Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Kentaro Toyama “…, an award-winning computer scientist, moved to India to start a new research group for Microsoft. Its mission: to explore novel technological solutions to the world’s persistent social problems. Together with his team, he invented electronic devices for under-resourced urban schools and developed digital platforms for remote agrarian communities. But after a decade of designing technologies for humanitarian causes, Toyama concluded that no technology, however dazzling, could cause social change on its own.

Technologists and policy-makers love to boast about modern innovation, and in their excitement, they exuberantly tout technology’s boon to society. But what have our gadgets actually accomplished? Over the last four decades, America saw an explosion of new technologies – from the Internet to the iPhone, from Google to Facebook – but in that same period, the rate of poverty stagnated at a stubborn 13%, only to rise in the recent recession. So, a golden age of innovation in the world’s most advanced country did nothing for our most prominent social ill.

Toyama’s warning resounds: Don’t believe the hype! Technology is never the main driver of social progress. Geek Heresy inoculates us against the glib rhetoric of tech utopians by revealing that technology is only an amplifier of human conditions. By telling the moving stories of extraordinary people like Patrick Awuah, a Microsoft millionaire who left his lucrative engineering job to open Ghana’s first liberal arts university, and Tara Sreenivasa, a graduate of a remarkable South Indian school that takes children from dollar-a-day families into the high-tech offices of Goldman Sachs and Mercedes-Benz, Toyama shows that even in a world steeped in technology, social challenges are best met with deeply social solutions….(More)”

Paper by David Becker, and Samuel Bendett in Procedia Engineering: “Crowdsourcing has become a quick and efficient way to solve a wide variety of problems – technical solutions, social and economic actions, fundraising and troubleshooting of numerous issues that affect both the private and the public sectors. US government is now actively using crowdsourcing to solve complex problems that previously had to be handled by a limited circle of professionals. This paper outlines several examples of how a Department of Defense project headquartered at the National Defense University is using crowdsourcing for solutions to disaster response problems….(More)”

Wasim Ahmed at the LSE Impact Blog: “I have a social media research blog where I find and write about tools that can be used to capture and analyse data from social media platforms. My PhD looks at Twitter data for health, such as the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. I am increasingly asked why I am looking at Twitter, and what tools and methods there are of capturing and analysing data from other platforms such as Facebook, or even less traditional platforms such as Amazon book reviews. Brainstorming a couple of responses to this question by talking to members of the New Social Media New Social Science network, there are at least six reasons:

1. Twitter is a popular platform in terms of the media attention it receives and it therefore attracts more research due to its cultural status
2. Twitter makes it easier to find and follow conversations (i.e., by both its search feature and by tweets appearing in Google search results)
3. Twitter has hashtag norms which make it easier gathering, sorting, and expanding searches when collecting data
4. Twitter data is easy to retrieve as major incidents, news stories and events on Twitter are tend to be centred around a hashtag
5. The Twitter API is more open and accessible compared to other social media platforms, which makes Twitter more favourable to developers creating tools to access data. This consequently increases the availability of tools to researchers.
6. Many researchers themselves are using Twitter and because of their favourable personal experiences, they feel more comfortable with researching a familiar platform.

It is probable that a combination of response 1 to 6 have led to more research on Twitter. However, this raises another distinct but closely related question: when research is focused so heavily on Twitter, what (if any) are the implications of this on our methods?

As for the methods that are currently used in analysing Twitter data i.e., sentiment analysis, time series analysis (examining peaks in tweets), network analysis etc., can these be applied to other platforms or are different tools, methods and techniques required? In addition to qualitative methods such as content analysis, I have used the following four methods in analysing Twitter data for the purposes of my PhD, below I consider whether these would work for other social media platforms:

1. Sentiment analysis works well with Twitter data, as tweets are consistent in length (i.e., <= 140) would sentiment analysis work well with, for example Facebook data where posts may be longer?
2. Time series analysis is normally used when examining tweets overtime to see when a peak of tweets may occur, would examining time stamps in Facebook posts, or Instagram posts, for example, produce the same results? Or is this only a viable method because of the real-time nature of Twitter data?
3. Network analysis is used to visualize the connections between people and to better understand the structure of the conversation. Would this work as well on other platforms whereby users may not be connected to each other i.e., public Facebook pages?
4. Machine learning methods may work well with Twitter data due to the length of tweets (i.e., <= 140) but would these work for longer posts and for platforms that are not text based i.e., Instagram?

It may well be that at least some of these methods can be applied to other platforms, however they may not be the best methods, and may require the formulation of new methods, techniques, and tools.

So, what are some of the tools available to social scientists for social media data? In the table below I provide an overview of some the tools I have been using (which require no programming knowledge and can be used by social scientists):…(More)”

New book edited by Rodríguez-Bolívar, Manuel Pedro: “There has been much attention paid to the idea of Smart Cities as researchers have sought to define and characterize the main aspects of the concept, including the role of creative industries in urban growth, the importance of social capital in urban development, and the role of urban sustainability. This book develops a critical view of the Smart City concept, the incentives and role of governments in promoting the development of Smart Cities and the analysis of experiences of e-government projects addressed to enhance Smart Cities. This book further analyzes the perceptions of stakeholders, such as public managers or politicians, regarding the incentives and role of governments in Smart Cities and the critical analysis of e-government projects to promote Smart Cities’ development, making the book valuable to academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, international organizations and technical experts in understanding the role of government to enhance Smart Cities’ projects….(More)”

Lisa Rein at the Washington Post: “The law that’s supposed to keep citizens in the know about what their government is doing is about to get more robust.

