Next City: “Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and researchers with Emerson College’s Engagement Game Lab have spent the last few years working to cobble together a methodology for figuring out whether the city’s civic innovations, from apps that track bumpy roads to contests to redesign streetscapes, actually work, and how to fix them when they don’t. They’re out now with a 21-page booklet on what they’ve learned so far, called Design Action Research with Government: A Guidebook.
The DARG approach, as they guidebook’s authors deem it, calls for pairing civic inventors with academics and, through design experimentation and continuous on-the-ground testing, building things that real citizens willingly use.
Take Citizens Connect, the city’s mobile tool for letting the public report problems like potholes, graffiti and broken sidewalks. Launched in 2009 in partnership with the New Hampshire development shop Connected Bits, it has proven popular. But some in the mayor’s office had the sense that users didn’t feel the same connection to the process that someone gets from ringing up the Mayor’s Hotline and explaining to a real-live human about the teenagers bouncing a basketball against a metal garage door at 3am. Speaking with an operator, says Eric Gordon, a professor of civic media who heads Emerson’s Engagement Game Lab, sparks “a certain amount of storytelling and commitment to the issue.”
The Citizens Connect app had been designed with social features, Gordon notes, “but it doesn’t mean that people are going to use it the way you built it.” Indeed, when the researchers started surveying app users, they found that 38 percent never even looked at other users’ complaints.
The DARG methodology, Gordon and his colleagues says, requires them not only to define a goal, but also to think hard about whether it’s a valid ambition. Is it worthwhile to make citizen reporting more social? They decided that it was, because a real objective isn’t just better pothole patching but, says Chris Osgood, co-chair of Boston’s New Urban Mechanics, making good on this bit of wisdom from Jane Jacobs: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Gordon and Osgood decided that getting there meant giving citizen reporters a better sense of how they shape day-to-day life in the city.
Their research prompted them to start building a “civic badging” API, or chunk of behind-the-scenes code, called StreetCred. The code can plug into reporting platforms and integrate with existing platforms like Foursquare and Instagram. It can also participate in ‘campaigns’ of activities, like reporting a hundred potholes, checking in at community meetings, and participating in spring clean-up drives. A new version is due out this spring, Gordon says, and eventually outside groups will be able to create their own campaigns through the tool…That guidebook is available here and below.”
openFDA
Dr. Taha Kass-Hout at the FDA: “Welcome to the new home of openFDA! We are incredibly excited to see so much interest in our work and hope that this site can be a valuable resource to those wishing to use public FDA data in both the public and private sector to spur innovation, further regulatory or scientific missions, educate the public, and save lives.
Through openFDA, developers and researchers will have easy access to high-value FDA public data through RESTful APIs and structured file downloads. In short, our goal is to make it simple for an application, mobile, or web developer, or all stripes of researchers, to use data from FDA in their work. We’ve done an extensive amount of research both internally and with potential external developers to identify which datasets are both in demand and have a high barrier of entry. As a result, our initial pilot project will cover a number of datasets from various areas within FDA, defined into three broad focus areas: Adverse Events, Product Recalls, and Product Labeling. These API’s won’t have one-on-one matching to FDA’s internal data organizational structure; rather, we intend to abstract on top of a myriad of datasets and provide appropriate metadata and identifiers when possible. Of course, we’ll always make the raw source data available for people who prefer to work that way (and it’s good to mention that we also will not be releasing any data that could potentially be used to identify individuals or other private information).
The openFDA initiative is one part of the larger Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation roadmap. As part of my role as FDA’s Chief Health Informatics Officer, I’m working to lead efforts to move FDA in to a cutting edge technology organization. You’ll be hearing more about our other initiatives, including Cloud Computing, High Performance Computing, Next Generation Sequencing, and mobile-first deployment in the near future.
As we work towards a release of openFDA we’ll begin to share more about our work and how you can get involved. In the meantime, I suggest you sign up for our listserv (on our home page) to get the latest updates on the project. You can also reach our team at open@fda.hhs.gov if there is a unique partnership opportunity or other collaboration you wish to discuss.”
