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)”

Data Reinvents Libraries for the 21st Century


 in GovTech: “Libraries can evoke tired assumptions. It could be a stack of battered books and yesteryear movies; that odd odor of wilted pages and circa-1970s decor; or it could be a bout of stereotypes, like obsolete encyclopedias and ruler-snapping librarians.

Whatever the case, the truth is that today libraries are proving they’re more than mausoleums of old knowledge. They’re in a state of progressive reform, rethinking services and restructuring with data. It’s a national trend as libraries modernize, strategize and recast themselves as digital platforms. They’ve taken on the role of data curator for information coming in and citizen-generated data going out….

Nate Hill is among this band of progressives. As a data zealot who believes in data’s inclination for innovation, the former deputy director for Tennessee’s Chattanooga Public Library, led a charge to transform the library into a data centric community hub. The library boasts an open data portal that it manages for the city, a civic hacker lab, a makerspace for community projects, and expanded access to in-person and online tutorials for coding and other digital skill sets….

The draw in data sharing and creating, Hill said, comes from the realization that today’s data channels are no longer one-way systems.

“I push people to the idea that now it’s about being a producer rather than just a consumer,” Hill said, “because really that whole idea of a read-write Web comes from the notion that you and I, for example, are just as capable at editing Wikipedia articles on the fly and changing information as anybody else.”

For libraries, Hill sees this as an opportunity and asks what institution can better pioneer the new frontier of information exchange. He posits the idea that, as the original public content curator, adding open data to libraries is only natural. In fact, he says it’s a logical next step when considering that traditional media like books, research journals and other sources infuse data points with rich context — something most city and state open data portals typically don’t do.

“The dream here is to treat the library as a different kind of community infrastructure,” Hill said. “You can conceivably be feeding live data about a city into an open data portal, and at the same time, turning the library into a real live information source — rather than something just static.”

In Chattanooga, an ongoing effort is in the works to do just that. The library seeks to integrate open data into its library catalog searches. Visitors researching Chattanooga’s waterfront could do a quick search and pull up local books, articles and mapping documents, but also a collection of latest data sets on water pollution and land use, for example.

Eyeing the library data movement at scale, Hill said he could easily envision a network of public libraries that act as local data hubs, retrieving and funneling data into larger state and national data portals….(More).

5 cool ways connected data is being used


 at Wareable: “The real news behind the rise of wearable tech isn’t so much the gadgetry as the gigantic amount of personal data that it harnesses.

Concerns have already been raised over what companies may choose to do with such valuable information, with one US life insurance company already using Fitbits to track customers’ exercise and offer them discounts when they hit their activity goals.

Despite a mildly worrying potential dystopia in which our own data could be used against us, there are plenty of positive ways in which companies are using vast amounts of connected data to make the world a better place…

Parkinson’s disease research

Apple Health ResearchKit was recently unveiled as a platform for collecting collaborative data for medical studies, but Apple isn’t the first company to rely on crowdsourced data for medical research.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research recently unveiled a partnership with Intel to improve research and treatment for the neurodegenerative brain disease. Wearables are being used to unobtrusively gather real-time data from sufferers, which is then analysed by medical experts….

Saving the rhino

Connected data and wearable tech isn’t just limited to humans. In South Africa, the Madikwe Conservation Project is using wearable-based data to protect endangered rhinos from callous poachers.

A combination of ultra-strong Kevlar ankle collars powered by an Intel Galileo chip, along with an RFID chip implanted in each rhino’s horn allows the animals to be monitored. Any break in proximity between the anklet and horn results in anti-poaching teams being deployed to catch the bad guys….

Making public transport smart

A company called Snips is collecting huge amounts of urban data in order to improve infrastructure. In partnership with French national rail operator SNCF, Snips produced an app called Tranquilien to utilise location data from commuters’ phones and smartwatches to track which parts of the rail network were busy at which times.

Combining big data with crowdsourcing, the information helps passengers to pick a train where they can find a seat during peak times, while the data can also be useful to local businesses when serving the needs of commuters who are passing through.

