Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Abhishek Nagaraj: “The wild success of a few online community-produced knowledge goods, notably Wikipedia, has obscured the fact that most attempts at forming online communities fail. A large body of work analyses motivations behind user contributions to successful, online communities but less is known, however, about early-stage interventions that might make online communities more or less successful.
This study evaluates information seeding, a popular practice to bootstrap online communities by enabling contributors to build on externally-sourced information rather that starting from scratch. I analyze the effects of information seeding on follow-on contributions using data from more than 350 million contributions made by over 577,000 contributors to OpenStreetMap, a Wikipedia-style digital map-making community that was seeded with data from the US Census. To estimate the effects of information seeding, I rely on a natural experiment in which an oversight caused about 60% of quasi-randomly chosen US counties to be seeded with a complete Census map, while the rest were seeded with less complete versions. While access to knowledge generally encourages follow-on knowledge production, I find that a higher level of information seeding significantly lowered follow-on knowledge production and contributor activity on OpenStreetMap and was also associated with lower levels of long-term quality. I argue that information seeding can crowd out contributors’ ability to develop ownership over baseline knowledge and disincentivize follow-on contributions in some circumstances. Empirical evidence supports this explanation as the mechanism through which a higher level of information seeding can stifle rather than spur knowledge production in online communities….(More)”.
“MobilityScore® helps you understand how easy it is to get around. It works at any location or address within the US and Canada and gives you a score ranging from 0 (no mobility choices) to 100 (excellent mobility choices).
What do we mean by mobility? Any transportation option that can help you move around your city. Transportation is changing massively as new choices emerge: ridesharing, bikesharing, carsharing. Private and on-demand mobility services have sprung up. However, tools for measuring transportation access have not kept up. That’s why we created MobilityScore as an easy-to-understand measure of transportation access.
Technical Details
MobilityScore includes all the transportation choices that can be found on TransitScreen displays, including the following services:
- Public transit (subways, trains, buses, ferries, cable cars…)
- Car sharing services (Zipcar, Enterprise, and one-way services like car2go)
- Bike sharing services
- Hailed ride sharing services (e.g. taxis, Uber, Lyft)
We have developed a common way of comparing how choices that might seem very different contribute to your mobility. For each mobility choice, we measure how long it will take you until you can start moving on it – for example, the time it takes you to leave your building, walk to a subway station, and wait for a train.
Because we’re measuring how easy it is for you to move around the city, we also consider what mobility choices look like at different times of the day and different days of the week. Mobility data is regularly collected for most services, while ridehailing (Uber/Lyft) data is based on a geographic model of arrival times.
MobilityScore’s framework is future-proof. Just like we do with TransitScreen, we will integrate future services into the calculation as they emerge (e.g. microtransit, autonomous vehicles, mobility-as-a-service)….(More)”
This case study describes how two climate resilience action projects in Semarang City, Indonesia, were able to provide new mechanisms allowing better engagement between the Semarang city government and its citizens. With the introduction of the Flood Early Warning System (FEWS), flood-prone communities in the Beringin River Basin are now able to evacuate to safe shelters before flood incidents occur. Through the Health Information and Early Warning System (HIEWS), citizens can access real-time information related to dengue fever cases in the city. Although the focus areas are different, both projects aim to help communities become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, specifically floods and vector-borne disease. We find similar patterns in the two cases, in which efforts to enhance community participation are essential to guarantee the success of the projects. Enhanced community engagement is achieved through the thoughtful consideration of local knowledge and social networks, intensive assistance to increase awareness and motivation of the community, and understanding governance structures to ensure that funds are allocated through formal handover processes to continue and expand the results of the interventions. These findings are useful and important to guide any climate change adaptation projects toward better sustainability and ownership, especially in the application of an early warning system or information system that requires technology, sustainable budget allocation from the local government to operate and maintain the system, and buy-in from local communities…(More)”
ChiC: “The unprecedented hyper connectivity enabled by digital technologies and the Internet are rapidly changing the opportunities we have to address some of the society’s biggest challenges: environmental preservation, reducing inequalities, fostering inclusion and putting in place sustainable economic models.
However, to make the most of these opportunities we need to move away from the current centralization of power by a small number of large tech companies and enable a much broader group of people and organisations to develop and share innovative digital solutions.
Across Europe, a growing movement of people is exploring opportunities for Digital Social Innovation (DSI), developing bottom-up solutions leveraging on participation, collaboration, decentralization, openness, and multi-disciplinarity. However, it is still at a relatively small scale, because of the little public and private investment in DSI, the limited experience in large-scale take-up of collective solutions, and the relative lack of skills of DSI actors (civil society) compared to commercial companies.
This Manifesto aims at fostering civic participation into democratic and social processes, increasing societal resilience and mutual trust as core element of the Digital Society. It provides recommendations for policy makers, to drive the development of the European Digital Single Market to fulfill first and foremost societal and sustainability challenges (rather than short-lived economic interests), with the help and engagement of all citizens.
