets from four different network sites (SI, Rockaways, Red Hook, and NJ) has been an incredibly challenging task on many levels.

Some of the cleaned and processed Occupy Sandy data was used for the Data Anywhere project.  Using the similar infrastructure and tool as the data sharing component of Data Anywhere, the aim is to develop longer term data solution for addressing some of the data management issues plaguing #OccupySandy and other relief organizations.  More details can be found here.

Other data was used for analysis.  For now, some highlights and preliminary findings from our partially processed and cleaned data collection are:

Over 300 assessment forms entered for the Rockaways and NJ Occupy Sandy network sites entered by participants and community volunteers in preparation for at at the Occupy Data hackathon.

Over 27,000 meal requests were filled by the Occupy Sandy Kitchen from Nov. 23rd through Jan 28th.

Over 60 New Yorkers volunteered through a web-based form to open their homes to strangers needing shelter right after the storm.

Almost 3,400 SI, Brooklyn, Queens and NJ residents assessed by Occupy Sandy network volunteers at only four network sites.  After eliminating incomplete records:

• 25% percent of households with at least one senior reported medical issues that requiring assistance from a medical professional or prescription drugs
• the most urgent needs among residents were financial assistance, repairs for water related damage, and basic supplies such as food and clothes, and at least one of these needs was reported by more than half of all residents surveyed.

Stay tuned for more updates!  Over the next few weeks we’ll continue to dive into what can seem like nebulous file directories looking for more data goodies, and map variables across multiple data sets for site and multi-level statistics and visualizations.

Team:
Christo, #OccupyData NYC
Devin, Occupy Sandy
Marisela, SandyNJvols Tumblr

On day two, we discussed the challenges Occupy Sandy encounters when matching up a large database of volunteers to relief efforts. Since the superstorm hit our area, the InterOccupy  site has been successful in  collecting nearly 20 thousand volunteer data, but the service hubs registration has only been a handful at a time.

In contrast, we looked at a different approach to volunteering engagement, where New Jersey Sandy relief effort opportunities are curated and published on the SandyNJVols Tumblr page; and then disseminated through social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook, using superstorm Sandy keywords and hashtags.  The simplicity of data curation and social network approach has been successful in inspiring spontaneous citizen engagement through opportunity validation and immediacy of need.

We analyzed and compared the two sites to identify the causes limiting volunteer and service hub engagement.

Main issues:

• Passive approach: undetermined waiting time until a volunteering opportunity becomes available.
• Metrics: measure individual volunteering hours and/or referrals.
• Service hubs: simplify process to notify opportunities to community through clearinghouses such as Occupy Sandy.
• Volunteer rights conflict: many service providers require the volunteer to also register in their database, which may result in duplicate requests and an unwanted sense of overcommitment with multiple organizations.

Next steps:
Explore volunteer tracking and reward system and mobile location-based push notifications with volunteering opportunities.  Develop an outreach campaign for organizations providing them with a simple way to submit their needs, considering the communication break down that occurs when disaster strikes.
Marisela from SandyNJvols Tumblr is willing to collaborate with the Occupy Sandy team on their content strategy.