Stefaan Verhulst
Book chapter by Stephanie L. McNulty and Brian Wample in “Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource”: “Efforts to engage new actors in political decision-making through innovative participatory programs have exploded around the world in the past 25 years. This trend, called participatory governance, involves state-sanctioned institutional processes that allow citizens to exercise voice and vote in public policy decisions that produce real changes in citizens’ lives. Billions of dollars are spent supporting these efforts around the world. The concept, which harks back to theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill, has only recently become prominent in theories about democracy. After presenting the foundational research on participatory governance, the essay notes that newer research on this issues falls into three areas: (i) the broader impact of these experiments; (ii) new forms of engagement, with a focus on representation, deliberation, and intermediation; and (iii) scaling up and diffusion. The essay concludes with a research agenda for future work on this topic….(More)”
Paper by Gabriel Puron Cid et al in the International Journal of E-Planning Research (IJEPR): “Although the field of study surrounding the “smart city” is in an embryonic phase, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in urban settings is not new (Dameri and Rosenthal-Sabroux, 2014; Toh and Low, 1993; Tokmakoff and Billington, 1994). Since ancient times, cities and metropolitan areas have propelled social transformation and economic prosperity in many societies (Katz and Bradley, 2013). Many modern urban sites and metros have leveraged the success and competitiveness of ICTs (Caragliu, Del Bo and Nijkamp, 2011). At least in part, the recent growth of smart city initiatives can be attributed to the rapid adoption of mobile and sensor technologies, as well as the diversity of available Internet applications (Nam and Pardo, 2011; Oberti and Pavesi, 2013).
The effective use of technological innovations in urban sites has been embraced by the emergent term “smart city”, with a strong focus on improving living conditions, safeguarding the sustainability of the natural environment, and engaging with citizens more effectively and actively (Dameri and Rosenthal-Sabroux, 2014). Also known as smart city, digital city, or intelligent city, many of these initiatives have been introduced as strategies to improve the utilization of physical infrastructure (e.g., roads and utility grids), engage citizens in active local governance and decision making, foster sustainable growth, and help government officials learn and innovate as the environment changes….(More)”
Dalton Conley et al. in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “After decades of fretting over declining response rates to traditional surveys (the mainstay of 20th-century social research), an exciting new era would appear to be dawning thanks to the rise of big data. Social contagion can be studied by scraping Twitter feeds; peer effects are tested on Facebook; long-term trends in inequality and mobility can be assessed by linking tax records across years and generations; social-psychology experiments can be run on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service; and cultural change can be mapped by studying the rise and fall of specific Google search terms. In many ways there has been no better time to be a scholar in sociology, political science, economics, or related fields.
However, what should be an opportunity for social science is now threatened by a three-headed monster of privatization, amateurization, and Balkanization. A coordinated public effort is needed to overcome all of these obstacles.
While the availability of social-media data may obviate the problem of declining response rates, it introduces all sorts of problems with the level of access that researchers enjoy. Although some data can be culled from the web—Twitter feeds and Google searches—other data sit behind proprietary firewalls. And as individual users tune up their privacy settings, the typical university or independent researcher is increasingly locked out. Unlike federally funded studies, there is no mandate for Yahoo or Alibaba to make its data publicly available. The result, we fear, is a two-tiered system of research. Scientists working for or with big Internet companies will feast on humongous data sets—and even conduct experiments—and scholars who do not work in Silicon Valley (or Alley) will be left with proverbial scraps….
To address this triple threat of privatization, amateurization, and Balkanization, public social science needs to be bolstered for the 21st century. In the current political and economic climate, social scientists are not waiting for huge government investment like we saw during the Cold War. Instead, researchers have started to knit together disparate data sources by scraping, harmonizing, and geocoding any and all information they can get their hands on.
Currently, many firms employ some well-trained social and behavioral scientists free to pursue their own research; likewise, some companies have programs by which scholars can apply to be in residence or work with their data extramurally. However, as Facebook states, its program is “by invitation only and requires an internal Facebook champion.” And while Google provides services like Ngram to the public, such limited efforts at data sharing are not enough for truly transparent and replicable science….(More)”
World Food Programme Press Release: “The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) have teamed up to provide access to global data on hunger and food insecurity. The data can be used to understand the type of food available in certain markets, how families cope in the face of food insecurity and how WFP provides food assistance in emergencies to those in need.
The data is being made available through OCHA’s Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), an open platform for sharing crisis data. The collaboration between WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian organization fighting hunger worldwide, and OCHA began at the height of the Ebola crisis when WFP shared its data on food market prices in affected countries in West Africa.
With funding from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, WFP has since been able to make large amounts of its data available dynamically, making it easier to integrate with other systems, including HDX.
From there, HDX built an interactive visualization for Food Prices data that allows a range of users, from the general public to a data scientist, to explore the data in insightful ways. The same visualization is also available on the WFP VAM Shop….(More)“
NESTA: “Governments across the world are creating innovation teams and labs to help them find new ways of tackling the complex challenges of the 21st century. If you want to get a sense of the scale of this global trend then check out this searchable global map of innovation labs worldwide.
There are about 80 in total represented here – colour-coded for the level of government (blue for local, green for regional, red national and yellow international). In this map I’ve concentrated on labs inside government excluding the dozens of public and social innovation labs (#psilabs) like Nesta, MaRS Solutions Lab or The GovLab that work alongside the public sector though they themselves are outside it. I’ve probably left lots of government i-teams and labs out of this list – so please suggest more and I’ll add them in.
