New paper by Aubry, Elian: “Nowadays cities invest more in their public services, and particularly digital ones, to improve their resident’s quality of life and attract more people. Thus, new crowdsourcing services appear and they are based on contributions made by mobile users equipped with smartphones. For example, the respect of the traffic code is essential to ensure citizens’ security and welfare in their city. In this paper, we present CrowdOut, a new mobile crowdsourcing service for improving road safety in cities. CrowdOut allows users to report traffic offence they witness in real time and to map them on a city plan. CrowdOut service has been implemented and experiments and demonstrations have been performed in the urban environment of the Grand Nancy, in France. This service allows users appropriating their urban environment with an active participation regarding the collectivity. This service also represents a tool for city administrators to help for decisions and improve their urbanization policy, or to check the impact of their policy in the city environment.”
The rise of open data driven businesses in emerging markets
Alla Morrison at the Worldbank blog:
Key findings —
- Many new data companies have emerged around the world in the last few years. Of these companies, the majority use some form of government data.
- There are a large number of data companies in sectors with high social impact and tremendous development opportunities.
- An actionable pipeline of data-driven companies exists in Latin America and in Asia. The most desired type of financing is equity, followed by quasi-equity in the amounts ranging from $100,000 to $5 million, with averages of between $2 and $3 million depending on the region. The total estimated need for financing may exceed $400 million.
“The economic value of open data is no longer a hypothesis
How can one make money with open data which is akin to air – free and open to everyone? Should the World Bank Group be in the catalyzer role for a sector that is just emerging? And if so, what set of interventions would be the most effective? Can promoting open data-driven businesses contribute to the World Bank Group’s twin goals of fighting poverty and boosting shared prosperity?
These questions have been top of the mind since the World Bank Open Finances team convened a group of open data entrepreneurs from across Latin America to share their business models, success stories and challenges at the Open Data Business Models workshop in Uruguay in June 2013. We were in Uruguay to find out whether open data could lead to the creation of sustainable new businesses and jobs. To do so, we tested a couple of hypotheses: open data has economic value, beyond the benefits of increased transparency and accountability; and open data companies with sustainable business models already exist in emerging economies.
Encouraged by our findings in Uruguay we set out to further explore the economic development potential of open data, with a focus on:
- Contribution of open data to countries’ GDP;
- Innovative solutions to tackle social problems in key sectors like agriculture, health, education, transportation, climate change, financial services, especially those benefiting low income populations;
- Economic benefits of governments’ buy-in into the commercial value of open data and resulting release of new datasets, which in turn would lead to increased transparency in public resource management (reductions in misallocations, a more level playing field in procurement) and better service delivery; and
- Creation of data-related private sector jobs, especially suited for the tech savvy young generation.
We proposed a joint IFC/World Bank approach (From open data to development impact – the crucial role of private sector) that envisages providing financing to data-driven companies through a dedicated investment fund, as well as loans and grants to governments to create a favorable enabling environment. The concept was received enthusiastically for the most part by a wide group of peers at the Bank, the IFC, as well as NGOs, foundations, DFIs and private sector investors.
Thanks also in part to a McKinsey report last fall stating that open data could help unlock more than $3 trillion in value every year, the potential value of open data is now better understood. The acquisition of Climate Corporation (whose business model holds enormous potential for agriculture and food security, if governments open up the right data) for close to a billion dollars last November and the findings of the Open Data 500 project led by GovLab of the NYU further substantiated the hypothesis. These days no one asks whether open data has economic value; the focus has shifted to finding ways for companies, both startups and large corporations, and governments to unlock it. The first question though is – is it still too early to plan a significant intervention to spur open data driven economic growth in emerging markets?”
After Sustainable Cities?
New book edited by Mike Hodson, and Simon Marvin: “A sustainable city has been defined in many ways. Yet, the most common understanding is a vision of the city that is able to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Central to this vision are two ideas: cities should meet social needs, especially of the poor, and not exceed the ability of the global environment to meet needs.
