When the Government Shuts, Even Web Sites Go Down

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
The New York Times:  “When the federal government last shutdown in 1995, most agencies and departments had either no presence on the Internet or a very basic Web site. Since then, agency Web sites have become the primary public face of the government for most Americans who do not live in or near Washington. So it’s perhaps not surprising that the decision by agencies such as NASA and the Library of Congress to take down their sites this week has gotten a lot of attention.

In keeping with the senseless nature of the shutdown, some Web sites are down while others are still up. The Federal Trade Commission, for instance, has blocked access to its site. It has posted a notice online saying that it’s closed indefinitely as are its systems for people to register complaints or enter telephone numbers on the do-not call list. By contrast, the Department of Education has left its site up with a notice informing visitors that it will not be updated during the shutdown. Sites for the White House, Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service, are being updated at least in part. (Here’s a pretty comprehensive list of which sites are up and which are not.)
Each department and agency has had to decide what to do with its Web site based on its interpretation of federal laws and rules. In a memo (PDF) written last month, the Office of Management and Budget offered some guidance to officials trying to figure out what to do. ..In further keeping with the truly bizarre nature of government shutdowns, the O.M.B. also reminded government officials that they should pay no attention to whether it will cost more to shut down their Web site than it does to keep it going.”
See also: Blacked Out Government Websites Available Through Wayback Machine

A New Kind of Economy is Born – Social Decision-Makers Beat the "Homo Economicus"

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A new paper by Dirk Helbing: “The Internet and Social Media change our way of decision-making. We are no longer the independent decision makers we used to be. Instead, we have become networked minds, social decision-makers, more than ever before. This has several fundamental implications. First of all, our economic theories must change, and second, our economic institutions must be adapted to support the social decision-maker, the “homo socialis”, rather than tailored to the perfect egoist, known as “homo economicus”….
Such developments will eventually create a participatory market society. “Prosumers”, i.e. co-producing consumers, the new “makers” movement, and the sharing economy are some examples illustrating this. Just think of the success of Wikipedia, Open Streetmap or Github. Open Streetmap now provides the most up-to-date maps of the world, thanks to more than 1 million volunteers.
This is just the beginning of a new era, where production and public engagement will more and more happen in a bottom up way through fluid “projects”, where people can contribute as a leaders (“entrepreneurs”) or participants. A new intellectual framework is emerging, and a creative and participatory era is ahead.
The paradigm shift towards participatory bottom-up self-regulation may be bigger than the paradigm shift from a geocentric to a heliocentric worldview. If we build the right institutions for the information society of the 21st century, we will finally be able to mitigate some very old problems of humanity. “Tragedies of the commons” are just one of them. After so many centuries, they are still plaguing us, but this needn’t be.”

How to Change the World by Building a Swarm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nina Misuraca Ignaczak at Shareable: “In 2005, Rick Falvinge of Sweden launched a new political party, the Swedish Pirate Party, on a platform to reform copyright and patent laws. It’s now the third largest party in Sweden, it won two European Parliament seats in 2009, and it inspired the International Pirate Party movement with representation in over 60 countries. The rise of the party has been remarkably fast. In Swarmwise: The Tactical Manual to Changing the World, Falvinge describes how he did it with a unique, decentralized organizing architecture that leverages the power of technology and the crowd to spread ideas and work across diverse groups of people.
Falvinge defines a swarm as: “a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.”
The key is decentralization. The founder must set the vision and goal and then release control of messaging and branding, delegate as much authority as possible, and embrace the fact that the only way to lead is to inspire.
A swarm has a shared direction, values and method. Informal leadership is strong, and focuses on everyone’s contributions. The main benefits to swarm organization are:

  • Speed of operation
  • Next-to-nothing operating cost
  • Large number of devoted volunteers
  • Open and inviting to anyone
  • No recruitment process
  • Multiple solutions tried in parallel
  • Transparent by default

Step One: Find an idea to change the world that people can get excited about.
This is critical. The idea must be a game-changer- so exciting, revolutionary and provocative that it will sell itself. Your idea must have four key attributes to be worthy:

  • Tangible: You must have concrete goals with specifics on when this goal should happen, where it will happen, and how it will happen. In the case of the Swedish Pirate Party, the goal was to elect an open-information platform candidate to the European Parliament in the next election. Period.
  • Credible: You must present the goals as realistic and doable.  The key is to strike a balance between a change-the-world idea and pure fantasy.
  • Inclusive: There must be a role and room for participation for everyone, and everyone must see not only how they will personally benefit form the idea but also ho they can be a part of making it happen.
  • Epic: The idea must be a big one, capable of changing how things are done on a broad scale, and people must see the scope of the idea’s impact when it is presented.

