From Crowds to Collaborators: Initiating Effort and Catalyzing Interactions Among Online Creative Workers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Harvard Business School Paper by Kevin J. Boudreau, Patrick Gaule, Karim R. Lakhani, Christoph Riedl, and Anita Williams Woolley: “Online “organizations” are becoming a major engine for knowledge development in a variety of domains such as Wikipedia and open source software development. Many online platforms involve collaboration and coordination among members to reach common goals. In this sense, they are collaborative communities. This paper asks: What factors most inspire online teams to begin to collaborate and to do so creatively and effectively? The authors analyze a data set of 260 individuals randomly assigned to 52 teams tasked with developing working solutions to a complex innovation problem over 10 days, with varying cash incentives. Findings showed that although cash incentives stimulated a significant boost of effort per se, cash incentives did not transform the nature of the work process or affect the level of collaboration. In addition, at a basic yet striking level, the likelihood that an individual chooses to participate depended on whether teammates were themselves active. Moreover, communications among teammates led to more communications, and communications among teammates also stimulated greater continuous levels of effort. Overall, the study sheds light on how perspectives on incentives, predominant in economics, and perspectives on social processes and interactions, predominant in research on organizational behavior and teams, can be better understood. Key concepts include:

  • An individual’s likelihood of being active in online collaboration increases by about 41 percent with each additional active teammate.
  • Management could provide communications channels to make the efforts of other members more visible. This is important in the design of systems for online work as it helps members to confirm that others are actively contributing.

Full Working Paper Text”
 

AskThem.io – Questions-and-Answers with Every Elected Official

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “AskThem.io, launching Feb. 10th, is a free & open-source website for questions-and-answers with public figures. AskThem is like a version of the White House’s “We The People” petition platform, where over 8 million people have taken action to support questions for a public response – but for the first time, for every elected official nationwide…AskThem.io has official government data for over 142,000 U.S. elected officials at every level of government: federal, state, county, and municipal. Also, AskThem allows anyone to ask a question to any verified Twitter account, for online dialogue with public figures.

Here’s how AskThem works for online public dialogue:

  • For the first time in an open-source website, visitors enter their street address to see all their elected officials, from federal down to the city levels, or search for a verified Twitter account.
  • Individuals & organizations submit a question to their elected officials – for example, asking a city council member about a proposed ban on plastic bags.
  • People then sign on to the questions and petitions they support, voting them up on AskThem and sharing them over social media, as with online petitions.
  • When a question passes a certain threshold of signatures, AskThem delivers it to the recipient over email & social media and encourages a public response – creating a continual, structured dialogue with elected officials at every level of government.

AskThem also incorporates open government data, such as city council agendas and key vote information, to inform good questions of people in power. Open government advocate, Chicago, IL Clerk Susana Mendoza, joined AskThem because she believes that “technology should bring residents and the Office of the Chicago City Clerk closer together.”

Elected officials who sign up with AskThem agree to respond to the most popular questions from their constituents (about two per month). Interested elected officials can sign up now to become verified, free & open to everyone.

Issue-based organizations can use question & petition info from AskThem to surface political issues in their area that people care about, stay continuously engaged with government, and promote public accountability. Participating groups on AskThem include the internet freedom non-profit Fight For the Future, the social media crowd-speaking platform Thunderclap.it, the Roosevelt Institute National Student Network, and more.”

DARPA Open Catalog Makes Agency-Sponsored Software and Publications Available to All

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Public website aims to encourage communities interested in DARPA research to build off the agency’s work, starting with big data…
DARPA has invested in many programs that sponsor fundamental and applied research in areas of computer science, which have led to new advances in theory as well as practical software. The R&D community has asked about the availability of results, and now DARPA has responded by creating the DARPA Open Catalog, a place for organizing and sharing those results in the form of software, publications, data and experimental details. The Catalog can be found at http://go.usa.gov/BDhY.
Many DoD and government research efforts and software procurements contain publicly releasable elements, including open source software. The nature of open source software lends itself to collaboration where communities of developers augment initial products, build on each other’s expertise, enable transparency for performance evaluation, and identify software vulnerabilities. DARPA has an open source strategy for areas of work including big data to help increase the impact of government investments in building a flexible technology base.
“Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government,” said Chris White, DARPA program manager. “Our hope is that the computer science community will test and evaluate elements of our software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products.”

