Douglas Haddow at Adbusters on “The Total Annihilation of Life as We Know It”: “…When the TechCrunchers preach the gospel of disruption, it’s from an industrial perspective that sees life on Earth as a series of business models to be upended. Disrupt or die is the motto, but they never mention the disruptees — the travel agents, the cab drivers, the bellhops. The journalists. The meat in the box before the box is crushed by the anvil of innovation.
“People have ideas about things but it’s a bunch of things. Sign up flow for example, high level things, but sometimes I think — let’s table this for now and put together some idea maps. I feel so empowered because we’re aligned,” someone else says. I look around but can’t trace the source.
It’s hard to focus on his questions when all the conversations occurring parallel to ours combine in a cacophony of sameness, as if we’re all Tedtalking a mantra of ancient buzzwords: Engagement. Intuitive. Connection. User base. Revolutionary. It’s like coke talk gone sour, not words that are meant to say things, but stale semiotics that signify you belong. This is the the new language of business. This is where Wall Street goes to find itself…
The internet is a failed utopia. And we’re all trapped inside of it. But I’m not willing to give up on it yet. It’s where I first discovered punk rock and anarchism. Where I learned about the I Ching and Albert Camus while downloading “Holiday in Cambodia” at 15kbps. It’s where I first perved out on the photos of a girl I would eventually fall in love with. It’s home to me, you and everybody we know.
No, the appropriate question to ask is: “What is the purpose of my life?”
I’ve seen the best minds of my generation sucked dry by the economics of the infinite scroll. Amidst the innovation fatigue inherent to a world with more phones than people, we’ve experienced a spectacular failure of the imagination and turned the internet, likely the only thing between us and a very dark future, into little more than a glorified counting machine.
Am I data, or am I human? The truth is somewhere in between. Next time you click I AGREE on some purposefully confusing terms and conditions form, pause for a moment to interrogate the power that lies behind the code. The dream of the internet may have proven difficult to maintain, but the solution is not to dream less, but to dream harder.”
Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets
New book edited by Bertino, Elisa, and Matei Sorin Adam: This title discusses the emerging trends in defining, measuring, and operationalizing reputation as a new and essential component of the knowledge that is generated and consumed online. The book also proposes a future research agenda related to these issues—with the ultimate goal of shaping the next generation of theoretical and analytic strategies needed for understanding how knowledge markets are influenced by social interactions and reputations built around functional roles.
Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets exposes issues that have not been satisfactorily dealt with in the current literature. In a broader sense, the volume aims to change the way in which knowledge generation in social media spaces is understood and utilized. The tools, theories, and methodologies proposed here offer concrete avenues for developing the next generation of research strategies and applications that will help: tomorrow’s information consumers make smarter choices, developers to create new tools, and researchers to launch new research programs….
- Proposes new methods for understanding how opinion leaders and influential authors emerge on social media knowledge markets
- Advances new approaches to theory-based understanding of how social media reputations emerge and shape content and public opinion
- Highlights the most important understudied or promising areas of research regarding reputation and authorship on social media
- Reviews existing accomplishments in the field of reputation research on social media knowledge markets
- Features a multidisciplinary team of authors, covering several disciplines
- Includes both senior, established authors and emerging, innovative voices”
Making Policy Public: Participatory Bureaucracy in American Democracy
New book by Susan L. Moffitt: “This book challenges the conventional wisdom that government bureaucrats inevitably seek secrecy and demonstrates how and when participatory bureaucracy manages the enduring tension between bureaucratic administration and democratic accountability. Looking closely at federal level public participation in pharmaceutical regulation and educational assessments within the context of the vast system of American federal advisory committees, this book demonstrates that participatory bureaucracy supports bureaucratic administration in ways consistent with democratic accountability when it focuses on complex tasks and engages diverse expertise. In these conditions, public participation can help produce better policy outcomes, such as safer prescription drugs. Instead of bureaucracy’s opposite or alternative, public participation can work as its complement.
- Argues that public participation through FDA drug review advisory committees leads to safer drug experiences on the market: fewer boxed warnings and fewer drug withdrawals
- Suggests that the American system of public committees is truly vast, involving upwards of 70,000 committee members across 1,000 different committees
- Details that public committees can be a source of transparency in government operations”
With Wikistrat, crowdsourcing gets geopolitical
Much to the surprise of western intelligence, in a matter of weeks Vladimir Putin’s troops would occupy the disputed peninsula and a referendum would be passed authorising secession from Ukraine.
That a dispersed team of thinkers – assembled by a consultancy known as Wikistrat – could out-forecast the world’s leading intelligence agencies seems almost farcical. But it is an eye-opening example of yet another way that crowdsourcing is upending conventional wisdom.
Crowdsourcing has long been heralded as a means to shake up stale thinking in corporate spheres by providing cheaper, faster means of processing information and problem solving. But now even traditionally enigmatic defence and intelligence organisations and other geopolitical soothsayers are getting in on the act by using the “wisdom of the crowd” to predict how the chips of world events might fall.