Step Two: Do the Math
…
All versions of the book (including free ones, of course) are available at the bottom of this page.”

Social media analytics for future oriented policy making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Verena Grubmüller, Katharina Götsch, and Bernhard Krieger: “Research indicates that evidence-based policy making is most successful when public administrators refer to diversified information portfolios. With the rising prominence of social media in the last decade, this paper argues that governments can benefit from integrating this publically available, user-generated data through the technique of social media analytics (SMA). There are already several initiatives set up to predict future policy issues, e.g. for the policy fields of crisis mitigation or migrant integration insights. The authors analyse these endeavours and their potential for providing more efficient and effective public policies. Furthermore, they scrutinise the challenges to governmental SMA usage in particular with regards to legal and ethical aspects. Reflecting the latter, this paper provides forward-looking recommendations on how these technologies can best be used for future policy making in a legally and ethically sound manner.”

Some Obvious Things About Internet Reputation Systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Tom Slee: “Debates around the “sharing economy” have been driven by personal stories and broad claims. There are no personal stories here. Instead, this is a fairly dense step-by-step look at the internet reputation systems on which the sharing economy claims are based, and some predictions about the future of the sharing economy.
This post is the short version. If you find you are interested, you should probably read the attached PDF, which has a whole bunch of footnotes, with references, statistics, and even personal stories….
Internet reputation systems let individuals rate other individuals over the internet and provide recommendations based on those ratings. A new class of enterprise claims to use internet reputation systems to enable sharing of personal goods and services at unprecedented scale. Its rise has been announced by both Forbes, and by The Economist, according to which accommodation rental service Airbnb…

…is the most prominent example of a huge new “sharing economy”, in which people rent beds, cars, boats and other assets directly from each other, co-ordinated via the internet. …[T]echnology has reduced transaction costs, making sharing assets cheaper and easier than ever—and therefore possible on a much larger scale… social networks provide a way to check up on people and build trust; and online payment systems handle the billing.

The claim is that internet reputation systems solve two problems. One is coordination (can I find someone who has what I want, or wants what I have?) and the other is trust (can you trust the person on the other side of the exchange to keep their end of the bargain?). Sharing economy advocates claim, and I will return to this at the end of the essay, that it is both necessary and sufficient to solve these problems to unlock a large new economy of resource sharing.
…
Market-based incentives erode the effectiveness of reputation, and in this respect reputation is a cultural commons. In her TED talk, influential author Rachel Botsman says that in the new economy “reputation will be your most valuable asset”, but as reputation becomes an important asset, markets will grow around it and intermediaries will claim to help you boost your reputation, but these market-based incentives destroy the value of reputation as a mechanism for establishing trust. Mechanisms for buying and selling testimonies, for example, cause testimonies to lose their ability to discriminate between trustworthiness and opportunism because an opportunist with money could buy themselves a good reputation…
Internet reputation systems promise to create a global village by scaling up informal word-of-mouth reputation mechanisms for sharing and for creating trust, and so solve both the coordination and the trust problem for a variety of services which could not previously be exchanged. For sharing economy advocates, reputation is an alternative to regulation: law professor Lior Strahilevitz asks us to “imagine if every plumber, manufactured product, cell phone provider, home builder, professor, hair stylist, accountant, attorney, golf pro, and taxi driver were rated… In such a world, there would be diminished need for regulatory oversight and legal remedies because consumers would police misconduct themselves.”
Do internet reputation systems act as an effective signal of trustworthiness?…
So even in the absence of explicit gaming, peer-to-peer internet reputation systems do not solve the problem of trust.…
Still, sharing economy web sites are growing fast. How are they succeeding if the peer-to-peer reputation systems fail to solve the problem of trust?
One reason is that coordination is useful in itself….
To be successful, the venture-capital-funded “sharing economy” will be forced to lose all those aspects of informal sharing that makes “sharing” attractive, and to keep those aspects that erode neighbourhoods, erode employment rights, and remove basic standards. And if they succeed, they will have used the language of sharing to bring about an unregulated, free-market, neoliberal economy.”