Public innovation labs can claim to be a global movement not just in sheer numbers of teams and labs worldwide but also because of the momentum behind the creation of new ones, at a current rate of least one a month. Though some of the most celebrated examples e.g. Denmark’s MindLab are well into their second decade about a third of the labs set out here have been born in the last two years.
The early wave of scenario-based creative “future centres” (like the Netherlands-based De Werf) was soon followed by the kind of design-based lab that continues to dominate much of the thinking and practice in the field. But lately this has been complemented by a new wave of teams using other tools (data and technology or behavioural economics) as well as the more hybrid approach often adopted by innovation delivery teams at a municipal level, particularly in the US. At a global level the shift to a lab-based approach in development policy has been particularly marked….(More)”
Adam Elkus at Slate: “Critics of “algorithms” are everywhere. Algorithms tell you how to vote.Algorithms can revoke your driver’s license and terminate your disability benefits. Algorithms predict crimes. Algorithms ensured you didn’t hear about #FreddieGray on Twitter. Algorithms are everywhere, and, to hear critics, they are trouble. What’s the problem? Critics allege that algorithms are opaque, automatic, emotionless, and impersonal, and that they separate decision-makers from the consequences of their actions. Algorithms cannot appreciate the context of structural discrimination, are trained on flawed datasets, and are ruining lives everywhere. There needs to be algorithmic accountability. Otherwise, who is to blame when a computational process suddenly deprives someone of his or her rights and livelihood?
But at heart, criticism of algorithmic decision-making makes an age-old argument about impersonal, automatic corporate and government bureaucracy. The machinelike bureaucracy has simply become the machine. Instead of a quest for accountability, much of the rhetoric and discourse about algorithms amounts to a surrender—an unwillingness to fight the ideas and bureaucratic logic driving the algorithms that critics find so creepy and problematic. Algorithmic transparency and accountability can only be achieved if critics understand that transparency (no modifier is needed) is the issue. If the problem is that a bureaucratic system is impersonal, unaccountable, creepy, and has a flawed or biased decision criteria, then why fetishize and render mysterious the mere mechanical instrument of the system’s will?…(More)”
Paper by Jay Marlowe and Martin Tolich: “This study examines a significant gap in the role of providing ethical guidance and support for community-based research. University and health-based ethical review committees in New Zealand predominantly serve as ‘gatekeepers’ that consider the ethical implications of a research design in order to protect participants and the institution from harm. However, in New Zealand, community-based researchers routinely do not have access to this level of support or review. A relatively new group, the New Zealand Ethics Committee (NZEC), formed in 2012, responds to the uneven landscape of access for community-based research. By offering ethical approval inclusive of the review of a project’s study design outside institutional settings, NZEC has endeavoured to move beyond a gatekeeping research governance function to that of bridge-building. This change of focus presents rich possibilities but also a number of limitations for providing ethical review outside conventional institutional contexts. This paper reports on the NZEC’s experience of working with community researchers to ascertain the possibilities and tensions of shifting ethics review processes from research governance to a focus on research ethics in community-based participatory research….(More)”
Paper by Ana Brandusescu and Renée E Sieber: “Crisis mapping has emerged as a method of connecting and empowering citizens during emergencies. This article explores the hyperbole behind crisis mapping as it extends into more long-term or ‘chronic’ community development practices. We critically examined developer issues and participant (i.e. community organization) usage within the context of local communities. We repurposed the predominant crisis mapping platform Crowdmap for three cases of community development in Canadian anglophone and francophone. Our case studies show mixed results about the actual cost of deployment, the results of disintermediation, and local context with the mapping application. Lastly, we discuss the relationship of hype, temporality, and community development as expressed in our cases…(More)”
Paper by Peter John, Forthcoming in Contemporary Approaches to Public Policy, edited by Philippe Zittoun and B. Guy Peters : “This paper reviews the use of behavioural ideas to improve public policy. There needs to be a behavioural take on decision-making itself so that policies are designed in more effective ways. it recounts the beginnings of behavioural sciences as currently conceived and then setting out the massive expansion of interest that has come about since that time. It reports on how such ideas have had a large impact on governments at all levels across the world, but also noting how decision-making itself has been influenced by more policy-relevant ideas. The paper discusses the paradox that the very decision-makers themselves are subject to the same biases as the objects of behavioural economics, which might imply limitations in the choices of such interventions. Here the text of the chapter reengages with the classics of decision-making theory. The chapter notes how behavioural sciences need not depend on a top down approach but can incorporate citizen voice. The paper reviews how citizens and other groups can use behavioural cues to alter the behaviour of policy-makers in socially beneficial ways. The paper discusses how behaviourally informed measures could be integrated within the policy making process in ways that advance the effective use of evidence and nudge decision to make better policies….(More)“
Springwise: “….a number of charities using social media campaigns to spread awareness about their causes. Only last week we covered the #EndangeredEmoji campaign from WWF, which uses Twitter and emojis to highlight the plight of seventeen endangered species. Now, two startups — Gramforacause and Gramming For Good — are turning to the photocentric platform Instagram to connect photographers with non-profits, helping spread the word about their causes through social photography.
Each startup curates a service tailored to the needs of the nonprofit — whether that be providing photos to populate the feed, an Instagram takeover or simply spreading the word on a photographer’s own account. When matching a photographer, both companies consider preferred photography type — phone, DSLR or film — their expected rate of pay and where their passions lie….
Website: www.grammingforgood.com & www.gramforacause.com “