Blog post by Cristin Dorgelo: “Today OSTP released its second annual comprehensive report detailing the use of prizes and competitions by Federal agencies to spur innovation and solve Grand Challenges. Those efforts have expanded in the last two years under the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, which granted all Federal agencies the authority to conduct prize competitions to spur innovation, solve tough problems, and advance their core missions.
This year’s report details the remarkable benefits the Federal Government reaped in Fiscal Year (FY) 2012 from more than 45 prize competitions across 10 agencies. To date, nearly 300 prize competitions have been implemented by 45 agencies through the website Challenge.gov.
Over the past four years, the Obama Administration has taken important steps to make prizes a standard tool in every agency’s toolbox. In his September 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, President Obama called on all Federal agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges. In March 2010, the Office of Management and Budget issued a policy framework to guide agencies in using prizes to mobilize American ingenuity and advance their respective core missions. Then, in September 2010, the Administration launched Challenge.gov, a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs and citizen solvers can find public-sector prize competitions.
The prize authority in COMPETES is a key piece of this effort. By giving agencies a clear legal path and expanded authority to deploy competitions and challenges, the legislation makes it dramatically easier for agencies to enlist this powerful approach to problem-solving and to pursue ambitious prizes with robust incentives…
To support these ongoing efforts, the General Services Administration continues to train agencies about resources and vendors available to help them administer prize competitions. In addition, NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (CoECI) provides other agencies with a full suite of services for incentive prize pilots – from prize design, through implementation, to post-prize evaluation”
Reinventing Participation: Civic Agency and the Web Environment
New paper by Peter Dahlgren: “Participation is a key concept in the vocabulary of democracy, and can encompass a variety of dimensions. Moreover, it can be shaped by a range of different factors; my emphasis here is on the significance of the web environment in this regard. I first situate participation against the backdrop of democracy’s contemporary developments, including the onslaught of neolibealism. From there I offer a set of parameters that can help us grasp participation both conceptually and empirically: trajectory, visibility, voice , and sociality, and relate these to the affordances of the digital media. Thereafter I explore the cultural resources necessary for the facilitation of participation; for this I make use of a six-dimensional model of civic cultures. My discussion focuses on two of the dimensions, practices and identities; I again relate these to the web environment. I conclude with a dilemma that online democratic participation faces, namely what I call the isolation of the solo sphere, yet affirm that we are justified in maintaining a guarded optimism about the future of participation.”
Buenos Aires, A Pocket of Civic Innovation in Argentina
Rebecca Chao in TechPresident: “…In only a few years, the government, civil society and media in Buenos Aires have actively embraced open data. The Buenos Aires city government has been publishing data under a creative commons license and encouraging civic innovation through hackathons. NGOs have launched a number of tech-driven tools and Argentina’s second largest newspaper, La Nación, has published several hard-hitting data journalism projects. The result is a fledgling but flourishing open data culture in Buenos Aires, in a country that has not yet adopted a freedom of information law.
A Wikipedia for Open Government Data
In late August of this year, the Buenos Aires government declared a creative commons license for all of its digital content, which allows it be used for free, like Wikipedia content, with proper attribution. This applies to their new open data catalog that allows users to visualize the data, examine apps that have been created using the data and even includes a design lab for posting app ideas. Launched only in March, the government has already published fairly substantial data sets, including the salaries of city officials. The website also embodies the principals of openness in its design; it is built with open-source software and its code is available for reuse via GitHub.
“We were the first city in Argentina doing open government,” Rudi Borrmann tells techPresident over Skype. Borrmann is the Director of Buenos Aires’ Open Government Initiative. Previously, he was the social media editor at the city’s New Media Office but he also worked for many years in digital media…
While the civil society and media sectors have forged ahead in using open data, Borrmann tells techPresident that up in the ivory tower, openness to open data has been lagging. “Only technical schools are starting to create areas focused on working on open data,” he says.
In an interview with NYU’s govlab, Borrmann explained the significance of academia in using and pushing for more open data. “They have the means, the resources, the methodology to analyze…because in government you don’t have that time to analyze,” he said.
Another issue with open data is getting other branches of the government to modernize. Borrmann says that a lot of the Open Government’s work is done behind the scenes. “In general, you have very poor IT infrastructure all over Latin America” that interferes with the gathering and publishing of data, he says. “So in some cases it’s not about publishing or not publishing,” but about “having robust infrastructure for the information.”
It seems that the behind the scenes work is bearing some fruit. Just last week, on Dec. 6, the team behind the Buenos Aires open data website launched an impressive, interactive timeline, based on a similar timelapse map developed by a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow, Noah Veltman. Against faded black and white photos depicting the subway from different decades over the last century, colorful pops of the Subterráneo lines emerge alongside factoids that go all the way back to 1910.”
The Documented Life
Sherry Turkle in the New York Times: “I’ve been studying people and mobile technology for more than 15 years. Until recently, it was the sharing that seemed most important. People didn’t seem to feel like themselves unless they shared a thought or feeling, even before it was clear in their mind. The new sensibility played on the Cartesian with a twist: “I share, therefore I am.”