Online public services and Design Thinking for governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ela Alptekin: “The digital era has changed the expectations citizens have regarding the communication of public services and their engagement with government agencies. ‘Digital Citizenship’ is common place and this is a great opportunity for institutions to explore the benefits this online presence offers.

Most government agencies have moved their public services to digital platforms by applying technology to the exact same workflow they had earlier. They’ve replaced hard copies with emails and signatures with digital prints. However, Information Technologies don’t just improve the efficiency of governments, they also have the power to transform how governments work by redefining their engagement with citizens. With this outlook they can expand the array of services that could be provided and implemented.

When it comes to online public services there are two different paths to building-up a strategy: Governments can either: Use stats, trends and quantitative surveys to measure and produce “reliable results”; or they can develop a deeper understanding of the basic needs of their consumers for a specific problem. With that focus, they may propose a solid solution that would satisfy those needs.

Two of the primary criteria of evaluation in any measurement or observation are:

  1. Does the same measurement process yields the same results?

  2. Are we measuring what we intend to measure?

These two concepts are reliability and validity.

According to Roger Martin, author of “The Design of Business”, truly innovative organisations are those that have managed to balance the “reliability” of analytical thinking with the “validity” of abductive thinking. Many organisations often don’t find this balance between reliability and validity and choose only the reliable data to move on with their future implementations.

So what is the relationship between reliability and validity? The two do not necessarily go hand-in-hand.

“At best, we have a measure that has both high validity and high reliability. It yields consistent results in repeated application and it accurately reflects what we hope to represent.

It is possible to have a measure that has high reliability but low validity – one that is consistent in getting bad information or consistent in missing the mark. *It is also possible to have one that has low reliability and low validity – inconsistent and not on target.

Finally, it is not possible to have a measure that has low reliability and high validity – you can’t really get at what you want or what you’re interested in if your measure fluctuates wildly.” – click here for further reading.

Many online, government, public services are based on reliable data and pay no attention to the validity of the results ( 1st figure “reliable but not valid” ).

What can government agencies use to balance the reliability and validity when it comes to public services? The answer is waiting in Design Thinking and abductive reasoning.

….Design thinking helps agencies to go back to the basics of what citizens need from their governments. It can be used to develop both reliable and valid online public services that are able to satisfy their needs….

As Government accelerates towards a world of public services that are digital by default, is this going to deliver the kind of digital services that move the public with them?

To find out, thinkpublic partnered with Consumer Focus (UK) to undertake detailed research into some of the fundamental questions and issues that users of digital public services are interested in. The findings have been published today in the Manifesto for Online Public Services, which sets out simple guiding principles to be placed at the heart of online service design.”

The transition towards transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Roland Harwood at the Open Data Institute Blog: “It’s a very exciting time for the field of open data, especially in the UK public sector which is arguably leading the world in this emerging discipline right now, in no small part thanks to the efforts to the Open Data Institute. There is a strong push to release public data and to explore new innovations that can be created as a result.
For instance, the Ordnance Survey have been leading the way with opening up half of their data for others to use, complemented by their GeoVation programme which provides support and incentive for external innovators to develop new products and services.
More recently the Technology Strategy Board have been working with the likes of NERC, Met Office, Environment Agency and other public agencies to help solve business problems using environmental data.…
It goes without saying that data won’t leap up and create any value by itself any more than a pile of discarded parts outside a factory will assemble themselves into a car.   We’ve found that the secret of successful open data innovation is to be with people working to solve some specific problem.  Simply releasing the data is not enough. See below a summary of our Do’s and Don’ts of opening up data
Do…

  • Make sure data quality is high (ODI Certificates can help!)
  • Promote innovation using data sets. Transparency is only a means to an end
  • Enhance communication with external innovators
  • Make sure your co-creators are incentivised
  • Get organised, create a community around an issue
  • Pass on learnings to other similar organisations
  • Experiement – open data requires new mindsets and business models
  • Create safe spaces – Innovation Airlocks – to share and prototype with trusted partners
  • Be brave – people may do things with the data that you don’t like
  • Set out to create commercial or social value with data

