Collection

Technology and the Resilience of Metropolitan Regions

Curated on May 19, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Michael A. Pagano: “Can today’s city govern well if its citizens lack modern technology? How important is access to computers for lowering unemployment? What infrastructure does a city have to build in order to attract new business? Michael A. Pagano curates engagement with such questions by public intellectuals, academics, policy analysts, and citizens. Each essay explores the impact and opportunities technology provides in government and citizenship, health care, workforce development, service delivery to citizens, and metropolitan growth. As the authors show, rapidly emerging technologies and access to such technologies shape the ways people and institutions interact in the public sphere and private marketplace. The direction of metropolitan growth and development, in turn, depends on access to appropriate technology scaled and informed by the individual, household, and community needs of the region.

An in-depth and perceptive collection, Technology and the Resilience of Metropolitan Regions confronts the increasing challenges faced by metropolitan regions not only in governing, but in ensuring a sustainable and acceptable quality of life for their citizens.

Contributors are Randy Blankenhorn, Bénédicte Callan, Jane E. Fountain, Chen-Yu Kao, Sandee Kastrul, Karen Mossberger, Daniel X. O’Neil, Michelle Stohlmeyer Russell, Kuang-Ting Tai, Alfred Tatum, Stephanie Truchan, Darrell M. West, and Howard Wial….(More)”

From Paint to Pixels

Curated on May 18, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jacoba Urist at the Atlantic: “A growing number of artists are using data from self-tracking apps in their pieces, showing that creative work is as much a product of its technology as of its time….A growing community of “data artists” is creating conceptual works using information collected by mobile apps, GPS trackers, scientists, and more.

Data artists generally fall into two groups: those who work with large bodies of scientific data and those who are influenced by self-tracking. The Boston-based artist Nathalie Miebach falls into the former category: She transforms weather patterns into complex sculptures and musical scores. Similarly, David McCandless, who believes the world suffers from a “data glut,” turns military spending budgets into simple, striking diagrams. On one level, the genre aims to translate large amounts of information into some kind of aesthetic form. But a number of artists, scholars, and curators also believe that working with this data isn’t just a matter of reducing human beings to numbers, but also of achieving greater awareness of complex matters in a modern world….

Current tools make self-tracking more efficient than ever, but data artists are hardly the first to express themselves through their daily activities—or to try to find meaning within life’s monotony. The Italian Mannerist painter Jacopo Pontormo kept records of his daily life from January 1554 to October 1556. In it, he detailed the amount of food he ate, the weather, symptoms of illness, friends he visited, even his bowel movements. In the 1970s, the Japanese conceptualistOn Kawara produced his self-observation series, I Got Up, I Went, and I Met(recently shown at the Guggenheim), in which he painstakingly records the rhythms of his day. Kawara stamped postcards with the time he awoke, traced his daily trips onto photocopied maps, and listed the names of people he encountered for nearly 12 years….(More)

Designing digital democracy: a short guide

Curated on May 18, 2015July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan at NESTA: “I’ve written quite a few blogs and pieces on digital technology and democracy – most recently on the relevance of new-style political parties.

Here I look at the practical question of how parliaments, assemblies and governments should choose the right methods for greater public engagement in decisions.

One prompt is the Nesta-led D-CENT project which is testing out new tools in several countries, and there’s an extraordinary range of engagement experiments underway around the world, from Brazil’s parliament to the Mayor of Paris. Tools like Loomio for smallish groups, and Your Priorities and DemocracyOS for larger ones, are well ahead of their equivalents a few years ago.

A crucial question is whether the same tools work well for different types of issue or context. The short answer is ‘no’. Here I suggest some simple formulae to ensure that the right tools are used for the right issues; I show why hybrid forms of online and offline are the future for parliaments and parties; and why the new tools emphasise conversation rather than only votes.

Clarity on purpose

First, it’s important to be clear what wider engagement is for. Engagement is rarely a good in itself. More passionate engagement in issues can be a powerful force for progress. But it can be the opposite, entrenching conflicts and generating heat rather than light….

Clarity on who you want to reach

Second, who do you want to reach? Even in the most developed nations and cities there are still very practical barriers of reach – despite the huge spread of broadband, mobiles and smart phones…..

Clarity on what tools for what issues – navigating ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’

Third, even if there were strong habits of digital engagement for the whole population it would not follow that all issues should be opened up for the maximum direct participation. A useful approach is to distinguish issues according to two dimensions.

The first dimension differentiates issues where the public has expertise and experience from ones where the knowledge needed to make decisions is very specialised. There are many issues on which crowds simply don’t have much information let alone wisdom, and any political leader who opened up decision making too far would quickly lose the confidence of the public.

The second dimension differentiates issues which are practical and pragmatic from ones where there are strongly held and polarised opinions, mainly determined by underlying moral beliefs rather than argument and evidence. Putting these together gives us a two dimensional space on which to map any public policy issue, which could be described as the ‘Belief and Knowledge Space’…..

