Paper by Paolo Parigi, Jessica J. Santana and Karen S. Cook in Social Psychology Quarterly: “Thanks to the Internet and the related availability of “Big Data,” social interactions and their environmental context can now be studied experimentally. In this article, we discuss a methodology that we term the online field experiment to differentiate it from more traditional lab-based experimental designs. We explain how this experimental method can be used to capture theoretically relevant environmental conditions while also maximizing the researcher’s control over the treatment(s) of interest. We argue that this methodology is particularly well suited for social psychology because of its focus on social interactions and the factors that influence the nature and structure of these interactions. We provide one detailed example of an online field experiment used to investigate the impact of the sharing economy on trust behavior. We argue that we are fundamentally living in a new social world in which the Internet mediates a growing number of our social interactions. These highly prevalent forms of social interaction create opportunities for the development of new research designs that allow us to advance our theories of social interaction and social structure with new data sources….(More)”.
Networked Governance: New Research Perspectives
Book edited by Betina Hollstein, Wenzel Matiaske and Kai-Uwe Schnapp: “This edited volume seeks to explore established as well as emergent forms of governance by combining social network analysis and governance research. In doing so, contributions take into account the increasingly complex forms which governance faces, consisting of different types of actors (e.g. individuals, states, economic entities, NGOs, IGOs), instruments (e.g. law, suggestions, flexible norms) and arenas from the local up to the global level, and which more and more questions theoretical models that have focused primarily on markets and hierarchies. The topics addressed in this volume are processes of coordination, arriving at and implementing decisions taking place in network(ed) (social) structures; such as governance of work relations, of financial markets, of innovation and politics. These processes are investigated and discussed from sociologists’, political scientists’ and economists’ viewpoints….(More)”.
These Refugees Created Their Own Aid Agency Within Their Resettlement Camp
Michael Thomas at FastCompany: “…“In the refugee camps, we have two things: people and time,” Jackl explained. He and his friends decided that they would organize people to improve the camp. The idea was to solve two problems at once: Give refugees purpose, and make life in the camp better for everyone….
It began with repurposing shipping material. The men noticed that every day, dozens of shipments of food, medicine, and other aid came to their camp. But once the supplies were unloaded, aid workers would throw the pallets away. Meanwhile, people were sleeping in tents that would flood when it rained. So Jackl led an effort to break the pallets down and use the wood to create platforms on which the tents could sit.
Shortly afterwards, they used scrap wood and torn pieces of fabric to build a school, and eventually found a refugee who was a teacher to lead classes. The philosophy was simple and powerful: Use resources that would otherwise go to waste to improve life in their camp. As word spread of their work on social media, Jackl began to receive offers from people who wanted to donate money to his then unofficial cause. “All these people began asking me ‘What can I do? Can I give you money?’ And I’d tell them, ‘Give me materials,’” he said.
“People think that refugees are weak. But they survived war, smugglers, and the camps,” Jackl explains. His mission is to change the refugee image from one of weakness to one of resilience and strength. Core to that is the idea that refugees can help one another instead of relying on aid workers and NGOs, a philosophy that he adopted from an NGO called Jafra that he worked for in Syria…(More)”
Unpaywall
Announcement by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem: “Today we’re launching a new tool to help people read research literature, instead of getting stuck behind paywalls. It’s an extension for Chrome and Firefox that links you to free full-text as you browse research articles. Hit a paywall? No problem: click the green tab and read it free!
The extension is called Unpaywall, and it’s powered by an open index of more than ten million legally-uploaded, open access resources. Reports from our pre-release are great: “Unpaywall found a full-text copy 53% of the time,” reports librarian, Lydia Thorne. Fisheries researcher Lachlan Fetterplace used Unpaywall to find “about 60% of the articles I tested. This one is a great tool and I suspect it will only get better.” And indeed it has! We’re now getting full-text on 85% of 2016’s most-covered research papers.
