Solving Public Problems with Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dinorah Cantú-Pedraza and Sam DeJohn at The GovLab: “….To serve the goal of more data-driven and evidence-based governing,  The GovLab at NYU Tandon School of Engineering this week launched “Solving Public Problems with Data,” a new online course developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

This online lecture series helps those working for the public sector, or simply in the public interest, learn to use data to improve decision-making. Through real-world examples and case studies — captured in 10 video lectures from leading experts in the field — the new course outlines the fundamental principles of data science and explores ways practitioners can develop a data analytical mindset. Lectures in the series include:

  1. Introduction to evidence-based decision-making  (Quentin Palfrey, formerly of MIT)
  2. Data analytical thinking and methods, Part I (Julia Lane, NYU)
  3. Machine learning (Gideon Mann, Bloomberg LP)
  4. Discovering and collecting data (Carter Hewgley, Johns Hopkins University)
  5. Platforms and where to store data (Arnaud Sahuguet, Cornell Tech)
  6. Data analytical thinking and methods, Part II (Daniel Goroff, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation)
  7. Barriers to building a data practice (Beth Blauer, Johns Hopkins University and GovEx)
  8. Data collaboratives (Stefaan G. Verhulst, The GovLab)
  9. Strengthening a data analytic culture (Amen Ra Mashariki, ESRI)
  10. Data governance and sharing (Beth Simone Noveck, NYU Tandon/The GovLab)

The goal of the lecture series is to enable participants to define and leverage the value of data to achieve improved outcomes and equities, reduced cost and increased efficiency in how public policies and services are created. No prior experience with computer science or statistics is necessary or assumed. In fact, the course is designed precisely to serve public professionals seeking an introduction to data science….(More)”.

SAM, the first A.I. politician on Messenger

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Digital Trends: “It’s said that all politicians are the same, but it seems safe to assume that you’ve never seen a politician quite like this. Meet SAM, heralded as the politician of the future. Unfortunately, you can’t exactly shake this politician’s hand, or have her kiss your baby. Rather, SAM is the world’s first Virtual Politician (and a female presence at that), “driven by the desire to close the gap between what voters want and what politicians promise, and what they actually achieve.”

The artificially intelligent chat bot is currently live on Facebook Messenger, though she probably is most helpful to those in New Zealand. After all, the bot’s website notes, “SAM’s goal is to act as a representative for all New Zealanders, and evolves based on voter input.” Capable of being reached by anyone at just about anytime from anywhere, this may just be the single most accessible politician we’ve ever seen. But more importantly, SAM purports to be a true representative, claiming to analyze “everyone’s views [and] opinions, and impact of potential decisions.” This, the bot notes, could make for better policy for everyone….(More)”.

GovEx Launches First International Open Data Standards Directory

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GT Magazine: “…A nonprofit gov tech group has created an international open data standards directory, aspiring to give cities a singular resource for guidance on formatting data they release to the public…The nature of municipal data is nuanced and diverse, and the format in which it is released often varies depending on subject matter. In other words, a format that works well for public safety data is not necessarily the same that works for info about building permits, transit or budgets. Not having a coordinated and agreed-upon resource to identify the best standards for these different types of info, Nicklin said, creates problems.

One such problem is that it can be time-consuming and challenging for city government data workers to research and identify ideal formats for data. Another is that the lack of info leads to discord between different jurisdictions, meaning one city might format a data set about economic development in an entirely different way than another, making collaboration and comparisons problematic.

What the directory does is provide a list of standards that are in use within municipal governments, as well as an evaluation based on how frequent that use is, whether the format is machine-readable, and whether users have to pay to license it, among other factors.

The directory currently contains 60 standards, some of which are in Spanish, and those involved with the project say they hope to expand their efforts to include more languages. There is also a crowdsourcing component to the directory, in that users are encouraged to make additions and updates….(More)”

How Muckrakers Use Crowdsourcing: Case Studies from ProPublica to The Guardian

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Toby McIntosh at Global Investigative Journalism:”…Creative use of social media provides new ways for journalists not just to solicit tips, but also to tap readers’ expertise, opinions and personal experiences.

A stronger ethos of reader engagement is resulting in more sophisticated appeals from journalists for assistance with investigations, including:

  • Seeking tips on very defined topics
  • Asking readers to talk about their experiences on broad subjects
  • Inviting comments after publication

Here are examples of what your colleagues are doing:

Hey, Shell Employees!

Dutch reporter Jelmer Mommers of Dutch news site De Correspondent appealed directly to Shell employees for information in a lengthy blog post, as described in this article. The resulting investigation revealed that Shell had detailed knowledge of the dangers of climate change more than a quarter century ago.

Along the way, in what Jelmer calls “the most romantic moment,” came the surprise delivery of a box full of internal documents. De Correspondent’s emphasis on communicating with subscribers is described here.