Clarity on requisite scale

Fourth, engagement looks and feels very different at different scales. …

Clarity on identity and anonymity

…. So any designer of democratic engagement tools has to decide what levels of anonymity should apply at each stage. We might choose to allow anonymity at early stages of consultations, but require people to show and validate identities at later stages (eg. to confirm they actually live in the neighbourhood or city involved), certainly as any issue comes closer to decisions. The diagram below summarises these different steps, and the block chain tools being used in the D-CENT pilots bring these issues to the fore.

The 2010s are turning out to be a golden age of democratic innovation. That’s bringing creativity and excitement but also challenges, in particular around how to relate the new forms to the old ones, online communities to offline ones, the democracy of voice and numbers and the democracy of formal representation….(More)

How to Get People to Pitch In

Curated on May 17, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Erez Yoeli, Syon Bhanot, Gordon Kraft-Todd And David Rand in The New York Times: “…The “Pigouvian” approach to encouraging cooperation, named after the economist who first suggested it nearly a century ago, is to change the price — i.e., the personal cost of cooperating: Make water more expensive, tax carbon or pay people to vaccinate their kids.

But Californians are stubbornly unresponsive to higher water prices. Estimates suggest that a 10 percent increase in price would result in reductions in water use of 2 to 4 percent. That’s not nothing, but it implies that huge, politically infeasible price increases would be needed to address the state’s needs.

This problem isn’t unique to Californians and their effort to save water. In a recent review of field experiments that promote cooperation in the journal Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, we found that changing the material costs and benefits of cooperation often doesn’t work. Researchers have tried various forms of payments — paying cash, handing out T-shirts — and they’ve tried providing information on how to cooperate, with only limited success.

What does consistently work may be surprising: interventions based not on money, but on leveraging social concerns.

There are two ways to do this, both building on people’s desire for others to think highly of them. One is to make people’s cooperative (or selfish) choices more observable to others, like neighbors or co-workers. The second works in the opposite direction, providing people with information about how others around them are behaving (this is called a “descriptive social norm”).

To see how this might work, consider the California drought. The state could set up a website where homeowners pledge publicly to reduce their water consumption by 15 percent. Those who do would get a lawn sign that would say something like, “My lawn is yellow because I took a pledge to help California. Join me at yellowlawns.ca.gov.”

And what about norms? Innovative companies and public utilities are already on the case. A San Francisco-based firm, WaterSmart Software, sends mailers that allow homeowners to compare their water use to their neighbors’. Estimates suggest that these mailers reduce water use by 2 to 5 percent — the same as a 10 percent price increase.

Why do social interventions work? Research on the evolution of cooperation provides an answer. Beyond helping our families — the people to whom we’re genetically related — making others better off is not our main motivation to give. Instead, we cooperate because it makes us look good. This can be going on consciously or, more often, subconsciously (a gut feeling of guilt when your neighbor sees you turning on your sprinkler).

When your choices are observable by others, it makes it possible for good actions to benefit your reputation. Similarly, norms make you feel you’re expected to cooperate in a given situation, and that people may think poorly of you if they learn you are not doing your part….(More)”

Chicago uses new technology to solve this very old urban problem

Curated on May 17, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mehboob Jeelani at Fortune: “Chicago has spent 12 years collecting data on resident complaints. Now the city is harnessing that data to control the rat population, stopping infestations before residents spot rats in the first place.

For the past three years, Chicago police have been analyzing 911 calls to better predict crime patterns across the city and, in one case, actually forecasted a shootout minutes before it occurred.

Now, the city government is turning its big data weapons on the city’s rat population.

The city has 12 years of data on the resident complaints, ranging from calls about rodent sitting to graffiti. Those clusters of data lead the engineers to where the rats can potentially breed. The report is shared with the city’s sanitation team, which later cleans up the rat-infested areas.

“We discovered really interesting relationship that led to developing an algorithm about rodent prediction,” says Brenna Berman, Chicago’s chief information officer. “It involved 31 variables related to calls about overflowing trash bins and food poisoning in restaurants.”

The results, Berman says, are 20% more efficient versus the old responsive model.

Governing cities in the 21st century is a difficult task. It needs a political and economic support. In America, it was only in the early 1990s—when young adults started moving from the suburbs back to the cities—that the academic and policy consensus shifted back toward urban centers. Since then, cities are facing an influx of new residents, overwhelming the service providing agencies. To meet that demand amid the recent budget sequestration, cities like New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Chicago are constantly elevating the art of governance through innovative policies.

