Collection

First They Got Sick, Then They Moved Into a Virtual Utopia

Curated on February 17, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kristen French at BackChannel: “…Today, Second Life is mostly forgotten by the broader public. An estimated 800,000 users are active on a monthly basis, according to Second Life parent company Linden Lab. That’s tiny compared to the 1.86 billion users who are active on Facebook each month.

Yet some communities have quietly continued to thrive in the virtual world. One of these is the disability community, a sundry group whose members include people who are blind or deaf, people with emotional handicaps such as autism and PTSD, and people with conditions that limit their mobility, such as Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy, and multiple sclerosis. There are no official tallies of their numbers, but Wagner James Au, who has written extensively about Second Life, estimates they may account for roughly 20 percent of users. Some active members estimate the number higher — at as much as 50 percent.

Unlike traditional gaming, Second Life is governed by few rules. Residents can customize their avatars in an infinite number of ways. They can fly and teleport as easily as they can walk, run, and jump. They can build bespoke homes and islands almost from scratch, and buy and sell wares in virtual stores — from biker gear to bird song to the ability to swim like a mermaid. They can marry a Second Life lover, take a rocket to the moon, or simply tuck themselves into bed at night.

For many disabled residents, who may spend 12 hours a day or more in Second Life, the most important moments and relationships of their lives happen inside the virtual world. For them, the fevered fantasies of a decade ago have become reality: Second Life is where they live.

Second Life’s largest community of disabled residents is clustered on Virtual Ability Island, which is actually an archipelago of five islands — two public and three “residential,” where people can rent or buy homes. It’s the creation of a woman named Alice Krueger. In 2007, Krueger joined Second Life with a few disabled friends she knew from online chat groups.

At the time, she was becoming more isolated as her multiple sclerosis progressed. She’d lost her job, had to drop her volunteer work, and couldn’t even attend her children’s school events. Her friends had stopped coming to see her. She was 58….

As Fran and Barbara tell it, the more time Fran spent in Second Life, the younger she felt in real life. Watching her avatar hike trails and dance gave her the confidence to try things in the physical world that she hadn’t tried in a half decade — like stepping off a curb or standing up without any help. These were small victories, but they felt significant to Fran.

Fran’s story began to spread after Draxtor, a Second Life video artist, filmed a Youtube video about her. (His “World Makers” video series profiles the people behind the avatars in Second Life.) In the film, Fran recounts her experience of Second Life as a quasi-fountain of youth. It also describes the fundraising Fran and Barbara have done for Parkinson’s research through Second Life and Fran’s weekly virtual Parkinson’s support group. Suddenly Fran had a following. Some in Second Life’s disability community now use the term “Fran effect” to describe improvements in real-life functioning that they attribute to their experience in Second Life.

This is not just magical thinking. Abundant research shows imagining movement, without actually moving the body, can have positive effects on motor skills, balance, and learning. The same effects are found in athletes and people who are healthy. Researchers have even found that people who have been paralyzed by severed spinal chord can stimulate regrowth and repair by envisioning their limbs moving over and over again — though it requires great effort and takes time. Studies suggest the therapeutic benefits of virtual reality extend beyond movement disorders — to chronic pain, cognitive functioning in people with ADHD and PTSD, and social skills for people on the autism spectrum….(More)”

Organizational crowdsourcing

Curated on February 17, 2017August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy Morgan at Lippincott: “One of the most consequential insights from the study of organizational culture happens to have an almost irresistible grounding in basic common sense. When attempting to solve the challenges of today’s businesses, inviting a broad slice of an employee population yields more creative, actionable solutions than restricting the conversation to a small strategy or leadership team.

This recognition, that in order to uncover new business ideas and innovations, organizations must foster listening cultures and a meritocracy of best thinking, is fueling interest in organizational crowdsourcing — a discipline focused on employee connection, collaboration and ideation. Leaders at companies such as Roche, Bank of the West, Merck, Facebook and IBM, along with countless Silicon Valley companies for whom the “hackathon” is a major cultural event, have embraced employee crowdsourcing as a way to unlock organizational knowledge and promote empathy through technology.

The benefits of internal crowdsourcing are clear. First, it ensures that a company’s understanding of key change drivers and potential strategic priorities is grounded in the organization’s everyday reality and not abstract hypotheses developed by a team of strategists. Second, employees inherently believe in and want to own the implementation of ideas that they generate through crowdsourcing. These are ideas borne of the culture for the culture, and are less likely to run aground on the rocks of employee indifference….

How can this be achieved through organizational crowdsourcing?

There is no out-of-the-box solution. Each campaign has to organically surface areas of focus for further inquiries, develop a framework and set of questions to guide participation and ignite conversations, and then analyze and communicate results in a way that helps bring solutions to life. But there are some key principles that will maximize the success of any crowdsourcing effort.