Call for Childbirth Experiences

Getting reader input in advance was key to a major U.S. story on maternal health to which thousands of people contributed. ProPublica  engagement reporter Adriana Gallardo and her colleagues published a questionnaire in February of 2017 aimed at women who had experienced life-threatening complications in childbirth.

Using a variety of social media channels, Gallardo, along with ProPublica’s Nina Martin and NPR’s Renee Montagne, received several thousand responses. The personal stories fueled a series and the connections made are still being maintained for follow-up work. Read more in this this GIJN article.

Testimonials from Mexico’s Drug War

“Anyone’s Child Mexico” is a documentary about the families affected by Mexico’s drug war. To gather stories, the producers of the documentary publicized a free phone line through local partners and asked people across Mexico to call in and recount their stories.

Callers could also listen to other testimonials. With funding from the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute, producers Matthew Brown, Ewan Cass-Kavanagh, Mary Ryder and Jane Slater created a website to bring together audio, photos, video and text and tell harrowing stories of a country ravaged by violence….(More)”.

The Hidden Pitfall of Innovation Prizes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Reto Hofstetter, John Zhang and Andreas Herrmann at Harvard Business Review: “…it is not so easy to get people to submit their ideas to online innovation platforms. Our data from an online panel reveal that 65% of the contributors do not come back more than twice, and that most of the rest quit after a few tries. This kind of user churn is endemic to online social platforms — on Twitter, for example, a majority of users become inactive over time — and crowdsourcing is no exception. In a way, this turnover is even worse than ordinary customer churn: When a customer defects, a firm knows the value of what it’s lost, but there is no telling how valuable the ideas not submitted might have been….

It is surprising, then, that crowdsourcing on popular platforms is typically designed in a way that amplifies churn. Right now, in typical innovation contests, rewards are granted to winners only and the rest get no return on their participation. This design choice is often motivated by the greater effort participants exert when there is a top prize much more valuable than the rest. Often, the structure is something like the Wimbledon Tennis Championship, where the winning player wins twice as much as the runner up and four times as much as the semifinalists — with the rest eventually leaving empty handed.

This winner-take-most prize spread increases the incentive to win and thus individual efforts. With only one winner, however, the others are left with nothing to show for their effort, which may significantly reduce their motivation to enter again.

An experiment we recently ran confirmed that the way entrants respond to this kind of winner-take-all prize structure. …

In line with the above reasoning, we found that winner-take-all contests yielded significantly better ideas compared to multiple prizes in the first round. Importantly, however, this result flipped when we invited the same cohort of innovators to participate again in the second subsequent contest. While 50% of the multiple-prize contest chose to participate again, only 37% did so when the winner-took-all in their first contest. Moreover, innovators who had received no reward in the first contest showed significantly lower effort in the second contest and generated fewer ideas. In the second contest, multiple prizes generated better ideas than the second round of the winner-take-all contest….

Other non-monetary positive feedback, such as encouraging comments or ratings, can have similar effects. These techniques are important, because alleviating innovator churn helps companies interested in longer-term success of their crowdsourcing activities….(More)”.

Participatory budgeting: adoption and transformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael Touchton and Brian Wampler: “Participatory budgeting programmes are spreading rapidly across the world because they offer government officials and citizens the opportunity to engage each other in new ways as they combine democratic practices with the ‘nitty gritty’ of policy-making. The principles and ideas associated with participatory budgeting appeal to a broad spectrum of citizens, civil society activists, government officials and international agencies, which helps explain why it is so popular and has expanded so quickly.

In this research briefing, we focus on adoption and transformation of participatory budgeting in several low- and middle-income countries where international donors are active. We are particularly interested in better understanding how participatory budgeting is transforming in countries where international donors are active, where states struggle to provide public services, and where urban and rural communities are characterised by high levels of poverty… (More)”.

Sharing is Daring: An Experiment on Consent, Chilling Effects and a Salient Privacy Nudge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hermstrüwer, Yoan and Dickert, Stephan at the International Review of Law and Economics: “Privacy law rests on the assumption that government surveillance may increase the general level of conformity and thus generate a chilling effect. In a study that combines elements of a lab and a field experiment, we show that salient and incentivized consent options are sufficient to trigger this behavioral effect. Salient ex ante consent options may lure people into giving up their privacy and increase their compliance with social norms – even when the only immediate risk of sharing information is mere publicity on a Google website. A right to be forgotten (right to deletion), however, seems to reduce neither privacy valuations nor chilling effects. In spite of low deletion costs people tend to stick with a retention default. The study suggests that consent architectures may play out on social conformity rather than on consent choices and privacy valuations. Salient notice and consent options may not merely empower users to make an informed consent decision. Instead, they can trigger the very effects that privacy law intends to curb….(More)”.