Citizen Engagement: 3 Cities And Their Civic Tech Tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Melissa Jun Rowley at the Toolbox: “Though democratic governments are of the people, by the people, and for the people, it often seems that our only input is electing officials who pass laws on our behalf. After all, I don’t know many people who attend town hall meetings these days. But the evolution of technology has given citizens a new way to participate. Governments are using technology to include as many voices from their communities as possible in civic decisions and activities. Here are three examples.
Raleigh, NC
Raleigh North Carolina’s open government initiative is a great example of passive citizen engagement. By following an open source strategy, Open Raleigh has made city data available to the public. Citizens then use the data in a myriad of ways, from simply visualizing daily crime in their city, to creating an app that lets users navigate and interactively utilize the city’s greenway system.
Fort Smith, AR
Using MindMixer, Fort Smith Arkansas has created an online forum for residents to discuss the city’s comprehensive plan, effectively putting the community’s future in the hands of the community itself. Citizens are invited to share their own ideas, vote on ideas submitted by others, and engage with city officials that are “listening” to the conversation on the site.
Seattle, WA
Being a tech town, it’s no surprise that Seattle is using social media as a citizen engagement tool. The Seattle Police Department (SPD) uses a variety of social media tools to reach the public. In 2012, the department launched a first-of-its kind hyper-local twitter initiative. A police scanner for the twitter generation, Tweets by Beat provides twitter feeds of police dispatches in each of Seattle’s 51 police beats so that residents can find out what is happening right on their block.
In addition to Twitter and Facebook, SPD created a Tumblr to, in their own words, “show you your police department doing police-y things in your city.” In a nutshell, the department’s Tumblr serves as an extension of their other social media outlets. “

Nudging News Producers and Consumers Toward More Thoughtful, Less Polarized Discourse

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New paper by Darrel West and Beth Stone from Brookings: “At a time of extraordinary domestic and international policy challenges, Americans need high-quality news.  Readers and viewers must decipher the policy options that the country faces and the manner in which various decisions affect them personally.  It often is not readily apparent how to assess complicated policy choices and what the best steps are for moving forward.

Having poor quality news coverage is especially problematic when the political process is sharply polarized.  As has been documented by political scientists Tom Mann and Norman Ornstein, the United States has a Congress today where the most conservative Democrat is to the left of the most moderate Republican. [1]  There are many reasons for this spike in polarization, but there is little doubt that the news media amplify and exacerbate social and political divisions.
Too often, journalists follow a “Noah’s Ark” approach to coverage in which a strong liberal is paired with a vocal conservative in an ideological food fight.  The result is polarization of discourse and “false equivalence” in reporting. This lack of nuanced analysis confuses viewers and makes it difficult for them to sort out the contrasting facts and opinions.  People get the sense that there are only two policy options and that there are few gradations or complexities in the positions that are reported.
In this paper, West and Stone review challenges facing the news media in an age of political polarization.  This includes hyper-competitiveness in news coverage, a dramatic decline in local journalism and resulting nationalization of the news, and the personalization of coverage.  After discussing these problems and how they harm current reporting, they present several ideas for nudging news producers and consumers towards more thoughtful and less polarizing responses.”

