Jeremy Wagstaff’ at Reuters: “Open data’ – the trove of data-sets made publicly available by governments, organizations and businesses – isn’t normally linked to high-wire politics, but just may have saved last month’s Indonesian presidential elections from chaos.
Data is considered open when it’s released for anyone to use and in a format that’s easy for computers to read. The uses are largely commercial, such as the GPS data from U.S.-owned satellites, but data can range from budget numbers and climate and health statistics to bus and rail timetables.
It’s a revolution that’s swept the developed world in recent years as governments and agencies like the World Bank have freed up hundreds of thousands of data-sets for use by anyone who sees a use for them. Data.gov, a U.S. site, lists more than 100,000 data-sets, from food calories to magnetic fields in space.
Consultants McKinsey reckon open data could add up to $3 trillion worth of economic activity a year – from performance ratings that help parents find the best schools to governments saving money by releasing budget data and asking citizens to come up with cost-cutting ideas. All the apps, services and equipment that tap the GPS satellites, for example, generate $96 billion of economic activity each year in the United States alone, according to a 2011 study.
But so far open data has had a limited impact in the developing world, where officials are wary of giving away too much information, and where there’s the issue of just how useful it might be: for most people in emerging countries, property prices and bus schedules aren’t top priorities.
But last month’s election in Indonesia – a contentious face-off between a disgraced general and a furniture-exporter turned reformist – highlighted how powerful open data can be in tandem with a handful of tech-smart programmers, social media savvy and crowdsourcing.
“Open data may well have saved this election,” said Paul Rowland, a Jakarta-based consultant on democracy and governance…”
Values at Play in Digital Games
New book by Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum: “All games express and embody human values, providing a compelling arena in which we play out beliefs and ideas. “Big ideas” such as justice, equity, honesty, and cooperation—as well as other kinds of ideas, including violence, exploitation, and greed—may emerge in games whether designers intend them or not. In this book, Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum present Values at Play, a theoretical and practical framework for identifying socially recognized moral and political values in digital games. Values at Play can also serve as a guide to designers who seek to implement values in the conception and design of their games.
After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.”
After developing a theoretical foundation for their proposal, Flanagan and Nissenbaum provide detailed examinations of selected games, demonstrating the many ways in which values are embedded in them. They introduce the Values at Play heuristic, a systematic approach for incorporating values into the game design process. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are texts by designers who have put Values at Play into practice by accepting values as a design constraint like any other, offering a real-world perspective on the design challenges involved.”
Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation
Jeremy Goldberg at Governing: “Innovation and entrepreneurship in local government increasingly require mobilizing talent from many sectors and skill sets. Fortunately, the opportunities for nurturing cross-pollination between the public and private sectors have never been greater, thanks in large part to the growing role of organizations such as Bayes Impact, Code for America, Data Science for Social Good and Fuse Corps.
Indeed, there’s reason to believe that we might be entering an even more exciting period of public-private collaboration. As one local-government leader recently put it to me when talking about the critical mass of pro-bono civic-innovation efforts taking place across the San Francisco Bay area, “We’re now riding the second wave of civic pro-bono and civic innovation.”
As an alumni of Fuse Corps’ executive fellows program, I’m convinced that the opportunities initiated by it and similar organizations are integral to civic innovation. Fuse Corps brings civic entrepreneurs with experience across the public, private and nonprofit sectors to work closely with government employees to help them negotiate project design, facilitation and management hurdles. The organization’s leadership training emphasizes “smallifying” — building innovation capacity by breaking big challenges down into smaller tasks in a shorter timeframe — and making “little bets” — low-risk actions aimed at developing and testing an idea.
Since 2012, I have managed programs and cross-sector networks for the Silicon Valley Talent Partnership. I’ve witnessed a groundswell of civic entrepreneurs from across the region stepping up to participate in discussions and launch rapid-prototyping labs focused on civic innovation.
Cities across the nation are creating new roles and programs to engage these civic start-ups. They’re learning that what makes these projects, and specifically civic pro-bono programs, work best is a process of designing, building, operationalizing and bringing them to scale. If you’re setting out to create such a program, here’s a short list of best practices:
• Assets: Explore existing internal resources and knowledge to understand the history, departmental relationships and overall functions of the relevant agencies or departments. Develop a compendium of current service/volunteer programs.
• City policies/legal framework: Determine what the city charter, city attorney’s office or employee-relations rules and policies say about procurement, collective bargaining and public-private partnerships.
