How Muckrakers Use Crowdsourcing: Case Studies from ProPublica to The Guardian

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Toby McIntosh at Global Investigative Journalism:”…Creative use of social media provides new ways for journalists not just to solicit tips, but also to tap readers’ expertise, opinions and personal experiences.

A stronger ethos of reader engagement is resulting in more sophisticated appeals from journalists for assistance with investigations, including:

  • Seeking tips on very defined topics
  • Asking readers to talk about their experiences on broad subjects
  • Inviting comments after publication

Here are examples of what your colleagues are doing:

Hey, Shell Employees!

Dutch reporter Jelmer Mommers of Dutch news site De Correspondent appealed directly to Shell employees for information in a lengthy blog post, as described in this article. The resulting investigation revealed that Shell had detailed knowledge of the dangers of climate change more than a quarter century ago.

Along the way, in what Jelmer calls “the most romantic moment,” came the surprise delivery of a box full of internal documents. De Correspondent’s emphasis on communicating with subscribers is described here.

Call for Childbirth Experiences

Getting reader input in advance was key to a major U.S. story on maternal health to which thousands of people contributed. ProPublica  engagement reporter Adriana Gallardo and her colleagues published a questionnaire in February of 2017 aimed at women who had experienced life-threatening complications in childbirth.

Using a variety of social media channels, Gallardo, along with ProPublica’s Nina Martin and NPR’s Renee Montagne, received several thousand responses. The personal stories fueled a series and the connections made are still being maintained for follow-up work. Read more in this this GIJN article.

Testimonials from Mexico’s Drug War

“Anyone’s Child Mexico” is a documentary about the families affected by Mexico’s drug war. To gather stories, the producers of the documentary publicized a free phone line through local partners and asked people across Mexico to call in and recount their stories.

Callers could also listen to other testimonials. With funding from the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute, producers Matthew Brown, Ewan Cass-Kavanagh, Mary Ryder and Jane Slater created a website to bring together audio, photos, video and text and tell harrowing stories of a country ravaged by violence….(More)”.

The Hidden Pitfall of Innovation Prizes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Reto Hofstetter, John Zhang and Andreas Herrmann at Harvard Business Review: “…it is not so easy to get people to submit their ideas to online innovation platforms. Our data from an online panel reveal that 65% of the contributors do not come back more than twice, and that most of the rest quit after a few tries. This kind of user churn is endemic to online social platforms — on Twitter, for example, a majority of users become inactive over time — and crowdsourcing is no exception. In a way, this turnover is even worse than ordinary customer churn: When a customer defects, a firm knows the value of what it’s lost, but there is no telling how valuable the ideas not submitted might have been….

It is surprising, then, that crowdsourcing on popular platforms is typically designed in a way that amplifies churn. Right now, in typical innovation contests, rewards are granted to winners only and the rest get no return on their participation. This design choice is often motivated by the greater effort participants exert when there is a top prize much more valuable than the rest. Often, the structure is something like the Wimbledon Tennis Championship, where the winning player wins twice as much as the runner up and four times as much as the semifinalists — with the rest eventually leaving empty handed.

This winner-take-most prize spread increases the incentive to win and thus individual efforts. With only one winner, however, the others are left with nothing to show for their effort, which may significantly reduce their motivation to enter again.

An experiment we recently ran confirmed that the way entrants respond to this kind of winner-take-all prize structure. …

In line with the above reasoning, we found that winner-take-all contests yielded significantly better ideas compared to multiple prizes in the first round. Importantly, however, this result flipped when we invited the same cohort of innovators to participate again in the second subsequent contest. While 50% of the multiple-prize contest chose to participate again, only 37% did so when the winner-took-all in their first contest. Moreover, innovators who had received no reward in the first contest showed significantly lower effort in the second contest and generated fewer ideas. In the second contest, multiple prizes generated better ideas than the second round of the winner-take-all contest….

Other non-monetary positive feedback, such as encouraging comments or ratings, can have similar effects. These techniques are important, because alleviating innovator churn helps companies interested in longer-term success of their crowdsourcing activities….(More)”.

Participatory budgeting: adoption and transformation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael Touchton and Brian Wampler: “Participatory budgeting programmes are spreading rapidly across the world because they offer government officials and citizens the opportunity to engage each other in new ways as they combine democratic practices with the ‘nitty gritty’ of policy-making. The principles and ideas associated with participatory budgeting appeal to a broad spectrum of citizens, civil society activists, government officials and international agencies, which helps explain why it is so popular and has expanded so quickly.

In this research briefing, we focus on adoption and transformation of participatory budgeting in several low- and middle-income countries where international donors are active. We are particularly interested in better understanding how participatory budgeting is transforming in countries where international donors are active, where states struggle to provide public services, and where urban and rural communities are characterised by high levels of poverty… (More)”.