Improving the sports fan experience

We’ve already written about how wearable tech is changing the NFL, but the collection of personal data is also set to benefit the fans.

Levi’s Stadium – the new home of the San Francisco 49ers – opened in 2014 and is one of the most technically advanced sports venues in the world. As well as a strong Wi-Fi signal throughout the stadium, fans also benefit from a dedicated app. This not only offers instant replays and real-time game information, but it also helps them find a parking space, order food and drinks directly to their seat and even check the lines at the toilets. As fans use the app, all of the data is collated to enhance the fan experience in future….

Creating interactive art

Don’t be put off by the words ‘interactive installation’. On Broadway is a cool work of art that “represents life in the 21st Century city through a compilation of images and data collected along the 13 miles of Broadway that span Manhattan”….(More)”

The Missing Statistics of Criminal Justice


Matt Ford at the Atlantic: “An abundance of data has fueled the reform movement, but from prisons to prosecutors, crucial questions remain unquantified.

After Ferguson, a noticeable gap in criminal-justice statistics emerged: the use of lethal force by the police. The federal government compiles a wealth of data on homicides, burglaries, and arson, but no official, reliable tabulation of civilian deaths by law enforcement exists. A partial database kept by the FBI is widely considered to be misleading and inaccurate. (The Washington Post has just released a more expansive total of nearly 400 police killings this year.) “It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people were shot by the police last week, last month, last year,” FBI Director James Comey told reporters in April.

This raises an obvious question: If the FBI can’t tell how many people were killed by law enforcement last year, what other kinds of criminal-justice data are missing? Statistics are more than just numbers: They focus the attention of politicians, drive the allocation of resources, and define the public debate. Public officials—from city councilors to police commanders to district attorneys—are often evaluated based on how these numbers change during their terms in office. But existing statistical measures only capture part of the overall picture, and the problems that go unmeasured are often also unaddressed. What changes could the data that isn’t currently collected produce if it were gathered?….

Without reliable official statistics, scholars often must gather and compile necessary data themselves. “A few years ago, I was struck at how many police killings of civilians we seemed to be having in Philadelphia,” Gottschalk said as an example. “They would be buried in the newspaper, and I was stunned by how difficult it was to compile that information and compare it to New York and do it on a per-capita basis. It wasn’t readily available.” As a result, criminal-justice researchers often spend more time gathering data than analyzing it.

This data’s absence shapes the public debate over mass incarceration in the same way that silence between notes of music gives rhythm to a song. Imagine debating the economy without knowing the unemployment rate, or climate change without knowing the sea level, or healthcare reform without knowing the number of uninsured Americans. Legislators and policymakers heavily rely on statistics when crafting public policy. Criminal-justice statistics can also influence judicial rulings, including those by the Supreme Court, with implications for the entire legal system.

Beyond their academic and policymaking value, there’s also a certain power to statistics. They have the irreplaceable ability to both clarify social issues and structure the public’s understanding of them. A wealth of data has allowed sociologists, criminologists, and political scientists to diagnose serious problems with the American criminal-justice system over the past twenty years. Now that a growing bipartisan consensus recognizes the problem exists, gathering the right facts and figures could help point the way towards solutions…(More)”

The Diffusion and Evolution of 311 Citizen Service Centers in American Cities from 1996 to 2012


PhD thesis by John Christopher O’Byrne: “This study of the diffusion and evolution of the 311 innovation in the form of citizen service centers and as a technology cluster has been designed to help identify the catalysts for the spread of government-to-citizen (G2C) technology in local government in order to better position future G2C technology for a more rapid rate of adoption. The 311 non-emergency number was first established in 1996 and had spread to 80 local governments across the United States by 2012. This dissertation examines: what factors contributed to the adoption of 311 in American local governments over 100,000 in population; how did the innovation diffuse and evolve over time; and why did some governments’ communications with citizens became more advanced than others? Given the problem of determining causality, a three-part research design was used to examine the topic including a historical narrative, logistic regression model, and case studies from Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and St. Louis. The narrative found that the political forces of the federal government, national organizations, and policy entrepreneurs (Karch, 2007) promoted the 311 innovation to solve different problems and that it evolved beyond its original intent.