Obtaining insightful and actionable answers boils down to asking the questions at just the right altitude. If they’re too high up, too broad and open-ended, the usefulness of the feedback will suffer. If the questions are too broad — “How can we make our workplace better?” — you will likely hear responses like “juice bars” and “massage therapists.” If the questions are too narrow — “What kind of lighting do we need in our conference rooms?” — you limit the opportunity of people to use their creativity. However, the answers are likely to spark a conversation if people are asked, “How can we create spaces that allow us to generate ideas more effectively?” Conversation will flow to discussion of breaking down physical barriers in office design, building social “hubs” and investing in live events that allow employees from disparate geographies to meet in person and solve problems together.

On the technology side, crowdsourcing platforms such as Jive Software and UserVoice, among others, make it easy to bring large numbers of employees together to gather, build upon and prioritize new ideas and innovation efforts, from process simplification and product development to the transformation of customer experiences. Respondents can vote on other people’s suggestions and add comments.

By facilitating targeted conversations across times zones, geographies and corporate functions, crowdsourcing makes possible a new way of listening: of harnessing an organization’s collective wisdom to achieve action by a united and inspired employee population. It’s amazing to see the thoughtfulness, precision and energy unleashed by crowdsourcing efforts. People genuinely want to contribute to their company’s success if you open the doors and let them.

Taking a page from the Silicon Valley hackathon, organizational crowdsourcing campaigns are structured as events of limited duration focused on a specific challenge or business problem….(More)”

DataRefuge

Curated on February 17, 2017October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“DataRefuge is a public, collaborative project designed to address the following concerns about federal climate and environmental data:

What are the best ways to safeguard data?
How do federal agencies play crucial roles in data collection, management, and distribution?
How do government priorities impact data’s accessibility?
Which projects and research fields depend on federal data?
Which data sets are of value to research and local communities, and why?

DataRefuge is also an initiative committed to identifying, assessing, prioritizing, securing, and distributing reliable copies of federal climate and environmental data so that it remains available to researchers. Data collected as part of the #DataRefuge initiative will be stored in multiple, trusted locations to help ensure continued accessibility.

DataRefuge acknowledges–and in fact draws attention to–the fact that there are no guarantees of perfectly safe information. But there are ways that we can create safe and trustworthy copies. DataRefuge is thus also a project to develop the best methods, practices, and protocols to do so.

DataRefuge depends on local communities. We welcome new collaborators who want to organize DataRescue Events or build DataRefuge in other ways.

There are many ways to be involved with building DataRefuge. They’re not mutually exclusive!…(More)”

The light and the dark side of the use of EU funding: the results of Monithon’s civic monitoring

Curated on February 17, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Luigi Reggi at Monithon (Monitoring Marathon): “…All in all, this small journey in Monithon’s civic monitoring proves at least two things.

The first is that using public data for a real accountability action is a huge effort, as well as an amusement. The data, despite being open, does not answer the universe of questions for responsible administrations, but on the contrary raises more. The novelty is that the funds we explored have reached that critical mass of transparency that allows anyone, as long as he or she is well organized and willing to study (that’s right, to study), to use the available information as a base for further research. These generally lead to the discovery of something useful also for the administrations, for example the impact of financed projects on the life of people.

The second is that, having acquired new tools, local communities are willing to work hard. You can see this in the very adult faces of the young kids that thanks to civic monitoring projects start to understand how public policies can improve their cities or guarantee more opportunities for their future. You can understand this by looking at those entities that everyday work to achieve their civic objectives and that by learning how financing works are provided with new weapons, acquire new powers and are more effective in using their energies.

Are our public administrations ready for all of this? How many of them are in turn willing to make the effort to listen, be accountable and take the necessary steps? As they say, we will find out in the next episode. In the next post we will examine the impact of civic monitoring, so whether and how the results we have seen have been used and what changes have they generated. We will report some cases with the intention of starting a good discussion. Which, of course, can already start now….(More)”

How a Political Scientist Knows What Our Enemies Will Do (Often Before They Do)

Curated on February 17, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by the National Academy of Sciences, part of a series, From Research to Reward, seeking to demonstrate how advances in our understanding of natural processes often lead to surprising and remarkable benefits for society: “…From the time of quills and cannons to our era of cyber-attacks and drone warfare, mathematics has been crucial to national security. Equations ensure missiles land on the right target, combat materials hold up on the battlefield, and secrets stay locked in code. But when it comes to the human side of conflict—decisions people make about when, how, and why to use these tools—professionals saw little place for the precise language of mathematics. Until recently.