"Natural Cities" Emerge from Social Media Location Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Nobody agrees on how to define a city. But the emergence of “natural cities” from social media data sets may change that, say computational geographers…
A city is a large, permanent human settlement. But try and define it more carefully and you’ll soon run into trouble. A settlement that qualifies as a city in Sweden may not qualify in China, for example. And the reasons why one settlement is classified as a town while another as a city can sometimes seem almost arbitrary.
City planners know this problem well.  They tend to define cities by administrative, legal or even historical boundaries that have little logic to them. Indeed, the same city can sometimes be defined in various different ways.
That causes all kinds of problems from counting the total population to working out who pays for the upkeep of the place.  Which definition do you use?
Now help may be at hand thanks to the work of Bin Jiang and Yufan Miao at the University of Gävle in Sweden. These guys have found a way to use people’s location recorded by social media to define the boundaries of so-called natural cities which have a close resemblance to real cities in the US.
Jiang and Miao began with a dataset from the Brightkite social network, which was active between 2008 and 2010. The site encouraged users to log in with their location details so that they could see other users nearby. So the dataset consists of almost 3 million locations in the US and the dates on which they were logged.
To start off, Jiang and Miao simply placed a dot on a map at the location of each login. They then connected these dots to their neighbours to form triangles that end up covering the entire mainland US.
Next, they calculated the size of each triangle on the map and plotted this size distribution, which turns out to follow a power law. So there are lots of tiny triangles but only a few  large ones.
Finally, the calculated the average size of the triangles and then coloured in all those that were smaller than average. The coloured areas are “natural cities”, say Jiang and Miao.
It’s easy to imagine that resulting map of triangles is of little value.  But to the evident surprise of ther esearchers, it produces a pretty good approximation of the cities in the US. “We know little about why the procedure works so well but the resulting patterns suggest that the natural cities effectively capture the evolution of real cities,” they say.
That’s handy because it suddenly gives city planners a way to study and compare cities on a level playing field. It allows them to see how cities evolve and change over time too. And it gives them a way to analyse how cities in different parts of the world differ.
Of course, Jiang and Miao will want to find out why this approach reveals city structures in this way. That’s still something of a puzzle but the answer itself may provide an important insight into the nature of cities (or at least into the nature of this dataset).
A few days ago, this blog wrote about how a new science of cities is emerging from the analysis of big data.  This is another example and expect to see more.
Ref:  http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.6756 : The Evolution of Natural Cities from the Perspective of Location-Based Social Media”

Mind the Map: The Impact of Culture and Economic Affluence on Crowd-Mapping Behaviours

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New paper by Dr. Licia Capra: “Crowd-mapping is a form of collaborative work that empowers citizens to collect and share geographic knowledge. Open-StreetMap (OSM) is a successful example of such paradigm, where the goal of building and maintaining an accurate global map of the changing world is being accomplished by means of local contributions made by over 1.2M citizens. While OSM has been subject to many country-specific studies, the relationship between national culture and economic affluence and users’ participation has been so far unexplored. In this work, we systematically study the link between them: we characterise OSM users in terms of who they are, how they contribute, during what period of time, and across what geographic areas. We find strong correlations between these characteristics and national culture factors (e.g., power distance, individualism, pace of life, self expression), and well as Gross Domestic Product per capita. Based on these findings, we discuss design issues that developers of crowd-mapping services should consider to account for cross-cultural differences”

‘Nudge Unit’ forming mutual joint venture

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The government’s Behavioural Insights Team – also known as the Nudge Unit – has teamed up with Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation, to create a new mutual joint venture, Minister for the Cabinet Office Francis Maude announced today.
The mutual joint venture will be a new UK-based company, paying taxes, exporting services across the world and helping get Britain on the rise.
The Behavioural Insights Team, which was set up in 2010 with a mission to find innovative ways of enabling people to make better choices for themselves and society, is now a world-leader in the application of insights from the behavioural sciences and credited with helping the UK government save millions of pounds for the taxpayer.
As a result, they have received an increasing number of requests to help apply insights from the behavioural sciences to tackle public policy problems, both at home and overseas. As of today, the team – which will continue to be known as the Behavioural Insights Team – is able to service this demand from any part of the UK public sector, charities and foreign governments. The new company will also be able to work with commercial organisations, where there is an underlying social purpose to the project….
The deal forms part of the government’s commitment to drive innovation in government commercial models – a central commitment in the Civil Service Reform Plan – and follows on from the launch of the civil service pension provider MyCSP in April 2012, which became the first mutual joint venture to spin out of government, and the launch of SSCL Ltd late last year in a joint venture with Steria Ltd to run shared services for Whitehall departments.
The government is determined to look beyond the old binary choice between in-house provision and outsourcing. As such they are working to develop a hybrid economy with a diverse range of suppliers from the mutual joint ventures to the voluntary sector, from in-house provision to straight sourcing.”

