Essays on collective intelligence


Thesis by Yiftach Nagar: “This dissertation consists of three essays that advance our understanding of collective-intelligence: how it works, how it can be used, and how it can be augmented. I combine theoretical and empirical work, spanning qualitative inquiry, lab experiments, and design, exploring how novel ways of organizing, enabled by advancements in information technology, can help us work better, innovate, and solve complex problems.

The first essay offers a collective sensemaking model to explain structurational processes in online communities. I draw upon Weick’s model of sensemaking as committed-interpretation, which I ground in a qualitative inquiry into Wikipedia’s policy discussion pages, in attempt to explain how structuration emerges as interpretations are negotiated, and then committed through conversation. I argue that the wiki environment provides conditions that help commitments form, strengthen and diffuse, and that this, in turn, helps explain trends of stabilization observed in previous research.

In the second essay, we characterize a class of semi-structured prediction problems, where patterns are difficult to discern, data are difficult to quantify, and changes occur unexpectedly. Making correct predictions under these conditions can be extremely difficult, and is often associated with high stakes. We argue that in these settings, combining predictions from humans and models can outperform predictions made by groups of people, or computers. In laboratory experiments, we combined human and machine predictions, and find the combined predictions more accurate and more robust than predictions made by groups of only people or only machines.

The third essay addresses a critical bottleneck in open-innovation systems: reviewing and selecting the best submissions, in settings where submissions are complex intellectual artifacts whose evaluation require expertise. To aid expert reviewers, we offer a computational approach we developed and tested using data from the Climate CoLab – a large citizen science platform. Our models approximate expert decisions about the submissions with high accuracy, and their use can save review labor, and accelerate the review process….(More)”

Obama Brought Silicon Valley to Washington


Jenna Wortham at The New York Times: “…“Fixing” problems with technology often just creates more problems, largely because technology is never developed in a neutral way: It embodies the values and biases of the people who create it. Crime-predicting software, celebrated when it was introduced in police departments around the country, turned out to reinforce discriminatory policing. Facebook was recently accused of suppressing conservative news from its trending topics. (The company denied a bias, but announced plans to train employees to neutralize political, racial, gender and age biases that could influence what it shows its user base.) Several studies have found that Airbnb has worsened the housing crises in some cities where it operates. In January, a report from the World Bank declared that tech companies were widening income inequality and wealth disparities, not improving them….

None of this was mentioned at South by South Lawn. Instead, speakers heralded the power of the tech community. John Lewis, the congressman and civil rights leader, gave a rousing talk that implored listeners to “get in trouble. Good trouble. Get in the way and make some noise.” Clay Dumas, chief of staff for the Office of Digital Strategy at the White House, told me in an email that the event could be considered part of a legacy to inspire social change and activism through technology. “In his final months in office,” he wrote, “President Obama wants to empower the generation of people that helped launch his candidacy and whose efforts carried him into office.”

…But a few days later, during a speech at Carnegie Mellon, Obama seemed to reckon with his feelings about the potential — and limits — of the tech world. The White House can’t be as freewheeling as a start-up, he said, because “by definition, democracy is messy. And part of government’s job is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.” But he added that he didn’t want people to become “discouraged and say, ‘I’m just not going to deal with government.’ ” Obama was the first American president to see technology as an engine to improve lives and accelerate society more quickly than any government body could. That lesson was apparent on the lawn. While I still don’t believe that technology is a panacea for society’s problems, I will always appreciate the first president who tried to bring what’s best about Silicon Valley to Washington, even if some of the bad came with it….(More)”

100 Stories: The Impact of Open Access


Report by Jean-Gabriel Bankier and Promita Chatterji: “It is time to reassess how we talk about the impact of open access. Early thought leaders in the field of scholarly communications sparked our collective imagination with a compelling vision for open access: improving global access to knowledge, advancing science, and providing greater access to education.1 But despite the fact that open access has gained a sizable foothold, discussions about the impact of open access are often still stuck at the level of aspirational or potential benefit. Shouldn’t we be able to gather real examples of positive outcomes to demonstrate the impact of open access? We need to get more concrete. Measurements like

Measurements like altmetrics and download counts provide useful data about usage, but remain largely indicators of early-level interest rather actual outcomes and benefits. There has been considerable research into how open access affects citation counts,2 but beyond that discussion there is still a gap between the hypothetical societal good of open access and the minutiae of usage and interest measurements. This report begins to bridge that gap by presenting a framework, drawn from 100 real stories that describe the impact of open access. Collected by bepress from across 500 institutions and 1400 journals using Digital Commons as their publishing and/or institutional repository platform, these stories present information about actual outcomes, benefits, and impacts.

