Collection

The Role of Digital Media in Participatory Politics

Curated on July 25, 2013August 15, 2018 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. – “

Why Contests Improve Philantropy

Curated on July 25, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report from the Knight Foundation: “Since 2007, Knight Foundation has run or funded nearly a dozen open contests, many over multiple years, choosing some 400 winners from almost 25,000 entries, and granting more than $75 million to individuals, businesses, schools and nonprofits. The winners believe, as we do, that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. The contests reflect the full diversity of our program areas: journalism and media innovation, engaging communities and fostering the arts. Over the past seven years, we have learned a lot about how good contests work, what they can do, and what the challenges are. Though contests represent less than 20 percent of our grant-making, they have improved our traditional programs in myriad ways.
A 2009 McKinsey & Company Report, “And the winner is…, ” put it this way: “Every leading philanthropist should consider the opportunity to use prizes to help achieve their mission, and to accept the challenge of fully exploiting this powerful tool. ” But of America ‘s more than 76,000 grant-making foundations, only a handful, maybe 100 at most, have embraced the use of contests. That means 99.9 percent do not.
Sharing these lessons here is an invitation to others to consider how contests, when appropriate, might widen their networks, deepen the work they already do, and broaden their definition of philanthropic giving.
Before you launch and manage your own contests, you might want to consider the six major lessons we ‘ve learned about how contests improved our philanthropy.
1. They bring in new blood and new ideas.
2. They create value beyond the winners.
3. They help organizations spot emerging trends.
4. They challenge routines and entrenched foundation behaviors.
5. They complement existing philanthropy strategies.
6. They create new ways to engage communities.
…Depending upon the competition, the odds of winning one of Knight’s contests are, at their lowest, one in six, and at their highest, more than one in 100. But if you think of your contest only as a funnel spitting out a handful of winning ideas, you overlook what’s really happening. A good contest is more a megaphone for a cause.”

Code for America: Announcing the 2013 Accelerator Class

Curated on July 25, 2013October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Code for America opened applications for the 2013 Accelerator knowing that the competition would be fierce. This year we received over 190 applications from amazing candidates. Today, we’re pleased to announce the five teams chosen to participate in the 2013 Accelerator.

The teams are articulate, knowledgeable, and passionate about their businesses. They come from all over the country — Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and California — and we’re excited to get started with them. Teams include:

ArchiveSocial enables organizations to embrace social media by minimizing risk and eliminating compliance barriers. Specifically, it solves the challenge of retaining Gov 2.0 communications for compliance with FOIA and other public records laws. It currently automates business-grade record keeping of communications on networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Moving forward, ArchiveSocial will help further enforce social media policy and protect the organizational brand.

The Family Assessment Form (FAF) Web is a tool designed by social workers, researchers, and technology experts to help family support practitioners improve family functioning, service planning for families, and organizational performance. The FAF is ideal for use in organizations performing home visitation services for families that address comprehensive concerns about family well-being and child welfare. FAF Web enables all stakeholders to access essential data remotely from any internet-enabled device.

OpenCounter helps entrepreneurs to register their businesses with the local government. It does so through an online check-out experience that adapts to the applicant’s answers and asks for pertinent information only once. OpenCounter estimates licensing time and costs so entrepreneurs can understand what it will take to get their business off the ground. It’s the TurboTax of business permitting.

SmartProcure is an online information service that provides access to local, state, and federal government procurement data, with two public-interest goals: 1. Enable government agencies to make more efficient procurement decisions and save taxpayer dollars. 2. Empower businesses to sell more effectively and competitively to government agencies. The proprietary system provides access to data from more than 50 million purchase orders issued by 1,700 government agencies.

StreetCred Software helps police agencies manage their arrest warrants, eliminate warrant backlogs, and radically improve efficiency while increasing officer safety. It helps agencies understand their fugitive population, measure effectiveness, and make improvements. StreetCred Software, Inc., was founded by two Texas police officers. One is an 18-year veteran investigator and fugitive hunter, the other a technology industry veteran who became an cop in 2010.”

Data Science for Social Good

Curated on July 25, 2013July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Data Science for Social Good: “By analyzing data from police reports to website clicks to sensor signals, governments are starting to spot problems in real-time and design programs to maximize impact. More nonprofits are measuring whether or not they’re helping people, and experimenting to find interventions that work.
None of this is inevitable, however.
We’re just realizing the potential of using data for social impact and face several hurdles to it’s widespread adoption:

Most governments and nonprofits simply don’t know what’s possible yet. They have data – but often not enough and maybe not the right kind.
There are too few data scientists out there – and too many spending their days optimizing ads instead of bettering lives.