Political scientists have now added rigorous mathematical techniques to their social-science toolbox, creating methods to explain—and even predict—the actions of adversaries, thus making society safer as well as smarter. Such techniques allowed the U.S. government to predict the fall of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines in 1986, helping hatch a strategy to ease him out of office and avoid political chaos in that nation. And at Los Angeles International Airport a computer system predicts the tactical calculations of criminals and terrorists, making sure that patrols and checkpoints are placed in ways that adversaries can’t exploit.

The advances in solving the puzzle of human behavior represent a dramatic turnaround for the field of political science, notes Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a professor of politics at New York University. “In the mid-1960s, I took a statistics course,” he recalls, “and my undergraduate advisor was appalled. He told me that I was wasting my time.” It took researchers many years of patient work, putting piece after piece of the puzzle of human behavior together, to arrive at today’s new knowledge. The result has been dramatic progress in the nation’s ability to protect its interests at home and abroad.

Social scientists have not abandoned the proven tools that Bueno de Mesquita and generations of other scholars acquired as they mastered their discipline. Rather, adding the rigor of mathematical analysis has allowed them to solve more of the puzzle. Mathematical models of human behavior let social scientists assemble a picture of the previously unnoticed forces that drive behavior—forces common to all situations, operating below the emotions, drama, and history that make each conflict unique….(More)”

Mapping open data governance models: Who makes decisions about government data and how?

Curated on February 16, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ana Brandusescu, Danny Lämmerhirt and Stefaan Verhulst call for a systematic and comparative investigation of the different governance models for open data policy and publication….

“An important value proposition behind open data involves increased transparency and accountability of governance. Yet little is known about how open data itself is governed. Who decides and how? How accountable are data holders to both the demand side and policy makers? How do data producers and actors assure the quality of government data? Who, if any, are data stewards within government tasked to make its data open?

Getting a better understanding of open data governance is not only important from an accountability point of view. If there is a better insight of the diversity of decision-making models and structures across countries, the implementation of common open data principles, such as those advocated by the International Open Data Charter, can be accelerated across countries.

In what follows, we seek to develop the initial contours of a research agenda on open data governance models. We start from the premise that different countries have different models to govern and administer their activities – in short, different ‘governance models’. Some countries are more devolved in their decision making, while others seek to organize “public administration” activities more centrally. These governance models clearly impact how open data is governed – providing a broad patchwork of different open data governance across the world and making it difficult to identify who the open data decision makers and data gatekeepers or stewards are within a given country.

For example, if one wants to accelerate the opening up of education data across borders, in some countries this may fall under the authority of sub-national government (such as states, provinces, territories or even cities), while in other countries education is governed by central government or implemented through public-private partnership arrangements. Similarly, transportation or water data may be privatised, while in other cases it may be the responsibility of municipal or regional government. Responsibilities are therefore often distributed across administrative levels and agencies affecting how (open) government data is produced, and published….(More)”

Corporate Social Responsibility for a Data Age

Curated on February 15, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Proprietary data can help improve and save lives, but fully harnessing its potential will require a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data….

We live, as it is now common to point out, in an era of big data. The proliferation of apps, social media, and e-commerce platforms, as well as sensor-rich consumer devices like mobile phones, wearable devices, commercial cameras, and even cars generate zettabytes of data about the environment and about us.

Yet much of the most valuable data resides with the private sector—for example, in the form of click histories, online purchases, sensor data, and call data records. This limits its potential to benefit the public and to turn data into a social asset. Consider how data held by business could help improve policy interventions (such as better urban planning) or resiliency at a time of climate change, or help design better public services to increase food security.

Data responsibility suggests steps that organizations can take to break down these private barriers and foster so-called data collaboratives, or ways to share their proprietary data for the public good. For the private sector, data responsibility represents a new type of corporate social responsibility for the 21st century.

While Nepal’s Ncell belongs to a relatively small group of corporations that have shared their data, there are a few encouraging signs that the practice is gaining momentum. In Jakarta, for example, Twitter exchanged some of its data with researchers who used it to gather and display real-time information about massive floods. The resulting website, PetaJakarta.org, enabled better flood assessment and management processes. And in Senegal, the Data for Development project has brought together leading cellular operators to share anonymous data to identify patterns that could help improve health, agriculture, urban planning, energy, and national statistics.

Examples like this suggest that proprietary data can help improve and save lives. But to fully harness the potential of data, data holders need to fulfill at least three conditions. I call these the “the three pillars of data responsibility.”…

The difficulty of translating insights into results points to some of the larger social, political, and institutional shifts required to achieve the vision of data responsibility in the 21st century. The move from data shielding to data sharing will require that we make a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data. We must incorporate new levels of pro-activeness, and make often-unfamiliar commitments to transparency and accountability.