These days, we still want to share, but now our first focus is to have, to possess, a photograph of our experience.
I interview people about their selfies. It’s how they keep track of their lives….We interrupt conversations for documentation all the time.
A selfie, like any photograph, interrupts experience to mark the moment. In this, it shares something with all the other ways we break up our day, when we text during class, in meetings, at the theater, at dinners with friends. And yes, at funerals, but also more regularly at church and synagogue services. We text when we are in bed with our partners and spouses. We watch our political representatives text during sessions.
Technology doesn’t just do things for us. It does thing to us, changing not just what we do but who we are. The selfie makes us accustomed to putting ourselves and those around us “on pause” in order to document our lives. It is an extension of how we have learned to put our conversations “on pause” when we send or receive a text, an image, an email, a call. When you get accustomed to a life of stops and starts, you get less accustomed to reflecting on where you are and what you are thinking.
We don’t experience interruptions as disruptions anymore….”
Philosophical Engineering: Toward a Philosophy of the Web
- Contains twelve essays that bridge the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, and phenomenology
- Tackles questions such as the impact of Google on intelligence and epistemology, the philosophical status of digital objects, ethics on the Web, semantic and ontological changes caused by the Web, and the potential of the Web to serve as a genuine cognitive extension
- Brings together insightful new scholarship from well-known analytic and continental philosophers, such as Andy Clark and Bernard Stiegler, as well as rising scholars in “digital native” philosophy and engineering
- Includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web”…
Digital Passivity
Jaron Lanier in the New York Times: “I fear that 2013 will be remembered as a tragic and dark year in the digital universe, despite the fact that a lot of wonderful advances took place.
It was the year in which tablets became ubiquitous and advanced gadgets like 3-D printers and wearable interfaces emerged as pop phenomena; all great fun. Our gadgets have widened access to our world. We now regularly communicate with people we would not have been aware of before the networked age. We can find information about almost anything, any time.
But 2013 was also the year in which we became aware of the corner we’ve backed ourselves into. We learned — through the leaks of Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, and the work of investigative journalists — how much our gadgets and our digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultra-powerful, remote organizations. We are being dissected more than we dissect.
I wish I could separate the two big trends of the year in computing — the cool gadgets and the revelations of digital spying — but I cannot.
Back at the dawn of personal computing, the idealistic notion that drove most of us was that computers were tools for leveraging human intelligence to ever-greater achievement and fulfillment. This was the idea that burned in the hearts of pioneers like Alan Kay, who a half-century ago was already drawing illustrations of how children would someday use tablets.
But tablets do something unforeseen: They enforce a new power structure. Unlike a personal computer, a tablet runs only programs and applications approved by a central commercial authority. You control the data you enter into a PC, while data entered into a tablet is often managed by someone else.
Steve Jobs, who oversaw the introduction of the spectacularly successful iPad at Apple, declared that personal computers were now ‘‘trucks’’ — tools for working-class guys in T-shirts and visors, but not for upwardly mobile cool people. The implication was that upscale consumers would prefer status and leisure to influence or self-determination.
I am not sure who is to blame for our digital passivity. Did we give up on ourselves too easily?
This would be bleak enough even without the concurrent rise of the surveillance economy. Not only have consumers prioritized flash and laziness over empowerment; we have also acquiesced to being spied on all the time.
The two trends are actually one. The only way to persuade people to voluntarily accept the loss of freedom is by making it look like a great bargain at first.
Consumers were offered free stuff (like search and social networking) in exchange for agreeing to be watched. Vast fortunes can be made by those who best use the personal data you voluntarily hand them. Instagram, introduced in 2010, had only 13 employees and no business plan when it was bought by Facebook less than two years later for $1 billion.
One can argue that network technology enhances democracy because it makes it possible, for example, to tweet your protests. But complaining is not yet success. Social media didn’t create jobs for young people in Cairo during the Arab Spring…”
Tech challenge develops algorithms to predict
SciDevNet: “Mathematical models that use existing socio-political data to predict mass atrocities could soon inform governments and NGOs on how and where to take preventative action.
The models emerged from one strand of the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention, a competition run by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and NGO Humanity United. The winners were announced last month (18 November) and will now work with the organiser to further develop and pilot their innovations.
The five winners from different countries who won between US$1,000 and US$12,000, were among nearly 100 entrants who developed algorithms to predict when and where mass atrocities are likely to happen.
Around 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by conflict, sometimes including atrocities such as genocides, mass rape and ethnic cleansing, according to the World Bank’s World Development Report 2011. Many of these countries are in the developing world.
The competition organisers hope the new algorithms could help governments and human rights organisations identify at-risk regions, potentially allowing them to intervene before mass atrocities happen.
The competition started from the premise that certain social and political measurements are linked to increased likelihood of atrocities. Yet because such factors interact in complex ways, organisations working to prevent atrocities lack a reliable method of predicting when and where they might happen next.
The algorithms use sociopolitical indicators and data on past atrocities as their inputs. The data was drawn from archives such as the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone, a data set that encodes more than 200 million globally newsworthy events, recording cultural information such as the people involved, their location and any religious connections.”
