The Charitable-Industrial Complex

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Buffett in the New York Times: “It’s time for a new operating system. Not a 2.0 or a 3.0, but something built from the ground up. New code.

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there.

There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff).

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

It’s an old story; we really need a new one.”

Big data  + politics = open data: The case of health care data in England

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Paper in Policy & Internet: “There is a great deal of enthusiasm about the prospects for Big Data held in health care systems around the world. Health care appears to offer the ideal combination of circumstances for its exploitation, with a need to improve productivity on the one hand and the availability of data that can be used to identify opportunities for improvement on the other. The enthusiasm rests on two assumptions. First, that the data sets held by hospitals and other organizations, and the technological infrastructure needed for their acquisition, storage, and manipulation, are up to the task. Second, that organizations outside health care systems will be able to access detailed datasets. We argue that both assumptions can be challenged. The article uses the example of the National Health Service in England to identify data, technology, and information governance challenges. The public acceptability of third party access to detailed health care datasets is, at best, unclear.”

Sitegeist

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Sitegeist is a mobile application that helps you to learn more about your surroundings in seconds. Drawing on publicly available information, the app presents solid data in a simple at-a-glance format to help you tap into the pulse of your location. From demographics about people and housing to the latest popular spots or weather, Sitegeist presents localized information visually so you can get back to enjoying the neighborhood. The application draws on free APIs such as the U.S. Census, Yelp! and others to showcase what’s possible with access to data. Sitegeist was created by the Sunlight Foundation in consultation with design firm IDEO and with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. It is the third in a series of National Data Apps.”

Create a Crowd Competition That Works

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ahmad Ashkar in HBR Blog Network: “It’s no secret that people in business are turning to the crowd to solve their toughest challenges. Well-known sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo allow people to raise money for new projects. Design platforms like Crowdspring and 99designs give people the tools needed to crowdsource graphic design ideas and feedback.
At the Hult Prize — a start-up accelerator that challenges Millennials to develop innovative social enterprises to solve our world’s most pressing issues (and rewards the top team with $1,000,000 in start-up capital) — we’ve learned that the crowd can also offer an unorthodox solution in developing innovative and disruptive ideas, particularly ones focused on tackling complex, large-scale social issues.
But to effectively harness the power of the crowd, you have to engage it carefully. Over the past four years, we’ve developed a well-defined set of principles that guide our annual “challenge,” (lauded by Bill Clinton in TIME magazine as one of the top five initiatives changing the world for the better) that produces original and actionable ideas to solve social issues.
Companies like Netflix, General Electric, and Proctor & Gamble have also started “challenging the crowd” and employing many of these principles to tackle their own business roadblocks. If you’re looking to spark disruptive and powerful ideas that benefit your company, follow these guidelines to launch an engaging competition:
1. Define the boundaries…
2. Identify a specific and bold stretch target. …
3. Insist on low barriers to entry. …
4. Encourage teams and networks. …
5. Provide a toolkit. Once interested parties become participants in your challenge, provide tools to set them up for success. If you are working on a social problem, you can use IDEO’s human-centered design toolkit. If you have a private-sector challenge, consider posting it on an existing innovation platform. As an organizer, you don’t have to spend time recreating the wheel — use one of the many existing platforms and borrow materials from those willing to share.”

Quantifying cities’ emotional effects

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Phil Salesses, Katja Schectner, Talia Kaufmann and Cesar A. Hidalgo

MIT Press: “A color-coded map of the perceived safety of New York City neighborhoods, based on Web volunteers’ comparisons of images extracted from Google Maps’ “street view” archive.
Image: Macro Connections Group
July 24, 2013

The “broken-windows theory,” which was propounded by two Harvard University researchers in the early 1980s, holds that urban “disorder” — visible signs of neglect, such as broken windows — actually promotes crime, initiating a vicious feedback loop. The theory was the basis for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on petty crime, but it’s come under sharp criticism from some social scientists. One of the difficulties in evaluating the theory is that it’s hard to quantify something as subjective as visible disorder.
In the latest issue of the journal PLoS One, researchers from MIT’s Media Lab present a new online tool that they hope will help social scientists take a more rigorous look at city dwellers’ emotional responses to their environments. The tool presents online volunteers with pairs of images randomly drawn from Google Maps’ compendium of street-level photographs; each volunteer selects the image that better represents some qualitative attribute. Algorithms use the results of the pairwise comparisons to assign geographical areas scores, from one to 10, on each attribute.
In the experiments reported in the PLoS One paper, volunteers ranked the neighborhoods depicted in the images according to how safe they looked, how “upper-class,” and how “unique” — an attribute selected in the hope that it would not be strongly correlated with the other two. The researchers found that the scores for the U.S. cities selected for the study — New York and Boston — showed greater disparity between the extremes for both class and safety than did those for the two Austrian cities selected, Linz and Salzburg.
They also found that, controlled for income, area, and population, the perceived-safety scores for neighborhoods in New York correlated very well with incidence of violent crime”.

New Book: Breakpoint, Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
breakpointbook.com: “We are living in a world in which cows send texts to farmers when they’re in heat, where the most valuable real estate in New York City houses computers, not people, and some of humanity’s greatest works are created by crowds, not individuals.