The logistic regression model found that there was a statistically significant relationship between 311 adoption and the variables of higher population, violent crime rate, and the mayor-council form of government. The case studies revealed that mayors played a strong role in establishing citizen service centers in all three cities while 311 adopter Pittsburgh and non-adopter St. Louis seemed to have more in common in their G2C evolution due to severe budget constraints. With little written about the 311 innovation in academic journals, practitioners and scholars will benefit from understanding the catalysts for the diffusion and evolution of the 311 in order to determine ways to increase the rate of adoption for future G2C communication innovations….(More)”

The Age of Every Building in Los Angeles, Mapped


Laura Bliss at CityLab: “A fascinating resource for lovers of city planning, made possible by open data.

Image built:LA
built:LA

Construction in Los Angeles may have exploded during the postwar era, but as a new interactive map shows, the wide age range of its buildings might surprise you.

Using open data from local governments, built: LA visualizes the age of roughly 3 million buildings across L.A. County constructed between 1890 and 2008. Drag your mouse to explore the vast web of communities and neighborhoods, hover over individual properties to discover birth years, and double click to zoom in further.

Perhaps best of all, hit the rainbow stopwatch to view a decade-by-decade timelapse of development across the county. The city’s core, in particular, clusters together buildings of century-spanning generations, while suburbs and communities to the east and west tend to represent just one or two decades of development….(More).”

The Everyone City: How ICT-Based Participation Shapes Urban Form


 

Book Chapter by Sara LevyKarel Martens,  and Rob van der Heijden : “Citizen participation is a cornerstone of urban planning. One common criticism is that the process can be cumbersome and slow. However, in the face of recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), those problems can be easily overcome, making it possible to extend public participation to a wider sphere of urban planning matters. But what do we know of how ICT-based public participation affects urban form? What does a city shaped by social networks and other ICT-tools look like? We develop an agent-based model of urban growth to improve our understanding of these issues. Our model consists of a spatially disaggregated, micro-economic-based, real estate market model coupled with an ICT-based planning process. In the model, public participation is based on social network affiliation and preferences over the height of buildings….(More)”

 

Nudging hits Berlin


Hanno Burmester, Philipp Sälhoff  and Marie Wachinger at Policy Network: “Despite suspicion, the nudge theory may have a place in the process of party reform. Ever since Germany’s Kanzleramt published a job ad in 2014 to recruit three behavioural scientists, “nudging” has become a political buzzword in Berlin. For people outside the Berlin bubble, this may come as a surprise: the British government established its Behavioural Insights Team in 2010 (the less Orwellian nickname is the Nudge Unit). The city of Copenhagen followed soon after and started experimenting with the concept in 2012. Still, nudging seems to have only hit Berlin in recent months, sparking fierce debate among political experts, as well as the German public….

It is not surprising, therefore, that the notions of nudging and libertarian paternalism has quickly found its enemies in the German political debate. Libertarianism here is understood as a radical political ideology which, with the disappearance from federal politics of the centre-right liberal FDP with its partly libertarian agenda, has no representatives at all on the national political stage. Paternalism evokes negative political connotations as well. Moreover, in contrast to the United States, extensive government regulation enjoys widespread public acceptance. At the same time, Germans harbour a deep distrust against opaque and/or seemingly manipulative government actions. The concept of nudging, which explicitly acknowledges that its subjects can be unaware of being consciously influenced, thus feeds into a cultural distrust that, with regards to German and European history, is more than understandable.

Interestingly, however, the political left seems less averse to the idea of stimulating behavioural change through government action. For instance, the German minister of justice and consumer protection, the Social Democrat, Heiko Maas, lauded the approach in an op-ed, saying that it would be wise to acknowledge that citizens do not act rationally all the time. Nudging thus could be a wise compromise “between over-regulation of everyday affairs and laissez-faire politics”.