Issue Voter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “When we vote, we’re hiring our elected officials. We pay their salaries with our tax dollars. Imagine hiring an employee, paying and promoting them, yet never seeing any of their work. That’s essentially what we’re all doing when we vote & re- elect. And incumbents are re-elected over 90% of the time.

We’re living with an outdated system

  • Bills are difficult to research and understand,
  • Contacting reps still involves snail mail, picking up the phone, or filling out long forms online,
  • Petitions don’t work. To elected officials, petitions are merely a list of names – you may not be one of their voters, and the person signing the petition has no way to track outcomes

Engage with Your Political Process

Track your rep’s activity. We tell you how your rep voted, how often your representative agrees with you, and whether or not they’ve attended a vote.

Encourage open discussion. You can share an issue on your favorite social network, without revealing your personal opinion.

Act on issues that don’t make headlines. We don’t only tell you about what is breaking the news; we check for updates every hour to make sure you have the latest information.

Become an informed voter. Using IssueVoter year-round informs you before elections and keeps money’s influence out of your opinion. Only re-elect reps who truly represented you….(More)”.

Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Oberhaus at Motherboard: “…Sixteen years later, the free encyclopedia and fifth most popular website in the world is well on its way to this goal. Today, Wikipedia is home to 43 million articles in 285 languages and all of these articles are written and edited by an autonomous group of international volunteers.

Although the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation diligently keeps track of how editors and users interact with the site, until recently it was unclear how content production on Wikipedia was distributed among editors. According to the results of a recent study that looked at the 250 million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years, only about 1 percent of Wikipedia’s editors have generated 77 percent of the site’s content.

“Wikipedia is both an organization and a social movement,” Sorin Matei, the director of the Purdue University Data Storytelling Network and lead author of the study, told me on the phone. “The assumption is that it’s a creation of the crowd, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Wikipedia wouldn’t have been possible without a dedicated leadership.”

At the time of writing, there are roughly 132,000 registered editors who have been active on Wikipedia in the last month (there are also an unknown number of unregistered Wikipedians who contribute to the site). So statistically speaking, only about 1,300 people are creating over three-quarters of the 600 new articles posted to Wikipedia every day.

Of course, these “1 percenters” have changed over the last decade and a half. According to Matei, roughly 40 percent of the top 1 percent of editors bow out about every five weeks. In the early days, when there were only a few hundred thousand people collaborating on Wikipedia, Matei said the content production was significantly more equitable. But as the encyclopedia grew, and the number of collaborators grew with it, a cadre of die-hard editors emerged that have accounted for the bulk of Wikipedia’s growth ever since.

Matei and his colleague Brian Britt, an assistant professor of journalism at South Dakota State University, used a machine learning algorithm to crawl the quarter of a billion publicly available edit logs from Wikipedia’s first decade of existence. The results of this research, published September as a book, suggests that for all of Wikipedia’s pretension to being a site produced by a network of freely collaborating peers, “some peers are more equal than others,” according to Matei.

Matei and Britt argue that rather than being a decentralized, spontaneously evolving organization, Wikipedia is better described as an “adhocracy“—a stable hierarchical power structure which nevertheless allows for a high degree of individual mobility within that hierarchy….(More)”.

India Social: How Social Media Is Leading The Charge And Changing The Country

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book excerpt of Ankit Lal’s book ‘India Social’: on “How social media showed its unique power of crowdsourcing during the Chennai floods…

One ingenious resource that was circulated widely during the floods was a crowdsourced effort that mapped inundated roads in the city. Over 2,500 flooded roads were added to the city’s map via social media, which was put together by engineer and information designer, Arun Ganesh.

The Chennai floods were a superb example of the power of collective effort. Users across social media channels came together to offer shelter, food, transport, and even a place for people to charge their phones. SOS messages asking ground teams to rescue stranded family members also went back and forth, and there were many who offered their homes and offices to those who were stranded.

Perhaps the most simple yet effective tool during the floods was the website chennairains.org.

It began as a simple Google spreadsheet. Sowmya Rao was trying to help her uncle and aunt figure out whether it was safe to stay in their house in suburban Chennai or move to a friend’s place. When she found out that the area they lived in was under severe risk of flooding, she relayed the message to them. But she felt helpless about the countless others who were facing the same plight as her relatives. Acting on a suggestion by another Twitter user, she created the Google spreadsheet that went on to become the website chennairains.org.

The idea was simple: crowdsource details about those who could offer shelter, and pass it on to those who were tweeting about rising waters. A hastily put-together spreadsheet soon blossomed into a multi-faceted, volunteer-driven, highly energetic online movement to help Chennai, and ended up being used by the general public, police officers, government officials and celebrities alike….(More)”.