This report brings to light the wide variety of scholarly and cultural activity that takes place on university campuses and the benefit resulting from greater visibility and access to these materials. We hope that administrators, authors, students, and others will be empowered to articulate and amplify the impact of their own work. We also created the framework to serve as a tool for stakeholders who are interested in advocating for open access on their campus yet lack the specific vocabulary and suitable examples. Whether it is a librarian hoping to make the case for open access with reluctant administrators or faculty, a faculty member who wants to educate students about changing modes of publishing, a funding agency looking for evidence in support of its open access requirement, or students advocating for educational affordability, the framework and stories themselves can be a catalyst for these endeavors. Put more simply, these are 100 stories to answer the question: “why does open access matter?”…(More)”

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Show, Don’t Tell


on Alberto Cairo, Power BI & the rise of data journalism for Microsoft Stories: “From the election of Pope Francis to the passing of Nelson Mandela to Miley Cyrus’ MTV #twerk heard ’round the world, 2013 was full of big headlines and viral hits. Yet The New York Times’ top story of the year was the humble result of a vocabulary survey of 350,000 randomly selected Americans conducted by a then-intern at the paper.

Instead of presenting these findings in a written article, “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” achieved breakout success as an interactive data visualization. It asked readers 25 questions such as “How would you address a group of two or more people?” or “How do you pronounce ‘aunt’?” and then heat-mapped their responses to the most similar regional dialect in the U.S. The interactivity and colorful visuals transmuted survey data into a fun, insightful tour through the contours of contemporary AmericanEnglish.

Visualization no longer just complements a written story. It is the story. In our increasingly data-driven world, visualization is becoming an essential tool for journalists from national papers to blogs with a staff of one.

I recently spent two days discussing the state of data journalism with Alberto Cairo, the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami. While he stressed the importance of data visualization for efficient communication and audience engagement, Cairo argued that “Above all else, visualizations — when done right — are a vehicle of clarification and truth.”…(More)”

Kenyans have launched a campaign on Twitter to fix their roads


Lily Kuo in Quartz: “Traffic is a problem in Nairobi. A short commute can last for hours during morning or evening rush hour. Buses and motorbikes cut in and out of traffic, worsening congestion. It’s estimated that road congestion costs Kenya’s capital as much as $570,000 a day in lost productivity.

One of the reasons for the city’s bad traffic is the state of the roads: drivers swerve to avoid potholes, bumps, or breaks in the roads, causing a buildup of traffic. To help, an online campaign called “What is a Road” is crowdsourcing the location and condition of potholes around the city in an effort to push local officials to fix them.

Nairobians tweet a photo and location of a pothole under the hashtag #whatisaroad. Those reports are uploaded to a map, used to analyze where the city’s potholes are located and track which ones have been fixed. “We decided to take a more data driven approach to track progress, promises made and projects delivered,” says Muthuri Kinyamu, one of the organizers.

A map showing crowdsourced reports of potholes across Nairobi. (What Is a Road)

The campaign is also about addressing some of the fundamental problems that hold cities like Nairobi back. In Nairobi, branded the center of “Silicon Savannah” in recent years, there’s often more focus on entrepreneurship and innovation than resolving simpler problems like the state of the roads. …The

The campaign, started in August, will continue until January. Chris Orwa, a data analyst helping with the project, says that they can’t take credit for all the repairs they have been documented around the city, but they have noticed that roads are being fixed within days of a #Whatisaroad report. The average response time for fixing a road reported by a What is a Road user is three days, according to Orwa….(More)”

Supporting Collaborative Political Decision Making: An Interactive Policy Process Visualization System


Paper by Tobias Ruppert et al: “The process of political decision making is often complex and tedious. The policy process consists of multiple steps, most of them are highly iterative. In addition, different stakeholder groups are involved in political decision making and contribute to the process. A series of textual documents accompanies the process. Examples are official documents, discussions, scientific reports, external reviews, newspaper articles, or economic white papers. Experts from the political domain report that this plethora of textual documents often exceeds their ability to keep track of the entire policy process. We present PolicyLine, a visualization system that supports different stakeholder groups in overview-and-detail tasks for large sets of textual documents in the political decision making process. In a longitudinal design study conducted together with domain experts in political decision making, we identified missing analytical functionality on the basis of a problem and domain characterization. In an iterative design phase, we created PolicyLine in close collaboration with the domain experts. Finally, we present the results of three evaluation rounds, and reflect on our collaborative visualization system….(More)”

There isn’t always an app for that: How tech can better assist refugees


Alex Glennie and Meghan Benton at Nesta: “Refugees are natural innovators. Often armed with little more than a smartphone, they must be adaptable and inventive if they are to navigate unpredictable, dangerous environments and successfully establish themselves in a new country.