Putting Crowdsourcing on the Map
MIT Technology Review: “Even in San Francisco, where Google’s roving Street View cars have mapped nearly every paved surface, there are still places that have remained untouched, such as the flights of stairs that serve as pathways between streets in some of the city’s hilliest neighborhoods.
It’s these places that a startup called Mapillary is focusing on. Cofounders Jan Erik Solem and Johan Gyllenspetz are attempting to build an open, crowdsourced, photographic map that lets smartphone users log all sorts of places, creating a richer view of the world than what is offered by Street View and other street-level mapping services. If contributors provide images often, that view could be more representative of how things look right now.
Google itself is no stranger to the benefits of crowdsourced map content: it paid $966 million last year for traffic and navigation app Waze, whose users contribute data. Google also lets people augment Street View content with their own images. But Solem and Gyllenspetz think there’s still plenty of room for Mapillary, which they say can be used for everything from tracking a nature hike to offering more up-to-date images to house hunters and Airbnb users.
Solem and Gyllenspetz have only been working on the project for four months; they released an iPhone app in November, and an Android app in January. So far, there are just a few hundred users who have shared about 100,000 photos on the service. While it’s free for anyone to use, the startup plans to eventually make money by licensing the data its users generate to companies.
With the app, a user can choose to collect images by walking, biking, or driving. Once you press a virtual shutter button within the app, it takes a photo every two seconds, until you press the button again. You can then upload the images to Mapillary’s service via Wi-Fi, where each photo’s location is noted through its GPS tag. Computer-vision software compares each photo with others that are within a radius of about 100 meters, searching for matching image features so it can find the geometric relationship between the photos. It then places those images properly on the map, and stitches them all together. When new images come in of an area that has already been mapped, Mapillary will add them to its database, too.
It can take less than 30 seconds for the images to show up on the Web-based map, but several minutes for the images to be fully processed. As with Google’s Street View photos, image-recognition software blurs out faces and license plate numbers.
Users can edit Mapillary’s map by moving around the icons that correspond to images—to fix a misplaced image, for instance. Eventually, users will also be able to add comments and tags.
So far, Mapillary’s map is quite sparse. But the few hundred users trying out Mapillary include some map providers in Europe, and the 100,000 or so images to the service ranging from a bike path on Venice Beach in California to a snow-covered ski slope in Sweden.
Street-level images can be viewed on the Web or through Mapillary’s smartphone apps (though the apps just pull up the Web page within the app). Blue lines and colored tags indicate where users have added photos to the map; you can zoom in to see them at the street level.
Navigating through photos is still quite rudimentary; you can tap or click to move from one image to the next with onscreen arrows, depending on the direction you want to explore.
Beyond technical and design challenges, the biggest issue Mapillary faces is convincing a large enough number of users to build up its store of images so that others will start using it and contributing as well, and then ensuring that these users keep coming back.”
New Research Network to Study and Design Innovative Ways of Solving Public Problems
MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance formed to gather evidence and develop new designs for governing
NEW YORK, NY, March 4, 2014 – The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at New York University today announced the formation of a Research Network on Opening Governance, which will seek to develop blueprints for more effective and legitimate democratic institutions to help improve people’s lives.
Convened and organized by the GovLab, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance is made possible by a three-year grant of $5 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as well as a gift from Google.org, which will allow the Network to tap the latest technological advances to further its work.
Combining empirical research with real-world experiments, the Research Network will study what happens when governments and institutions open themselves to diverse participation, pursue collaborative problem-solving, and seek input and expertise from a range of people. Network members include twelve experts (see below) in computer science, political science, policy informatics, social psychology and philosophy, law, and communications. This core group is supported by an advisory network of academics, technologists, and current and former government officials. Together, they will assess existing innovations in governing and experiment with new practices and how institutions make decisions at the local, national, and international levels.
