Valentin Kassarnig at arXiv: “In this report we present a system that can generate political speeches for a desired political party. Furthermore, the system allows to specify whether a speech should hold a supportive or opposing opinion. The system relies on a combination of several state-of-the-art NLP methods which are discussed in this report. These include n-grams, Justeson & Katz POS tag filter, recurrent neural networks, and latent Dirichlet allocation. Sequences of words are generated based on probabilities obtained from two underlying models: A language model takes care of the grammatical correctness while a topic model aims for textual consistency. Both models were trained on the Convote dataset which contains transcripts from US congressional floor debates. Furthermore, we present a manual and an automated approach to evaluate the quality of generated speeches. In an experimental evaluation generated speeches have shown very high quality in terms of grammatical correctness and sentence transitions….(More)”
Innovating and changing the policy-cycle: Policy-makers be prepared!
Marijn Janssen and Natalie Helbig in Government Information Quarterly: “Many policy-makers are struggling to understand participatory governance in the midst of technological changes. Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to have an impact on the ways that policy-makers and citizens engage with each other throughout the policy-making process. A set of developments in the areas of opening government data, advanced analytics, visualization, simulation, and gaming, and ubiquitous citizen access using mobile and personalized applications is shaping the interactions between policy-makers and citizens. Yet the impact of these developments on the policy-makers is unclear. The changing roles and need for new capabilities required from the government are analyzed in this paper using two case studies. Salient new roles for policy-makers are outlined focused on orchestrating the policy-making process. Research directions are identified including understand the behavior of users, aggregating and analyzing content from scattered resources, and the effective use of the new tools. Understanding new policy-makers roles will help to bridge the gap between the potential of tools and technologies and the organizational realities and political contexts. We argue that many examples are available that enable learning from others, in both directions, developed countries experiences are useful for developing countries and experiences from the latter are valuable for the former countries…(More)”
The true geographers are in the buses
Felix Delattre: “When there is no map for the 1670 kilometers of metropolitan Managua’s public 45 bus lines network, there is only one thing you and anybody can do: Ask the people in the buses how to get from one point to another.
Once, a bus driver told us, that had no idea about the route of this bus, the first day he arrived at work. His supervisors didn’t explain him anything, so he took the most logical decision: he turned around and started asking the passengers where to go. And this is how he learned his own bus route.
The passengers of this complex – and naturally grown network within the capital – know most about it. But until today, a comprehensible map of Managua and Ciudad Sandino, that makes the cities more enjoyable has never existed. In both municipalities together every day there are approximately 1 million boardings. And within seventeen years of existence the city’s regulatory entity for municipal transports (IRTRAMMA), nor any private company, never could achieve to provide such a transit map.
But two years ago, a group inhabitants of Managua by own initiative decided to take the the feat and create the first bus network map in whole Central America. All creators are regular users of public transportation, which they use to get around in Nicaragua’s capital, in order to reach their job, their school, university or visit friends and family. We empowered ourselves, learned and mapped together the public transportation network of Managua. We were using available resources of new technologies and Free and Open Software, in particular the OpenStreetMap project and it’s ecosystem. This way more than 150 citizens collaborated in this gigantic task to map all routes and bus stops of the two cities.
The product of the effort is available online….(More)”
The Smart City and its Citizens
Paper by Carlo Francesco Capra on “Governance and Citizen Participation in Amsterdam Smart City…Smart cities are associated almost exclusively with modern technology and infrastructure. However, smart cities have the possibility to enhance the involvement and contribution of citizens to urban development. This work explores the role of governance as one of the factors influencing the participation of citizens in smart cities projects. Governance characteristics play a major role in explaining different typologies of citizen participation. Through a focus on Amsterdam Smart City program as a specific case study, this research examines the characteristics of governance that are present in the overall program and within a selected sample of projects, and how they relate to different typologies of citizen participation. The analysis and comprehension of governance characteristics plays a crucial role both for a better understanding and management of citizen participation, especially in complex settings where multiple actors are interacting….(More)”
Designing for Respect: UX Ethics for the Digital Age
O’Reilly Publishing: Although designers are responsible for orchestrating the behaviors of all sorts of interactions on the Web, mobile devices, and in consumer environments every day, they often forget—or don’t fully realize—the influence they have on others.With this O’Reilly report, you’ll examine the subject of design with an ethical lens, and focus specifically on how UX, interaction, graphic, and visual product designers can affect a user’s time, mood, and trust. Author David Hindman, Interaction Design Director at Fjord San Francisco, investigates the topic of respectful design by providing examples of the challenges and frameworks to help inform considerate design solutions.
