In this project, we are seeking ways to integrate and visualize the massive new social data (see our partnership with Facebook at peace.facebook.com for an example of this kind of data) showing the positive and negative engagement between any two sides of any actual or potential conflict.

Many social technology companies have data showing individual-to-individual engagement via their products, programs, or websites. In partnership with these companies, we are integrating and visualizing these huge, precise, dynamic Peace Data sets to show both positive levels across difference boundaries.

These difference boundaries include nationality (the gross difference boundary we usually think of when we talk about war and peace), but also, with the much higher resolution of data we now get from all the human interactions that are mediated by technology, difference boundaries also include language, religion, race, ethnicity, gender, geography, political affiliation, age, and all the other group identities we humans create to categorize and distinguish ourselves and each other.

This project to aggregate a rich, multi-dimensional longitudinal Peace dataset, and visualize it in different useful ways, will help enable the possibility of a model to predict the emergence of a conflict before it happens; if we can build such a predictive model, we will be able to quickly test a range of preventive interventions, to stop conflicts from happening or escalating.

This project is brought to you in collaboration with the United States Institute of Peace, our colleagues at thePsychology of Evolving Media research group at the University of Helsinki, and George Washington University, and our wonderful open innovation co-creation community partner jovoto.

Special thanks and credit go to our colleagues Tanja Aitamurto and Søren Ingomar Petersen for initiating and building our relationship with jovoto and their global creative community.