Starting this week, seven agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence —  launched a new effort to put online the records they distribute to requesters under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

So if a journalist, nonprofit group or corporation asks for the records, what they see, the public also will see. Documents still will be redacted where necessary to protect what the government decides is sensitive information, an area that’s often disputed but won’t change with this policy.

The Obama administration’s new Open Government initiative began quietly on the agencies’ Web sites days after FOIA’s 49th anniversary. It’s a response to years of pressure from open-government groups and lawmakers to boost public access to records of government decisions, deliberations and policies.

The “release to one is release to all” policy will start as a six-month pilot at the EPA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and within some offices at the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the National Archives and Records Administration….(More)”

Jonathan Gray at Open Knowledge: “What will the “data revolution” do? What will it be about? What will it count? What kinds of risks and harms might it bring? Whom and what will it serve? And who will get to decide?

Today we are launching a new discussion paper on “Democratising the Data Revolution”, which is intended to advance thinking and action around civil society engagement with the data revolution. It looks beyond the disclosure of existing information, towards more ambitious and substantive forms of democratic engagement with data infrastructures.¹

It concludes with a series of questions about what practical steps institutions and civil society organisations might take to change what is measured and how, and how these measurements are put to work.

You can download the full PDF report here, or continue to read on in this blog post.

What Counts?

How might civil society actors shape the data revolution? In particular, how might they go beyond the question of what data is disclosed towards looking at what is measured in the first place? To kickstart discussion around this topic, we will look at three kinds of intervention: changing existing forms of measurement, advocating new forms of measurement and undertaking new forms of measurement.

Changing Existing Forms of Measurement

Rather than just focusing on the transparency, disclosure and openness of public information, civil society groups can argue for changing what is measured with existing data infrastructures. One example of this is recent campaigning around company ownership in the UK. Advocacy groups wanted to unpick networks of corporate ownership and control in order to support their campaigning and investigations around tax avoidance, tax evasion and illicit financial flows.

While the UK company register recorded information about “nominal ownership”, it did not include information about so-called “beneficial ownership”, or who ultimately benefits from the ownership and control of companies. Campaigners undertook an extensive programme of activities to advocate for changes and extensions to existing data infrastructures – including via legislation, software systems, and administrative protocols.²

Advocating New Forms of Measurement

As well as changing or recalibrating existing forms of measurement, campaigners and civil society organisations can make the case for the measurement of things which were not previously measured. For example, over the past several decades social and political campaigning has resulted in new indicators about many different issues – such as gender inequality, health, work, disability, pollution or education.³ In such cases activists aimed to establish a given indicator as important and relevant for public institutions, decision makers, and broader publics – in order to, for example, inform policy development or resource allocation.

Undertaking New Forms of Measurement

Historically, many civil society organisations and advocacy groups have collected their own data to make the case for action on issues that they work on – from human rights abuses to endangered species….(More)”

Christian Masdeval and Adriano Veloso in Information Systems: “Crowdsourcing technology offers exciting possibilities for local governments. Specifically, citizens are increasingly taking part in reporting and discussing issues related to their neighborhood and problems they encounter on a daily basis, such as overflowing trash-bins, broken footpaths and lifts, illegal graffiti, and potholes. Pervasive citizen participation enables local governments to respond more efficiently to these urban issues. This interaction between citizens and municipalities is largely promoted by civic engagement platforms, such as See-Click-Fix, FixMyStreet, CitySourced, and OpenIDEO, which allow citizens to report urban issues by entering free text describing what needs to be done, fixed or changed. In order to develop appropriate action plans and priorities, government officials need to figure out how urgent are the reported issues. In this paper we propose to estimate the urgency of urban issues by mining different emotions that are implicit in the text describing the issue. More specifically, a reported issue is first categorized according to the emotions expressed in it, and then the corresponding emotion scores are combined in order to produce a final urgency level for the reported issue. Our experiments use the SeeClickFix hackathon data and diverse emotion classification algorithms. They indicate that (i) emotions can be categorized efficiently with supervised learning algorithms, and (ii) the use of citizen emotions leads to accurate urgency estimates. Further, using additional features such as the type of issue or its author leads to no further accuracy gains….(More)”

Social media has helped to bridge the communication gap between customers and hotels. Bed bug infestations are a growing health crisis and have obtained increasing attention on social media sites. Without managing this crisis effectively, bed bug infestation can cause economic loss and reputational damages to hotel properties, ranging from negative comments and complaints, to possible law suits. Thus, it is essential for hoteliers to understand the importance of social media in crisis communication, and to incorporate social media in hotels’ crisis management plans.