Curating the Internet: Business, leadership, and management micro-summaries for September 24, 2019

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Authored by @remlaps

A plan to educate 1.6 million more girls in India; Snap executives said to be discussing Facebook with FTC; A new sort of business risk from open source software use; Too many video silos may drive consumers back to piracy; and a Steem essay on the polarization of public debate

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  1. A bold plan to empower 1.6 million out-of-school girls in India - In this TED talk, Safeena Husain discusses her plan to get 1.6 million Indian girls into school. She starts by challenging the belief that, "a goat is an asset and a girl is a liability." She hopes to accomplish this mass enrollment with a muti-step process by (i) recruiting local volunteers; (ii) using a custom app and door to door visits to identify "out of school girls."; (iii) mobilizing the community to get the girls back in school through the use of neighborhood meetings and other activism; (iv) making sure that the schools have the basic infrastructure that girls need - including separate bathrooms and drinking water; and (v) helping the girls with the learning process. According to recent data, the organization was able to bring 92% of girls back to school with a learning improvement that is equivalent to an extra year of schooling. By scaling the method up, her goal is to solve 40% of the problem of unschooled girls during the next 5 years. The cost to find a girl, she says is around $20, and the cost to keep her enrolled and make sure she's learning is about $40. By accomplishing this, she believes it will help to accomplish many of the UN's development goals as second order results.

  2. Facebook's copycat behavior was reportedly tracked by Snapchat in a dossier called 'Project Voldemort' — and Snap may have given it to the FTC to help its investigation into the social media giant - According to the article, Snap (i.e. snapchat) had their legal team maintain a dossier, termed Project Voldemort, detailing anti-trust abuses by facebook, and dozens of Snap executives are now in discussions with the FTC. Facebook has a long history of releasing features that are similar or identical to those of its competitors. Responses to inquiries have not been received from Facebook, Snap, or the FTC.

  3. A former employee of an IT startup was upset about a contract with ICE. The outage he triggered has exposed a big new risk for companies using open source. - CEO Barry Crist of IT automation firm, Chef, wrote a blog post and an e-mail to employees saying that the company made a principled decision to work with government agencies, regardless of their support or opposition to particular policies. In response, a former employee, Seth Vargo, was unhappy about the company's work with ICE and removed open source code that Chef relied upon from his account (presumably github). As a result of the code deletion, several customers experienced outages. The company began work with ICE during the Obama administration, and CTO Corey Scobie said, "to the best of our knowledge, no Chef software is being used in systems that further the separation of parents and children at the US border." Although there's no novel technology, the article suggests a new form of procedural risk for companies who use open source code.

  4. Ironically, Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy - It's not actually the number of choices, it's the paywalls and silos, but the rise of video streaming services may also be leading to a rise of piracy. Users are becoming frustrated by the number of streaming subscriptions that are needed in order to watch the shows that they want, and they feel that there is too much friction and fragmentation in the market place. h/t OS News

  5. STEEM Public debate may be polarized, but can we really speak of increasing differences in opinion? - In this Steem essay, @keysa discusses confirmation bias, echo chambers, and the "spiral of silence" in today's society. In short, the essay discusses the mechanisms behind the rise of tribalism, a concept it calls "affective polarization, and ascribes two primary causes. The first underlying cause, it says, is the increasingly personalized digital world, which lets people exchange opinions in a virtual echo chamber, free of disagreement or contradiction. Additionally, the increasing trend towards digital communications means that subtle cues like body language and facial expressions are lost. The second cause it identifies is the spiral of silence where people who hold a minority position are afraid to speak openly about their opinions. The end result of all this is a world with two highly polarized groups of people who are confident in their beliefs in conflicting ideas, a world where society divides itself between "us" and "them", and a world where nuance in belief is increasingly unacceptable to large majorities. (This post has a 10% beneficiary setting assigned to @keysa.)

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