Support for the Network from Google.org will be used to build technology platforms to solve problems more openly and to run agile, real-world, empirical experiments with institutional partners such as governments and NGOs to discover what can enhance collaboration and decision-making in the public interest.
The Network’s research will be complemented by theoretical writing and compelling storytelling designed to articulate and demonstrate clearly and concretely how governing agencies might work better than they do today. “We want to arm policymakers and practitioners with evidence of what works and what does not,” says Professor Beth Simone Noveck, Network Chair and author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citi More Powerful, “which is vital to drive innovation, re-establish legitimacy and more effectively target scarce resources to solve today’s problems.”
“From prize-backed challenges to spur creative thinking to the use of expert networks to get the smartest people focused on a problem no matter where they work, this shift from top-down, closed, and professional government to decentralized, open, and smarter governance may be the major social innovation of the 21st century,” says Noveck. “The MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance is the ideal crucible for helping transition from closed and centralized to open and collaborative institutions of governance in a way that is scientifically sound and yields new insights to inform future efforts, always with an eye toward real-world impacts.”
MacArthur Foundation President Robert Gallucci added, “Recognizing that we cannot solve today’s challenges with yesterday’s tools, this interdisciplinary group will bring fresh thinking to questions about how our governing institutions operate, and how they can develop better ways to help address seemingly intractable social problems for the common good.”
Members
The MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance comprises:
Chair: Beth Simone Noveck
Network Coordinator: Andrew Young
Chief of Research: Stefaan Verhulst
Faculty Members:
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)/University of Southampton, UK)
- Deborah Estrin (Cornell Tech/Weill Cornell Medical College)
- Erik Johnston (Arizona State University)
- Henry Farrell (George Washington University)
- Sheena S. Iyengar (Columbia Business School/Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business)
- Karim Lakhani (Harvard Business School)
- Anita McGahan (University of Toronto)
- Cosma Shalizi (Carnegie Mellon/Santa Fe Institute)
Institutional Members:
- Christian Bason and Jesper Christiansen (MindLab, Denmark)
- Geoff Mulgan (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts – NESTA, United Kingdom)
- Lee Rainie (Pew Research Center)
The Network is eager to hear from and engage with the public as it undertakes its work. Please contact Stefaan Verhulst to share your ideas or identify opportunities to collaborate.”
Revolutionising Digital Public Service Delivery: A UK Government Perspective
Paper by Alan W. Brown, Jerry Fishenden, and Mark Thompson: ” For public sector organizations across the world, the pressures for improved
efficiency during the past decades are now accompanied by an equally strong need to revolutionise service delivery to create solutions that better meet citizens’ needs; to develop channels that offer efficiency and increase inclusion to all citizens being served; and to re-invent supply chains to deliver services faster, cheaper, and more effectively. But how do government organisations ensure investment in digital transformation delivers the intended outcomes after earlier “online government” and “e-government” initiatives produced little in terms of significant, sustainable benefits? Here we focus on how digitisation, built on open standards, is transforming the public sector’s relationship with its citizens. This paper provides a perspective of digital change efforts across the UK government as an illustration of the improvements taking place more broadly in the public sector. It provides a vision for the future of our digital world, revealing the symbiotic relationship between organisational change and digitisation, and offering insights into public service delivery in the digital economy.”
Can A Serious Game Improve Privacy Awareness on Facebook?
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Do you know who can see the items you’ve posted on Facebook? This, of course, depends on the privacy settings you’ve used for each picture, text or link that you’ve shared throughout your Facebook history.
You might be extremely careful in deciding who can see these things. But as time goes on, the number of items people share increases. And the number contacts they share them with increases too. So it’s easy to lose track of who can see what.
What’s more, an item that you may have been happy to share three years ago when you were at university, you may not be quite so happy to share now that you are looking for employment.
So how best to increase people’s awareness of their privacy settings? Today, Alexandra Cetto and pals from the University of Regensburg in Germany, say they’ve developed a serious game called Friend Inspector that allows users to increase their privacy awareness on Facebook.
