Disaster recovery’s essential tool: Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Amy Liu and Allison Plyer at Brookings: “To recover from a disaster on the scale of Harvey and Irma requires a massive coordinated effort. Federal, state and local governments must lead. Philanthropy, nonprofits and the private sector will be key partners. Residents will voice their views, through community planning meetings and other venues, on how best to spend disaster-recovery dollars. With so many stakeholders and rebuilding needs, the process of restoring neighborhoods and economic activity will become emotionally and politically charged. As Brock Long, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has already warned in Texas: “This is going to be a frustrating and painful process.”

For public officials to effectively steer a recovery process and for citizens to trust in the effort, reliable, transparent information will be essential. Leaders and the public need a shared understanding of the scale and extent of the damage and which households, businesses and neighborhoods have been affected. This is not a one-time effort. Data must be collected and issued regularly over months and years to match the duration of the rebuilding effort.

Without this information, it will be nearly impossible to estimate the nature of aid required, determine how best to deploy resources, prioritize spending and monitor progress. Rebuilding processes are chaotic, with emotions high over multiple, competing priorities. Credible public information organized in one place can help to neutralize misconceptions, put every need in context and depoliticize decision-making. Most importantly, data on recovery needs also can enable citizen involvement and allow residents to hold public leaders accountable for progress.

We know this first-hand from our experience in New Orleans, where the Brookings Institution and the New Orleans Data Center teamed up to produce what became the New Orleans Index following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We set out to help the public and decision-makers understand the level of outstanding damage in New Orleans and the region and to monitor the extent to which the city was bouncing back….(More)”.

Mapping service design and policy design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UK Policy Lab: “…Over the summer in the Policy Lab we have started mapping different policy options, showing the variety of ways policy-makers might use their power to influence people’s actions and behaviours. We have grouped these into seven categories from low level to large scale interventions.

Carrots or sticks

These styles of intervention include traditional law-making powers (sticks) or applying softer influencing powers (carrots)  such as system stewardship.   In reality policy-making is much more complex than most people imagine.  From this starting point we’ve created a grid of 28 different ways policy-makers operate at different stages of maturity. This is still work in progress so we would very much welcome your thoughts. We are currently building examples for each of the styles from across government.  The design choices for policy-makers early in policy development shape how a policy is delivered and the kind of results that can be achieved. We have played around a lot with the language, and will continue to test this in the Lab.  However, it should be clear from the array of possibilities that determining which course of action, which levers will deliver the outcomes needed, in any particular circumstance requires great skill and judgement…(More)”.

Introducing the Digital Policy Model Canvas

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Stefaan Verhulst: “…Yesterday, the National Digital Policy Network of the World Economic Forum, of which I am a member,  released a White Paper aimed at facilitating this process. The paper, entitled “Digital Policy Playbook 2017: Approaches to National Digital Governance,”  examines a number of case studies from around the world to develop a “playbook” that can help leaders in designing digital policies that maximize the forthcoming opportunities and effectively meet the challenges. It is the result of a series of extensive discussions and consultations held around the world, over , and attended by leading experts from various sectors and geographies…..

How can such insights be translated into a practical and pragmatic approach to policymaking? In order to find implementable solutions, we sought to develop a “Digital Policy Model Canvas” that would guide policy makers to derive specific policies and regulatory mechanisms in an agile and iterative manner – integrating both design thinking and evidence based policy making. This notion of a canvas is borrowed from the business world. For example, in Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur introduce the idea of a “Business Model Canvas” to generate new, innovative business models that can help companies–and others–go beyond legacy systems and approaches.

Applying this approach to the world of digital policymaking and innovation, we arrive at the “Digital Policy Model Canvas” represented in the accompanying figure.

Screen Shot 2017-09-22 at 6.08.24 AM

The design and implementation of such a canvas can be applied to a specific problem and/or geographic context, and would include the following steps…(More)”.

Storm Crowds: Evidence from Zooniverse on Crowd Contribution Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sandra Barbosu and Joshua S. Gans: “Crowdsourcing – a collaborative form of content production based on the contributions of large groups of individuals – has proliferated in the past decade. As a result, recent research seeks to understand the factors that affect its sustainability. Prior studies have highlighted the importance of volunteers’ prosocial motivations, the sense of belonging to a community, and symbolic rewards within crowdsourcing websites. One factor that has received limited attention in the existing literature is how the design of crowdsourcingplatforms affects their sustainability.

We study whether the design element – particularly, the divisibility of contributions (i.e. whether contributing tasks are bundled together or can be carried out separately) – is a factor that affects the level and quality of crowdsourcing contributions. We investigate this in the context of Zooniverse, the world’s largest crowdsourced science site, in which volunteers contribute to scientific research by performing data processing tasks. Our choice of empirical setting is motivated by the fact that one of the Zooniverse projects, Cyclone Center, underwent a format change that decreased the divisibility of contributions, by bundling together two tasks that were previously separate. We refer to contributions for which both tasks were done as complete, and contributions for which only one task was done as incomplete. In this context, we develop a theoretical model that predicts (i) a positive relationship between contribution divisibility and the total number of contributions (i.e. complete and incomplete) per volunteer, (ii) an ambiguous relationship between contribution divisibility and the number of complete contributions per volunteer, and (iii) an ambiguous relationship between contribution divisibility and the value of complete contributions. We test these predictions empirically by exploiting the format change in Cyclone Center.

