Guidebook by Eskelinen, Jarmo; Garcia Robles, Ana; Lindy, Ilari; Marsh, Jesse; Muente-Kunigami, Arturo: “… aims to bring citizen-driven innovation to policy makers and change agents around the globe, by spreading good practice on open and participatory approaches as applied to digital service development in different nations, climates, cultures, and urban settings. The report explores the concept of smart cities through a lens that promotes citizens as the driving force of urban innovation. Different models of smart cities are presented, showing how citizen-centric methods have been used to mobilize resources to respond to urban innovation challenges in a variety of situations, objectives, and governance structures. The living lab approach strengthens these processes as one of the leading methods for agile development or the rapid prototyping of ideas, concepts, products, services, and processes in a highly decentralized and user-centric manner. By adopting these approaches and promoting citizen-driven innovation, cities around the world are aiming to alleviate the demand for services, increase the quality of delivery, and promote local entrepreneurship. This guidebook is structured into seven main sections: an introductory section describes the vision of a humanly smart city, in order to give an idea of the kind of result that can be attained from opening up and applying citizen-driven innovation methods. Chapter one getting started helps mayors launch co-design initiatives, exploring innovation processes founded on trust and verifying the benefits of opening up. Chapter two, building a strategy identifies the key steps for building an innovation partnership and together defining a sustainable city vision and scenarios for getting there. Chapter three, co-designing solutions looks at the process of unpacking concrete problems, working creatively to address them, and following up on implementation. Chapter four, ensuring sustainability describes key elements for long-term viability: evaluation and impact assessment, appropriate institutional structuring, and funding and policy support. Chapter five, joining forces suggests ways to identify a unique role for participation in international networks and how to best learn from cooperation. Finally, the report provides a starter pack with some of the more commonly used tools and methods to support the kinds of activities described in this guidebook….(More)”
The privacy paradox: The privacy benefits of privacy threats
Paper by Benjamin Wittes and Jodie Liu: “In this paper, Wittes and Liu argue that how we balance the relative value of different forms of privacy is a function of how much we fear the potential audiences from whom we want to keep certain information secret.
Some basic principles these authors propose regarding the nature of privacy are as follows:
- Most new technologies often both enhance and diminish privacy depending on how it is used, who is using it, and what sorts of privacy that person values.
- Individual concern with privacy often will not involve privacy in the abstract, but rather vis à vis specific audiences – that is to say that the question of privacyfrom whom matters.
- At least some modern technologies that we commonly think of as privacy-eroding may in fact enhance privacy from the people in our immediate surroundings.
From Google searches to online shopping to Kindle readers, the privacy equation is seldom as simple as a trade of convenience for privacy. It is far more often a tradeoff among different types of privacy, Wittes and Liu suggest. In conclusion, the privacy debate does not pay much attention to aggregated consumer preferences as a metric against which to measure privacy, and the authors venture to suggest that it should….(More)”
The Tragedy of the Digital Commons
J. Nathan Matias in the Atlantic: “….Milland and other regular Turkers navigate this precariously free market withTurkopticon, a DIY technology for rating employers created in 2008. To use it, workers install a browser plugin that extends Amazon’s website with special rating features. Before accepting a new task, workers check how others have rated the employer. After finishing, they can also leave their own rating of how well they were treated. Collective rating on Turkopticon is an act of citizenship in the digital world. This digital citizenship acknowledges that online experiences are as much a part of our common life as our schools, sidewalks, and rivers—requiring as much stewardship, vigilance, and improvement as anything else we share.
“How do you fix a broken system that isn’t yours to repair?” That’s the question that motivated the researchers Lilly Irani and Six Silberman to create Turkopticon, and it’s one that comes up frequently in digital environments dominated by large platforms with hands-off policies. (On social networks like Twitter, for example, harassment is a problem for many users.) Irani and Silberman describe Turkopticon as a “mutual aid for accountability” technology, a system that coordinates peer support to hold others accountable when platforms choose not to step in.
Mutual aid accountability is a growing response to the complex social problems people face online. On Twitter, systems like The Block Bot and BlockTogether coordinate collective judgments about alleged online harassers. The systems then collectively block tweets from accounts that a group prefers not to hear from. Last month, the advocacy organization Hollaback raised over $20,000 on Kickstarter to create support networks for people experiencing harassment. In November, I worked with the advocacy organization Women, Action, and the Media, which took a role as “authorized reporter” with Twitter. For three weeks WAM! accepted reports, sorted evidence, and forwarded serious cases to Twitter. In response, the company warned, suspended, and deleted the accounts of many alleged harassers.
