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)”
Political behaviour and the acoustics of social media
Helen Margetts in Nature: “Social networks are not a new phenomenon — people have always associated with like-minded others — but the advent of social media has led to a vast increase in the amount of social information that we see. We need data and experiments to understand how this information shapes our political landscape…(More)”
Crowdmapping as a new data source for journalists
Ana Brandusescu and Renée Sieber in Data Driven Journalism: “Crowdsourced data, especially for mapping, is a boon for data driven journalism. In 2015, Nepal’s earthquake was mapped in an astounding 48 hours. The number of volunteers increased to over 2,400 mappers, most of them international, a number that increased exponentially from the initial range of seven to 100 mapping volunteers present before the earthquake occurred.
A significant use of crowdsourced data for mapping, or crowdmapping, is to inform crisis responses like the Nepal earthquake by providing a medium for citizens to communicate with one another and with those seeking to help victims. The benefits to affected peoples are immediate information sharing and visualization of dire and urgent events. These apps have the ability to fill information gaps and even provide aid for disaster victims. Volunteers from across the globe also can contribute to crowdsource entire maps of post-disaster road infrastructures and refugee sites. As a platform and medium, crisis mapping has become so popular that it is increasingly replacing traditional mapping methods for humanitarian emergencies. This is also a huge benefit to journalists as they demonstrate connectivity between open source software, humanitarian crises, and crowdsourcing. According to the Tow Center’s Guide to Crowdsourcing, “Crowdsourcing allows newsrooms to build audience entry points at every stage of the journalistic process—from story assigning, to pre-data collection, to data mining, to sharing specialized expertise, to collecting personal experiences and continuing post-story conversations”….
But let’s get real. Crowdsourced apps have a highly nuanced and complex process with many problems. Here’s five points.
1. Some crises are sexier than others…
2. These apps are far from being zero-cost…
3. Participant engagement is opaque…
4. The problem with “disruption” as a transformative tech…
5. The technical literacy of journalists… (More)
This article is based on the authors’ research article “Confronting the hype: The use of crisis mapping for community development”. Read the full article here.
Welcome to E-Estonia, the tiny nation that’s leading Europe in digital innovation
The Conversation: “Big Brother does “just want to help” – in Estonia, at least. In this small nation of 1.3 million people, citizens have overcome fears of an Orwellian dystopia with ubiquitous surveillance to become a highly digital society.
The government took nearly all its services online in 2003 with the e-Estonia State Portal. The country’s innovative digital governance was not the result of a carefully crafted master plan, it was a pragmatic and cost-efficient response to budget limitations.
It helped that citizens trusted their politicians after Estonia regained independence in 1991. And, in turn, politicians trusted the country’s engineers, who had no commitment to legacy hardware or software systems, to build something new.
This proved to be a winning formula that can now benefit all the European countries.
The once-only principle
With its digital governance, Estonia introduced the “once-only” principle, mandating that the state is not allowed to ask citizens for the same information twice.
In other words, if you give your address or a family member’s name to the census bureau, the health insurance provider will not later ask you for it again. No department of any government agency can make citizens repeat information already stored in their database or that of some other agency….The once-only principle has been such a big success that, based on Estonia’s common-sense innovation, the EU enacted a digital Once Only Principle and Initiative early this year. It ensures that “citizens and businesses supply certain standard information only once, because public administration offices take action to internally share this data, so that no additional burden falls on citizens and businesses.”…
‘Twice-mandatory’ principle
Governments should always be brainstorming, asking themselves, for example, if one government agency needs this information, who else might benefit from it? And beyond need, what insights could we glean from this data?
Financier Vernon Hill introduced an interesting “One to Say YES, Two to Say NO” rule when founding Metro Bank UK: “It takes only one person to make a yes decision, but it requires two people to say no. If you’re going to turn away business, you need a second check for that.”
Imagine how simple and powerful a policy it would be if governments learnt this lesson. What if every bit of information collected from citizens or businesses had to be used for two purposes (at least!) or by two agencies in order to merit requesting it?
The Estonian Tax and Customs Board is, perhaps unexpectedly given the reputation of tax offices, an example of the potential for such a paradigm shift. In 2014, it launched a new strategy to address tax fraud, requiring every business transaction of over €1,000 to be declared monthly by the entities involved.
To minimise the administrative burden of this, the government introduced an application-programming interface that allows information to be automatically exchanged between the company’s accounting software and the state’s tax system.
Though there was some negative push back in the media at the beginning by companies and former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves even vetoed the initial version of the act, the system was a spectacular success. Estonia surpassed its original estimate of €30 million in reduced tax fraud by more than twice.
Latvia, Spain, Belgium, Romania, Hungary and several others have taken a similar path for controlling and detecting tax fraud. But analysing this data beyond fraud is where the real potential is hidden….(More).”
