Socialmetrica: moldable civic tech and critical code and data literacy practices to empower grassroots communities via reproducible research and data activism on social media

Offray Vladimir Luna-Cárdenas

Funding Area: Capacity building / Construcción de capacidad

Problem Statement: Social media discourse is affecting democracy and increasing polarization, while recent changes in popular sites API policies are eroding the data commons, where many contribute but making sense of it is even more dificult for all contributors. The need/challenge that out proposal is addressing is the lack of civic oversight and awareness about the discourse in social media platforms from different relevant actors: public figures, government institutions, NGOs and multinational entities. We are providing a open source and reproducible research moldable tool, named Socialmetrica, and the related critical code/data literacy curriculum, that allows grassroots communities and civic society actors analyze, visualize and report data from different social media platforms with low latency (almost real-time). Our technologies make big data approachable and reproducible by using what we call "pocket infrastructures": simple, extensible, local-first, deployable in wide variety of hardware.

Proposed Activities: Those are our activities organized by yearly quarters (Qn-Qm, means that propossed activities are occupying both) Q1-Q2: Increasing data sources beyond Twitter (Mastodon, NOSTR, Instagram). Adding web reports as default. Decoupling PDF reports from LaTeX machinery. Q2-Q3: Adding discourse models via machine traning/learning. Adding data sources beyond previously added ones or improving data adquisition. Q3-Q4: Improving discourse models. Q1-Q2-Q3-Q4 Networking Workshops and curriculum prototyping/deploying in grassroots communities. Software packaging, testing and delivering.

Openness: Socialmetrica is Libre Open Source covered by a curanted and interconnected collection of several open source tools. The ones we developed are under MIT license and when we need to extend our core toolkit with external tools, we look for compatible licenses. The static and interactive documentation is covered by copyleft/copyfarleft licenses and we have accumulated around 800 hours of open workshops about critical code and data literacy since 2015 (called data rodas and data weeks) with diverse audience participants: scientists, students, journalists, designers, artist, young adults and adults, among others. Our techniques and aproaches are the result of a PhD research bridging grassroots innovation, moldable digital metatools and civic tech. And they have been recognized in dozen of international events we we share openly our results with other open academia/research/software/data practitioners: Berlín, Cologne, Lüneburg, Germany, 2017, 2018, 2023. Cambridge, England, 2019. Madrid, Valencia, Spain, 2017, 2018 Perast, Montenegro, 2017, 2018 Bogotá, Medellín, Manizales, Cartagena, Colombia, 2016 to 2019. Prague, Czech Republic, 2016. Santiago, Chile, 2016. Buenos aires, Argentina, 2015.

Challenges: We are a small team(2 to 5 people, depending on the amount of work), located in the Global South, inhabiting a particular not well populated intersection: civic tech, grassroots/open innovation, moldable digital metatools and critical code/data literacy. As such, our general challenges are in three fronts: *''visibility'': usually technical innovation coming from the Global South is not widely known. *''sustainability'': we have been mostly famlily/self funded, with small consutancy work alternating with PhD research. Once the PhD ended (in 2018), the degree was obtained (2021) and a new job started (2022), the rhythm and continuity of this efforts can be severely diminish. * ''scalability'': we want to congragate a diverse group of data (h)ac(k)tivists from different grassroots communities. That means to support/fund the learning process as we have done previously with intensive weekend workshops that end with a public portfolio and certificates. Implementing external/internal learning/prototyping practices that allow the core group and the surrounding community to grow organically while addressing those three challenges in big/small scope is our main challenge. This is accentuated by the progressive enclosure of the data commons by closing their APIs and while our data scrapping techniques have been successful so far, we envison some landscaping of extition for the data commons, while mapping emergent/unfamiliar ones.

Neglectedness: We are just starting to map funding opportunities for our work. We have not applied to any other funding in the past for this particular work as Socialmetrica, our current prototype, is the last evolution of a decade long PhD research on moldable digital metatools, civic tech and grassroots innovation, so it's a relative young prototype on deeply studied ideas. But we're applying to other multinational entities and we hope that our prototypes, tech stack and methodologies will be interesting to other funders. So far, our project has been family/self funded with some minor consultacy works on the related ideas/tecnologies. We have not applied before to other funds as the main researcher was occupied finishing his PhD and going back to academia. Our current external funding efforts look for making this research and its applications sustainable, beyond the main researcher, in an independient umbrella entity, instead of a particular university and keep the related prototyping agile, rooted and practical, which would be difficult under most research agendas and the publish or perish logic of current paper circuits and indexes.

Success: Our main success measurement is related with the grassroots communities appropiation of our methodologies and technologies for amplifying their voices and improve agency over their concerns. That could be measure in: Number of iterations in the prototype(s). Amount of social networks where Socialmetrica is able to connect, from hegemonic ones (i.e: Twitter, Instagram) to independent ones (ie.Mastodon, NOSTR) Number of participants on the Socialmetrica certified intensive workshops. Number of national a international networking events. Number of people/researches using Socialmetrica to make sense of public discouse in social media. Number of data stories and infografic pieces build with Socialmetrica and shared in hegemonic and indenpendient Social networks and the reaction metrics for them (which could be analyzed, in a reproducible way, with Socialmetrica).

Total Budget: 25000

Affiliations: mutabiT S.A.S.

LMIE Carveout: Our project fits the Low and MIddle Income Economies (LMIEs) as the enterprise and the research, development and administrative team members are located in Colombia, a LMIE country. mutabiT, as an I+D+i (Investigation, Develoment and innovation) enterprise has a particular approach from Global South combining agile techniques to account for present needs with slow academia, supporting long/deep questions. In practice, we take consultancy works that funds "sabbatical" research projects to be developed in periods with low/no income.

Team Skills: Some of the elements that are vital for our success are: * mutabiT, the umbrella research entity exists since 2003. * Solid research and development (8+ years of a PhD). * Several prototypes around grassroots innovation and civic tech as showed in https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/offray-blog/uv/bliki/#Portfolio * So far the project has been self/family funded as a research micro-enterprise with no external loans. * Our team is diverse with expertise including: social sciences, math, informatics, music, live performance and living arts, teaching, design, research and administration and with work experience in academia, civic organizations, public and private sectors * We have long ties to grassroots communities: including starting and organizing big and small events, some that spread accross all Latin America, like FLISoL: Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre (200 cities across 20 countries since 2004) the data weeks and data rodas workshops (800+ hours since 2015) and co-creating community spaces like the HackBo hackerspace (since 2010), among other experiences. * Our tools and methodologies have been acknowledge, selected, invited and shared in a several national and international events (see Opennes answer). * Our practices are informed by hacktivism, grassroots innovations, popular feminism, co-design and research.

Submission Number: 141