Designers and business owners alike will examine some of the most commonly used digital services from an ethical standpoint. This report will help you:
- Recognize deceitful patterns, and learn how to create more efficient and honest solutions
- Understand the impact of respectful design on business
- Create more efficient and honest solutions
- Raise awareness about the value of clarity and respect from digital services…(More)”
Transparency, accountability, and technology
Shanthi Kalathil at Plan International: “The recently launched Sustainable Development Goals have kicked off a renewed development agenda that features, among other things, a dedicated emphasis on peace, justice, and strong institutions. This emphasis, encapsulated in Goal #16, contains several sub-priorities, including reducing corruption; developing effective, accountable, and transparent institutions; ensuring inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making; and ensuring access to information.
Indeed, the governance-related Goals merely stamp an official imprimatur on what have now become key buzzwords in development. Naturally, where there are buzzwords, there are “tools.” In many cases, those “tools” turn out to be information and communications technologies, and the data flows they facilitate. It’s no wonder, then, that technology has been embraced by the development community as a crucial component of the global accountability and transparency “toolkit.”
Certainly, information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) has long been a part of the development conversation. More recently, ICTs have emerged prominently in the context of good governance, transparency, and accountability. Yet – despite a growing number of studies and evaluations – there hasn’t been a field-wide deeper reckoning with technology’s role in fostering accountability. Technology often seems to promise greater transparency and empowered citizen voice, fitting seamlessly into broader goals of good governance for development. Yet the actual track record of many initiatives has been spotty, and dedicated examination has been sparse (although efforts are underway to change this). That hasn’t stemmed the enthusiasm to press ahead with tech-related applications and open-data-everything; if anything, calls for more critical examination are often treated as mere bumps on the road to progress.
One problem with the “tool for accountability” frame is that it minimizes the political, economic, and social ramifications of technology itself, including the complex web of laws, regulation, culture, norms, and power relations that accompany any form of communication. This means that, while many of these projects tackle the accountability piece using the recommended political economy lens, there is no corresponding emphasis on the communications and/or technology side of the equation. Referring to technology primarily as a “tool” to facilitate aspects of good governance, accountability, or transparency reinforces the idea that it’s merely a widget, one that doesn’t carry its own complexities. It subsumes technology as a means to a broader end, and in doing so, minimizes its ramifications. This, in turn, can lead to unintended or unsustainable outcomes.
Perhaps the answer, then, is to view accountability projects that employ technology in a different way. It’s time to ditch the “tech toolkit,” and instead embrace the emergence of a truly hybrid field with its own unique political economy. This will require a deeper engagement with the power relations that accompany the introduction of technology, and is likely to illuminate a host of issues that currently lie hidden in the planning stage and beyond. This deeper engagement will also require a rethink of current design, monitoring, and evaluation practices; so, for example, in addition to understanding the accountability challenge in question, program design will have to incorporate an equally substantive analysis of the political economy of the proposed ICT intervention, including stakeholders, potential obstacles, and an examination of all possible outcomes (intended or otherwise). While this will require substantial effort, by moving beyond the toolkit approach, we may be able to engage holistically with transparency, accountability, AND technology in ways that could lead to more sustained development impact. (
The Open (Data) Market
Sean McDonald at Medium: “Open licensing privatizes technology and data usability. How does that effect equality and accessibility?…The open licensing movement(open data, open source software, etc.) predicates its value on increasing accessibility and transparency by removing legal and ownership restrictions on use. The groups that advocate for open data and open sourcecode, especially in government and publicly subsidized industries, often come from transparency, accountability, and freedom of information backgrounds. These efforts, however, significantly underestimate the costs of refining, maintaining, targeting, defining a value proposition, marketing, and presenting both data and products in ways that are effective and useful for the average person. Recent research suggests the primary beneficiaries of civic technologies — those specifically built on government data or services — are privileged populations. The World Banks recent World Development Report goes further to point out that public digitization can be a driver of inequality.