Meanwhile, companies with crucial geopolitical interests, such as energy and financial services firms, have begun commissioning crowdsourced simulations of their own from Wikistrat to better gauge investment risk.
While some intelligence agencies have experimented with crowdsourcing to gain insights from the general public, Wikistrat uses a “closed crowd” of subject experts and bills itself as the world’s first crowdsourced analytical services consultancy.
A typical simulation, run on its interactive web platform, has roughly 70 participants. The crowd’s expertise and diversity is combined with Wikistrat’s patented model of “collaborative competition” that rewards participants for the breadth and quality of their contributions. The process is designed to provide a fresh view and shatter the traditional confines of groupthink….”
Beta Release of the Open Contracting Data Standard
Open Contracting: “Each year, governments around the world spend over $9 trillion dollars of citizens’ money through public contracts. All too often, however, little to no data is made available to the public about these contracts. If data is available, it is often supplied in ways which make analysis very challenging or downright impossible.
Yet, if data relating to public contracts is released in a clear, reusable and timely way, the rewards will be great. Governments will have data to make better decisions and enhance their effectiveness, private companies will be better able to compete in the market and citizens will be able to hold their governments accountable for how they spend public resources.
To help unlock these benefits, the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) is pleased to share for broad consultation the Beta Release of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).This Standard is currently being developed for the OCP by the World Wide Web Foundation through the support of Omidyar Network and the World Bank.
The objective of the Data Standard is to support governments to publish contracting data in a more accessible, interoperable and useful manner and to enable the widest possible range of stakeholders to use contracting data effectively.
Some of the features provided by this Beta Release include a description of the overall Open Contracting Data Standard Model and a JSON Schema for open contracting releases and records that includes a set of recommended fields.
The development of the Open Contracting Data Standard is an open process and inputs and feedback are encouraged. Although this will be an ongoing process, those comments provided before September 30, 2014 will be more likely to fully inform version 1.0 of the Standard. These comments will help refine the standard, both the structure and fields, in preparation for the initial release version.
Those interested in providing comments can do so in two different ways:
- Inline comments on the document – Log in to the Open Contracting Data Standard Github site and then highlight portions of text to add comment. To “reply” to an existing comment, highlight the same portion of text, and then add your comment. See instructions at the top of the Github login page for more help on commenting.
- Mailing list – If you have more general comments that don’t fit well as inline comments, please join the OCDS mailing list and start a discussion with your thoughts….”
When Citizens Bypass Government
in Governing: “Local governments are facing new realities. Citizens’ trust in government has declined, and financial constraints do not allow local governments to deliver all of the services their communities would like. In response, citizens are changing as well. Increasingly, local residents and organizations are seizing opportunities to engage with their communities in their own ways by creating platforms that bypass government.
These platforms are powered by inexpensive technology and driven by a desire for community improvement that is bottom-up. While some local governments are embracing this development, others are reacting defensively, at least initially. As this phenomenon grows, more and more local governments will be faced with the challenge of deciding what their stances should be toward these citizen-engagement platforms.
In Alexandria, Va., a citizens’ group launched ACTion Alexandria, an online platform for residents to engage in challenges, debate solutions, share stories and develop relationships, all on their own and without the help or permission of the city government. Even though ACTion Alexandria is a platform created and owned by citizens, the city government supports it and even partners with it.
Oakland, Calif., initially took a less supportive stance to the citizen-developed Oakland Crimespotting website. Using open city law-enforcement data, Oakland Crimespotting provides residents with the most up-to-date information on crime in the city on an interactive map. A week after the site was launched, however, the city government cut off its data stream, saying Oakland Crimespotting’s frequent data demands were disrupting the city’s own crime-tracking website. Eventually, the city changed its mind and restored the data flow.
Citizen platforms are also have much to offer in times of crisis. In Allentown, Pa., in 2011, a devastating natural-gas explosion occurred in the downtown area. Five people died. During and following the disaster, Allentown residents used social-media platforms to provide updates about rescue and recovery, disseminate information about ways to help the affected families, and volunteer….”
18F launches alpha foia.gov in a bid to reboot Freedom of Information Act requests for the 21st century
at E Pluribus Unum: “18F, the federal government’s new IT development shop, has launched a new look at the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the form of a open source application hosted on Github. Today’s announcement is the most substantive evidence yet that the Obama administration will indeed modernize the Freedom of Information Act, as the United States committed to doing in its second National Action Plan on Open Government. Given how poor some of the “FOIA portals” and underlying software that supports them exists is at all level of government, this is tremendous news for anyone that cares about the use of technology to support open government.
Notably, 18F already has a prototype (pictured above) online that shows what a consolidated request submission hub could look like and plans to iterate upon it. This is a perfect example of “lean government,” or the application of lean startup principles and agile development to the creation of citizen-centric services in the public sector. Demonstrating its commitment to developing free and open source software in the open, 18F asked the public to follow the process online at their FOIA software repository on Github, send them feedback or even contribute to the project….”