Nudging is more than a tool for governments, though. We believe it offers advantages in fields that, from an ethical perspective, are less controversial. One of those is the reform of political parties. Since August 2014 we have been  developing new approaches and to party reform in our projectLegitimation and Self-efficacy: Impulses for the Future of Party Democracy. The past decades have shown how hard it is to implement structural reforms in political parties, irrespective of the national context. On the left, for instance, the German Social Democratic party shows a remarkable institutional immunity to change, despite a widespread desire for parties to reflect the demands of rapidly changing societies.

Nudging may provide a tool to identify and analyse current practices of exerting political influence, thereby opening new prospects for changing organisational structures….(More)”

Montreal plans to become a Smart City with free WiFi and open data


Ian Hardy at MobileSyrup: “Earlier this month, the Coderre Administration announced the Montreal Action Plan that includes 70 projects that will turn Montreal into a “smart city.”

The total allocated budget of $23 million is broken down into 6 sections — listed below with the official description — and is targeted for completion by the end of 2017. Apart from ensuring a fast fiber network, “unleashing municipal data,” and the rollout of “intelligent transport systems” that will bring your real-time info on your subway/bus/car service, the city plans to deploy free WiFi.

According to the statement, Montreal will be deploying wireless access points in 750 locations to have facilitate free public WiFi. The larger idea is to “enhance the experience of citizens, boost tourism and accelerate economic development of Montreal.”…

1. Wi-Fi public: Deploy APs to extend coverage in the area, creating a harmonized experience and provide uniform performance across the network to enhance the experience of citizens, boost tourism and accelerate the economic development of Montreal.

2. Very high speed network, multiservice: Adopt a telecommunications policy, create one-stop telecommunications and urban integrate the telecommunications component in the charter of all major urban projects, so that all players in the Montreal community have access a fiber network at high speed and multi-service, that meets their current and future needs.

3. Economic Niche smart city: Create an environment facilitating the emergence of companies in the smart city economic niche, multiply the sources of innovation for solving urban problems and simplify doing business with the City, so that Montreal becoming a leader in innovation as smart city and accelerate economic development.

4. Intelligent Mobility: Make available all data on mobility in real time, implement intelligent transport systems, intermodal and integrated deployment and support solutions designed to inform users to optimize mobility users in real time on the entire territory.

5. Participatory democracy: Unleashing municipal data, information management and governance and adapt the means of citizen participation to make them accessible online, to improve access to the democratic process and consolidate the culture of transparency and accountability.

6. Digital Public Services: Making a maximum of services available on a multitude of digital channels, involve citizens in the development of services and create opportunities for all, to become familiar with their use, to provide access to municipal services 24/7, across multiple platforms….(More)”

Smart Cities, Smart Governments and Smart Citizens: A Brief Introduction


Paper by Gabriel Puron Cid et al in the International Journal of E-Planning Research (IJEPR): “Although the field of study surrounding the “smart city” is in an embryonic phase, the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in urban settings is not new (Dameri and Rosenthal-Sabroux, 2014; Toh and Low, 1993; Tokmakoff and Billington, 1994). Since ancient times, cities and metropolitan areas have propelled social transformation and economic prosperity in many societies (Katz and Bradley, 2013). Many modern urban sites and metros have leveraged the success and competitiveness of ICTs (Caragliu, Del Bo and Nijkamp, 2011). At least in part, the recent growth of smart city initiatives can be attributed to the rapid adoption of mobile and sensor technologies, as well as the diversity of available Internet applications (Nam and Pardo, 2011; Oberti and Pavesi, 2013).

The effective use of technological innovations in urban sites has been embraced by the emergent term “smart city”, with a strong focus on improving living conditions, safeguarding the sustainability of the natural environment, and engaging with citizens more effectively and actively (Dameri and Rosenthal-Sabroux, 2014). Also known as smart city, digital city, or intelligent city, many of these initiatives have been introduced as strategies to improve the utilization of physical infrastructure (e.g., roads and utility grids), engage citizens in active local governance and decision making, foster sustainable growth, and help government officials learn and innovate as the environment changes….(More)”