Openness as social praxis
Matthew Longshore Smith and Ruhiya Seward in First Monday: “Since the early 2000s, there has been an explosion in the usage of the term open, arguably stemming from the advent of networked technologies — including the Internet and mobile technologies. ‘Openness’ seems to be everywhere, and takes many forms: from open knowledge, open education, open data and open science, to open Internet, open medical records systems and open innovation. These applications of openness are having a profound, and sometimes transformative, effect on social, political and economic life.
This explosion of the use of the term has led to multiple interpretations, ambiguities, and even misunderstandings, not to mention countless debates and disagreements over precise definitions. The paper “Fifty shades of open” by Pomerantz and Peek (2016) highlighted the increasing ambiguity and even confusion surrounding this term. This article builds on Pomerantz and Peek’s attempt to disambiguate the term by offering an alternative understanding to openness — that of social praxis. More specifically, our framing can be broken down into three social processes: open production, open distribution, and open consumption. Each process shares two traits that make them open: you don’t have to pay (free price), and anyone can participate (non-discrimination) in these processes.
We argue that conceptualizing openness as social praxis offers several benefits. First, it provides a way out of a variety of problems that result from ambiguities and misunderstandings that emerge from the current multitude of uses of openness. Second, it provides a contextually sensitive understanding of openness that allows space for the many different ways openness is experienced — often very different from the way that more formal definitions conceptualize it. Third, it points us towards an approach to developing practice-specific theory that we believe helps us build generalizable knowledge on what works (or not), for whom, and in what contexts….(More)”.
Ten simple rules for responsible big data research
Matthew Zook et al in PLOS Computational Biology: “The use of big data research methods has grown tremendously over the past five years in both academia and industry. As the size and complexity of available datasets has grown, so too have the ethical questions raised by big data research. These questions become increasingly urgent as data and research agendas move well beyond those typical of the computational and natural sciences, to more directly address sensitive aspects of human behavior, interaction, and health. The tools of big data research are increasingly woven into our daily lives, including mining digital medical records for scientific and economic insights, mapping relationships via social media, capturing individuals’ speech and action via sensors, tracking movement across space, shaping police and security policy via “predictive policing,” and much more.
The beneficial possibilities for big data in science and industry are tempered by new challenges facing researchers that often lie outside their training and comfort zone. Social scientists now grapple with data structures and cloud computing, while computer scientists must contend with human subject protocols and institutional review boards (IRBs). While the connection between individual datum and actual human beings can appear quite abstract, the scope, scale, and complexity of many forms of big data creates a rich ecosystem in which human participants and their communities are deeply embedded and susceptible to harm. This complexity challenges any normative set of rules and makes devising universal guidelines difficult.
Nevertheless, the need for direction in responsible big data research is evident, and this article provides a set of “ten simple rules” for addressing the complex ethical issues that will inevitably arise. Modeled on PLOS Computational Biology’s ongoing collection of rules, the recommendations we outline involve more nuance than the words “simple” and “rules” suggest. This nuance is inevitably tied to our paper’s starting premise: all big data research on social, medical, psychological, and economic phenomena engages with human subjects, and researchers have the ethical responsibility to minimize potential harm….
- Acknowledge that data are people and can do harm
- Recognize that privacy is more than a binary value
- Guard against the reidentification of your data
- Practice ethical data sharing
- Consider the strengths and limitations of your data; big does not automatically mean better
- Debate the tough, ethical choices
- Develop a code of conduct for your organization, research community, or industry
- Design your data and systems for auditability
- Engage with the broader consequences of data and analysis practices
- Know when to break these rules…(More)”
What Algorithms Want
Book by Ed Finn: “We depend on—we believe in—algorithms to help us get a ride, choose which book to buy, execute a mathematical proof. It’s as if we think of code as a magic spell, an incantation to reveal what we need to know and even what we want. Humans have always believed that certain invocations—the marriage vow, the shaman’s curse—do not merely describe the world but make it. Computation casts a cultural shadow that is shaped by this long tradition of magical thinking. In this book, Ed Finn considers how the algorithm—in practical terms, “a method for solving a problem”—has its roots not only in mathematical logic but also in cybernetics, philosophy, and magical thinking.
Finn argues that the algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in a messy reality, with unpredictable and sometimes fascinating results. Drawing on sources that range from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, from Adam Smith to the Star Trek computer, Finn explores the gap between theoretical ideas and pragmatic instructions. He examines the development of intelligent assistants like Siri, the rise of algorithmic aesthetics at Netflix, Ian Bogost’s satiric Facebook game Cow Clicker, and the revolutionary economics of Bitcoin. He describes Google’s goal of anticipating our questions, Uber’s cartoon maps and black box accounting, and what Facebook tells us about programmable value, among other things.
If we want to understand the gap between abstraction and messy reality, Finn argues, we need to build a model of “algorithmic reading” and scholarship that attends to process, spearheading a new experimental humanities….(More)”