And they say that within five months of its launch, the game had been requested over 100,000 times.
In recent years, serious games have become an increasingly important learning medium through digital simulations and virtual environments. So Cetto and co set about developing a game that could increase people’s awareness of privacy on Facebook.
Designing serious games is something of a black art. At the very least, there needs to be motivation to play and some kind of feedback or score to beat. And at the same time, the game has to achieve some kind of learning objective, in this case an enhanced awareness of privacy.
Aimed at 16-25 year olds, the game these guys came up with is deceptively simple. When potential players land on the home page, they’re asked a simple question: “Do you know who can see your Facebook profile?” This is followed by the teaser: “Playfully discover who can see your shared items and get advice to improve your privacy.”
When players sign up, the game retrieves his or her contacts, shared items and their privacy settings from Facebook. It then presents the player with a pair of these shared items asking which is more personal….
Finally, the game assesses the player’s score and makes a set of personalised recommendations about how to improve privacy, such as how to create friend lists, how to share personal items in a targeted manner and how the term friendship on a social network site differs from friendship in the real world…. Try it at http://www.friend-inspector.org/.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1402.5878 : Friend Inspector: A Serious Game to Enhance Privacy Awareness in Social Networks”
Coordinating the Commons: Diversity & Dynamics in Open Collaborations
Dissertation by Jonathan T. Morgan: “The success of Wikipedia demonstrates that open collaboration can be an effective model for organizing geographically-distributed volunteers to perform complex, sustained work at a massive scale. However, Wikipedia’s history also demonstrates some of the challenges that large, long-term open collaborations face: the core community of Wikipedia editors—the volunteers who contribute most of the encyclopedia’s content and ensure that articles are correct and consistent — has been gradually shrinking since 2007, in part because Wikipedia’s social climate has become increasingly inhospitable for newcomers, female editors, and editors from other underrepresented demographics. Previous research studies of change over time within other work contexts, such as corporations, suggests that incremental processes such as bureaucratic formalization can make organizations more rule-bound and less adaptable — in effect, less open— as they grow and age. There has been little research on how open collaborations like Wikipedia change over time, and on the impact of those changes on the social dynamics of the collaborating community and the way community members prioritize and perform work. Learning from Wikipedia’s successes and failures can help researchers and designers understand how to support open collaborations in other domains — such as Free/Libre Open Source Software, Citizen Science, and Citizen Journalism.
In this dissertation, I examine the role of openness, and the potential antecedents and consequences of formalization, within Wikipedia through an analysis of three distinct but interrelated social structures: community-created rules within the Wikipedia policy environment, coordination work and group dynamics within self-organized open teams called WikiProjects, and the socialization mechanisms that Wikipedia editors use to teach new community members how to participate.To inquire further, I have designed a new editor peer support space, the Wikipedia Teahouse, based on the findings from my empirical studies. The Teahouse is a volunteer-driven project that provides a welcoming and engaging environment in which new editors can learn how to be productive members of the Wikipedia community, with the goal of increasing the number and diversity of newcomers who go on to make substantial contributions to Wikipedia …”
State
New Social media platform called “State”: The simplest way to get your opinions heard.Just state about whatever matters to you, get counted and instantly see where you stand. When everyone’s opinion counts, the full picture emerges. This could make good things happen…
We set up State, because at the moment, most people never get heard. So we’re levelling the playing field for everyone by allowing them to express their opinions quickly and delivering them to the people who most need to hear them.
State lets people communicate in a lucid, non-competitive way. It’s a place where you don’t need hashtags, followers, or fame, just an opinion. The solution we lit upon was at the convergence of design simplicity and semantic intelligence. It allows people to express opinions in a quick and fun way that also provides enough information to interpret, count, and connect them.
For those in positions of leadership or influence, State offers the first many-to-one capability that can precisely map the prevailing sentiment on key issues. These are opinions shared spontaneously, not extracted from a survey.