• Leadership: The support of the city’s top leadership is especially important during the formative stages of a civic-innovation program, so it’s important to understand how the city’s form of government will impact the program. For example, in a “strong mayor” government the ability to make definitive decisions on a public-private collaboration may be unlikely to face the same scrutiny as it might under a “council/mayor” government.
• Cross-departmental collaboration: This is essential. Without the support of city staff across departments, innovation projects are unlikely to take off. Convening a “tiger team” of individuals who are early adopters of such initiatives is important step. Ultimately, city staffers best understand the needs and demands of their departments or agencies.
• Partners from corporations and philanthropy: Leveraging existing partnerships will help to bring together an advisory group of cross-sector leaders and executives to participate in the early stages of program development.
• Business and member associations: For the Silicon Valley Talent Partnership, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group has been instrumental in advocating for pro-bono volunteerism with the cities of Fremont, San Jose and Santa Clara….”
The Changing Nature of Privacy Practice
Numerous commenters have observed that Facebook, among many marketers (including political campaigns like U.S. President Barack Obama’s), regularly conducts A-B tests and other research to measure how consumers respond to different products, messages and messengers. So what makes the Facebook-Cornell study different from what goes on all the time in an increasingly data-driven world? After all, the ability to conduct such testing continuously on a large scale is considered one of the special features of big data.
The answer calls for broader judgments than parsing the language of privacy policies or managing compliance with privacy laws and regulations. Existing legal tools such as notice-and-choice and use limitations are simply too narrow to address the array of issues presented and inform the judgment needed. Deciding whether Facebook ought to participate in research like its newsfeed study is not really about what the company can do but what it should do.
As Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky, CIPP/US, point out in an article on Facebook’s research study, “Increasingly, corporate officers find themselves struggling to decipher subtle social norms and make ethical choices that are more befitting of philosophers than business managers or lawyers.” They add, “Going forward, companies will need to create new processes, deploying a toolbox of innovative solutions to engender trust and mitigate normative friction.” Tene and Polonetsky themselves have proposed a number of such tools. In recent comments on Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights legislation filed with the Commerce Department, the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) endorsed the use of internal review boards along the lines of those used in academia for human-subject research. The FPF also submitted an initial framework for benefit-risk analysis in the big data context “to understand whether assuming the risk is ethical, fair, legitimate and cost-effective.” Increasingly, companies and other institutions are bringing to bear more holistic review of privacy issues. Conferences and panels on big data research ethics are proliferating.
The expanding variety and complexity of data uses also call for a broader public policy approach. The Obama administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights (of which I was an architect) adapted existing Fair Information Practice Principles to a principles-based approach that is intended not as a formalistic checklist but as a set of principles that work holistically in ways that are “flexible” and “dynamic.” In turn, much of the commentary submitted to the Commerce Department on the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights addressed the question of the relationship between these principles and a “responsible use framework” as discussed in the White House Big Data Report….”
Enchanted Objects
Book by David Rose: “Some believe the future will look like more of the same—more smartphones, tablets, screens embedded in every conceivable surface. David Rose has a different vision: technology that atomizes, combining itself with the objects that make up the very fabric of daily living. Such technology will be woven into the background of our environment, enhancing human relationships and channeling desires for omniscience, long life, and creative expression. The enchanted objects of fairy tales and science fiction will enter real life.
Groundbreaking, timely, and provocative, Enchanted Objects is a blueprint for a better future, where efficient solutions come hand in hand with technology that delights our senses. It is essential reading for designers, technologists, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and anyone who wishes to understand the future and stay relevant in the Internet of Things. Download the prologue here.”
CrowdCriMa – a complete Next Generation Crowsourced Crisis Management Platform
Pitch at ClimateCoLab: “The proposed #CrowdCriMa would be a disaster management platform based on an innovative, interactive and accountable Digital Governance Framework– in which common people, crisis response or disaster response workers, health workers, decision makers would participate actively. This application would be available for mobile phones and other smart devices.
Crowdsourcing Unheard Voices
The main function would be to help collecting voice messages of disaster victims in the forms of phone call, recorded voice, SMS, E-mail and Fax to seek urgent help from the authority and spread those voices via online media, social media, SMS and etc to inform the world about the situation. As still in developing countries, Fax communication is more powerful than SMS or email, we have also included FAX as one of the reporting tools.
People will be able to record their observations, potential crisis, seek helps and appeals for funds for disaster response works, different environment related activities (e.g. project for pollution free environment and etc). To have all functions in the #CrowdCriMa platform, an IVR system, FrontlineSMS-type software will be developed / integrated in the proposed platform.