Dont…

  • Just release data and expect people to understand or create with it. Publication is not the same as communication
  • Wait for data requests, put the data out first informally
  • Avoid challenges to current income streams
  • Go straight for the finished article, use rapid prototyping
  • Be put off by the tensions between confidentiality, data protection and publishing
  • Wait for the big budget or formal process but start big things with small amounts now
  • Be technology led, be business led instead
  • Expect the community to entirely self-manage
  • Restrict open data to the IT literate – create interdisciplinary partnerships
  • Get caught in the false dichotomy that is commercial vs. social

In summary we believe we need to assume openness as the default (for organisations that is, not individuals) and secrecy as the exception – the exact opposite to how most commercial organisations currently operate. …”

Undefined By Data: A Survey of Big Data Definitions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Jonathan Stuart Ward and Adam Barker: “The term big data has become ubiquitous. Owing to shared origin between academia, industry and the media there is no single unified definition, and various stakeholders provide diverse and often contradictory definitions. The lack of a consistent definition introduces ambiguity and hampers discourse relating to big data. This short paper attempts to collate the various definitions which have gained some degree of traction and to furnish a clear and concise definition of an otherwise ambiguous term…
Despite the range and differences existing within each of the aforementioned definitions there are some points of similarity. Notably all definitions make at least one of the following assertions:
Size: the volume of the datasets is a critical factor.
Complexity: the structure, behaviour and permutations of the datasets is a critical factor.
Technologies: the tools and techniques which are used to process a sizable or complex dataset is a critical factor.
The definitions surveyed here all encompass at least one of these factors, most encompass two. An extrapolation of these factors would therefore postulate the following: Big data is a term describing the storage and analysis of large and or complex data sets using a series of techniques including, but not limited to: NoSQL, MapReduce and machine learning.”

Using Participatory Crowdsourcing in South Africa to Create a Safer Living Environment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New Paper by Bhaveer Bhana, Stephen Flowerday, and Aharon Satt in the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks: “The increase in urbanisation is making the management of city resources a difficult task. Data collected through observations (utilising humans as sensors) of the city surroundings can be used to improve decision making in terms of managing these resources. However, the data collected must be of a certain quality in order to ensure that effective and efficient decisions are made. This study is focused on the improvement of emergency and non-emergency services (city resources) through the use of participatory crowdsourcing (humans as sensors) as a data collection method (collect public safety data), utilising voice technology in the form of an interactive voice response (IVR) system.
The study illustrates how participatory crowdsourcing (specifically humans as sensors) can be used as a Smart City initiative focusing on public safety by illustrating what is required to contribute to the Smart City, and developing a roadmap in the form of a model to assist decision making when selecting an optimal crowdsourcing initiative. Public safety data quality criteria were developed to assess and identify the problems affecting data quality.
This study is guided by design science methodology and applies three driving theories: the Data Information Knowledge Action Result (DIKAR) model, the characteristics of a Smart City, and a credible Data Quality Framework. Four critical success factors were developed to ensure high quality public safety data is collected through participatory crowdsourcing utilising voice technologies.”

Digital Participation – The Case of the Italian 'Dialogue with Citizens'

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Gianluca Sgueo presented at Democracy and Technology – Europe in Tension from the 19th to the 21th Century – Sorbonne Paris, 2013: “This paper focuses on the initiative named “Dialogue With Citizens” that the Italian Government introduced in 2012. The Dialogue was an entirely web-based experiment of participatory democracy aimed at, first, informing citizens through documents and in-depth analysis and, second, designed for answering to their questions and requests. During the year and half of life of the initiative roughly 90.000 people wrote (approximately 5000 messages/month). Additionally, almost 200.000 participated in a number of public online consultations that the government launched in concomitance with the adoption of crucial decisions (i.e. the spending review national program).
From the analysis of this experiment of participatory democracy three questions can be raised. (1) How can a public institution maximize the profits of participation and minimize its costs? (2) How can public administrations manage the (growing) expectations of the citizens once they become accustomed to participation? (3) Is online participatory democracy going to develop further, and why?
In order to fully answer such questions, the paper proceeds as follows: it will initially provide a general overview of online public participation both at the central and the local level. It will then discuss the “Dialogue with Citizens” and a selected number of online public consultations lead by the Italian government in 2012. The conclusions will develop a theoretical framework for reflection on the peculiarities and problems of the web-participation.”