What should we do about the naming deficit/surplus?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in mySociety Blog: “As I wrote in my last post, I am very concerned about the lack of comprehensible, consistent language to talk about the hugely diverse ways in which people are using the internet to bring about social and political change….My approach to finding an appropriate name was to look at the way that other internet industry sectors are named, so that I could choose a name that sits nicely next to very familiar sectoral labels….

Segmenting the Civic Power sector

Choosing a single sectoral name – Civic Power – is not really the point of this exercise. The real benefit would come from being able to segment the many projects within this sector so that they are more easy to compare and contrast.

Here is my suggested four part segmentation of the Civic Power sector…:

  1. Decision influencing organisations try to directly shape or change particular decisions made by powerful individuals or organisations.
  2. Regime changing organisations try to replace decision makers, not persuade them.
  3. Citizen Empowering organisations try to give people the resources and the confidence required to exert power for whatever purpose those people see fit, both now and in the future.
  4. Digital Government organisations try to improve the ways in which governments acquire and use computers and networks. Strictly speaking this is just a sub-category of ‘decision influencing organisation’, on a par with an environmental group or a union, but more geeky.”

See also: Open Government – What’s in a Name?

Social Influence Bias: A Randomized Experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper in Science: “Our society is increasingly relying on the digitized, aggregated opinions of others to make decisions. We therefore designed and analyzed a large-scale randomized experiment on a social news aggregation Web site to investigate whether knowledge of such aggregates distorts decision-making. Prior ratings created significant bias in individual rating behavior, and positive and negative social influences created asymmetric herding effects. Whereas negative social influence inspired users to correct manipulated ratings, positive social influence increased the likelihood of positive ratings by 32% and created accumulating positive herding that increased final ratings by 25% on average. This positive herding was topic-dependent and affected by whether individuals were viewing the opinions of friends or enemies. A mixture of changing opinion and greater turnout under both manipulations together with a natural tendency to up-vote on the site combined to create the herding effects. Such findings will help interpret collective judgment accurately and avoid social influence bias in collective intelligence in the future.”
See also: ‘Like’ This Article Online? Your Friends Will Probably Approve, Too, Scientists Say

Searching Big Data for ‘Digital Smoke Signals’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steve Lohr in the New York Times: “It is the base camp of the United Nations Global Pulse team — a tiny unit inside an institution known for its sprawling bureaucracy, not its entrepreneurial hustle. Still, the focus is on harnessing technology in new ways — using data from social networks, blogs, cellphones and online commerce to transform economic development and humanitarian aid in poorer nations….

The efforts by Global Pulse and a growing collection of scientists at universities, companies and nonprofit groups have been given the label “Big Data for development.” It is a field of great opportunity and challenge. The goal, the scientists involved agree, is to bring real-time monitoring and prediction to development and aid programs. Projects and policies, they say, can move faster, adapt to changing circumstances and be more effective, helping to lift more communities out of poverty and even save lives.

Research by Global Pulse and other groups, for example, has found that analyzing Twitter messages can give an early warning of a spike in unemployment, price rises and disease. Such “digital smoke signals of distress,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said, usually come months before official statistics — and in many developing countries today, there are no reliable statistics.

Finding the signals requires data, though, and much of the most valuable data is held by private companies, especially mobile phone operators, whose networks carry text messages, digital-cash transactions and location data. So persuading telecommunications operators, and the governments that regulate and sometimes own them, to release some of the data is a top task for the group. To analyze the data, the groups apply tools now most widely used for pinpointing customers with online advertising.”

China Law Translate (CLT), a collaborative translation project.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“CLT allows many users to translate small pieces of legal texts between Chinese and English, to promote mutual understanding and provide a resource to legal professionals around the world. The sum of these small pieces, contributed in any order or no order at all, gradually creates a completed translation. You can translate as little or as much as you like, or leave comments to discuss the work of others or suggest better translations.
Quick Start: 1. open a post 2. Select Language you want to translate INTO 3. Open Tranlator Mode. 4. Translate…
We aim to create complete translations of important Chinese laws and articles, but some of the articles you view may still be incomplete or translated less than fluently. Bear with us, we are a new resource and getting there slowly. If you are able,, help us improve the translations you see!”