To make an impact, we need to show social good organizations the power of data and analytics. We need to work on analytics projects that have high social impact. And we need to expose data scientists to the problems that really matter.

The fellowship

That’s exactly why we’re doing the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good summer fellowship at the University of Chicago.
We want to bring three dozen aspiring data scientists to Chicago, and have them work on data science projects with social impact.
Working closely with governments and nonprofits, fellows will take on real-world problems in education, health, energy, transportation, and more.
Over the next three months, they’ll apply their coding, machine learning, and quantitative skills, collaborate in a fast-paced atmosphere, and learn from mentors in industry, academia, and the Obama campaign.
The program is led by a strong interdisciplinary team from the Computation institute and the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago.”

Information Consumerism – The Price of Hypocrisy

Curated on July 25, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Evgeny Morozov in Frankfurter Algemeine: “What we need is a sharper, starker picture of the information apocalypse that awaits us in a world where personal data is traded like coffee or any other commodity. Take the oft-repeated argument about the benefits of trading one’s data in exchange for some tangible commercial benefit. Say, for example, you install a sensor in your car to prove to your insurance company that you are driving much safer than the average driver that figures in their model for pricing insurance policies. Great: if you are better than the average, you get to pay less. But the problem with averages is that half of the population is always worse than the benchmark. Inevitably –regardless of whether they want to monitor themselves or not – that other half will be forced to pay more, for as the more successful of us take on self-tracking, most social institutions would (quite logically) assume that those who refuse to self-track have something to hide. Under this model, the implications of my decision to trade my personal data are no longer solely in the realm of markets and economics – they are also in the realm of ethics. If my decision to share my personal data for a quick buck makes someone else worse off and deprives them of opportunities, then I have an extra ethical factor to consider – economics alone doesn’t suffice.
All of this is to say that there are profound political and moral consequences to information consumerism– and they are comparable to energy consumerism in scope and importance. Making these consequences more pronounced and vivid is where intellectuals and political parties ought to focus their efforts. We should do our best to suspend the seeming economic normalcy of information sharing. An attitude of “just business!” will no longer suffice. Information sharing might have a vibrant market around it but it has no ethical framework to back it up. More than three decades ago, Michel Foucault was prescient to see that neoliberalism would turns us all into “entrepreneurs of the self” but let’s not forget that entrepreneurship is not without its downsides: as most economic activities, it can generate negative externalities, from pollution to noise. Entrepreneurship focused on information sharing is no exception….”

5 Big Data Projects That Could Impact Your Life

Curated on July 25, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mashable: “We reached out to a few organizations using information, both hand- and algorithm-collected, to create helpful tools for their communities. This is only a small sample of what’s out there — plenty more pop up each day, and as more information becomes public, the trend will only grow….
1. Transit Time NYC
Transit Time NYC, an interactive map developed by WNYC, lets New Yorkers click a spot in any of the city’s five boroughs for an estimate of subway or train travel times. To create it, WNYC lead developer Steve Melendez broke the city into 2,930 hexagons, then pulled data from open source itinerary platform OpenTripPlanner — the Wikipedia of mapping software — and coupled it with the MTA’s publicly downloadable subway schedule….
2. Twitter’s ‘Topography of Tweets
In a blog post, Twitter unveiled a new data visualization map that displays billions of geotagged tweets in a 3D landscape format. The purpose is to display, topographically, which parts of certain cities most people are tweeting from…
3. Homicide Watch D.C.
Homicide Watch D.C. is a community-driven data site that aims to cover every murder in the District of Columbia. It’s sorted by “suspect” and “victim” profiles, where it breaks down each person’s name, age, gender and race, as well as original articles reported by Homicide Watch staff…
4. Falling Fruit
Can you find a hidden apple tree along your daily bike commute? Falling Fruit can.
The website highlights overlooked or hidden edibles in urban areas across the world. By collecting public information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, municipal tree inventories, foraging maps and street tree databases, the site has created a network of 615 types of edibles in more than 570,000 locations. The purpose is to remind urban dwellers that agriculture does exist within city boundaries — it’s just more difficult to find….
5. AIDSvu
AIDSVu is an interactive map that illustrates the prevalence of HIV in the United States. The data is pulled from the U.S. Center for Disease Control’s national HIV surveillance reports, which are collected at both state and county levels each year…”