We are in the midst of a networking revolution–set to transform the way we access the world’s information and the way we connect with one another. Studying biological systems is perhaps the best way to understand such networks, and nature has a lesson for us if we care to listen: bigger is rarely better in the long run. The deadliest creature is the mosquito, not the lion. It is the quality of a network that is important for survival, not the size, and all networks–the human brain, Facebook, Google, even the internet itself–eventually reach a breakpoint and collapse. That’s the bad news. The good news is that reaching a breakpoint can be a step forward, allowing a network to substitute quality for quantity.
In Breakpoint, brain scientist and entrepreneur Jeff Stibel takes readers to the intersection of the brain, biology, and technology. He shows how exceptional companies are using their understanding of the internet’s brain-like powers to create a competitive advantage by building more effective websites, utilizing cloud computing, engaging social media, monetizing effectively, and leveraging a collective consciousness. Indeed, the result of these technologies is a more tightly connected world with capabilities far beyond the sum of our individual minds. Breakpoint offers a fresh and exciting perspective about the future of technology and its effects on all of us.”

Taking Games for Good to a New Level

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Idit Harel Caperton (@idit) in SSIR: “Last month’s Games for Change Festival (G4C) celebrated the promising power of video games to yield social change. The event, now in its tenth year, brings game developers, educators, NGOs, and government agencies to New York City to discuss and promote the creation of social-issue games in an industry with a global market of $67 billion, projected to reach $82 billion by 2017. Big numbers like this prove that the gaming industry has engaged the masses, and G4C wants to push this engagement toward social learning and positive action.
It’s already happening on a small scale. The Games for Change Awards, announced annually at the festival, recognizes effective mission-driven games. This year’s winning games included “Data Dealer,” which raises awareness around personal data and online privacy, and “Quandary,” where players are social pioneers facing decisions that challenge their moral compass. These and other games endorsed at G4C achieve a blend of social influence and technical innovation through engaging gameplay.
G4C has also aligned with larger social impact movements, proving that video games can be vehicles for positive global action through game mechanics. Half the Sky Movement is a transmedia campaign working against the oppression of women worldwide; it includes a book, film, and game. The game, produced by G4C and available for free on Facebook, features game tasks that transfer to real-world donations and social action opportunities. Since launching in March, “Half the Sky Movement: The Game” has raised nearly $350,000 to empower women worldwide. Yet, social issue games production still resides on the edge of the gaming industry. …”

Copyright Done Right? Finland To Vote On Crowdsourced Regulations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Fast-Feed: “Talk about crowdsourcing: Finland is set to vote on a set of copyright laws that weren’t proposed by government or content-making agencies: They were drafted by citizens.
Finns are able to propose laws that the government must consider if 50,000 supporters sign a petition calling for the law within six months. A set of copyright regulations that are fairer to everyone just passed that threshold, and TorrentFreak.com reports that a government vote is likely in early 2014. The new laws were created with the help of the Finnish Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the body has promised that it will maintain pressure on the political system so that the law will actually be changed.
The proposed new laws would decriminalize file sharing and prevent house searches and surveillance of pirates. TorrentFreak reminds us of the international media outcry that happened last year when during a police raid a 9-year-old girl’s laptop was confiscated on the grounds that she stole copyrighted content. Finland’s existing copyright laws, under what’s called the Lex Karpela amendment, are very strict and criminalize the breaking of DRM for copying purposes as well as preventing discussion of the technology for doing so. The laws have been criticized by activists and observers for their strictness and infringement upon freedom of speech.”

The Danger of Human Rights Proliferation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Jacob Mchangama and Guglielmo Verdirame in Foreign Affairs on “When Defending Liberty, Less Is More“: “If human rights were a currency, its value would be in free fall, thanks to a gross inflation in the number of human rights treaties and nonbinding international instruments adopted by international organizations over the last several decades. These days, this currency is sometimes more likely to buy cover for dictatorships than protection for citizens. Human rights once enshrined the most basic principles of human freedom and dignity; today, they can include anything from the right to international solidarity to the right to peace.Consider just how enormous the body of binding human rights law has become. The Freedom Rights Project, a research group that we co-founded, counts a full 64 human-rights-related agreements under the auspices of the United Nations and the Council of Europe. A member state of both of these organizations that has ratified all these agreements would have to comply with 1,377 human rights provisions (although some of these may be technical rather than substantive). Add to this the hundreds of non-treaty instruments, such as the resolutions of the UN General Assembly and Human Rights Council (HRC). The aggregate body of human rights law now has all the accessibility of a tax code.
Supporters of human rights should worry about this explosion of regulation. If people are to demand human rights, then they must first be able to understand them — a tall order given the current bureaucratic tangle of administrative regulation…”

The Role of Digital Media in Participatory Politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview with Joseph Kahne, chair of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics: “What we found was that many games provided civic learning opportunities, such as opportunities to take on the role of a leader—the president, for example—or opportunities to help others. There also were simulations where players had opportunities to work on a societal issue and to learn about institutional processes—how a legislature works, for example. And we found that when games provided those kinds of civic learning opportunities, playing them was associated with much higher commitments to civic engagement. We think some of the relationship was due to youth with civic interests choosing to play those games, and that some of the relationship was due to these games orienting youth towards the potential of civic activity. – …

Historically, the way I thought about how people engaged with the internet did not emphasize what Henry Jenkins and others refer to as “participatory culture.” I focused on whether people send email or look things up on the web. But that’s really not so different than what people did before. It’s just more efficient. The more I got involved, though, the more I began to see that the ways in which people participated with digital media actually transformed or enabled new kinds of engagement—or at least greatly facilitated the kinds of engagement that might have been possible before but would have been much less common. Such participation teaches norms and skills that end up being quite valuable in the civic realm—and it connects youth and adults to networks where they learn about issues and ways to get involved. – …
We found that many youth engage in nonpolitical forms of interest-driven activity— they’re part of online groups connected to their hobbies or sports or entertainment, for example. And we found that youth who engage in those nonpolitical, interest-driven activities become more engaged civically and politically even after controlling for their prior levels of civic and political engagement. That’s fascinating. – “