These mutual aid technologies operate in the shadow of larger systems with gaps in how people are supported—even when platforms do step in, says Stuart Geiger, a Berkeley Ph.D. student. In other words, sometimes a platform’s system-wide solutions to a problem can create their own problems. For several years, Geiger and his colleague Aaron Halfaker, now a researcher at Wikimedia, were concerned that Wikipedia’s semi-automated anti-vandalism systems might be making the site unfriendly. As a graduate student unable to change Wikipedia’s code, Halfaker created Snuggle, a mutual-aid mentorship technology that tracks the site’s spam responders. When Snuggle users think a newcomer’s edits were mistakenly flagged as spam, the software coordinates Wikipedians to help those users recover from the negative experience of getting revoked.
By organizing peer support at scale, the designers of Turkopticon and its cousins draw attention to common problems, hoping to influence longer-term change on a complex issue. In time, the idea goes, requesters on Mechanical Turk might change their treatment of workers, Amazon might change its policies and software, or regulators might set new rules for digital labor. This is an approach with a long history in an area that might seem unlikely: the conservation movement. (Silberman and Irani cite the movement as inspiration for Turkopticon.)
To better understand how this approach might influence digital citizenship, I followed the history of mutual-aid accountability in a precious common network that the city of Boston enjoys every day: the Charles River. Planned, re-routed, exploited and contested, it has inspired and supported human life since before written history….(More)”
Policy Practice and Digital Science
New book edited by Janssen, Marijn, Wimmer, Maria A., and Deljoo, Ameneh: “The explosive growth in data, computational power, and social media creates new opportunities for innovating the processes and solutions of Information and communications technology (ICT) based policy-making and research. To take advantage of these developments in the digital world, new approaches, concepts, instruments and methods are needed to navigate the societal and computational complexity. This requires extensive interdisciplinary knowledge of public administration, policy analyses, information systems, complex systems and computer science. This book provides the foundation for this new interdisciplinary field, in which various traditional disciplines are blending. Both policy makers, executors and those in charge of policy implementations acknowledge that ICT is becoming more important and is changing the policy-making process, resulting in a next generation policy-making based on ICT support. Web 2.0 and even Web 3.0 point to the specific applications of social networks, semantically enriched and linked data, whereas policy-making has also to do with the use of the vast amount of data, predictions and forecasts, and improving the outcomes of policy-making, which is confronted with an increasing complexity and uncertainty of the outcomes. The field of policy-making is changing and driven by developments like open data, computational methods for processing data, opining mining, simulation and visualization of rich data sets, all combined with public engagement, social media and participatory tools….(More)”
A framework for Adoption of Challenges and Prizes in US Federal Agencies: A Study of Early Adopters
Thesis by Louis, Claudia (Syracuse University): “In recent years we have witnessed a shift in the innovation landscape of organizations from closed to more open models embracing solutions from the outside. Widespread use of the internet and web 2.0 technologies have made it easier for organizations to connect with their clients, service providers, and the public at large for more collaborative problem solving and innovation. Introduction of the Open Government initiative accompanied by the America Competes Reauthorization Act signaled an unprecedented commitment by the US Federal Government to stimulating more innovation and creativity in problem solving. The policy and legislation empowered agencies to open up their problem solving space beyond their regular pool of contractors in finding solutions to the nation’s most complex problems.
This is an exploratory study of the adoption of challenges as an organizational innovation in public sector organizations. The main objective is to understand and explain how, and under what conditions challenges are being used by federal agencies and departments as a tool to promote innovation. The organizational innovation literature provides the main theoretical foundation for this study, but does not directly address contextual aspects regarding the type of innovation and the type of organization. The guiding framework uses concepts drawn from three literature streams: organizational innovation, open innovation, and public sector innovation…. (More)”
Why it is time to redesign our political system?
Article by Pia Mancini: “Modern political systems are out of sync with the times we are living in. While the Internet allows us unprecedented access to information, low costs for collaborating and participating, and the ability to express our desires, demands and concerns, our input in policymaking is limited to voting once every two to five years. Innovative tools, both online and offline, are needed to upgrade our democracies. Society needs instruments and processes that allow it to choose how it is governed. Institutions have to be established that reflect today’s technological, cultural and social realities and values. These institutions must be able to generate trust and provide mechanisms for social debate and collaboration, as well as social feedback loops that can accelerate institutionalised change….(More)”
Safecity: Combatting Sexual Violence Through Technology
“Safecity, …. is a not for profit organization that provides a platform for people to share their personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data, which may be anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration for social and systemic change for safer cities. We launched on 26 Dec 2012 and since then have collected over 4000 stories from over 50 cities in India and Nepal.
How can Safecity help?
Safecity is a crowd map that converts these individual stories into data that is then plotted on a map. It is then easier to see trends at the location level (e.g. a street). The focus is taken away from the individual victim and instead we can focus on solving the problem at the local neighborhood level.
The Objectives:
• Create awareness on street harassment and abuse and get people, especially women, victims of hate and LGBTQ crimes to break their silence and report their personal experiences.
• Collate this information to showcase location based trends.
• Make this information available and useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to solve the problem at the local level through urban planning aimed at addressing infrastructural deficits
• Establish successful models of community engagement using crowd sourced data to solve civic and local issues.