Sharing is Daring: An Experiment on Consent, Chilling Effects and a Salient Privacy Nudge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hermstrüwer, Yoan and Dickert, Stephan at the International Review of Law and Economics: “Privacy law rests on the assumption that government surveillance may increase the general level of conformity and thus generate a chilling effect. In a study that combines elements of a lab and a field experiment, we show that salient and incentivized consent options are sufficient to trigger this behavioral effect. Salient ex ante consent options may lure people into giving up their privacy and increase their compliance with social norms – even when the only immediate risk of sharing information is mere publicity on a Google website. A right to be forgotten (right to deletion), however, seems to reduce neither privacy valuations nor chilling effects. In spite of low deletion costs people tend to stick with a retention default. The study suggests that consent architectures may play out on social conformity rather than on consent choices and privacy valuations. Salient notice and consent options may not merely empower users to make an informed consent decision. Instead, they can trigger the very effects that privacy law intends to curb….(More)”.

Issue Voter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “When we vote, we’re hiring our elected officials. We pay their salaries with our tax dollars. Imagine hiring an employee, paying and promoting them, yet never seeing any of their work. That’s essentially what we’re all doing when we vote & re- elect. And incumbents are re-elected over 90% of the time.

We’re living with an outdated system

  • Bills are difficult to research and understand,
  • Contacting reps still involves snail mail, picking up the phone, or filling out long forms online,
  • Petitions don’t work. To elected officials, petitions are merely a list of names – you may not be one of their voters, and the person signing the petition has no way to track outcomes

Engage with Your Political Process

Track your rep’s activity. We tell you how your rep voted, how often your representative agrees with you, and whether or not they’ve attended a vote.

Encourage open discussion. You can share an issue on your favorite social network, without revealing your personal opinion.

Act on issues that don’t make headlines. We don’t only tell you about what is breaking the news; we check for updates every hour to make sure you have the latest information.

Become an informed voter. Using IssueVoter year-round informs you before elections and keeps money’s influence out of your opinion. Only re-elect reps who truly represented you….(More)”.

Nearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Oberhaus at Motherboard: “…Sixteen years later, the free encyclopedia and fifth most popular website in the world is well on its way to this goal. Today, Wikipedia is home to 43 million articles in 285 languages and all of these articles are written and edited by an autonomous group of international volunteers.

Although the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation diligently keeps track of how editors and users interact with the site, until recently it was unclear how content production on Wikipedia was distributed among editors. According to the results of a recent study that looked at the 250 million edits made on Wikipedia during its first ten years, only about 1 percent of Wikipedia’s editors have generated 77 percent of the site’s content.

“Wikipedia is both an organization and a social movement,” Sorin Matei, the director of the Purdue University Data Storytelling Network and lead author of the study, told me on the phone. “The assumption is that it’s a creation of the crowd, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Wikipedia wouldn’t have been possible without a dedicated leadership.”

At the time of writing, there are roughly 132,000 registered editors who have been active on Wikipedia in the last month (there are also an unknown number of unregistered Wikipedians who contribute to the site). So statistically speaking, only about 1,300 people are creating over three-quarters of the 600 new articles posted to Wikipedia every day.

Of course, these “1 percenters” have changed over the last decade and a half. According to Matei, roughly 40 percent of the top 1 percent of editors bow out about every five weeks. In the early days, when there were only a few hundred thousand people collaborating on Wikipedia, Matei said the content production was significantly more equitable. But as the encyclopedia grew, and the number of collaborators grew with it, a cadre of die-hard editors emerged that have accounted for the bulk of Wikipedia’s growth ever since.

Matei and his colleague Brian Britt, an assistant professor of journalism at South Dakota State University, used a machine learning algorithm to crawl the quarter of a billion publicly available edit logs from Wikipedia’s first decade of existence. The results of this research, published September as a book, suggests that for all of Wikipedia’s pretension to being a site produced by a network of freely collaborating peers, “some peers are more equal than others,” according to Matei.

Matei and Britt argue that rather than being a decentralized, spontaneously evolving organization, Wikipedia is better described as an “adhocracy“—a stable hierarchical power structure which nevertheless allows for a high degree of individual mobility within that hierarchy….(More)”.

India Social: How Social Media Is Leading The Charge And Changing The Country

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book excerpt of Ankit Lal’s book ‘India Social’: on “How social media showed its unique power of crowdsourcing during the Chennai floods…

One ingenious resource that was circulated widely during the floods was a crowdsourced effort that mapped inundated roads in the city. Over 2,500 flooded roads were added to the city’s map via social media, which was put together by engineer and information designer, Arun Ganesh.

The Chennai floods were a superb example of the power of collective effort. Users across social media channels came together to offer shelter, food, transport, and even a place for people to charge their phones. SOS messages asking ground teams to rescue stranded family members also went back and forth, and there were many who offered their homes and offices to those who were stranded.

Perhaps the most simple yet effective tool during the floods was the website chennairains.org.

It began as a simple Google spreadsheet. Sowmya Rao was trying to help her uncle and aunt figure out whether it was safe to stay in their house in suburban Chennai or move to a friend’s place. When she found out that the area they lived in was under severe risk of flooding, she relayed the message to them. But she felt helpless about the countless others who were facing the same plight as her relatives. Acting on a suggestion by another Twitter user, she created the Google spreadsheet that went on to become the website chennairains.org.