After Sustainable Cities critically reviews what has happened to these priorities and asks whether these social commitments have been abandoned in a period of austerity governance and climate change and replaced by a darker and unfair city. This book provides the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the new eco-logics reshaping conventional sustainable cities discourse and environmental priorities of cities in both the global north and south. The dominant discourse on sustainable cities, with a commitment to intergenerational equity, social justice and global responsibility, has come under increasing pressure. Under conditions of global ecological change, international financial and economic crisis and austerity governance new eco-logics are entering the urban sustainability lexicon – climate change, green growth, smart growth, resilience and vulnerability, ecological security. This book explores how these new eco-logics reshape our understanding of equity, justice and global responsibility, and how these more technologically and economically driven themes resonate and dissonate with conventional sustainable cities discourse. This book provides a warning that a more technologically driven and narrowly constructed economic agenda is driving ecological policy and weakening previous commitment to social justice and equity.
After Sustainable Cities brings together leading researchers to provide a critical examination of these new logics and identity what sort of city is now emerging, as well as consider the longer-term implication on sustainable cities research and policy.”
After Sustainable Cities critically reviews what has happened to these priorities and asks whether these social commitments have been abandoned in a period of austerity governance and climate change and replaced by a darker and unfair city. This book provides the first comprehensive and comparative analysis of the new eco-logics reshaping conventional sustainable cities discourse and environmental priorities of cities in both the global north and south. The dominant discourse on sustainable cities, with a commitment to intergenerational equity, social justice and global responsibility, has come under increasing pressure. Under conditions of global ecological change, international financial and economic crisis and austerity governance new eco-logics are entering the urban sustainability lexicon – climate change, green growth, smart growth, resilience and vulnerability, ecological security. This book explores how these new eco-logics reshape our understanding of equity, justice and global responsibility, and how these more technologically and economically driven themes resonate and dissonate with conventional sustainable cities discourse. This book provides a warning that a more technologically driven and narrowly constructed economic agenda is driving ecological policy and weakening previous commitment to social justice and equity.
After Sustainable Cities brings together leading researchers to provide a critical examination of these new logics and identity what sort of city is now emerging, as well as consider the longer-term implication on sustainable cities research and policy.”
The Social Machine
New book by Judith Donath: “Computers were first conceived as “thinking machines,” but in the twenty-first century they have become social machines, online places where people meet friends, play games, and collaborate on projects. In this book, Judith Donath argues persuasively that for social media to become truly sociable media, we must design interfaces that reflect how we understand and respond to the social world. People and their actions are still harder to perceive online than face to face: interfaces are clunky, and we have less sense of other people’s character and intentions, where they congregate, and what they do.
Donath presents new approaches to creating interfaces for social interaction. She addresses such topics as visualizing social landscapes, conversations, and networks; depicting identity with knowledge markers and interaction history; delineating public and private space; and bringing the online world’s open sociability into the physical world. Donath asks fundamental questions about how we want to live online and offers thought-provoking designs that explore radically new ways of interacting and communicating.”
Public service workers will have to become Jacks and Jills of all trades
Catherine Needham in the Guardian: “When Kent county council was looking to save money a couple of years ago, it hit upon the idea of merging the roles of library manager and registrar. Library managers were expected to register births and deaths on top of their existing duties, and registrars took on roles in libraries. One former library manager chose to leave the service as a result. It wasn’t, he said, what he signed up for: “I don’t associate the skills in running a library with those of a registrar. I don’t have the emotional skill to do it.”
Since the council was looking to cut staff numbers, it was probably not too troubled by his departure. But this does raise questions about how to support staff who are being asked to work well beyond their professional boundaries.
In our 21st Century Public Servant project at the University of Birmingham, we have found that this trend is evident across public services. We interviewed local government managers who said staff needed to think differently about their skills. As one put it: “We need to use people’s latent talent – if you are a librarian, for example, a key skill will be working with people from the local community. It’s about a different background mindset: ‘I am not just here to do a specific job, but to help the people of this town.'”
The skills of this generic public service worker include interpersonal skills (facilitation, empathy, political skills), analysing skills (sorting evidence, making judgements, offering critique and being creative), organisation (particularly for group work and collaboration) and communication skills (such as using social media and multimedia resources).