Link to the winners of the Model Challenge
Participation Dynamics in Crowd-Based Knowledge Production: The Scope and Sustainability of Interest-Based Motivation
New paper by Henry Sauermann and Chiara Franzoni: “Crowd-based knowledge production is attracting growing attention from scholars and practitioners. One key premise is that participants who have an intrinsic “interest” in a topic or activity are willing to expend effort at lower pay than in traditional employment relationships. However, it is not clear how strong and sustainable interest is as a source of motivation. We draw on research in psychology to discuss important static and dynamic features of interest and derive a number of research questions regarding interest-based effort in crowd-based projects. Among others, we consider the specific versus general nature of interest, highlight the potential role of matching between projects and individuals, and distinguish the intensity of interest at a point in time from the development and sustainability of interest over time. We then examine users’ participation patterns within and across 7 different crowd science projects that are hosted on a shared platform. Our results provide novel insights into contribution dynamics in crowd science projects. Moreover, given that extrinsic incentives such as pay, status, self-use, or career benefits are largely absent in these particular projects, the data also provide unique insights into the dynamics of interest-based motivation and into its potential as a driver of effort.”
20 Innovations that Mattered in 2013
New Guide from GovLoop: “The end of the year means two things: setting unrealistic New Year’s resolutions and endless retrospectives. While we can’t force you to put down the cake and pick up a carrot, we can help you to do your job better by highlighting some of the biggest and best innovations to come out of government in the last 365 days.
The past year brought us the Interior Department’s Instagram feed and Colorado’s redesigned website. It also brought us St. Louis’ optimized data analytics that make their city safer and North Carolina’s iCenter that adopted a “try before you buy” policy.
All of these new technologies and tactics saved time and resources, critical outcomes in the current government landscape where budget cuts are making each new purchase risky.
But these were not the only buzzworthy projects for government technology in 2013. In this end-of-year issue, GovLoop analyzed the 20 best innovations in government in four different categories:
- Mobile Apps Movers and Shakers?
- Big Data Dynamos
- Social Media Mavericks
- Website Wonders
We also asked two of the most innovative Chief Information Officers in the country to don some Google Glass’ In a year where the government shutdown and sequestration brought progress to a screeching halt, many agencies were able to rise above the inauspicious environment and produce groundbreaking and innovative programs.
For instance, when the horrible bombings brought terror to the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the local police department sprang into action. They immediately mobilized their forces on the ground. But then they did something else, too. The Boston Police Department took to Twitter. The social media team was informative, timely and, accurate. The BPD flipped the script on emergency media management. They innovated in a time of crisis and got people the information they needed in a timely and appropriate manner.
We know that oftentimes it is hard to see through the budget cuts and government shutdowns, but government innovation is all around us. Our goal with this guide is to showcase programs that are not only making a difference but demonstrate risk and reward….”
Building tech-powered public services
Could tech-powered public services be an affordable, sustainable solution to some of the challenges of these times of austerity?
This report looks at 20 case studies of digital innovation in public services, using these examples to explore the impact of new and disruptive technologies. It considers how tech-powered public services can be delivered, focusing on the area of health and social care in particular.
We identify three key benefits of increasing the role of technology in public services: saving time, boosting user participation, and encouraging users to take responsibility for their own wellbeing.
In terms of how to successfully implement technological innovations in public services, five particular lessons stood out clearly and consistently:
- User-based iterative design is critical to delivering a product that solves real-world problems. It builds trust and ensures the technology works in the context in which it will be used.
- Public sector expertise is essential in order for a project to make the connections necessary to initial development and early funding.
- Access to seed and bridge funding is necessary to get projects off the ground and allow them to scale up.
- Strong leadership from within the public sector is crucial to overcoming the resistance that practitioners and managers often show initially.
- A strong business case that sets out the quality improvements and cost savings that the innovation can deliver is important to get attention and interest from public services.
The seven headline case studies in this report are:
- Patchwork creates an elegant solution to join up professionals working with troubled families, in an effort to ensure that frontline support is truly coordinated.
- Casserole Club links people who like cooking with their neighbours who are in need of a hot meal, employing the simplest possible technology to grow social connections.
- ADL Smartcare uses a facilitated assessment tool to make professional expertise accessible to staff and service users without years of training, meaning they can carry out assessments together, engaging people in their own care and freeing up occupational therapists to focus where they are needed.
- Mental Elf makes leading research in mental health freely available via social media, providing accessible summaries to practitioners and patients who would not otherwise have the time or ability to read journal articles, which are often hidden behind a paywall.
- Patient Opinion provides an online platform for people to give feedback on the care they have received and for healthcare professionals and providers to respond, disrupting the typical complaints process and empowering patients and their families.
- The Digital Pen and form system has saved the pilot hospital trust three minutes per patient by avoiding the need for manual data entry, freeing up clinical and administrative staff for other tasks.
- Woodland Wiggle allows children in hospital to enter a magical woodland world through a giant TV screen, where they can have fun, socialise, and do their physiotherapy.”