Innovation Network' Connects Leaders Across Latin America to Share Ideas

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

National Democratic Institute: “Throughout Latin America, political and civic leaders are under increasing pressure to solve pervasive problems such as poverty, insecurity, corruption and lack of government transparency. Some of that pressure is generated by social media and other new communications tools available to constituents. But new technology is also aiding the response.
Revolutionary developments such as georeferencing and low-cost video conferencing have spawned new ways for political and civic leaders to address some of these problems. Georeferencing, for example, helps combat corruption by making it possible to track the location of individuals, such as government employees, at a given time to ensure they are performing work when and where they say they are.
Leaders are using new technology to push for campaign finance transparency in Colombia, and to improve how political parties in Argentina and Uruguay prepare their members to tackle public policy challenges by using web-based tools for virtual trainings. In Honduras, where it is common for corrupt teachers to claim pay for work in multiple districts, the government is using georeferencing to ensure that these teachers aren’t paid for work they didn’t do.
But despite the innovations, there is little communication among countries in the region, so new methods developed in one country are often unknown in another. To overcome that gap, NDI has supported the creation of Red Innovación (RI), or “Innovation Network,” a virtual online Spanish-language forum where social and political innovators from throughout the region can highlight initiatives, solicit feedback and harvest new ideas to help governments become more responsive, transparent and effective.
Red Innovación uses platforms such as Google Hangout videoconferences to help put political parties and civil society organizations in touch with experts on such topics as how to communicate more effectively, how cyberactivism works and how to use technology to promote transparency.”
 

Operation Decode San Francisco Will Hack the City's Legal Code

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Motherboard: “The city of San Francisco is set to be hacked tonight. Legally, of course. It’s all part of the Operation Decode San Francisco effort, which will unwrap and simplify the city’s dense, labyrinthine laws and re-package them in a fresh, easy-to-use and searchable format.
The crew behind this, OpenGov, originally cut its teeth on KeepTheWebOpen.org. Founded by Rep. Darrell Issa and others to combat SOPA/PIPA, and running on a $5,000 piece of software called the Madison Project, the site also offered up an alternative bill: Issa’s Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN). Characterized as the first technological crowd-sourcing of legislation, the bill is still stuck in committee, but the site was certainly one of the many tentacles that helped suffocate SOPA/PIPA.

…The immediate hope with these beta Decoded sites is that they will appeal to individuals and organizations that regularly interact with the law. Lawyers and public interest groups are prime targets. However, the developers would like to make the sites attractive to all sorts of individuals who want to better understand city laws, and involve themselves in the debate process. The Decoded sites will first educate constituents, whereupon the Madison technology will takeover, allowing citizens to critique bills line-by-line with track changes. ”

The New Innovation Battlegrounds Are City Hall And The State House

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julius Genachowski in Forbes: “What’s going on here? In cities and states across the country, two forces are engaged in battles with major consequences for the future of the Internet and the U.S. innovation economy.
The first force is new ventures harnessing technology—particularly the Internet and mobile—to challenge incumbents in a growing number of industries: From hotels (Airbnb) to rental cars (ZipCar, RelayRides, Car2Go) to taxis (SideCar, Lyft, Uber) to car dealerships (Tesla) to parking lots (Parking Panda) to textbooks (Chegg) to lending and fundraising (Lending Club, Kickstarter) to restaurants (food trucks) to boating (Boatband, GetMyBoat) to errand running services (TaskRabbit) to Internet service (Chattanooga, TN; Lafayette, LA; Google Fiber).
Many of these ventures are part of the new “sharing economy.” ….
The second force in these battles is city and state governments, which typically have long and deep relationships with established industries. Not surprisingly, and acting rationally from their perspective, existing businesses have been lobbying state and local officials to restrict new entrants.
And across the country, new laws are being proposed and enacted—and existing but out-of-date laws are being enforced—to protect incumbents from new Internet- and mobile-based competitors….
There are lessons here for the current battles in city halls and state houses. We suggest four simple principles for every state and local official considering regulatory decisions affecting the sharing economy and other disruptive Internet- and mobile-based businesses:

  • Stand with innovation. The benefits of innovation can be hard to appreciate fully early on, but we know from our history that innovation drives consumer benefits and economic growth. Give innovative new services the benefit of the doubt. And where there are issues to address, take a tailored, technology-neutral approach.
  • Focus on consumers. Consider the full range of benefits new services provide consumers. Most innovators and their investors are putting up their time and money because they see a gap in the market—ways in which consumers are not fully served by existing businesses. The results of a fair-minded consumer-focused analysis might be different than some first instincts. For example, Airbnb and Uber provide insurance to protect consumers; grey-market home stays and unlicensed livery cabs may not. Weigh the benefits of moving grey-market activities out of the shadows.
  • Keep an open mind. Spend the time to understand new businesses and new technologies, including by speaking with new service providers and their users. Don’t just rely on opponents’ characterizations.
  • Use the service. Before deciding to regulate an innovative service, public officials should use the service. Because they’re new, innovative services can be hard to fully appreciate without experiencing them—and using them will provide hands-on insights on their benefits as well as tailored ways to address any issues. At the FCC we launched a Technology Experience Center so that agency staff could use cutting-edge communications devices and services potentially affected by agency rules.
  • Innovation is a core competitive advantage for the U.S. and a primary driver of economic growth and job creation across the country. In today’s fast-moving global economy, capital and talent can flow anywhere. Pro-innovation policies are critical to growing jobs and investment in U.S. cities.”

Open Economics Principles

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
“The Open Economics Working Group would like to introduce the Open Economics Principles, a Statement on Openness of Economic Data and Code…

Economic research is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of economic knowledge. Furthermore, empirical economic research and data play a central role for policy-making in many important areas of our economies and societies.
Openness enables and underpins scholarly enquiry and debate, and is crucial in ensuring the reproducibility of economic research and analysis. Thus, for economics to function effectively, and for society to reap the full benefits from economic research, it is therefore essential that economic research results, data and analysis be openly and freely available, wherever possible.

  1. Open by default…
  2. Privacy and confidentiality…
  3. Reward structures and data citation…
  4. Data availability….
  5. Publicly funded data should be open…
  6. Usable and discoverable…
See Reasons and Background: http://openeconomics.net/principles/”

Smart Government and Big, Open Data: The Trickle-Up Effect

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Anthony Townsend at the Future Now Blog: “As we grow numb to the daily headlines decrying the unimaginable scope of data being collected from Internet companies by the National Security Agency’s Prism program, its worth remembering that governments themselves also produce mountains of data too. Tabulations of the most recent U.S. census, conducted in 2010, involved billions of data points and trillions of calculations. Not surprisingly, it is probably safe to assume that the federal government is also the world’s largest spender on database software—its tab with just one company, market-leader Oracle, passed $700 million in 2012 alone. Government data isn’t just big in scope. It is deep in history—governments have been accumulating data for centuries. In 2006, the genealogical research site Ancestry.com imported 600 terabytes of data (about what Facebook collects in a single day!) from the first fifteen U.S. censuses (1790 to 1930).

But the vast majority of data collected by governments never sees the light of day. It sits squirreled away on servers, and is only rarely cross-referenced in ways that private sector companies do all the time to gain insights into what’s actually going on across the country, and emerging problems and opportunities. Yet as governments all around the world have realized, if shared safely with due precautions to protect individual privacy, in the hand of citizens all of this data could be a national civic monument of tremendous economic and social value.”

When Hacking Is Actually a Good Thing: The Civic Hacking Movement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

, Founder and CEO, PublicStuff in Huffington Post: “Many people think of the word “hacking” in a pejorative sense, understanding it to mean malicious acts of breaking into secure systems and wreaking havoc with private information. Popular culture likes to propagate a particular image of the hacker: a fringe-type individual with highly specialized technical skills who does what he or she does out of malice and/or greed. And so to many of us the concept of “civic hacking” may seem like an oxymoron, for how can the word “civic,” defined by its associations with municipal government and citizen concerns, be linked to the activity of hacking? Here is where another definition of hacking comes in–one that is more commonly used by denizens of the information technology industries–basically, the process of fixing a problem. As Jake Levitas defined it on the Code for America blog, civic hacking is “people working together quickly and creatively to make their cities better for everyone.” Moreover, as Levitas points out, civic hacking does not necessarily involve computer expertise or specialized technical knowledge; rather, it is a collective effort made up of people who want to make things better for themselves and each other, whether it be an ordinary citizen or a programming prodigy. So how does it work?”