Collection

Nine Lessons for Bridging the Gap between Cities and Citizens

Curated on October 31, 2014May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Soren Gigler at the Worldbank Blog: “…Moving towards a citizen-centered model of government is critical for achieving better results.
But what does this mean in praxis? What are some of the bottlenecks and pitfalls of such an approach?
Here are nine lessons learned from our work on Open Government and Citizen Engagement programs around the world.

Open Government is more than just making Government more open and transparent. It is about rebalancing the “governance” and power structure between government institutions, civil society, the private sector and citizens.
Openness and accountability of government is the basis for building a relationship of trust for effective civic participation. It can fundamentally alter the relationship between government and citizens.
Open Government programs are not effective if they are not embedded into a much broader institutional and cultural changes within government and fully integrated into the governments overall economic and social development goals.
New technologies can be powerful enablers to strengthen existing transparency and social accountability mechanisms that empower citizens and traditionally excluded groups. Technologies by themselves, however, are not transformational; they need to be closely embedded into the different local socio-political context and amplify existing social accountability and governance processes.
Enhancing the capabilities of the urban poor, youth and minorities to engage in policy debates is equally important as strengthening the capacity of government institutions to effectively respond to citizen engagement.
Effective Open Government programs not only enhance the openness and responsiveness of governments however also fosters the inclusiveness of institutions.
It’s critical to recognize that Open Government initiatives are not just about learning how to better listen to citizens. It’s also about how to become more responsive to them and their expressed needs.
Civil society plays a central role in enhancing government accountability. They can form effective bridges between government and citizens. Improved government openness does not translate automatically into the effective uses of information by citizens. CSOs are critical ‘infomediaries’ that can strengthen the capabilities of poor communities to better access information, evaluate and act upon the provided information.
A genuine process of political and institutional reforms can grow out of an effective alliance between reform-minded policymakers, civil society and private sector leaders. Thus, open governance reforms need to be driven by the local socio-economic, political and cultural context….”

ShareHub: at the Heart of Seoul's Sharing Movement

Curated on October 31, 2014October 30, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Cat Johnson at Shareable: “In 2012, Seoul publicly announced its commitment to becoming a sharing city. It has since emerged as a leader of the global sharing movement and serves as a model for cities around the world. Supported by the municipal government and embedded in numerous parts of everyday life in Seoul, the Sharing City project has proven to be an inspiration to city leaders, entrepreneurs, and sharing enthusiasts around the world.
At the heart of Sharing City, Seoul is ShareHub, an online platform that connects users with sharing services, educates and informs the public about sharing initiatives, and serves as the online hub for the Sharing City, Seoul project. Now a year and a half into its existence, ShareHub, which is powered by Creative Commons Korea (CC Korea), has served 1.4 million visitors since launching, hosts more than 350 articles about sharing, and has played a key role in promoting sharing policies and projects. Shareable connected with Nanshil Kwon, manager of ShareHub, to find out more about the project, its role in promoting sharing culture, and the future of the sharing movement in Seoul….”

Crowd-Sourcing Corruption: What Petrified Forests, Street Music, Bath Towels and the Taxman Can Tell Us About the Prospects for Its Future

Curated on October 28, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dieter Zinnbauer: “This article seeks to map out the prospects of crowd-sourcing technologies in the area of corruption-reporting. A flurry of initiative and concomitant media hype in this area has led to exuberant hopes that the end of impunity is not such a distant possibility any more – at least not for the most blatant, ubiquitous and visible forms of administrative corruption, such as bribes and extortion payments that on average almost a quarter of citizens reported to face year in, year out in their daily lives in so many countries around the world (Transparency International 2013).
Only with hindsight will we be able to tell, if these hopes were justified. However, a closer look at an interdisciplinary body of literature on corruption and social mobilisation can help shed some interesting light on these questions and offer a fresh perspective on the potential of social media based crowd-sourcing for better governance and less corruption. So far the potential of crowd-sourcing is mainly approached from a technology-centred perspective. Where challenges are identified, pondered, and worked upon they are primarily technical and managerial in nature, ranging from issues of privacy protection and fighting off hacker attacks to challenges of data management, information validation or fundraising.
In contrast, short shrift is being paid to insights from a substantive, multi-disciplinary and growing body of literature on how corruption works, how it can be fought and more generally how observed logics of collective action and social mobilisation interact with technological affordances and condition the success of these efforts.
This imbalanced debate is not really surprising as it seems to follow the trajectory of the hype-and-bust cycle that we have seen in the public debate for a variety of other technology applications. From electronic health cards to smart government, to intelligent transport systems, all these and many other highly ambitious initiatives start with technology-centric visions of transformational impact. However, over time – with some hard lessons learnt and large sums spent – they all arrive at a more pragmatic and nuanced view on how social and economic forces shape the implementation of such technologies and require a more shrewd design approach, in order to make it more likely that potential actually translates into impact….”