The dynamic of self-replicating privilege in both technology and openmarkets is not a new phenomenon. Social science research refers to it as the Matthew Effect, which says that in open or unregulated spaces, theprivileged tend to become more privileged, while the poor become poorer.While there’s no question the advent of technology brings massive potential,it is already creating significant access and achievement divides. Accordingto the Federal Communication Commission’s annual Broadband Progressreport in 2015, 42% of students in the U.S. struggle to do their homeworkbecause of web access — and 39% of rural communities don’t even have abroadband option. Internet access skews toward urban, wealthycommunities, with income, geography, and demographics all playing a rolein adoption. Even further, research suggests that the rich and poor use technology differently. This runs counter to narrative of Interneteventualism, which insist that it’s simply a (small) matter of time beforethese access (and skills) gaps close. Evidence suggests that for upper andmiddle income groups access is almost universal, but the gaps for lowincome groups are growing…(More)”
A Gargantuan Challenge for The Megalopolis: Mexico City calls citizens to help map its complex public bus system
“Mexico City, the largest and oldest urban agglomeration in the American continent. The city is home to an incredible diversity of people and cultures, and its size and its diversity also poses certain challenges. In a city with such big scale (the metropolitan area measures 4,887 mi2) transportation is one of its main problems. Finding ways to improve how people move within requires imagination and cooperation from decision makers and society alike.
The scale and dynamism of Mexico City’s public transport system represents a challenge to generate quality information. Processes for the generation of mobility data are time-consuming and expensive. Given this scenario, the best alternative for the city is to include transport users in generating this information.
The megalopolis lacks an updated, open database of its more than 1,500 bus routes. To tackle this problem, Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Mexico City’s experimental office and creative think-tank, reporting to the Mayor) partnered with 12 organizations that include NGOs and other government offices to develop Mapatón CDMX: a crowdsourcing and gamification experiment to map the city’s bus routes through civic collaboration and technology.
After one year of designing and testing a strategy, the team behind Mapatón CDMX is calling citizens to map the public transport system by participating on a city game from January 29th to February 14th 2016. The game’s goal is to map routes of licenced public transport (buses, minibuses and vans) from start to finish in order to score points, which is done through an app for Android devices that gathers GPS data from the user inside the bus.
The mappers will participate individually or in groups with friends and family for two weeks. As an incentive and once the mapping marathon is finished, those participants with higher scores will earn cash prizes and electronic devices. (A smart algorithm creates incentives to map the longest or most ignored routes, giving mappers extra points.) But what is most valuable: the data resulting will be openly available at the end of February 2016, much faster and cheaper than with traditional processes.
Mapatón CDMX is an innovative and effective way to generate updated and open information about transport routes as the game harnesses collective intelligence of the gargantuan city. Organisers consider that the open database may be used by anyone to create –for example– data driven policy, strategies for academic analysis, maps for users, applications, visualizations, among many other digital products….(More)”
Translator Gator
Yulistina Riyadi & Lalitia Apsar at Global Pulse: “Today Pulse Lab Jakarta launches Translator Gator, a new language game to support research initiatives in Indonesia. Players can earn phone credit by translating words between English and six common Indonesian languages. The database of keywords generated by the game will be used by researchers on topics ranging from computational social science to public policy.