Unpaywall doesn’t just help researchers, but also people outside academia who don’t enjoy the expensive subscription benefits of institutional libraries. “As someone who runs a non-profit organisation in a developing country this extension is GOLD!” says Nikita Shiel-Rolle. It helps journalists, high school students, practitioners, and, crucially, policymakers, who don’t usually have subscription access to the fact-based research literature. There has never been a time when unlocking facts has been so important. So we’re thrilled that more than 10,000 people from 143 countries have installed the extension already.
The best part is it’s powered by fully legal, free, open access uploads by the authors themselves. More and more funders and universities are requiring authors to upload copies of their papers to institutional and subject repositories. This has created a deep resource of legal open access papers, ripe for building upon….
This month is a great time to appreciate this; there’s amazing OA news everywhere you look:
- PubMed announced institutional repository LinkOut, which links every PubMed article to a free Green copy in institutional repositories, where available. This is huge, since PubMed is one of the world’s most important portals to the research literature
- The Helmsley Charitable Trust awarded ASAPbio $1 million to build a next-generation preprint infrastructure for life sciences, followed later by an NIH announcement that it’ll accept citations to preprints
- The Open Access Button announced a new project to use green OA to meet interlibrary loan requests …(More)”.
Realising the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development: Towards Capacity Development 4.0
Report by Niels Keijzer and Stephan Klingebiel for Paris21: “An ever-deepening data revolution is shaping everyday lives in many parts of the world. As just one of many mindboggling statistics on Big Data, it has been estimated that by the year 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second for every human being on the planet. The benefits of the data revolution extend to different groups of people, social movements, institutions and businesses. Yet many people and countries do not have access to these positive benefits and in richer countries potentially positive changes raise suspicion amongst citizens as well as concerns related to privacy and confidentiality. The availability of potential advantages is, to a large extent, guided by levels of development and income. Despite the rapid spread of mobile phone technology that allows regions otherwise disconnected from the grid to ‘leapfrog’ in terms of using and producing data and statistics, poor people are still less likely to benefit from the dramatic changes in the field of data.
Against the background of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the main challenge for statistics is to manage the data revolution in support of sustainable development. The main priorities are the broadening and deepening of production, dissemination and use of data and statistics, and achieving them requires identifying those population groups which are most vulnerable and making governments more accountable to their citizens. In parallel, the risks accompanying the data revolution need to be mitigated and reduced, including the use of data for purposes of repression or otherwise infringing on the privacy of citizens. In addition to representing a universal agenda that breaks away from the dichotomy of developed and developing countries, the new agenda calls for tailor-made approaches in each country or region concerned, supported by global actions. The 2030 Agenda further states the international community’s realisation of the need to move away from ‘business as usual’ in international support for data and statistics.
The most important driving forces shaping the data revolution are domestic (legal) frameworks and public policies across the globe. This applies not only to wealthier countries but also developing countries2 , and external support cannot compensate for absent domestic leadership and investment. Technical, legal and political factors all affect whether countries are willing and able to succeed in benefiting from the data revolution. However, in both low income countries and lower-middle income countries, and to some extent in upper-middle income countries, we can observe two constraining factors in this regard, capacities and funding. These factors are, to some degree, interrelated: if funding is not sufficiently available it might be difficult to increase the capacities required, and if capacities are insufficient funding issues might be more challenging….(More)”
A How-to Book for Wielding Civic Power
Interview by David Bornstein at the New York Times: “Last year, the RAND Survey Research Group asked 3,037 Americans about their political preferences and found that the factor that best predicted support for Donald Trump wasn’t age, race, gender, income, educational attainment or attitudes toward Muslims or undocumented immigrants. It was whether respondents agreed with the statement “People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.”
A feeling of disenfranchisement, or powerlessness, runs deep in the country — and it’s understandable. For most Americans, wages have been flat for 40 years, while incomes have soared for the superrich. Researchers have found, unsurprisingly, that the preferences of wealthy people have a much bigger influence on policy than those of poor or middle-income people.