When Experts Are a Waste of Money

Curated on October 28, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Vivek Wadhwa at the Wall Street Journal: “Corporations have always relied on industry analysts, management consultants and in-house gurus for advice on strategy and competitiveness. Since these experts understand the products, markets and industry trends, they also get paid the big bucks.
But what experts do is analyze historical trends, extrapolate forward on a linear basis and protect the status quo — their field of expertise. And technologies are not progressing linearly anymore; they are advancing exponentially. Technology is advancing so rapidly that listening to people who just have domain knowledge and vested interests will put a company on the fastest path to failure. Experts are no longer the right people to turn to; they are a waste of money.
Just as the processing power of our computers doubles every 18 months, with prices falling and devices becoming smaller, fields such as medicine, robotics, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are seeing accelerated change. Competition now comes from the places you least expect it to. The health-care industry, for example, is about to be disrupted by advances in sensors and artificial intelligence; lodging and transportation, by mobile apps; communications, by Wi-Fi and the Internet; and manufacturing, by robotics and 3-D printing.
To see the competition coming and develop strategies for survival, companies now need armies of people, not experts. The best knowledge comes from employees, customers and outside observers who aren’t constrained by their expertise or personal agendas. It is they who can best identify the new opportunities. The collective insight of large numbers of individuals is superior because of the diversity of ideas and breadth of knowledge that they bring. Companies need to learn from people with different skills and backgrounds — not from those confined to a department.
When used properly, crowdsourcing can be the most effective, least expensive way of solving problems.
Crowdsourcing can be as simple as asking employees to submit ideas via email or via online discussion boards, or it can assemble cross-disciplinary groups to exchange ideas and brainstorm. Internet platforms such as Zoho Connect, IdeaScale and GroupTie can facilitate group ideation by providing the ability to pose questions to a large number of people and having them discuss responses with each other.
Many of the ideas proposed by the crowd as well as the discussions will seem outlandish — especially if anonymity is allowed on discussion forums. And companies will surely hear things they won’t like. But this is exactly the input and out-of-the-box thinking that they need in order to survive and thrive in this era of exponential technologies….
Another way of harnessing the power of the crowd is to hold incentive competitions. These can solve problems, foster innovation and even create industries — just as the first XPRIZE did. Sponsored by the Ansari family, it offered a prize of $10 million to any team that could build a spacecraft capable of carrying three people to 100 kilometers above the earth’s surface, twice within two weeks. It was won by Burt Rutan in 2004, who launched a spacecraft called SpaceShipOne. Twenty-six teams, from seven countries, spent more than $100 million in competing. Since then, more than $1.5 billion has been invested in private space flight by companies such as Virgin Galactic, Armadillo Aerospace and Blue Origin, according to the XPRIZE Foundation….
Competitions needn’t be so grand. InnoCentive and HeroX, a spinoff from the XPRIZE Foundation, for example, allow prizes as small as a few thousand dollars for solving problems. A company or an individual can specify a problem and offer prizes for whoever comes up with the best idea to solve it. InnoCentive has already run thousands of public and inter-company competitions. The solutions they have crowdsourced have ranged from the development of biomarkers for Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis disease to dual-purpose solar lights for African villages….”

VoteATX

Curated on October 28, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “Local volunteers have released a free application that helps Austin area residents find the best place to vote. The application, Vote ATX, is available at http://voteatx.us
Travis County voters have many options for voting. The Vote ATX application tries to answer the simple question, “Where is the best place I can go vote right now?” The application is location and calendar aware, and helps identify available voting places – even mobile voting locations that move during the day.
The City of Austin has incorporated the Vote ATX technology to power the voting place finder on its election page at http://www.austintexas.gov/vote
The Vote ATX application was developed by volunteers at Open Austin, and is provided as a free public service. …Open Austin is a citizen volunteer group that promotes open government, open data, and civic application development in Austin, Texas. Open Austin was formed in 2009 by citizens interested in the City of Austin web strategy. Open Austin is non-partisan and non-endorsing. It has conducted voter outreach campaigns in every City of Austin municipal election since 2011. Open Austin is on the web at www.open-austin.org“

