Dr Lucy Kimbell at Open Policy Making Blog (UK Cabinet): “Set up in April 2014, Policy Lab brings new tools and techniques, new insights and practical experimentation to policy-making. This second demonstrator project has over the past two months resulted in learning about how policy professionals can work in a more open, user-centred way to engage with others and generate novel solutions to policy issues.
The project, with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), is concerned with family mediation during divorce and separation….
The main findings from the Lab’s perspective are in three areas.
Clarifying what user perspectives bring to policy-making.
The project gave us some insights into the potential value of ethnography in policy-making. It was centred around people’s whole experience of divorce or separation, not just their interactions with mediators or lawyers. The research explored what it was like for people now, and the creative activities in the workshop proposed what it could be like for people in the future. Unexpected insights included that some people going through separation and divorce lacked confidence in their ability to make decisions about their futures.
Using person-centred techniques in the workshop made participants accountable to the users. Their stories were read, interpreted and discussed at the start. Throughout the workshop, participants repeatedly raised questions about what a proposed new solution might be like for these personas. It was as if these participants were now accountable to these individuals.
Reconstituting the issue of family mediation.
Another result of this project was to shift from seeing policy-making as primarily as the province of the MoJ towards a collective activity in which many actors and different kinds of expertise needed to be involved. The project constituted policy-making as a complex configuration of socio-cultural, organizational and technological actors, processes, data and resources – more of a living system than a mechanical object with inputs, outputs and policy “levers”.
Starting and ending with people’s lives, not government-funded or delivered services, as the driver to innovate.
Finally, this Lab project looked broadly at people’s lives, not just as users of mediation or court services…. (More)”
Climaps
Climaps: “This website presents the results of the EU research project EMAPS, as well as its process: an experiment to use computation and visualization to harness the increasing availability of digital data and mobilize it for public debate. To do so, EMAPS gathered a team of social and data scientists, climate experts and information designers. It also reached out beyond the walls of Academia and engaged with the actors of the climate debate.
The climate is changing. Efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions have so far been ineffective or, at least, insufficient. As the impacts of global warming are emerging, our societies experience an unprecedented pressure. How to live with climate change without giving up fighting it? How to share the burden of adaptation among countries, regions and communities? How to be fair to all human and non-human beings affected by such a planetary transition? Since our collective life depends on these questions, they deserve discussion, debate and even controversy. To provide some help to navigate in the uncharted territories that lead to our future, here is an electronic atlas. It proposes a series of maps and stories related to climate adaptation issues. They are not exhaustive or error-proof. They are nothing but sketches of the new world in which we will have to live. Such a world remains undetermined and its atlas can be but tentative…(More)”
Making Futures – Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy
Book edited by Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson and Richard Topgaard: “Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people’s everyday activities. They can encompass local services, cultural production, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods.
These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics. (More) “
Senate moves to open-data format
Adam Mazmanian in FCW: “The U.S. Senate will begin making bills and other legislative information available for bulk XML download, following on efforts made by the House of Representatives in 2013. The Senate will include all summary and bill information from the 113th Congress, which just gaveled out, and legislation from the upcoming 114th
This is a very big deal for watchdog groups and private firms that use legislative data to make products for tracking Congress. Before the Senate decision was announced Dec. 18 at a meeting of the Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force, users of Senate data had to scrape information from multiple sources. That can be expensive and yield inaccurate data, said Hudson Hollister, executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition and a former Capitol Hill staffer.
“This change by the Senate means a crucial link in the chain will become more reliable. It’s great news for the ecosystem that wants to use government information to deliver transparency and deliver efficiency,” Hollister told FCW.
Having the House and Senate legislation available for bulk download means it’s possible to build services that track legislative language by keyword or topic as bills move through Congress, and follow the process as bills get marked up in committee, combined with other bills, or amended on the floor. Already a few firms are building services along these lines, such as (Leg)Cyte and Fiscal Note.
Despite the recent move by the Senate, all of Congress isn’t exactly speaking with one voice regarding data standards. In the summer of 2013, the Office of Law Revision Council, which maintains the U.S. Code as new legislation is signed into law, developed an XML information model called U.S. Legislative Markup (USLM) as a way of publishing laws and associated metadata in XML. This model could potentially be adapted for use across Congress for bills, summaries, reports and other information….(More)”
Geneticists Begin Tests of an Internet for DNA
Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review: “A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet. The researchers hope their work could be as important to medical science as HTTP, the protocol created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, was to the Web.