The growing interest in genericism seems to have two main drivers. The first, of course, is austerity. Cost cutting on an unprecedented scale in local authorities requires those staff that survive the waves of redundancies to be willing to take on new roles and work in multi-purpose settings. The second is the drive for whole-person approaches in which proper engagement with the public might require staff to cross traditional sector boundaries.
It is good that public service workers are being granted greater flexibility. But there are two main limitations to this move to greater genericism. The first is that multi-tasking in an era of cost cutting can look a lot like deprofessionalisation. Within social work, for example, concerns have been expressed about the downgrading of social work posts (by appointing brokers in their place, say) and the resulting loss of professional skills and knowledge.
A second limitation is that skills training continues to be sectoral, failing to catch up with the move to genericism….”
Learning from The Wealth of the Commons
We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives’.
This is the starting point for what David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, the editors of The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (2012), describe as ‘an extended global exercise in commoning’ – Peter Linebaugh’s term for ‘the self-determination of commoners in managing their shared resources’ (p. 396). In other words, the book itself is offered as an active process of ‘making the path’ by presenting ‘some of the most promising new paths now being developed’. It is intended to be ‘rigorous enough for academic readers yet accessible enough for the layperson’. In this, it more than achieves its ambitions. The Wealth of the Commons is an edited collection of seventy-three short papers from thirty countries: ‘a collective venture of sharing, collaboration, negotiation and creative production among some of the most diverse commons scholars, activists and projects leaders imaginable’. This rich and diverse source of knowledge and inspiration could be described as ‘polyvocal’ in the sense that it presents a multiplicity of voices improvising around a single theme – sometimes in harmony, sometimes discordant, but always interesting.
The book brings together an impressive collection of contributors from different places, backgrounds and interests to explore the meaning of the commons and to advocate for it ‘as a new paradigm’ for the organization of public and private life. In this sense, it represents a project rather than an analysis: essentially espousing a cause with imperative urgency. This is not necessarily a weakness, but it does raise specific questions about what is included and what is absent or marginalized in this particular selection of accounts, and what might be lost along the way. What counts as ‘commons’ or ‘the commons’ or ‘the common’ (all used in the text) is a subject of discussion and contestation here, as elsewhere. The effort to ‘name and claim’ is an integral aspect of the project. As Jeffrey et al. (2012, p. 10) comment, ‘the struggle for the commons has never been without its own politics of separation and division’, raising valid questions about the prospects for a coherent paradigm at this stage. At the very least, however, this rich resource may prove seminal in countering those dominant paradigms of growth and development in which structural and cultural adjustments ‘serve as a justifying rhetoric for continuity in plunder’ of common resources (Mattei, p. 41).
The contributions fall into three general categories: those offering a critique of existing ‘increasingly dysfunctional’ market/state relations; those that ‘enlarge theoretical understandings of the commons as a way to change the world’; and those that ‘describe innovative working projects which demonstrate the feasibility’ of the commons.
What counts as the commons?
As acknowledged in many of the chapters, defining the commons in any consistent and convincing way can be deeply problematic. Like ‘community’ itself, it can be regarded to some degree as an ideological portmanteau which contains a variety of meanings. Nonetheless, there is a general commitment to confront such difficulties in an open way, and to be as clear as possible about what the commons might represent, what it might replace, and what it should not be confused with. Put most simply, the commons refers to what human beings share in nature and society that should be cherished for all now and for the future: ‘the term … provides the binding element between the natural and the social or cultural worlds’ (Weber p.11). Its profound challenge to the logic of competitive capitalist relations, therefore, is to ‘validate new schemes of human relations, production and governance … commonance’ (Bollier and Helfrich, p. xiv) that penetrate all levels of public and private life. This idea is explored in detail in many of the contributions.
The commons, then, claims to represent a philosophical stance, an intellectual framework, a moral and economic imperative, a set of organizing principles and commitments, a movement, and an emerging ‘global community of practice’ (O’Connell, 2012). It has also developed an increasingly shared discourse, which is designed to unsettle institutionalized norms and values and to reclaim or remake the language of co-operation, fairness and social justice. As the editorial points out, the language of capitalism is one that becomes ‘encoded into the epistemology of our language and internalized by people’. In community development, and elsewhere, we have become sensitized to the way in which progressive language can be appropriated to support individualistic market values. When empowerment can mean facilitated asset-stripping of local communities, and solidarity targets can be set by government (e.g. Scottish Government, 2007), then we must be wary about assuming proprietorial closure on the term ‘commons’ itself.
