Two events at MIT this week

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Abdelhamid, Souad

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May 6, 2014, 8:19:02 PM5/6/14

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EVENT 1

Date: May 7, 2014
Time: 10:00 - 11:00 AM
Location: E14-633 Lecture Hall

TITLE: Scalable Civics

ABSTRACT:

For thousands of years, we governed ourselves in small-scale
societies. But as the world explodes in size and complexity, our
ability for sense-making, mobilization, and cooperation diminished.
For some time now, we have had to rely on an increasing set of
autocratic and topocratic agents and institutions to represent our
interests and govern our affairs. As a result, people's ability to
influence their government and society diminished, culminating in a
"crisis in agency." In this talk, Iyad argues that Internet-mediated
participation has the potential to allow us, for the first time, to
scale-up our ancient civics. He describes his work on mobilizing
millions of people via social media, harnessing social networks to
better govern the commons, and building technology that might one day
enable mass-scale debate. After discussing emerging design challenges
for building scalable civics, he outlines the need for a delicate
ecology in which we retain our agency in the face of rising
automation.

BIO:

Iyad Rahwan, a native of Aleppo, Syria, is an associate professor at
Masdar Institute, a research institute in Abu Dhabi established in
cooperation with MIT. He is an Honorary Fellow at the University of
Edinburgh, and holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne. Iyad won
the US State Department's Tag Challenge, in which he mobilized
thousands of people world-wide to find target individuals in under 12
hours using only mug shots. This led The Economist magazine to coin
the term "6 degrees of mobilization" to describe how social media is
making Milgram's "6 degrees of separation" actionable.

Event 2: Discussion with Dr. Jamal Al-Suwaidi

Date: May 8

Time: 4 pm

Location: 3-133 MIT

Q&A and Discussion with Dr. Jamal Al-Suwaidi

Director of the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research

Please RSVP here

Invite your friends.