One of the group’s first demonstration projects is a simple search engine that combs through the DNA letters of thousands of human genomes stored at nine locations, including Google’s server farms and the University of Leicester, in the U.K. According to the group, which includes key players in the Human Genome Project, the search engine is the start of a kind of Internet of DNA that may eventually link millions of genomes together.
The technologies being developed are application program interfaces, or APIs, that let different gene databases communicate. Pooling information could speed discoveries about what genes do and help doctors diagnose rare birth defects by matching children with suspected gene mutations to others who are known to have them.
The alliance was conceived two years ago at a meeting in New York of 50 scientists who were concerned that genome data was trapped in private databases, tied down by legal consent agreements with patients, limited by privacy rules, or jealously controlled by scientists to further their own scientific work. It styles itself after the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, a body that oversees standards for the Web.
“It’s creating the Internet language to exchange genetic information,” says David Haussler, scientific director of the genome institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is one of the group’s leaders.
The group began releasing software this year. Its hope—as yet largely unrealized—is that any scientist will be able to ask questions about genome data possessed by other laboratories, without running afoul of technical barriers or privacy rules….(More)”
Will Organization Design Be Affected By Big Data?
Paper by Giles Slinger and Rupert Morrison in the Journal of Organization Design: “Computing power and analytical methods allow us to create, collate, and analyze more data than ever before. When datasets are unusually large in volume, velocity, and variety, they are referred to as “big data.” Some observers have suggested that in order to cope with big data (a) organizational structures will need to change and (b) the processes used to design organizations will be different. In this article, we differentiate big data from relatively slow-moving, linked people data. We argue that big data will change organizational structures as organizations pursue the opportunities presented by big data. The processes by which organizations are designed, however, will be relatively unaffected by big data. Instead, organization design processes will be more affected by the complex links found in people data.”
Gamifying Cancer Research Crowdsources the Race for the Cure
Jason Brick at PSFK: “Computer time and human hours are among of the biggest obstacles in the face of progress in the fight against cancer. Researchers have terabytes of data, but only so many processors and people with which to analyze it. Much like the SETI program (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), it’s likely that big answers are already in the information we’ve collected. They’re just waiting for somebody to find them.
Reverse the Odds, a free mobile game from Cancer Research UK, accesses the combined resources of geeks and gamers worldwide. It’s a simple app game, the kind you play in line at the bank or while waiting at the dentist’s office, in which you complete mini puzzles and buy upgrades to save an imaginary world.
Each puzzle of the game is a repurposing of cancer data. Players find patterns in the data — the exact kind of analysis grad students and volunteers in a lab look for — and the results get compiled by Cancer Research UK for use in finding a cure. Errors are expected and accounted for because the thousands of players expected will round out the occasional mistake….(More)”
This vending machine will deny you snacks based on medical records
Springwise: “Businesses often stand by the motto ‘the customer is always right’ — but are they? We’ve already seen a few services that deny consumers what they want based on their personal info. For example, Billboard Brasil’s Fan Check Machine only gave out copies of the music magazine if the buyer could prove they owned tracks by the artist on the cover. Now the Luce X2 Touch TV vending machine uses facial recognition and customers’ medical records to determine if they should be allowed to buy an unhealthy snack.
Created by Italy-based Rhea Vendors and recently launched in the UK, the machine features a 22-inch touchscreen display that lets customers to select an item just like a standard vending machine. However, before the snack is released customers with an account can go through a facial recognition check.
The technology detects the customer’s age, build and mood in order to determine whether the purchase is a wise decision. The machine can also be programmed to access information about the user’s medical records and purchase history. If the algorithms decide that purchasing a coffee with 3 sugars or the fourth candy bar of the day is a bad idea for their health or mood, it can refuse to vend the product.
While some customers won’t appreciate their private data being analyzed or getting rejected by a lifeless machine, the idea could be a savior for those on a diet….(More).
Make policy for real, not ideal, humans
Martin Wolf at the Financial Times: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made. This famous remark of the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is particularly relevant to economists. “Homo economicus” is far-sighted, rational and self-interested. Real human beings are none of these things. We are bundles of emotions, not calculating machines. This matters
The World Bank’s latest World Development Report examines this territory. It notes that “behavioural economics” alters our view of human behaviour in three ways: first, most of our thinking is not deliberative, but automatic; second, it is socially conditioned; and, third, it is shaped by inaccurate mental models.
The Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, explored the idea that we think in two different ways in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow . The need for an automatic system is evident. Our ancestors did not have the time to work out answers to life’s challenges from first principles. They acquired automatic responses and a cultural predisposition towards rules of thumb. We inherited both these traits. Thus, we are influenced by how a problem is framed.
Another characteristic is “confirmation bias” — the tendency to interpret new information as support for pre-existing beliefs. We also suffer from loss aversion, fierce resistance to losing what one already has. For our ancestors, on the margin of survival, that made sense.
The fact that humans are intensely social is clear. Even the idea that we are autonomous is itself socially conditioned. We are also far from solely self-interested. A bad consequence of the power of norms is that societies may be stuck in destructive patterns of behaviour. Nepotism and corruption are examples. If they are entrenched, it may be difficult (or dangerous) for individuals not to participate. But social norms can also be valuable. Trust is a valuable norm. It rests on one of humanity’s strongest behaviours: conditional co-operation. People will punish free-riders even when it costs them to do so. This trait strengthens groups and so must raise members’ ability to survive.
Mental models are essential. Some seem to be inbuilt; and some can be damaging — as well as productive. Ideas about “us” and “them”, reinforced by social norms, may well lead to results that range from the merely unfair to the catastrophic. Equally important may be mental models that create self-fulfilling expectations of who will succeed and who will fail. There is evidence, notes the WDR, that mental models rooted in history may shape people’s view of the world for centuries: caste is an example. Such mental models survive because they are reproduced socially and become part of the automatic rather than the deliberative system. They influence not just our perceptions of others, but perceptions of ourselves.
To illustrate the relevance of these realities, the report analyses the policy challenges of poverty, early childhood development, household finance, productivity, health and climate change….(More)”
Just say no to digital hoarding
Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “We have become a nation of digital hoarders. We save everything, even stuff that we know, deep down, we’ll never need or be able to find. We save every e-mail, every photo, every file, every text message and every video clip. If we don’t have enough space on our mobile devices, we move it to a different storage device, maybe even a hard drive or a flash drive. Or, better yet, we just move it to “the cloud.”….
If this were simply a result of the exponential growth of information — the “information overload” — that would be one thing. That’s what technology is supposed to do for us – provide new ways of creating, storing and manipulating information. Innovation, from this perspective, can be viewed as technology’s frantic quest to keep up with society’s information needs.
But digital hoarding is about something much different – it’s about hoarding data for the sake of data. When Apple creates a new “Burst Mode” on the iPhone 5s, enabling you to rapidly save a series of up to 10 photos in succession – and you save all of them – is that not an example of hoarding? When you save every e-book, every movie and every TV season that you’ve “binge-watched” on your tablet or other digital device — isn’t that another symptom of being a digital hoarder? In the analog era, you would have donated used books to charity, hosted a garage sale to get rid of old albums you never listen to, or simply dumped these items in the trash.
You may not think you are a digital hoarder. You may think that the desire to save each and every photo, e-mail or file is something relatively harmless. Storage is cheap and abundant, right? You may watch a reality TV show such as “Hoarders” and think to yourself, “That’s not me.” But maybe it is you. (Especially if you still have those old episodes of “Hoarders” on your digital device.)
Unlike hoarding in the real world — where massive stacks of papers, books, clothing and assorted junk might physically obstruct your ability to move and signal to others that you need help – there are no obvious outward signs of being a digital hoarder. And, in fact, owning the newest, super-slim 128GB tablet capable of hoarding more information than anyone else strikes many as being progressive. However, if you are constantly increasing the size of your data plan or buying new digital devices with ever more storage capacity, you just might be a digital hoarder…
In short, innovation should be about helping us transform data into information. “Search” was perhaps the first major innovation that helped us transform data into information. The “cloud” is currently the innovation that has the potential to organize our data better and more efficiently, keeping it from clogging up our digital devices. The next big innovation may be “big data,” which claims that it can make sense of all the new data we’re creating. This may be either brilliant — helping us find the proverbial needle in the digital haystack — or disastrous — encouraging us to build bigger and bigger haystacks in the hope that there’s a needle in there somewhere… (More).”