By way of conclusion, here are four immediate steps—essential but not exhaustive—we can take to move forward:

Data holders should issue a public commitment to data responsibility so that it becomes the default—an expected, standard behavior within organizations.
Organizations should hire data stewards to determine what and when to share, and how to protect and act on data.
We must develop a data responsibility decision tree to assess the value and risk of corporate data along the data lifecycle.
Above all, we need a data responsibility movement; it is time to demand data responsibility to ensure data improves and safeguards people’s lives…(More)”

Dumpster diving made easier with food donation points

Curated on February 15, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “With food waste a substantial contributor to both environmental and social problems, communities around the world are trying to find ways to make better use of leftovers as well as reduce the overall production of unused foodstuffs. One of the biggest challenges in getting leftovers to the people who need them is the logistics of finding and connecting the relevant groups and transporting the food. Several on-demand apps, like this one that matches homeless shelters with companies that have leftover food, are taking the guesswork out of what to do with available food. And retailers are getting smarter, like this one in the United States, now selling produce that would previously have been rejected for aesthetic reasons only.

In Brazil, the Makers Society collective designed a campaign called Prato de Rua (Street Dish) to help link people in possession of edible leftovers with community members in need. The campaign centers around a sticker that is affixed to the side of city dumpsters requesting that donated food be left at the specific points. By providing a more organized approach to getting rid of leftover food, the collective hopes to help people think more carefully about what they are getting rid of and why. At the same time, the initiative helps people who would otherwise be forced to go through the contents of a dumpster for edible remains, access good food more safely and swiftly.

The campaign sticker is available for download for communities globally to take on and adapt the idea….(More)”

Understanding Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy

Curated on February 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Video on “The Actionable Intelligence (AI) model is a new approach to policy development. The AI approach is supported by Integrated Data Systems (IDS) which link administrative records from multiple agencies to give a broader view of social problems and policy solutions. The use of linked administrative data allows policy analysts, program evaluators and social innovators to test new social program ideas at a much lower cost and higher speed. AI uses these IDS to create a newly informed dialogue among executive leaders, stakeholders and researchers regarding what works best, for whom and in the most cost effective way….(More videos from AISP-UPENN)

Understanding Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy from AISP_UPENN on Vimeo.

Recovering from disasters: Social networks matter more than bottled water and batteries

Curated on February 14, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel P. Aldrich at The Conversation: “Almost six years ago, Japan faced a paralyzing triple disaster: a massive earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns that forced 470,000 people to evacuate from more than 80 towns, villages and cities. My colleagues and I investigated how communities in the hardest-hit areas reacted to these shocks, and found that social networks – the horizontal and vertical ties that connect us to others – are our most important defense against disasters….

We studied more than 130 cities, towns and villages in Tohoku, looking at factors such as exposure to the ocean, seawall height, tsunami height, voting patterns, demographics, and social capital. We found that municipalities which had higher levels of trust and interaction had lower mortality levels after we controlled for all of those confounding factors.

The kind of social tie that mattered here was horizontal, between town residents. It was a surprising finding given that Japan has spent a tremendous amount of money on physical infrastructure such as seawalls, but invested very little in building social ties and cohesion.

Based on interviews with survivors and a review of the data, we believe that communities with more ties, interaction and shared norms worked effectively to provide help to kin, family and neighbors. In many cases only 40 minutes separated the earthquake and the arrival of the tsunami. During that time, residents literally picked up and carried many elderly people out of vulnerable, low-lying areas. In high-trust neighborhoods, people knocked on doors of those who needed help and escorted them out of harm’s way….

In another study I worked to understand why some 40 cities, towns and villages across the Tohoku region had rebuilt, put children back into schools and restarted businesses at very different rates over a two-year period. Two years after the disasters some communities seemed trapped in amber, struggling to restore even half of their utility service, operating businesses and clean streets. Other cities had managed to rebound completely, placing evacuees in temporary homes, restoring gas and water lines, and clearing debris.

To understand why some cities were struggling, I looked into explanations including the impact of the disaster, the size of the city, financial independence, horizontal ties between cities, and vertical ties from the community to power brokers in Tokyo. In this phase of the recovery, vertical ties were the best predictor of strong recoveries.

Communities that had sent more powerful senior representatives to Tokyo in the years before the disaster did the best. These politicians and local ambassadors helped to push the bureaucracy to send aid, reach out to foreign governments for assistance, and smooth the complex zoning and bureaucratic impediments to recovery…

As communities around the world face disasters more and more frequently, I hope that my research on Japan after 3.11 can provide guidance to residents facing challenges. While physical infrastructure is important for mitigating disaster, communities should also invest time and effort in building social ties….(More)”