The Technium

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

EdgeVideo Conversation with Kevin Kelly: “The question that I’m asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we going to stop sharing, and how far are we going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there’s no end to how much we can track each other—how far we’re going to self-track, how much we’re going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there’s going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.
How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don’t see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I’m trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can’t stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It’s suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can’t stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there’s no tracking in a temporary basis. I don’t know, but this is the question I’m asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?…
I call myself a protopian, not a utopian. I believe in progress in an incremental way where every year it’s better than the year before but not by very much—just a micro amount. I don’t believe in utopia where there’s any kind of a world without problems brought on by technology. Every new technology creates almost as many problems that it solves. For most people that statement would suggest that technology is kind of a wash. It’s kind of neutral, because if you’re creating as many problems as it solves, then it’s a 50/50 wash, but the difference in my protopian view versus, say, a neutral view is that all these new technologies bring new possibilities that did not exist before, including the new possibility of doing harm versus good.
….

Over time we are generating new technologies, we’re producing all new problems. Most of the problems we have today are technogenic, meaning that they were created by technology in the past. Most of the problems in the future are going to be created by technologies we’re creating today. Technology is a means of producing new problems. It’s a means of producing new solutions, but the fact that we have a choice between those two is what tips the balance very, very slightly in the favor of the good for the long term. Over civilization scale, we have this net tiny incremental accumulation of these choices over time, and that tiny accumulation is what we call progress. If you have one percent compounded annually, that can be very, very powerful. It doesn’t seem like very much. What’s one percent? But when you compound this accumulation of choices and options over time, that’s what civilization is. It’s the slow accumulation of a very tiny increase in new choices over time.
Yes, technology will at times obliterate some older choices, but the net gain over time is a small advantage in new choices, and that’s what civilization is—it’s an accumulation of increasing choices, and that’s why people move from countries into the cities. There are lots of reasons, but in the end the main motivator is a pulling of people to a city because it has more choices and options than they had in their beautiful country home, and that’s what the future is doing, the same thing. It’s pulling people from the past into the future. Very few people go back the other way and live like their ancestors because the future has more choices and possibilities, and—in the end, given everything else about technology—that’s what technology gives us, too. That’s why we keep making this stuff. It’s not really to sell more things. Yes, it’s about selling things, but primarily what we’re doing with technology is we’re inventing new possibilities that did not exist before….”

Community boxes let city residents share anything

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “While startups such as Boxbee aim to turn customers self storage assets into a shareable library of goods among friends, a new project in Switzerland is taking a similar concept into the public sphere. Boîtes d’Échange Entre Voisins — or Neighborhood Exchange Boxes — are a network of brightly-decorated repositories where residents can leave books, toys or other items they’d like to give to the community.
The idea, which was conceived by public art organization Tako in collaboration with the City of Geneva, is a fairly simple one — boxes big enough to hold objects such as books, DVDs, games and household items are installed in public locations. The boxes can be identified by their often artistic decorations bearing the name of the project. Any member of the public can then leave unwanted goods in the boxes for anyone else to take. The idea takes inspiration from schemes such as Bookcrossing and Little Free Library, which both focus more narrowly on book sharing. However, there is no restriction to what can be left in the project’s boxes, so long as it fits — users have even seen one generous neighbor leave an unwanted Apple TV.
There are currently around 20 Boîtes d’Échange Entre Voisins across Switzerland, and anyone can join in by setting up a box for their own neighborhood. Could this work in your part of the world?
Website: www.tako.ch”