We find that after the format change, which decreased contribution divisibility, (i) the total number of contributions per volunteer decreased, (ii) the number of complete contributions made by anonymous volunteers increased, while that made by registered volunteers remained unchanged, and (iii) the value of complete contributions increased because anonymous volunteers, who increased their number of complete contributions, contributed high quality contributions. Our results have strategic implications for crowdsourcing platforms because they suggest that the design of crowdsourcing platforms, specifically the divisibility of contributions, is a factor that matters for their sustainability….(More)”

Google Gets Serious About Mapping Wheelchair Accessibility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Linda Poon at CityLab: “If there’s one thing Google’s got at its disposal, it’s a global army of avid map users. Now the company is leveraging that power to make its Maps feature more useful for people with mobility challenges—a group that often gets overlooked in the world of transit and urban innovation.

Google Maps already indicates if a location is wheelchair accessible—a result of a personal project by one of its employees—but its latest campaign will crowdsource data from its 30 million Local Guides worldwide, who contribute tips and photos about neighborhood establishments in exchange for points and small prizes like extra digital storage space. The company is calling on them to answer five simple questions—like whether a building has accessible entrances or bathrooms—when they submit a review for a location. In the coming weeks, Google will host workshops and “geowalks” specifically focused on mobility across seven cities, from New York City and London to Tokyo and Surabaya, Indonesia.

“The [users] have multiple motivations, and one is wanting to help their own community get around.” says Laura Slabin, Google’s director of local content and community. “So we’re leveraging the fact that people are motivated by altruism.”

But as simple as the questions seem—Is there wheelchair-accessible seating? or Is there a wheelchair-accessible elevator?—answering them requires careful attention to detail. That’s why Google even sent out a  nifty tip sheet to help its physically abled members answer those questions….(More)”.

Why Information Matters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Luciano Floridi in Special Issue of Atlantis on Information, Matter and Life: “…As information technologies come to affect all areas of life, they are becoming implicated in our most important problems — their causes, effects, and solutions, the scientific investigations aimed at explaining them, the concepts created to understand them, the means of discussing them, and even, as in the case of Bill Gates, the wealth required to tackle them.

Furthermore, information technologies don’t just modify how we act in the world; they also profoundly affect how we understand the world, how we relate to it, how we see ourselves, how we interact with each other, and how our hopes for a better future are shaped. All these are old philosophical issues, of course, but we must now consider them anew, with the concept of information as a central concern.

This means that if philosophers are to help enable humanity to make sense of our world and to improve it responsibly, information needs to be a significant field of philosophical study. Among our mundane and technical concepts, information is currently not only one of the most important and widely used, but also one of the least understood. We need a philosophy of information.

How to Ask a Question

In the fall of 1999, NASA lost radio contact with its Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million weather satellite that had been launched the year before. In a maneuver to enter the spacecraft into orbit around Mars, the trajectory had put the spacecraft far closer to Mars than planned, so that it directly entered the planet’s atmosphere, where it probably disintegrated. The reason for this unhappy event was that for a particular software file, the Lockheed Martin engineering team had used English (imperial) units of measurement instead of the metric units specified by the agency, whose trajectory modelers assumed the data they were looking at was provided in metric.

This incident illustrates a simple lesson: successful cooperation depends on an agreement between all parties that the information being exchanged is fixed at a specified level. Wrongly assuming that everyone will follow the rules that specify the level — for example, that impulse will be expressed not as pound-seconds (the English unit) but as newton-seconds (the metric unit) — can lead to costly mistakes. Even though this principle may seem obvious, it is one of the most valuable contributions that philosophy can offer to our understanding of information. This is because, as we will see, failing to specify a level at which we ask a given philosophical question can be the reason for deep confusions and useless answers. Another simple example will help to illustrate the problem…(More)”

Reclaiming personal data for the common good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Theo Bass at Nesta: “…The argument of our new report for DECODE is that more of the social value of personal data can be discovered by tools and platforms that give people the power to decide how their data is used. We need to flip the current model on its head, giving people back full control and respecting our data protection and fundamental rights framework.

The report describes how this might pave the way for a fairer distribution of the value generated by data, while opening up new use-cases that are valuable to government, society and individuals themselves. In order to achieve this vision, the DECODE project will develop and test the following:

Flexible rules to give people full control:  There is currently a lack of  technical and legal norms that would allow people to control and share data on their own terms. If this were possible, then people might be able to share their data for the public good, or publish it as anonymised open data under specific conditions, or for specific use-cases (say, non-commercial purposes). DECODE is working with the Making Sense project and Barcelona City Council to assist local communities with new forms of citizen sensing. The pilots will tackle the challenges of collating, storing and sharing data anonymously to influence policy on the city’s digital democracy platform Decidim (part of the D-CENT toolkit).