Due to this new model, in Chicago, you might not even spot a rat. The city’s Department of Innovation and Technology analyzes big chunks of data to an extent where the likelihood of a rodent infestation is thwarted seven days ahead of resident rat-sightings…(More)”

Handbook Of Digital Politics

Curated on May 16, 2015November 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Stephen Coleman and Deen Freelon: “It would be difficult to imagine how a development as world-changing as the emergence of the Internet could have taken place without having some impact upon the ways in which politics is expressed, conducted, depicted and reflected upon. The Handbook of Digital Politics explores this impact in a series of chapters written by some of the world’s leading Internet researchers. This volume is a must-read for students, researchers and practitioners interested in the changing landscape of political communication….Politics is continually changing in the digital era, largely based on a range of new and comprehensive empirical findings. This cutting-edge Handbook includes the very latest research on the relationship between digital information, communication technologies and politics.

Written by leading scholars in the field the chapters explore, in seven parts, theorizing digital politics, government and policy, collective action and civic engagement, political talk, journalism, internet governance and expanding the frontiers of digital politics research. Their key focus throughout is with the political nature behind the ways in which society implements digital technologies, and each of the chapters help the reader to discover this. …(More)

Development Tracker

Curated on May 16, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

City of Victoria: “Welcome to the new Development Tracker, a tool to help keep you informed on developments happening in your neighbourhood and community.

To get started, click the icon below. You will be directed to a start menu, where you can choose to sort by neighbourhood, or view all current rezoning applications. All applications will have a list of completed and upcoming milestones, as well as plans and other documents to give you more information on what each project is all about….(More)”

Detroit Revitalizes City with 311 App

Curated on May 15, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Shueh at Government Technology: “In the wake of the Detroit bankruptcy, blight sieged parts of the city as its populous exited. The fallouts were typical. There was a run of vandalism, thefts, arson and graffiti. Hard times pushed throngs of looters into scores of homes to scavenge for anything that wasn’t bolted down — and often, even for the things that were…. For solutions, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and DWSD’s CIO Dan Rainey partnered with SeeClickFix. The company, based in New Haven, Conn., is known for its mobile platform that’s embedded itself as a conduit between city service departments and citizen non-emergency — or 311 — requests. Duggan saw the platform as an opportune answer to address more than a single issue. Instead, the mayor asked how the app could be integrated throughout the city. Potholes, downed trees, graffiti, missing signage, streetlight outages — the mayor wanted a bundled solution to handle an array of common challenges.

Improve Detroit was his answer. The city app, officially available since April, allows citizens to report problems using photos, location data and by request type. Notifications on progress follow and residents can even pay utility bills through the app. For departments, it’s ingrained into work orders and workflows, while analytics provide data for planning, and filters permit a deep-dive analysis….

Detroit now sits among many metropolitan cities pioneering such 311 apps. San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Chicago are just a few of them. And there are a host of equally adroit tech providers supplying and supporting the apps — companies like Salesforce, CitySourced, PublicStuff, Fix 311 and others. Some cities have even developed their own apps through their internal IT departments.

What’s unique in Detroit is the city’s ambition to leverage a 311 app against major blight while the city works to demolish more than 20,000 abandoned homes — susceptible to fire, flooding, pest infestations and criminal activity. Beyond this, Lingholm said the initiative doubles as a tool to rejuvenate public trust. Data from the app is fed to the city’s new open data portal, and departments have set goals to ensure responsiveness….(More)

How to use mobile phone data for good without invading anyone’s privacy

Curated on May 14, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Leo Mirani in Quartz: “In 2014, when the West African Ebola outbreak was at its peak, some academics argued that the epidemic could have been slowed by using mobile phone data.

Their premise was simple: call-data records show the true nature of social networks and human movement. Understanding social networks and how people really move—as seen from phone movements and calls—could give health officials the ability to predict how a disease will move and where a disease will strike next, and prepare accordingly.

The problem is that call-data records are very hard to get a hold of. The files themselves are huge, there are enormous privacy risks, and the process of making the records safe for distribution is long.
First, the technical basics

Every time you make a phone call from your mobile phone to another mobile phone, the network records the following information (note: this is not a complete list):

The number from which the call originated
The number at which the call terminated
Start time of the call
Duration of the call
The ID number of the phone making the call
The ID number of the SIM card used to make the call
The code for the antenna used to make the call

On their own, these records are not creepy. Indeed, without them, networks would be unable to connect calls or bill customers. But it is easy to see why operators aren’t rushing to share this information. Even though the data includes none of the actual content of a phone call in the data, simply knowing which number is calling which, and from where and when, is usually more than enough to identify people.
So how can network operators use this valuable data for good while also protecting their own interests and those of their customers? A good example can be found in Africa, where Orange, a French mobile phone network with interests across several African countries, has for the second year run its “Data for Development” (D4D) program, which offers researchers a chance to mine call data for clues on development problems.

Steps to safe sharing

After a successful first year in Ivory Coast, Orange this year ran the D4D program in Senegal. The aim of the program is to give researchers and scientists at universities and other research labs access to data in order to find novel ways to aid development in health, agriculture, transport or urban planning, energy, and national statistics….(More)”