As Federici, in a particularly persuasive chapter, warns: ‘… capital is learning about the virtues of the common good’ (p. 46). She argues that, ‘since at least the 1990s, the language of the commons has been appropriated … by the World Bank and put at the service of privatization’. For this reason, it is important to think of the commons as a ‘quality of relations, a principle of co-operation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals’ (p. 50). This produces a different operational logic, which is explored in depth across the collection.
Deficiencies in the commons framework
To advance the commons as ‘a new paradigm’, it is necessary to locate it historically and to show the ways in which it has been colonized and compromised, as some of these pieces do. It may seem ironic that the meaning of ‘the commons’ to many people in the UK, for example, is that bear pit of parliamentary business, the House of Commons, in which adversarial rather than consensual politics is the order of the day. Reclaiming such foundational ideas is a lengthy and demanding process, as David Graeber shows in The Democracy Project, his recent account of the Occupy Movement, which for a time commanded considerable international interest. Drawing on Linebaugh, Federici contends that ‘commons have been the thread that has connected the history of the class struggle into our time’.
It is unfortunate, therefore, that the volume fails to address the relationship between organized labour and the commons, as highlighted in the introduction, because there is a distinctive contribution to be made here. As Harvey (2012) argues, decentralization and autonomy are also primary vehicles for reinforcing neoliberal class strategies of social reproduction and producing greater inequality. For example, in urban environments in particular, ‘the better the common qualities a social group creates, the more likely it is to be raided and appropriated by private profit-maximising interests’ leading inexorably to economic cleansing of whole areas. Gentrification and tourism are the clearest examples. The salience of class in general is an underdeveloped line of argument. If this authoritative collection is anything to go by, this may be a significant deficiency in the commons framework.
Without historical continuity – honouring the contribution of those ‘commoners’ who came before in various guises and places – there is a danger of falling into the contemporary trap of regarding ‘innovation’ as a way of separating us from our past. History in the past as well as in the making is as essential a part of our commons as is the present and the future – material, temporal and spiritual….”
New Research Suggests Collaborative Approaches Produce Better Plans
JPER: “In a previous blog post (see, http://goo.gl/pAjyWE), we discussed how many of the most influential articles in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (and in peer publications, like JAPA) over the last two decades have focused on communicative or collaborative planning. Proponents of these approaches, most notably Judith Innes, Patsy Healey, Larry Susskind, and John Forester, developed the idea that the collaborative and communicative structures that planners use impact the quality, legitimacy, and equity of planning outcomes. In practice, communicative theory has led to participatory initiatives, such as those observed in New Orleans (post-Katrina, http://goo.gl/A5J5wk), Chattanooga (to revitalize its downtown and riverfront, http://goo.gl/zlQfKB), and in many other smaller efforts to foment wider involvement in decision making. Collaboration has also impacted regional governance structures, leading to more consensus based forms of decision making, notably CALFED (SF Bay estuary governance, http://goo.gl/EcXx9Q) and transportation planning with Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs)….
Most studies testing the implementation of collaborative planning have been case studies. Previous work by authors such as Innes and Booher, has provided valuable qualitative data about collaboration in planning, but few studies have attempted to empirically test the hypothesis that consensus building and participatory practices lead to better planning outcomes.
Robert Deyle (Florida State) and Ryan Weidenman (Atkins Global) build on previous case study research by surveying officials in involved in developing long-range transportation plans in 88 U.S. MPOs about the process and outcomes of those plans. The study tests the hypothesis that collaborative processes provide better outcomes and enhanced long-term relationships in situations where “many stakeholders with different needs” have “shared interests in common resources or challenges” and where “no actor can meet his/her interests without the cooperation of many others (Innes and Booher 2010, 7; Innes and Gruber 2005, 1985–2186). Current theory posits that consensus-based collaboration requires 1) the presence of all relevant interests, 2) mutual interdependence for goal achievement, and 3) honest and authentic dialog between participants (Innes and Booher 2010, 35–36, Deyle and Weidenmann, 2014).