Translator Gator is inspired by the need to socialise the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), currently being integrated into the Government of Indonesia’s programme, and the need to better monitor progress against the varied indicators. Thus, Translator Gator will raise awareness of the SDGs and develop a taxonomy of keywords to inform research.
An essential element of public policy research is to pay attention to citizens’ feedback, both active and passive, for instance, citizens’ complaints to governments through official channels and on social media. To do this in a computational manner, researchers need a set of keywords, or ‘taxonomy’, by topic or government priorities for example.
But given the rich linguistic and cultural diversity in Indonesia, this poses some difficulties in that many languages and dialects are used in different provinces and islands. On social media, such variations – including jargon – make building a list of keywords more challenging as words, context and, by extension, meaning change from region to region. …(More)”
Idea to retire: Leaders can’t take risks or experiment
David Bray at TechTank: “Technology is rapidly changing our world. Traditionally, a nation’s physical borders could mark the beginning of their sovereign space, but in the early to mid-20th century airplanes challenged this notion. Later on, space-based satellites began flying in space above all nations. By the early 21st century, smartphone technologies costing $100 or so gave individuals computational capabilities that dwarfed the multi-million dollar computers operated by large nation-states just three decades earlier.
In this period of exponential change, all of us across the public sector must work together, enabling more inclusive work across government workers, citizen-led contributions, and public-private partnerships. Institutions must empower positive change agents on the inside of public service to pioneer new ways of delivering superior results. Institutions must also open their data for greater public interaction, citizen-led remixing, and discussions.
All together, these actions will transform public service to truly be “We the (mobile, data-enabled, collaborative) People” working to improve our world. These actions all begin creating creative spaces that allow public service professionals the opportunities to experiment and explore new ways of delivering superior results to the public.
21st Century Reality #1: Public service must include workspaces for those who want to experiment and explore new ways of delivering results.
The world we face now is dramatically different then the world of 50, 100, or 200 years ago. More technological change is expected to occur in the next five years than the last 15 years combined. Advances in technology have blurred what traditionally was considered government, and consequentially we must experiment and explore new ways of delivering results.
21st Century Reality #2: Public service agencies need, within reason, to be allowed to have things fail, and be allowed to take risks.
The words “expertise” and “experiments” have the same etymological root, which is “exper,” meaning “out of danger.” Whereas the motto in Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs around the world might be “fail fast and fail often,” such a model is not going to work for public service, where certain endeavors absolutely must succeed and cannot waste taxpayer funds.
The only way public sector technologists will gain the expertise needed to respond to and take advantage of the digital disruptions occurring globally will be to do “dangerous experiments” as positive change agents akin to what entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley also do….
21st Century Reality #3: Public service cannot be done solely by government professionals in a top-down fashion.
With the communication capabilities provided by smartphones, social media, and freely available apps, individual members of the public can voluntarily access, analyze, remix, and choose to contribute data and insights to better inform public service. Recognizing this shift from top-down to bottom-up activities represents the first step to the resiliency of our legacy institutions….
Putting a cultural shift into practice
Senior executives need to shift from managing those who report to them to championing and creating spaces for creativity within their organizations. Within any organization, change agents should be able to approach an executive, pitch new ideas, bring data to support these ideas, and if a venture is approved move forward with speed to transform public service away from our legacy approaches….
The work of public service also can be done by public-private partnerships acting beyond their own corporate interests to benefit the nation and local communities. Historically the U.S. has lagged other nations, like Singapore or the U.K., in exploring new innovative forms of public-private partnerships. This could change by examining the pressing issues of the day and considering how the private sector might solve challenging issues, or complement the efforts of government professionals. This could include rotations of both government and private sector professionals as part of public-private partnerships to do public service that now might be done more collaboratively, effectively, and innovatively using alternative forms of organizational design and delivery.
If public service returns to first principles – namely, what “We the People” choose to do together – new forms of organizing, collaborating, incentivizing, and delivering results will emerge. Our exponential era requires such transformational partnerships for the future ahead….(More)”