Metadata Liberation Movement

Curated on July 24, 2013October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal: “The biggest problem, then, with metadata surveillance may simply be that the wrong agencies are in charge of it. One particular reason why this matters is that the potential of metadata surveillance might actually be quite large but is being squandered by secret agencies whose narrow interest is only looking for terrorists….
“Big data” is only as good as the algorithms used to find out things worth finding out. The efficacy and refinement of big-data techniques are advanced by repetition, by giving more chances to find something worth knowing. Bringing metadata out of its black box wouldn’t only be a way to improve public trust in what government is doing. It would be a way to get more real value for society out of techniques that are being squandered on a fairly minor threat.
Bringing metadata out of the black box would open up new worlds of possibility—from anticipating traffic jams to locating missing persons after a disaster. It would also create an opportunity to make big data more consistent with the constitutional prohibition of unwarranted search and seizure. In the first instance, with the computer withholding identifying details of the individuals involved, any red flag could be examined by a law-enforcement officer to see, based on accumulated experience, whether the indication is of interest.
If so, a warrant could be obtained to expose the identities involved. If not, the record could immediately be expunged. All this could take place in a reasonably aboveboard, legal fashion, open to inspection in court when and if charges are brought or—this would be a good idea—a court is informed of investigations that led to no action.
Our guess is that big data techniques would pop up way too many false positives at first, and only considerable learning and practice would allow such techniques to become a useful tool. At the same time, bringing metadata surveillance out of the shadows would help the Googles, Verizons and Facebooks defend themselves from a wholly unwarranted suspicion that user privacy is somehow better protected by French or British or (heavens) Chinese companies from their own governments than U.S. data is from the U.S. government.
Most of all, it would allow these techniques to be put to work on solving problems that are actual problems for most Americans, which terrorism isn’t.”

Eduardo Paes on Open Government

Curated on July 24, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Eduardo Paes, Mayor, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the Huffington Post: “The Internet revolution has transformed the way knowledge is disseminated and how people unite over causes. Social networks are playing a key role in this movement, just as books and the press have done over the last six centuries. During the recent demonstrations in Brazil, approximately 62 percent of the people were informed of the event via Facebook, a much higher rate than TV, which was first source of information to 14 percent of attendees, according to Ibope Institute. Three out of four agitators used social networks to round up support. As generations succeed and the digital gap narrows, these statistics could possibly rise.
This revolution is also accentuating the imperfections of the representative democracy, the only plausible alternative, as Churchill famously said. We live in an era of “Liquid Modernity” as defined by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, which describes the ephemeral nature of contemporary social interactions. Bauman says that these days society, in a similar manner to liquid, adopts various unstable forms under small amounts of pressure. They are incapable of stabilizing in a consistent form, which results in consequences to social relationships and politics. Meanwhile, political parties, bureaucracy and institutions seem to remain firmly in the 17th Century.
Democracy has to reinvent itself in accordance with this new “liquid society” where collaboration happens between many millions of people directly. Leadership is not vertical, as in the past, but horizontal. Nowadays some say following is more important than leading. Cyber culture understands open code as a principle, something the music industry has reluctantly had to learn. There is no time and space limitation for public accountability on the Internet. Creative commonality is standard and does not resemble the authoritarian style of the dead communist experience. It seems that it is no longer society’s obligation to understand legislation, it is a duty for governments to be understood by their people.”

Feedback Labs

Curated on July 23, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Feedback Labs: “If you find yourself asking the following three questions, then you have come to the right place:

“What do citizens want?”
“Are they getting it?”
“If not, how will things change?”

Much excellent work has been done over recent years to answer the first and second questions. Our goal is to catalyze that work and make it matter by focusing on the third question – “How will things change?”
Aid, philanthropy, and government programs are often designed, implemented and evaluated by experts. We think that citizens should increasingly be in the driver’s seat. Experts are still important, but in many cases their role needs to shift from being a decision-maker to being people who enrich and inform conversations among citizens.

What will Feedback Labs do?

Based on what we have heard so far, we think we can add value in three ways:

Frame the issues – for example, what exactly do we mean by feedback loops? What works and what doesn’t? What is the evidence for impact?
Help close the feedback loop – uncover approaches that are succeeding at finding out what people want and whether they are getting it, and then helping to close the loop by understanding (and in some cases funding) what it takes to translate citizen voice into real changes in programs.
Facilitate mainstreaming – i.e., assist aid, philanthropy and government organizations adopt feedback loops in their normal course of operation. We want to make feedback loops the norm rather than the exception.

Historically we have often assumed that the flow of knowledge is from the richer countries to the poorer. But learning goes both ways, and in the case of feedback loops, some of the most innovative approaches are being pioneered in developing countries. So we plan to support work both internationally and domestically.”