Figure 2 Deyle and Weidenman (2014)
By surveying planning authorities, the authors found that most of the conditions (See Figure 2, above) posited in collaborative planning literature had statistically significant impacts on planning outcomes.These included perceptions of plan quality, participant satisfaction with the plan, as well as intangible outcomes that benefit both the participants and their ongoing collaboration efforts. However, having a planning process in which all or most decisions were made by consensus did not improve outcomes. ….
Deyle, Robert E., and Ryan E. Wiedenman. “Collaborative Planning by Metropolitan Planning Organizations A Test of Causal Theory.” Journal of Planning Education and Research (2014): 0739456X14527621.
To access this article FREE until May 31 click the following links: Online, http://goo.gl/GU9inf, PDF, http://goo.gl/jehAf1.”
#BringBackOurGirls: Can Hashtag Activism Spur Social Change?
Nancy Ngo at TechChange: “In our modern times of media cycles fighting for our short attention spans, it is easy to ride the momentum of a highly visible campaign that can quickly fizzle out once another competing story emerges. Since the kidnappings of approximately 300 Nigerian girls by militant Islamist group Boko Haram last month, the international community has embraced the hashtag, “#BringBackOurGirls”, in a very vocal and visible social media campaign demanding action to rescue the Chibok girls. But one month since the mass kidnapping without the rescue of the girls, do we need to take a different approach? Will #BringBackOurGirls be just another campaign we forget about once the next celebrity scandal becomes breaking news?
#BringBackOurGirls goes global starting in Nigeria
Most of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign activity has been highly visible on Twitter, Facebook, and international media outlets. In this fascinating Twitter heat map created using the tool, CartoDB, featured in TIME Magazine, we can see a time-lapsed digital map of how the hashtag, “#BringBackOurGirls” spread globally, starting organically from within Nigeria in mid April.
The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag has been embraced widely by many public figures and has garnered wide support across the world. Michelle Obama, David Cameron, and Malala Yusafzai have posted images with the hashtag, along with celebrities such as Ellen Degeneres, Angelina Jolie, and Dwayne Johnson. To date, nearly 1 million people signed the Change.org petition. Countries including the USA, UK, China, Israel have pledged to join the rescue efforts, and other human rights campaigns have joined the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter momentum, as seen on this Hashtagify map.
Is #BringBackOurGirls repeating the mistakes of #KONY2012?
A great example of a past campaign where this happened was with the KONY2012 campaign, which brought some albeit short-lived urgency to addressing the child soldiers recruited by Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Michael Poffenberger, who worked on that campaign, will join us a guest expert in TC110: Social Media for Social Change online course in June 2013 and compare it the current #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Many have drawn parallels to both campaigns and warned of the false optimism that hyped social media messages can bring when context is not fully considered and understood.
According to Lauren Wolfe of Foreign Policy magazine, “Understanding what has happened to the Nigerian girls and how to rescue them means beginning to face what has happened to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of girls over years in global armed conflict.” To some critics, this hashtag trivializes the weaknesses of Nigerian democracy that have been exposed. Critics of using social media in advocacy campaigns have used the term “slacktivism” to describe the passive, minimal effort needed to participate in these movements. Others have cited such media waves being exploited for individual gain, as opposed to genuinely benefiting the girls. Florida State University Political Science professor, Will H. Moore, argues that this hashtag activism is not only hurting the larger cause of rescuing the kidnapped girls, but actually helping Boko Haram. Jumoke Balogun, Co-Founder of CompareAfrique, also highlights the limits of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag impact.
Hashtag activism, alone, is not enough
With all this social media activity and international press, what actual progress has been made in rescuing the kidnapped girls? If the objective is raising awareness of the issue, yes, the hashtag has been successful. If the objective is to rescue the girls, we still have a long way to go, even if the hashtag campaign has been part of a multi-pronged approach to galvanize resources into action.