The idea was simple: crowdsource details about those who could offer shelter, and pass it on to those who were tweeting about rising waters. A hastily put-together spreadsheet soon blossomed into a multi-faceted, volunteer-driven, highly energetic online movement to help Chennai, and ended up being used by the general public, police officers, government officials and celebrities alike….(More)”.

The world watches Reykjavik’s digital democracy experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Jacobs at the Financial Times: “When Iceland’s banks collapsed and mistrust of politicians soared during the 2008 financial crisis, two programmers thought software could help salvage the country’s democracy. They created Your Priorities, a platform that allows citizens to suggest laws, policies and budget measures, which can then be voted up or down by other users. “

We thought: If we manage somehow to connect regular citizens with government then we create a dialogue that will ultimately result in better decisions,” says Robert Bjarnason, chief executive of Citizens Foundation, the company that created Your Priorities. Mr Bjarnason and his fellow co-founder of Citizens Foundation, Gunnar Grimsson, used the software to create a policy website called Better Reykjavik just before the city’s 2010 elections.

Jon Gnarr, Reykjavik’s then mayor, encouraged people to use the platform to give him policy suggestions and he committed to funding the top 10 ideas each month. Seven years on, Better Reykjavik has some 20,000 users and 769 of their ideas have been approved by the city council. These include increasing financial support for the city’s homeless, converting a former power station into a youth centre, introducing gender-neutral toilets and naming a street after Darth Vader, the character from Star Wars.

Your Priorities has also been tested in other countries, including Estonia, Australia, Scotland, Wales, Norway and Malta. In Estonia, seven proposals have become law, including one limiting donations from companies to political parties and another that requires the national parliament to debate any proposal with more than 1,000 votes.

The software is part of a global trend for people to seek more influence over their politicians. In Australia, for example, the MiVote app allows people to vote on issues being debated in parliament.

…At times, the portal can become a “crazy sounding board” Mr Svansson concedes. The Reykjavik council has put in quality controls to filter out hare-brained proposals, although Mr Bjarnason says he has had to remove inappropriate content only a handful of times….During Iceland’s parliamentary elections last month, 10 out of 11 political parties published their election pitches on Your Priorities, allowing voters to comment on policies and propose new ones. This interactive manifesto website attracted 22,000 visitors.

Testing the efficacy of platforms such as Your Priorities is perhaps easier in Reykjavik — population 123,000 — than in larger cities. Even so, integrating the site into the council’s policymaking apparatus has been slower than Mr Bjarnason had foreseen. “Everything takes a long time and sometimes it is like you are swimming in syrup,” he says. “Still, it has been a really good experience working with the city.”…(More).

More Machine Learning About Congress’ Priorities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ProPublica: “We keep training machine learning models on Congress. Find out what this one learned about lawmakers’ top issues…

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan is a tax wonk ― and most observers of Congress know that. But knowing what interests the other 434 members of Congress is harder.

To make it easier to know what issues each lawmaker really focuses on, we’re launching a new feature in our Represent database called Policy Priorities. We had two goals in creating it: To help researchers and journalists understand what drives particular members of Congress and to enable regular citizens to compare their representatives’ priorities to their own and their communities.

We created Policy Priorities using some sophisticated computer algorithms (more on this in a second) to calculate interest based on what each congressperson talks ― and brags ― about in their press releases.

Voting and drafting legislation aren’t the only things members of Congress do with their time, but they’re often the main way we analyze congressional data, in part because they’re easily measured. But the job of a member of Congress goes well past voting. They go to committee meetings, discuss policy on the floor and in caucuses, raise funds and ― important for our purposes ― communicate with their constituents and journalists back home. They use press releases to talk about what they’ve accomplished and to demonstrate their commitment to their political ideals.

We’ve been gathering these press releases for a few years, and have a body of some 86,000 that we used for a kind of analysis called machine learning….(More)”.

The frontiers of data interoperability for sustainable development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report from the Joined-Up Data Standards [JUDS] project: “…explores where progress has been made, what challenges still remain, and how the new Collaborative on SDG Data Interoperability will play a critical role in moving forward the agenda for interoperability policy.

There is an ever-growing need for a more holistic picture of development processes worldwide and interoperability solutions that can be scaled, driven by global development agendas such as the 2030 Agenda and the Open Data movement. This requires the ability to join up data across multiple data sources and standards to create actionable information.

Solutions that create value for front-line decision makers — health centre managers, local school authorities or water and sanitation committees, for example, and those engaged in government accountability – will be crucial to meet the data needs of the SDGs, and do so in an internationally comparable way. While progress has been made at both a national and international level, moving from principle to practice by embedding interoperability into day-to-day work continues to present challenges.

Based on research and learning generated by the JUDS project team at Development Initiatives and Publish What You Fund, as well as inputs from interviews with key stakeholders, this report aims to provide an overview of the different definitions and components of interoperability and why it is important, and an outline of the current policy landscape.

We offer a set of guiding principles that we consider essential to implementing interoperability, and contextualise the five frontiers of interoperability for sustainable development that we have identified. The report also offers recommendations on what the role of the Collaborative could be in this fast-evolving landscape….(More)”.