This Manifesto reflects the views of a broad community of innovators, catalyzed by the coordination action ChiC, which is funded by the European Commission, within the context of the CAPS initiative. As such, it is open to incorporating incoming views and opinions from other stakeholders and it does not intend to promote the specific commercial interests of actors of any kind….(More)”
Book by Kenji E. Kushida; Yuko Kasuya and Eiji Kawabata: “The history of human civilization has been about managing information, from hunting and gathering through contemporary times. In modern societies, information flows are central to how individuals and societies interact with governments, economies, and other countries. Despite this centrality of information, information governance—how information flows are managed—has not been a central concern of scholarship. We argue that it should be, especially now that digitization has dramatically altered the amount of information generated, how it can be transmitted, and how it can be used.
This book examines various aspects of information governance in Japan, utilizing comparative and historical perspectives. The aim is threefold: 1) to explore Japan’s society, politics, and economy through a critical but hitherto under-examined vantage that we believe cuts to the core of what modern societies are built with—information; 2) articulate a set of components which can be used to analyze other countries from the vantage of information governance; and 3) provide frameworks of reference to analyze each component.
This book is the product of a multidisciplinary, multinational collaboration between scholars based in the US and Japan. Each are experts in their own fields (economics, political science, information science, law, library science), and were brought together in two workshops to develop, explore, and analyze the conception and various of facets of information governance. This book is frontier research by proposing and taking this conception of information governance as a framework of analysis.
The introduction sets up the analysis by providing background and a framework for understanding the conception of information governance. Part I focuses on the management of government-held information. Part II examines information central to economic activity. Part III explores information flows crucial to politics and social life….(More)”.
Interesting Engineering: “The United Nations has created a new office in the Netherlands dedicated to the monitoring and research of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The new office will collect information about the way in which AI is impacting the world. Researchers will have a particular focus on the way AI relates to global security but will also monitor the effects of job loss from AI and automation.
Irakli Beridze, a UN senior strategic adviser will head the office. They have described the new office saying, “A number of UN organisations operate projects involving robots and AI, such as the group of experts studying the role of autonomous military robots in the realm of conventional weapons. These are temporary measures. Ours is the first permanent UN office on this subject. We are looking at the risks as well as the advantages.”….He suggests that the speed of AI technology development is of primary concern. He explains, “This can make for instability if society does not adapt quickly enough. One of our most important tasks is to set up a network of experts from business, knowledge institutes, civil society organisations and governments. We certainly do not want to plead for a ban or a brake on technologies. We will also explore how new technology can contribute to the sustainable development goals of the UN. For this, we want to start concrete projects. We will not be a talking club.”…(More).
BBC Press Release: “In a first of its kind nationwide citizen science experiment, Dr Hannah Fry is asking volunteers to download the BBC Pandemic App onto their smartphones. The free app will anonymously collect vital data on how far users travel over a 24 hour period. Users will be asked for information about the number of people they have come into contact with during this time. This data will be used to simulate the spread of a highly infectious disease to see what might happen when – not if – a real pandemic hits the UK.
By partnering with researchers at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the BBC Pandemic app will identify the human networks and behaviours that spread infectious disease. The data collated from the app will help improve public health planning and outbreak control.
The results of the experiment will be revealed in a 90 minute landmark documentary, BBC Pandemic which will air in spring 2018 on BBC Four with Dr Hannah Fry and Dr Javid Abdelmoneim. The pair will chart the creation of the first ever life-saving pandemic, provide new insight into the latest pandemic science and use the data collected by the BBC Pandemic app to chart how an outbreak would spread across the UK.
In the last 100 years there have been four major flu pandemics including the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918 that killed up to 100 million people world wide. The Government National Risk Register estimates that infectious diseases are an even greater risk since 2015 and pandemic flu is the key concern as 50% of the population could be affected.
“Nobody knows when the next epidemic will hit, how far it will spread, or how many people will be affected. And yet, because of the power of mathematics, we can still be prepared for whatever lies ahead. What’s really important is that every single download will help improve our models so please please do take part – it will make a difference.” explains Dr Fry.
Dr Abdelmoneim says: “We shouldn’t underestimate the flu virus. It could easily be the cause of a major pandemic that could sweep around the world in a matter of weeks. I’m really excited about the BBC Pandemic app. If it can help predict the spread of a disease and be used to work out ways to slow that spread, it will be much easier for society and our healthcare system to manage”.
Cassian Harrison, Editor BBC Four says: “This is a bold and tremendously exciting project; bringing genuine insight and discovery, and taking BBC Four’s Experimental brief absolutely literally!”…(More)”
Essay by Tim Wu: “The First Amendment was a dead letter for much of American history. Unfortunately, there is reason to fear it is entering a new period of political irrelevance. We live in a golden age of efforts by governments and other actors to control speech, discredit and harass the press, and manipulate public debate. Yet as these efforts mount, and the expressive environment deteriorates, the First Amendment has been confined to a narrow and frequently irrelevant role. Hence the question — when it comes to political speech in the twenty-first century, is the First Amendment obsolete?