Trusted platforms to realise the collective value of data: Much of the opportunity will only be realised where individuals are able to pool their data together to leverage its potential economic and social value. Platform cooperatives offer a feasible model, highlighting the potential of digital technologies to help members collectively govern themselves. Effective data sharing has to be underpinned by high levels of user trust, and platform co-ops achieve this by embedding openness, respect for individual users’ privacy, and democratic participation over how decisions are made. DECODE is working with two platform co-ops – a neighbourhood social networking site called Gebied Online; and a democratic alternative to Airbnb in Amsterdam called FairBnB – to test new privacy-preserving features and granular data sharing options….(More)”

A Guide to Tactical Data Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sunlight Foundation Press Release: “A Guide to Tactical Data Engagement is a brand new resource released today designed to help city leaders and residents collaborate on increasing the social impact of open government data. Based on the core concepts of human-centered design and tactical urbanism, this approach challenges city halls to make open data programs more transparent, accountable, and participatory by actively helping residents use open government data to improve their communities.

The new guide outlines a four-step process to help readers complete a resident-informed project, product, or tool that addresses a specific community need:

  • Find a focus area by observing the community
  • Refine use cases by interviewing stakeholders
  • Design a plan by coordinating with target users
  • Implement an intervention by collaborating with actual users

Readers can carry out each of these steps “tactically” — using lightweight, adaptable, and inexpensive tactics that can realistically fit within a city hall’s or community’s unique constraints and capacities. The tactics are drawn from examples of good resident engagement around the country, and ensure that in every step, residents are collaborators in determining promising opportunities for impact through the community use of open government data.

Read the new guide to see the full process, including specific ideas at each step of the way to help your community come together and use open data to solve problems, together….”

We Shouldn’t Always Need a “Business Case” to Do the Right Thing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alison Taylor in Harvard Business Review: “I’ve been a consultant for almost 20 years, advising companies on complex challenges in ethics, risk, and responsibility. Each year several clients raise the same issue: the need to get buy-in from a skeptical senior executive in order to demonstrate a concrete benefit that will follow a proposed investment in an ethical business initiative or function. The executive needs a business case. And so I get asked questions like “What evidence can I provide that doing the right thing will make or save a company money?” and “How can I persuade the organization that embracing integrity is a win-win?”…

After all, there is also a business case for tax avoidance, deregulation, and even higher death rates.The problem is that our obsession with making the business case for ethics makes us sound apologetic and hollow.In this context, isn’t the business case a bit reductive?. On the other hand, senior executives often respond enthusiastically to the potential of business integrity to provide an inspirational narrative….(More)”.

Humanizing technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kaliya Young at Open Democracy: “Can we use the internet to enhance deep human connection and support the emergence of thriving communities in which everyone’s needs are met and people’s lives are filled with joy and meaning?….

Our work on ‘technical’ technologies won’t generate broad human gains unless we invest an equal amount of time, energy and resources in the development of social and emotional technologies that drive how our whole society is organized and how we work together. I think we are actually on the cusp of having the tools, understanding and infrastructure to make that happen, without all our ideas and organizing being intermediated by giant corporations. But what does that mean in practice?

I think two things are absolutely vital.

First of all, how do we connect all the people and all the groups that want to align their goals in pursuit of social justice, deep democracy, and the development of new economies that share wealth and protect the environment? How are people supported to protect their own autonomy while also working with multiple other groups in processes of joint work and collective action?

One key element of the answer to that question is to generate a digital identity that is not under the control of a corporation, an organization or a government.

I have been co-leading the community surrounding the Internet Identity Workshop for the last 12 years. After many explorations of the techno-possibility landscape we have finally made some breakthroughs that will lay the foundations of a real internet-scale infrastructure to support what are called ‘user-centric’ or ‘self-sovereign’ identities.

This infrastructure consists of a network with two different types of nodes—people and organizations—with each individual being able to join lots of different groups. But regardless of how many groups they join, people will need a digital identity that is not owned by Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Google or Facebook. That’s the only way they will be able to control their own autonomous interactions on the internet. If open standards are not created for this critical piece of infrastructure then we will end up in a future where giant corporations control all of our identities. In many ways we are in this future now.

This is where something called ‘Shared Ledger Technology’ or SLT comes in—more commonly known as ‘blockchain’ or ‘distributed ledger technology.’  SLT represents a huge innovation in terms of databases that can be read by anyone and which are highly resistant to tampering—meaning that data cannot be erased or changed once entered. At the moment there’s a lot of work going on to design the encryption key management that’s necessary to support the creation and operation of these unique private channels of connection and communication between individuals and organizations. The Sovrin Foundation has built an SLT specifically for digital identity key management, and has donated the code required to the HyperLeger Foundation under ‘project Indy.’…

To put it simply, technical technologies are easier to turn in the direction of democracy and social justice if they are developed and applied with social and emotional intelligence. Combining all three together is the key to using technology for liberating ends….(More)”.