We believe that everyone deserves a powerful voice online, no one should be left out, and when everyone’s opinions count, a more complete picture emerges. We firmly believe that this could make good things happen.
True Collective Intelligence? A Sketch of a Possible New Field
Paper by Geoff Mulgan in Philosophy & Technology :” Collective intelligence is much talked about but remains very underdeveloped as a field. There are small pockets in computer science and psychology and fragments in other fields, ranging from economics to biology. New networks and social media also provide a rich source of emerging evidence. However, there are surprisingly few useable theories, and many of the fashionable claims have not stood up to scrutiny. The field of analysis should be how intelligence is organised at large scale—in organisations, cities, nations and networks. The paper sets out some of the potential theoretical building blocks, suggests an experimental and research agenda, shows how it could be analysed within an organisation or business sector and points to the possible intellectual barriers to progress.”
The Economics of Access to Information
Article by Mariano Mosquera at Edmond J. Safra Research Lab: “There has been an important development in the study of the right of access to public information and the so-called economics of information: by combining these two premises, it is possible to outline an economics theory of access to public information.
Moral Hazard
The legal development of the right of access to public information has been remarkable. Many international conventions, laws and national regulations have been passed on this matter. In this regard, access to information has consolidated within the framework of international human rights law.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights was the first international court to acknowledge that access to information is a human right that is part of the right to freedom of speech. The Court recognized this right in two parts, as the individual right of any person to search for information and as a positive obligation of the state to ensure the individual’s right to receive the requested information.
This right and obligation can also be seen as the demand and supply of information.
The so-called economics of information has focused on the issue of information asymmetry between the principal and the agent. The principal (society) and the agent (state) enter into a contract.This contract is based on the idea that the agent’s specialization and professionalism (or the politician’s, according to Weber) enables him to attend to the principal’s affairs, such as public affairs in this case. This representation contract does not provide for a complete delegation,but rather it involves the principal’s commitment to monitoring the agent.
When we study corruption, it is important to note that monitoring aims to ensure that the agent adjusts its behavior to comply with the contract, in order to pursue public goals, and not to serve private interests. Stiglitz4 describes moral hazard as a situation arising from information asymmetry between the principal and the agent. The principal takes a risk when acting without comprehensive information about the agent’s actions. The moral hazard means that the handling of closed, privileged information by the agent could bring about negative consequences for the principal.
In this case, it is a risk related to corrupt practices, since a public official could use the state’s power and information to achieve private benefits, and not to resolve public issues in accordance with the principal-agent contract. This creates negative social consequences.
In this model, there are a number of safeguards against moral hazard, such as monitoring institutions (with members of the opposition) and rewards for efficient and effective administration,5 among others. Access to public information could also serve as an effective means of monitoring the agent, so that the agent adjusts its behavior to comply with the contract.
The Economic Principle of Public Information
According to this principal-agent model, public information should be defined as:
information whose social interpretation enables the state to act in the best interests of society. This definition is based on the idea of information for monitoring purposes and uses a systematic approach to feedback. This definition also implies that the state is not entirely effective at adjusting its behavior by itself.
Technically, as an economic principle of public information, public information is:
information whose interpretation by the principal is useful for the agent, so that the latter adjusts its behavior to comply with the principal-agent contract. It should be noted that this is very different from the legal definition of public information, such as “any information produced or held by the state.” This type of legal definition is focused only on supply, but not on demand.
In this principal-agent model, public information stems from two different rationales: the principal’s interpretation and the usefulness for the agent. The measure of the principal’s interpretation is the likelihood of being useful for the agent. The measure of usefulness for the agent is the likelihood of adjusting the principal-agent contract.
Another totally different situation is the development of institutions that ensure the application of this principle. For example, the channels of supplied, and demanded, information, and the channels of feedback, could be strengthened so that the social interpretation that is useful for the state actually reaches the public authorities that are able to adjust policies….”