Mapping the Age of Every Building in Manhattan

Curated on October 27, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kriston Capps at CityLab: “The Harlem Renaissance was the epicenter of new movements in dance, poetry, painting, and literature, and its impact still registers in all those art forms. If you want to trace the Harlem Renaissance, though, best look to Harlem itself.
Many if not most of the buildings in Harlem today rose between 1900 and 1940—and a new mapping tool called Urban Layers reveals exactly where and when. Harlem boasts very few of the oldest buildings in Manhattan today, but it does represent the island’s densest concentration of buildings constructed during the Great Migration.
Thanks to Morphocode‘s Urban Layers, it’s possible to locate nearly every 19th-century building still standing in Manhattan today. That’s just one of the things that you can isolate with the map, which combines two New York City building datasets (PLUTO and Building Footprints) and Mapbox GL JS vector technology to generate an interactive architectural history.
So, looking specifically at Harlem again (with some of the Upper West Side thrown in for good measure), it’s easy to see that very few of the buildings that went up between 1765 to 1860 still stand today….”

Tell Everyone: Why We Share & Why It Matters

Curated on October 26, 2014October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book review by Tim Currie: “Were the people sharing these stories outraged by Doug Ford’s use of an ethnic stereotype? Joyfully amused at the ongoing campaign gaffes? Or saddened by the state of public discourse at a democratic forum? All of these emotions likely played a part in driving social shares. But a growing body of research suggests some emotions are more influential than others.
Alfred Hermida’s new book, Tell Everyone: Why We Share & Why It Matters, takes us through that research—and a pile more, from Pew Center data on the makeup of our friends lists to a Yahoo! study on the nature of social influencers. One of Hermida’s accomplishments is to have woven that research into a breezy narrative crammed with examples from recent headlines.
Not up on the concept of cognitive dissonance? Homophily? Pluralistic ignorance? Or situational awareness? Not a deal breaker. Just in time for Halloween, Tell Everyone (Doubleday Canada) is a social science literature review masquerading as light bedside reading from the business management section. Hermida has tucked the academic sourcing into 21 pages of endnotes and offered a highly readable 217-page tour of social movements, revolutions, journalistic gaffes and corporate PR disasters.
The UBC journalism professor moves easily from chronicling the activities of Boston Marathon Redditors to Tahrir Square YouTubers to Japanese earthquake tweeters. He dips frequently into the past for context, highlighting the roles of French Revolution-era salon “bloggers,” 18th-century Portuguese earthquake pamphleteers and First World War German pilots.
Indeed, this book is only marginally about journalism, made clear by the absence of a reference to “news” in its title. It is at least as much about sociology and marketing.
Mathew Ingram argued recently that journalism’s biggest competitors don’t look like journalism. Hermida would no doubt agree. The Daily Show’s blurring of comedy and journalism is now a familiar ingredient in people’s information diet, he writes. And with nearly every news event, “the reporting by journalists sits alongside the accounts, experiences, opinions and hopes of millions of others.” Journalistic accounts didn’t define Mitt Romney’s 2012 U.S. presidential campaign, he notes; thousands of users did, with their “binders full of women” meme.
Hermida devotes a chapter to chronicling the ways in which consumers are asserting themselves in the marketplace—and the ways in which brands are reacting. The communications team at Domino’s Pizza failed to engage YouTube users over a gross gag video made by two of its employees in 2009. But Lionsgate films effectively incorporated user-generated content into its promotions for the 2012 Hunger Games movie. Some of the examples are well known but their value lies in the considerable context Hermida provides.
Other chapters highlight the role of social media in the wake of natural disasters and how users—and researchers—are working to identify hoaxes.
Tell Everyone is the latest in a small but growing number of mass-market books aiming to distill social media research from the ivory tower. The most notable is Wharton School professor Jonah Berger’s 2013 book Contagious: Why Things Catch On. Hermida discusses the influential 2009 research conducted by Berger and his colleague Katherine Milkman into stories on the New York Times most-emailed list. Those conclusions now greatly influence the work of social media editors.
But, in this instance at least, the lively pacing of the book sacrifices some valuable detail.
Hermida explores the studies’ main conclusion: positive content is more viral than negative content, but the key is the presence of activating emotions in the user, such as joy or anger. However, the chapter gives only a cursory mention to a finding Berger discusses at length in Contagious—the surprisingly frequent presence of science stories in the list of most-emailed articles. The emotion at play is awe—what Berger characterizes as not quite joy, but a complex sense of surprise, unexpectedness or mystery. It’s an important aspect of our still-evolving understanding of how we use social media….”