The bottom line: social media can be a powerful tool to bring visibility and awareness to a cause, but a hashtag alone is not enough to bring about social change. There are a myriad of resources that must be coordinated to effectively implement this rescue mission, which will only become more difficult as more time passes. However, prioritizing and shining a sustained light on the problem, instead getting distracted by competing media cycles on celebrities getting into petty fights, is the first step toward a solution…”
ShouldWe
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Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place
Rodrigo Davis: “Today I’m capping two years of studying the emergence of civic crowdfunding by submitting my master’s thesis to the MIT archives…You can read Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place in its entirety (173 pages) now,…
Crowdfunding is everywhere. People are using it to fund watches, comic books, even famous film directors are doing it. In what is now a $6 billion industry globally, I think the most interesting, disruptive and exciting work that’s happening is in donation-based crowdfunding. That’s worth, very roughly, $1.2 billion a year worldwide per year. Within that subset, I’ve been looking at civic projects, people who are producing shared goods for a community or broader public. These projects build on histories of community fundraising and resource pooling that long predate the Internet; what’s changed is that we’ve created a scalable, portable platform model to carry out these existing practices.
So how is civic crowdfunding doing? When I started this project very few people were using that term. No one had done any aggregated data collection and published it. So I decided to take on that task. I collected data on 1224 projects between 2010 and March 2014, which raised $10.74 million in just over three years. I focused on seven platforms: Catarse (Brazil), Citizinvestor (US), Goteo (Spain), IOBY (US), Kickstarter (US), Neighbor.ly (US) and Spacehive (UK). I didn’t collect everything. …
Here are four things I found out about civic crowdfunding.
- Civic crowdfunding is small-scale but relatively successful, and it has big ambitions.Currently the average civic crowdfunding project is small in scale: $6,357 is the median amount raised. But these civic projects seem to be doing pretty well. Projects tagged ‘civic’ on Kickstarter, for instance, succeed 81% of the time. If Civic were a separate category, it would be Kickstarter’s most successful category. Meanwhile, most platform owners and some incumbent institutions see civic crowdfunding as a new mechanism for public-private partnerships capable of realizing large-scale projects. In a small minority of cases, such as the three edge-case projects I explored in Chapter 3 of my thesis, civic crowdfunding has begun to fulfill some of those ambitions. For the center of gravity to shift further in the direction of these potential outcomes, though, existing institutions, including government, large non-profits and the for-profit sector, will need to engage more comprehensively with the process.
- Civic crowdfunding started as a hobby for green space projects by local non-profits, but larger organizations are getting involved. Almost a third of campaigners are using civic crowdfunding platforms for park and garden-related projects (29%). Event-based projects, and education and training are also popular. Sports and mobility projects are pretty uncommon. The frequency of garden and park projects is partly because these projects are not capital intensive, and they’re uncontroversial. That’s also changing. Organizations from governments to corporations and large foundations, are exploring ways to support crowdfunding for a much wider range of community-facing activities. Their modes of engagement include publicizing campaigns, match-funding campaigns on an ad-hoc basis, running their own campaigns and even building new platforms from the ground up.
- Civic crowdfunding is concentrated in cities (especially those where platforms are based). The genre is too new to have spread very effectively, it seems. Five states account for 80% of the projects, and this is partly a function of where the platforms are located. New York, California are our top two, followed by Illinois and Oregon. We know there’s a strong trend towards big cities. It’s hard work for communities to use crowdfunding to get projects off the ground, especially when it’s an unfamiliar process. The platforms have played a critical role in building participants’ understanding of crowdfunding and supporting them through the process.
- Civic crowdfunding has the same highly unequal distributional tendencies as other crowd markets. When we look at the size distribution of projects, the first thing we notice is something close to a Pareto distribution, or Long Tail. Most projects are small-scale, but a small number of high-value projects have taken a large share of the total revenue raised by civic crowdfunding. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. On Kickstarter most successful projects are between 5 and 10k, and 47% of civic projects I studied are in the same bracket. The problem is that we tend to remember the outliers, such as Veronica Mars and Spike Lee – because they show what’s possible. But they are still the outliers.
Now, here are two things we don’t know.
- Will civic crowdfunding deter public investment or encourage it?
- Will civic crowdfunding widen wealth gaps?”