A cloud-based information management system would be used to sustain the flow of information. This would help not to lose any information if communications infrastructures are not functioning properly during and after the disaster.
Crowdfunding:
Another function of this #CrowdCriMa platform would be the crowdfunding function. When individual donor logs in, they find the list of issues / crisis where fund is needed. An innovative and sustainable approach would be taken to meet the financial need in crisis / disaster and post-crisis financial empowerment work for victims.
Some services are available differently but innovative parts of this proposal is several services to deal disaster would be in platform so people do not need to use different platforms for disaster management work. ..”
Federalism and Municipal Innovation: Lessons from the Fight Against Vacant Properties
New Paper by Benton Martin: “Cities possess a far greater ability to be trailblazers on a national scale than local officials may imagine. Realizing this, city advocates continue to call for renewed recognition by state and federal officials of the benefits of creative local problem-solving. The goal is admirable but warrants caution. The key to successful local initiatives lies not in woolgathering about cooperation with other levels of government but in identifying potential conflicts and using hard work and political savvy to build constituencies and head off objections. To demonstrate that point, this Article examines the legal status of local governments and recent efforts to regulate vacant property through land banking and registration ordinances.”
Just how well has the 'nudge unit' done?
Broadcast at BBC News: “Nudging – concept of changing people’s behaviour without recourse to the law but to psychology – has been one of the big policy ideas of the last few years
The coalition government set up a “nudge unit”, officially called the Behavioural Insights Team, in 2010. But just how successful has it been?
David Halpern, who heads the unit, told the Today programme’s Evan Davis that it has enjoyed a wide range of successes. He said that by adding the line “‘most people pay their tax on time’ to a letter you get a significant increase in the number of people who pay their tax on time and you get a reduction in complaints.
“It turns out it’s a nicer way, to encourage people than to threaten them.”
But Professor Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, told the programme that he did not “object against nudging per se but against the philosophy underlying it, namely that basically that people are born more or less stupid.”
There is, he said, a real alternative to nudging, that of educating people to become “risk-savvy citizens: to invest in to making people competent”.
4 things you didn't know about civic 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. There’s a new crowdfunding site every week that may or may not have a few civic projects on it. If you’re interested in my methodology, check out Chapter 2. I don’t pretend to have captured every civic project that has ever existed, but I’m working with a representative sample.
Here are four things I found out about civic crowdfunding.
- Civic crowdfunding is small-scale but relatively successful, and it has big ambitions. …
- Civic crowdfunding started as a hobby for green space projects by local non-profits, but larger organizations are getting involved. …
- Civic crowdfunding is concentrated in cities (especially those where platforms are based). …
- Civic crowdfunding has the same highly unequal distributional tendencies as other crowd markets. …”
Detroit and Big Data Take on Blight
Susan Crawford in Bloomberg View: “The urban blight that has been plaguing Detroit was, until very recently, made worse by a dearth of information about the problem. No one could tell how many buildings needed fixing or demolition, or how effectively city services were being delivered to them (or not). Today, thanks to the combined efforts of a scrappy small business, tech-savvy city leadership and substantial philanthropic support, the extent of the problem is clear.
The question now is whether Detroit has the heart to use the information to make hard choices about its future.
In the past, when the city foreclosed on properties for failure to pay back taxes, it had no sense of where those properties were clustered. The city would auction off the houses for the bargain-basement price of $500 each, but the auction was entirely undocumented, so neighbors were unaware of investment opportunities, big buyers were gaming the system, and, as often as not, arsonists would then burn the properties down. The result of this blind spot was lost population, lost revenue and even more blight.
Then along came Jerry Paffendorf, a San Francisco transplant, who saw what was needed. His company, Loveland Technologies, started mapping all the tax-foreclosed and auctioned properties. Impressed with Paffendorf’s zeal, the city’s Blight Task Force, established by President Barack Obama and funded by foundations and the state Housing Development Authority, hired his team to visit every property in the city. That led to MotorCityMapping.org, the first user-friendly collection of information about all the attributes of every property in Detroit — including photographs.
Paffendorf calls this map a “scan of the genome of the city.” It shows more than 84,000 blighted structures and vacant lots; in eight neighborhoods, crime, fires and other torments have led to the abandonment of more than a third of houses and businesses. To demolish all those houses, as recommended by the Blight Task Force, will cost almost $2 billion. Still more money will then be needed to repurpose the sites….”