• Reach out to women who do not have equal access to technology through our Missed dial facility for them to report any cases of abuse and harassment.
We wish to take this data forward to lobby for systemic change in terms of urban planning and infrastructure, reforms in our law that are premised on gender equity, and social changes to loosen the shackles that do not allow us otherwise to live the way we want to, with the freedom we want to, and with the rights that are fundamental to all of us, and it will just build our momentum further by having as many passionate, concerned and diverse genders on board.
We are trying to build a movement by collecting these reports through campaigns, workshops and awareness programs with schools, colleges, local communities and partners with shared vision. Crime against women has been rampant and largely remains unreported even till date. That silence needs to gain a voice and the time is now. We are determined to highlight this serious social issue and we believe we are taking a step towards changing the way our society thinks and reacts and are hopeful that so are you. In time we hope it will lead to a safe and non-violent environment for all.
Safecity uses technology to document sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces in the following way. People can report incidents of sexual abuse and street harassment, that they have experienced or witnessed. They can share solutions that can help avoid such situations and decide for themselves what works best for them, their geographic location or circumstances.
By allowing people to pin such incidents on a crowd-sourced map, we aim to let them highlight the “hotspots” of such activities. This accentuates the emerging trend in a particular area, enabling the citizens to acknowledge the problem, take personal precautions and devise a solution at the neighbourhood level.
Safecity believes in uniting millions of voices that can become a catalyst for change.
You can read the FAQs section for more information on how the data is used for public good. (More)”
Social Dimensions of Privacy
New book edited by Dorota Mokrosinska and Beate Roessler: “Written by a select international group of leading privacy scholars, Social Dimensions of Privacy endorses and develops an innovative approach to privacy. By debating topical privacy cases in their specific research areas, the contributors explore the new privacy-sensitive areas: legal scholars and political theorists discuss the European and American approaches to privacy regulation; sociologists explore new forms of surveillance and privacy on social network sites; and philosophers revisit feminist critiques of privacy, discuss markets in personal data, issues of privacy in health care and democratic politics. The broad interdisciplinary character of the volume will be of interest to readers from a variety of scientific disciplines who are concerned with privacy and data protection issues.
- Takes an innovative approach to privacy which focuses on the social dimensions and value of privacy in contrast to the value of privacy for individuals
- Addresses readers from a variety of disciplines, including law, philosophy, media studies, gender studies and political science
- Addresses new privacy-sensitive areas triggered by recent technological developments (More)”
India wants all government organizations to develop open APIs
Medianama: “The department of electronics and information technology (DeitY) is looking to frame a policy (pdf) for adopting and developing open application programming interfaces (APIs) in government organizations to promote software interoperability for all e-governance applications & systems. The policy shall be applicable to all central government organizations and to those state governments that choose to adopt the policy.
DeitY also said that all information and data of a government organisation shall be made available by open APIs, as per the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy and adhere to National Cyber Security Policy.
Policy points
– Each published API of a Government organization shall be provided free of charge whenever possible to other government organizations and public.
– Each published API shall be properly documented with sample code and sufficient information for developers to make use of the API.
– The life-cycle of the open API shall be made available by the API publishing Government organisation. The API shall be backward compatible with at least two earlier versions.
– Government organizations may use an authentication mechanism to enable service interoperability and single sign-on.
– All Open API systems built and data provided shall adhere to GoI security policies and guidelines.
…. This would allow anyone to build a website or an application and pull government information into the public domain. Everyone knows navigating a government website can be nightmarish. For example, Indian Railways provides open APIs which enabled the development of applications such as RailYatri. Through the eRail APIs, the application pulls info which includes list of stations, trains between stations, route of a train, Train Fares, PNR Status, Live train status, seat availability, cancelled, rescheduled or diverted train information and current running status of the train. …(More)”
See also “Policy on Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Government of India“
Shedding light on government, one dataset at a time
Bill Below of the OECD Directorate for Public Governance and Territorial Development at OECD Insights: “…As part of its Open Government Data (OGD) work, the OECD has created OURdata, an index that assesses governments’ efforts to implement OGD in three critical areas: Openness, Usefulness and Re-usability. The results are promising. Those countries that began the process in earnest some five years ago, today rank very high on the scale. According to this Index, which closely follows the principles of the G8 Open Data Charter, Korea is leading the implementation of OGD initiatives with France a close second.
Those who have started the process but who are lagging (such as Poland) can draw on the experience of other OECD countries, and benefit from a clear roadmap to guide them.
Indeed, bringing one’s own country’s weaknesses out into the light is the first, and sometimes most courageous, step towards achieving the benefits of OGD. Poland has just completed its Open Government Data country review with the OECD revealing some sizable challenges ahead in transforming the internal culture of its institutions. For the moment, a supply-side rather than people-driven approach to data release is prevalent. Also, OGD in Poland is not widely understood to be a source of value creation and growth….(More)”