The 3L Mantra to live by!

I am thrilled by this new article with my former Master's student Linnea Thompson, one of the brightest students I have come across over these years. A dream collaboration which went smoothly and resulted in a publication with a top tier journal in the Communications field - the International Journal of Communication We got to present this in Manchester for the Digital Economies workshop organized by Richard Heeks, a fantastic platform for sharing this work. The article,  Crowdsourcing as a Platform for Digital Labor Unions  is about how crowdsourcing is used as a tool to reconfigure relations between outsourced factory workers and corporations through innovative platform designs and the challenges that ensue. Below is the full abstract and link to the full paper: Global complex supply chains have made it difficult to know the realities in factories. This structure obfuscates the networks, channels, and flows of communication between employers, workers, nongov...

My paper, "Bottom of the Data Pyramid, Big data and the Global South" has been published in the International Journal of Communication , an open access journal. This work is a build-up from the blog that I wrote earlier on regarding this topic for   Discover Society  as well as a couple of keynotes I gave in 2015 at the Technology, Knowledge & Society Conference in Berkeley and IS4IS Summit in Vienna.  Basically, this paper argues that so far, little attention has been given to the impact of big data in the Global South, about 60% of whose residents are below the poverty line. Big data manifests in novel and unprecedented ways in these neglected contexts. For instance, India has created biometric national identities for her 1.2 billion people, linking them to welfare schemes, and social entrepreneurial initiatives like the Ushahidi project that leveraged crowdsourcing to provide real-time crisis maps for humanitarian relief. While these projects are indeed inspir...