Ebola and big data: Call for help

Curated on October 26, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “WITH at least 4,500 people dead, public-health authorities in west Africa and worldwide are struggling to contain Ebola. Borders have been closed, air passengers screened, schools suspended. But a promising tool for epidemiologists lies unused: mobile-phone data.
When people make mobile-phone calls, the network generates a call data record (CDR) containing such information as the phone numbers of the caller and receiver, the time of the call and the tower that handled it—which gives a rough indication of the device’s location. This information provides researchers with an insight into mobility patterns. Indeed phone companies use these data to decide where to build base stations and thus improve their networks, and city planners use them to identify places to extend public transport.
But perhaps the most exciting use of CDRs is in the field of epidemiology. Until recently the standard way to model the spread of a disease relied on extrapolating trends from census data and surveys. CDRs, by contrast, are empirical, immediate and updated in real time. You do not have to guess where people will flee to or move. Researchers have used them to map malaria outbreaks in Kenya and Namibia and to monitor the public response to government health warnings during Mexico’s swine-flu epidemic in 2009. Models of population movements during a cholera outbreak in Haiti following the earthquake in 2010 used CDRs and provided the best estimates of where aid was most needed.
Doing the same with Ebola would be hard: in west Africa most people do not own a phone. But CDRs are nevertheless better than simulations based on stale, unreliable statistics. If researchers could track population flows from an area where an outbreak had occurred, they could see where it would be likeliest to break out next—and therefore where they should deploy their limited resources. Yet despite months of talks, and the efforts of the mobile-network operators’ trade association and several smaller UN agencies, telecoms firms have not let researchers use the data (see article).
One excuse is privacy, which is certainly a legitimate worry, particularly in countries fresh from civil war, or where tribal tensions exist. But the phone data can be anonymised and aggregated in a way that alleviates these concerns. A bigger problem is institutional inertia. Big data is a new field. The people who grasp the benefits of examining mobile-phone usage tend to be young, and lack the clout to free them for research use.”

Ebola’s Information Paradox

Curated on October 25, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Johnson at The New York Times:” …The story of the Broad Street outbreak is perhaps the most famous case study in public health and epidemiology, in large part because it led to the revolutionary insight that cholera was a waterborne disease, not airborne as most believed at the time. But there is another element of the Broad Street outbreak that warrants attention today, as popular anxiety about Ebola surges across the airwaves and subways and living rooms of the United States: not the spread of the disease itself, but the spread of information about the disease.

It was a full seven days after Baby Lewis became ill, and four days after the Soho residents began dying in mass numbers, before the outbreak warranted the slightest mention in the London papers, a few short lines indicating that seven people had died in the neighborhood. (The report understated the growing death toll by an order of magnitude.) It took two entire weeks before the press began treating the outbreak as a major news event for the city.

Within Soho, the information channels were equally unreliable. Rumors spread throughout the neighborhood that the entire city had succumbed at the same casualty rate, and that London was facing a catastrophe on the scale of the Great Fire of 1666. But this proved to be nothing more than rumor. Because the Soho crisis had originated with a single-point source — the poisoned well — its range was limited compared with its intensity. If you lived near the Broad Street well, you were in grave danger. If you didn’t, you were likely to be unaffected.

Compare this pattern of information flow to the way news spreads now. On Thursday, Craig Spencer, a New York doctor, was given a diagnosis of Ebola after presenting a high fever, and the entire world learned of the test result within hours of the patient himself learning it. News spread with similar velocity several weeks ago with the Dallas Ebola victim, Thomas Duncan. In a sense, it took news of the cholera outbreak a week to travel the 20 blocks from Soho to Fleet Street in 1854; today, the news travels at nearly the speed of light, as data traverses fiber-optic cables. Thanks to that technology, the news channels have been on permanent Ebola watch for weeks now, despite the fact that, as the joke went on Twitter, more Americans have been married to Kim Kardashian than have died in the United States from Ebola.

As societies and technologies evolve, the velocities vary with which disease and information can spread. The tremendous population density of London in the 19th century enabled the cholera bacterium to spread through a neighborhood with terrifying speed, while the information about that terror moved more slowly. This was good news for the mental well-being of England’s wider population, which was spared the anxiety of following the death count as if it were a stock ticker. But it was terrible from a public health standpoint; the epidemic had largely faded before the official institutions of public health even realized the magnitude of the outbreak….

Information travels faster than viruses do now. This is why we are afraid. But this is also why we are safe.”