The most important change in the expressive environment can be boiled down to one idea: it is no longer speech itself that is scarce, but the attention of listeners. Emerging threats to public discourse take advantage of this change. As Zeynep Tufekci puts it, “censorship during the Internet era does not operate under the same logic [as] it did under the heyday of print or even broadcast television.” Instead of targeting speakers directly, it targets listeners or it undermines speakers indirectly. More precisely, emerging techniques of speech control depend on (1) a range of new punishments, like unleashing “troll armies” to abuse the press and other critics, and (2) “flooding” tactics (sometimes called “reverse censorship”) that distort or drown out disfavored speech through the creation and dissemination of fake news, the payment of fake commentators, and the deployment of propaganda robots. As journalist Peter Pomerantsev writes, these techniques employ “information . . . in weaponized terms, as a tool to confuse, blackmail, demoralize, subvert and paralyze.”
The First Amendment first came to life in the early twentieth century, when the main threat to the nation’s political speech environment was state suppression of dissidents. The jurisprudence of the First Amendment was shaped by that era. It presupposes an information-poor world, and it focuses exclusively on the protection of speakers from government, as if they were rare and delicate butterflies threatened by one terrible monster.
But today, speakers are more like moths — their supply is apparently endless. The massive decline in barriers to publishing makes information abundant, especially when speakers congregate on brightly lit matters of public controversy. The low costs of speaking have, paradoxically, made it easier to weaponize speech as a tool of speech control. The unfortunate truth is that cheap speech may be used to attack, harass, and silence as much as it is used to illuminate or debate. And the use of speech as a tool to suppress speech is, by its nature, something very challenging for the First Amendment to deal with. In the face of such challenges, First Amendment doctrine seems at best unprepared. It is a body of law that waits for a pamphleteer to be arrested before it will recognize a problem. Even worse, the doctrine may actually block efforts to deal with some of the problems described here….(More)”
Marissa Clifford at Curbed: “Want to watch street life unfold outside of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, long after it’s closed for the day? Or uncover the hidden ways both tourists and locals alike use Manhattan’s most famous landmarks? Now you can, all thanks to the power of data.
Urban Pulse, open-source software developed at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, uses data to create a map that visualizes how people move through cities. From Urban Pulse’s interface, you can observe, for example, how tourists navigate Central Park.
Sociologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, who worked in the early years of the 20th century, developed a theory of urban environments that used the human body as an organizing analogy: They likened the mundane processes of everyday urban life (things like phone calls and taxi rides) to the heartbeat. Urban Pulse brings that analogy into the 21st century, replacing statistics about phone calls with social media and other digital data.
Essentially, Urban Pulse is a dynamic, comparative heat map. And the hot spots on the map are made up of what the research team dubbed “pulses” and “beats,” terminology that was inspired by Park and Burgess’s original analogy.
But Urban Pulse’s findings don’t simply reinforce what we already know about cities. By pinpointing how, when, and by whom city spaces are most often used, the data has the power to upend our preconceptions about civic space. This has potentially far-reaching implications for urban planners, architects, and city planners.
But what is a “pulse?” And where is that social media data coming from? Simply put, a pulse is a graphic representation of the kinds of open source data that serve as proxies for human activity, like tweets and Flickr uploads. Though Urban Pulse currently only uses data from Flickr and Twitter, it is free to download on GitHub, and its creators are hoping to see a wider variety of data types input by the open source community….(More)”.
Conference paper by Keegan Mcbride et al: “Large amounts of Open Government Data (OGD) have become available and co-created public services have started to emerge, but there is only limited empirical material available on co-created OGD-driven public services. The authors have built a conceptual model around an innovation process based on the ideas of co-production and agile development for co-created OGD-driven public service. An exploratory case study on Chicago’s use of OGD in a predictive analytics model that forecasts critical safety violations at food serving establishments was carried out to expose the intricate process of how co-creation occurs and what factors allow for it to take place. Six factors were identified as playing a key role in allowing the co-creation of an OGD-driven public service to take place: external funding, motivated stakeholders, innovative leaders, proper communication channels, an existing OGD portal, and agile development practices. The conceptual model was generally validated, but further propositions on co-created OGD-driven public services emerged. These propositions state that the availability of OGD and tools for data analytics have the potential to enable the co-creation of OGD-driven public services, governments releasing OGD are acting as a platform and from this platform the co-creation of new and innovative OGD-driven public services may take place, and that the idea of Government as a Platform (GaaP) does appear to be an idea that allows for the topics of co-creation and OGD to be merged together….(More)”.