“I don’t think people are wrong to feel that the game has been rigged,” says Eric Liu, the author of “You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen,” an engaging and extremely timely book published last week. “But we’re in a period where across the political spectrum — from the libertarian Tea Party right to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter left — people are pushing back and recognizing that the only remedy is to convert this feeling of ‘not having a say’ into ‘demanding a say.’ ”
Liu, who founded Citizen University, a nonprofit citizen participation organization in Seattle, teaches citizens to do just that. He has also traveled the country, searching across the partisan divide for places where citizens are making democracy work better. In his new book, he has assembled stories of citizen action and distilled them into powerful insights and strategies….
Can you explain the three “core laws of power” you outline in the book?
L. No. 1: Power compounds, as does powerlessness. The rich get richer, and people with clout get more clout.
No. 2: Power justifies itself. In a hundred different ways — propaganda, conventional wisdom, just-so stories — people at the top of the hierarchy tell narratives about why it should be so.
If the world stopped with laws No. 1 and 2, we would be stuck in this doom loop that would tip us toward monopoly and tyranny.
What saves us is law No. 3: Power is infinite. I don’t mean we are all equally powerful. I mean simply and quite literally that we can generate power out of thin air. We do that by organizing….(More)”
With great power comes great responsibility: crowdsourcing raises methodological and ethical questions for academia
Isabell Stamm and Lina Eklund at LSE Impact Blog: “Social scientists are expanding the landscape of academic knowledge production by adopting online crowdsourcing techniques used by businesses to design, innovate, and produce. Researchers employ crowdsourcing for a number of tasks, such as taking pictures, writing text, recording stories, or digesting web-based data (tweets, posts, links, etc.). In an increasingly competitive academic climate, crowdsourcing offers researchers a cutting-edge tool for engaging with the public. Yet this socio-technical practice emerged as a business procedure rather than a research method and thus contains many hidden assumptions about the world which concretely affect the knowledge produced. With this comes a problematic reduction of research participants into a single, faceless crowd. This requires a critical assessment of crowdsourcing’s methodological assumptions….(More)”
Governing through Goals
Book edited by Norichika Kanie and Frank Biermann: “In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Sustainable Development Goals as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Sustainable Development Goals built on and broadened the earlier Millennium Development Goals, but they also signaled a larger shift in governance strategies. The seventeen goals add detailed content to the concept of sustainable development, identify specific targets for each goal, and help frame a broader, more coherent, and transformative 2030 agenda. The Sustainable Development Goals aim to build a universal, integrated framework for action that reflects the economic, social, and planetary complexities of the twenty-first century.
This book examines in detail the core characteristics of goal setting, asking when it is an appropriate governance strategy and how it differs from other approaches; analyzes the conditions under which a goal-oriented agenda can enable progress toward desired ends; and considers the practical challenges in implementation….(More)”
The 2017 Connected Citizen Report
Salesforce Research: “To understand how Americans today engage with local and federal government agencies, Salesforce released its “2017 Connected Citizen Report.” The survey was conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of Salesforce, Dec. 9-13, 2016, among 2,057 adults, ages 18 and older, in the United States. The report found that some Americans said their local governments do not provide many general services — such as being able to report a road issue or apply for/submit a business permit — via modern digital channels. In addition, more than half of Americans would be open to their taxpayer money going to research forward-looking technologies for their cities, assuming it is for services they would find helpful. Finally, while most Americans agree they have better experiences communicating with private enterprises than government agencies, many that did engage with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Health and Human Services (HHS) or the Veterans Affairs (VA) in the past 12 months reported positive interactions overall….(More)”
OpenAerialMap
“OpenAerialMap (OAM) is a set of tools for searching, sharing, and using openly licensed satellite and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery.
Built on top of the Open Imagery Network (OIN), OAM is an open service that provides search and access to this imagery…
Use the map to pan and zoom to search available imagery. Imagery can be previewed by selecting a tile and browsing the sidebar. Read the User Guide for more information.
All imagery is publicly licensed and made available through the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s Open Imagery Network (OIN) Node. All imagery contained in OIN is licensed CC-BY 4.0, with attribution as contributors of Open Imagery Network. All imagery is available to be traced in OpenStreetMap.
OAM is available for sharing and distributing aerial imagery. There are plenty of ways to get involved in OpenAerialMap.
Check out the GitHub repository to learn more about the design and how to get involved in the project….(More)”