Take Mojahed Akil, a young Syrian computer science student whose involvement in street protests in Aleppo brought him to the attention – and torture chambers – of the regime. With the support of his family, Mojahed was able to move across the border to the relative safety of Gaziantep, a city in southwest Turkey. Yet once he was there, he found it very difficult to communicate with those around him (most of whom only spoke Turkish but not Arabic or English) and to access essential information about laws, regulations and local services.

To overcome these challenges, Mojahed used his software training to develop a free smartphone app and website for Syrians living in Turkey. The Gherbetna platform offers both information (for example, about job listings) and connections (through letting users ask for help from the app’s community of contributors). Since its launch in 2014, it is estimated that Gherbetna has been downloaded by more than 50,000 people.

Huge efforts, but mixed results

Over the last 18 months, an explosion of creativity and innovation from tech entrepreneurs has tried to make life better for refugees. A host of new tools and resources now exists to support refugees along every stage of their journey. Our new report for the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration explores some of these tools trying to help refugees integrate, and examines how policymakers can support the best new initiatives.

Our report finds that the speed of this ‘digital humanitarianism’ has been a double-edged sword, with a huge amount of duplication in the sector and some tools failing to get off the ground. ‘Failing fast’ might be a badge of honour in Silicon Valley, but what are the risks if vulnerable refugees rely on an app that disappears from one day to the next?

For example, consider Migreat, a ‘skyscanner for migration’, which pivoted at the height of the refugee crisis to become an asylum information app. Its selling point was that it was obsessively updated by legal experts, so users could trust the information — and rely less on smugglers or word of mouth. At its peak, Migreat had two million users a month, but according to an interview with Josephine Goube (one of the cofounders of the initiative) funding challenges meant the platform had to fold. Its digital presence still exists, but is no longer being updated, a ghost of February 2016.

Perhaps an even greater challenge is that few of these apps were designed with refugees, so many do not meet their needs. Creating an app to help refugees navigate local services is a bit like putting a sticking plaster on a deep wound: it doesn’t solve the problem that most services, and especially digital services, are not attuned to refugee needs. Having multilingual, up-to-date and easy-to-navigate government websites might be more helpful.

A new ‘digital humanitarianism’…(More)”

‘Good Nudge Lullaby’: Choice Architecture and Default Bias Reinforcement


Thomas De Haan and Jona Linde in The Economic Journal: “Because people disproportionally follow defaults, both libertarian paternalists and marketers try to present options they want to promote as the default. However, setting certain defaults and thereby influencing current decisions, may also affect choices in later, similar decisions. In this paper we explore experimentally whether the default bias can be reinforced by providing good defaults. We show that people who faced better defaults in the past are more likely to follow defaults than people who faced random defaults, hurting their later performance. This malleability of the default bias explains certain marketing practices and serves as an insight for libertarian paternalists….(More)”

Improving Services—At What Cost? Examining the Ethics of Twitter Research


Case study by Sara Mannheimer, Scott W. H. Young and Doralyn Rossmann: “As social media use has become widespread, academic and corporate researchers have identified social networking services as sources of detailed information about people’s viewpoints and behaviors. Social media users share thoughts, have conversations, and build communities in open, online spaces, and researchers analyze social media data for a variety of purposes—from tracking the spread of disease (Lampos & Cristianini, 2010) to conducting market research (Patino, Pitta, & Quinones, 2012; Hornikx & Hendriks, 2015) to forecasting elections (Tumasjan et al., 2010). Twitter in particular has emerged as a leading platform for social media research, partly because user data from non-private Twitter accounts is openly accessible via an application programming interface (API). This case study describes research conducted by Montana State University (MSU) librarians to analyze the MSU Library’s Twitter community, and the ethical questions that we encountered over the course of the research. The case study will walk through our Twitter research at the MSU Library, and then suggest discussion questions to frame an ethical conversation surrounding social media research. We offer a number of areas of ethical inquiry that we recommend be engaged with as a cohesive whole….(More)”.

Open parliament policy applied to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies


Paper by  &   in The Journal of Legislative Studies:”…analyse the implementation of an open parliament policy that is taking place at the Chamber of Deputies, in accordance with the guidelines of the Open Government Partnership international programme (OGP), regarding the action plan of the Opening Parliament Work Group in particular, one of the subgroups of OGP. The authors will evaluate two blocks of initiatives for open parliaments executed by the Chamber in the last few years, that is, digital participation in the legislative process and Transparency 2.0, in order to observe their impasses and results obtained until now. In the first part the authors will study the e-Democracy portal and in the second part the authors will focus on open data, collaborative activities to use those data (hackathons) and the creation of the Hacker Lab, a permanent space dedicated to open parliament practices. The analysis considers the initiatives that the authors evaluated as part of the transformative and arena profiles of the Brazilian Parliament, according to Polsby’s classification, with exclusive characteristics…. (More)”

See also Hacking Parliament