More Feedback Would Improve Foundations’ Service to Society
OpEd by Hilary Pennington and Fay Twersky at the Chronicle on Philanthropy: “We value your feedback as a customer of our services. Would you be willing to answer a few questions at the end of this?”
Airlines, online retailers, medical offices, and restaurants all ask these kinds of questions. They recognize that getting regular customer feedback helps them continuously improve. It doesn’t mean they take every suggestion, or that businesses are handing over the reins of decisions to their customers.
Far from it.
But the consistent avenues for feedback do mean that businesses can listen and consider what they hear, and then make adjustments to respond to customer preferences, thereby improving their outcomes—the bottom line. Often, businesses publicly share the changes they make because customers appreciate responsive businesses.
What if the people meant to benefit from the programs that foundations support, as well as the nonprofits we finance, could contribute their needs, opinions, and experiences to help us improve our current grant-making programs and suggest ideas for the future? Imagine if all of us working for social and environmental change understood better what the intended beneficiaries of our work think and what we could do differently to ensure that we achieve our goals….
As foundation leaders, we believe that lack of openness and input from the people nonprofits serve prevents us from being as effective as we want and need to be. We have been asking ourselves how the foundation world can do better.
How can we learn more about the ways people experience the services and products our grantees provide? Do they find the services useful? Relevant? Are the hours of operation convenient? Is there room for improvement? If we knew the answers, might we also improve the outcomes?
It’s time to make gathering such feedback routine so that all of us, at both foundations and other nonprofits, reliably consider the perspectives and experiences of those we seek to help.
But we know such efforts are costly, in both time and money, and too few experiments have been conducted to figure out the most effective ways to get feedback that matters.
To help elevate the voices of the people our grant money is designed to help, we have joined with five other grant makers to create the Fund for Shared Insight, which will award $5-million to $6-million a year over the next three years.
In addition to Ford and Hewlett, we are joined by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the JPB Foundation, Liquidnet, the Rita Allen Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Shared Insight will award one- to three-year grants to nonprofit organizations that seek new ways to get feedback and use the findings to improve their programs and services, and conduct research on whether those improvements—and the willingness to listen to clients—make a difference. We’ll also finance projects that take other steps to promote more openness among grant makers, nonprofits, and the public.”
The Age of Intelligent Cities: Smart Environments and Innovation-for-all Strategies
New book by Nicos Komninos: “This book concludes a trilogy that began with Intelligent Cities: Innovation, Knowledge Systems and digital spaces (Routledge 2002) and Intelligent Cities and Globalisation of Innovation Networks (Routledge 2008). Together these books examine intelligent cities as environments of innovation and collaborative problem-solving. In this final book, the focus is on planning, strategy and governance of intelligent cities.
Divided into three parts, each section elaborates upon complementary aspects of intelligent city strategy and planning. Part I is about the drivers and architectures of the spatial intelligence of cities, while Part II turns to planning processes and discusses top-down and bottom-up planning for intelligent cities. Cities such as Amsterdam, Manchester, Stockholm and Helsinki are examples of cities that have used bottom-up planning through the gradual implementation of successive initiatives for regeneration. On the other hand, Living PlanIT, Neapolis in Cyprus, and Saudi Arabia intelligent cities have started with the top-down approach, setting up urban operating systems and common central platforms. Part III focuses on intelligent city strategies; how cities should manage the drivers of spatial intelligence, create smart environments, mobilise communities, and offer new solutions to address city problems.
Main findings of the book are related to a series of models which capture fundamental aspects of intelligent cities making and operation. These models consider structure, function, planning, strategies toward intelligent environments and a model of governance based on mobilisation of communities, knowledge architectures, and innovation cycles.”
Main findings of the book are related to a series of models which capture fundamental aspects of intelligent cities making and operation. These models consider structure, function, planning, strategies toward intelligent environments and a model of governance based on mobilisation of communities, knowledge architectures, and innovation cycles.”
The Decalogue of Policy Making 2.0: Results from Analysis of Case Studies on the Impact of ICT for Governance and Policy Modelling
Paper by Sotirios Koussouris, Fenareti Lampathaki, Gianluca Misuraca, Panagiotis Kokkinakos, and Dimitrios Askounis: “Despite the availability of a myriad of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) based tools and methodologies for supporting governance and the formulation of policies, including modelling expected impacts, these have proved to be unable to cope with the dire challenges of the contemporary society. In this chapter we present the results of the analysis of a set of promising cases researched in order to understand the possible impact of what we define ‘Policy Making 2.0’, which refers to ‘a set of methodologies and technological solutions aimed at enabling better, timely and participative policy-making’. Based on the analysis of these cases we suggest a bouquet of (mostly ICT-related) practical and research recommendations that are relevant to researchers, practitioners and policy makers in order to guide the introduction and implementation of Policy Making 2.0 initiatives. We argue that this ‘decalogue’ of Policy Making 2.0 could be an operational checklist for future research and policy to further explore the potential of ICT tools for governance and policy modelling, so to make next generation policy making more ‘intelligent’ and hopefully able to solve or anticipate the societal challenges we are (and will be) confronted today and in the future.