Science’s Next Frontier? It’s Civic Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Louise Lief at Discover Magazine: “…As a lay observer who has explored scientists’ relationship to the public, I have often wondered why many scientists and scientific institutions continue to rely on what is known as the “deficit model” of science communication, despite its well-documented shortcomings and even a backfire effect. This approach views the public as  “empty vessels” or “warped minds” ready to be set straight with facts. Perhaps many scientists continue to use it because it’s familiar and mimics classroom instruction. But it’s not doing the job.

Scientists spend much of their time with the public defending science, and little time building trust.

Many scientists also give low priority to trust building. At the 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, Michigan State University professor John C. Besley showed these results (right) of a survey of scientists’ priorities for engaging with the public online.

Scientists are focusing on the frustrating, reactive task of defending science, spending little time establishing bonds of trust with the public, which comes in last as a professional priority. How much more productive their interactions with the public – and through them, policymakers — would be if establishing trust was a top priority!

There is evidence that the public is hungry for such exchanges. When Research!America asked the public in 2016 how important is it for scientists to inform elected officials and the public about their research and its impact on society, 84 percent said it was very or somewhat important — a number that ironically mirrors the percentage of Americans who cannot name a scientist….

This means scientists need to go even further, venturing into unfamiliar local venues where science may not be mentioned but where communities gather to discuss their problems. Interesting new opportunities to do this are emerging nation wide. In 2014 the Chicago Community Trust, one of the nation’s largest community foundations, launched a series of dinners across the city through a program called On the Table, to discuss community problems and brainstorm possible solutions. In 2014, the first year, almost 10,000 city residents participated. In 2017, almost 100,000 Chicago residents took part. Recently the Trust added a grants component to the program, awarding more than $135,000 in small grants to help participants translate their ideas into action….(More)”.

MOPA: How an app generates data that help clean-up Maputo

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Making All Voices Count: “Maputo has a population of over 1.1 million people, with 54 per cent living below the poverty line and 70 per cent living in informal settlements. The majority of the city’s roads are unpaved and flood control is limited, particularly in informal settlements in peri-urban areas. During the rainy season, streets flood and gutters quickly fill with debris and garbage, blocking the drainage of rainwater.

Solid waste management is one of the most important services that the Maputo Municipal Council must provide. However the lack of funding, capacity, and transparency within the municipality has resulted in substandard waste removal.

The municipality has contracted private companies to collect the waste from the urban communities. Micro-entrepreneurs are hired to travel by foot through high-density, low-income areas using trolleys to pick up trash from households and communal bins in the peri-urban neighborhoods.

Both the waste removal companies and individual waste collectors have difficulties locating waste for removal, coordinating their routes and organising collection points.

MOPA – a tool for both citizens and local government

MOPA is a communications platform that allows participatory monitoring of waste collection in Maputo. Once a waste management problem is reported, one of two large waste collection companies and 56 micro-enterprises act to resolve it. Their actions are logged on the platform by Maputo’s municipality staff.

Implemented by the private company UX Information Technologies and co-designed with the Maputo Municipal Waste Management Services, the platform was initially supported by the World Bank.

With funding from Making All Voices Count, the platform expanded to 42 neighbourhoods (from the four pilot areas) and managed to include a free-to-user mobile application that can be used on any cellphone device with USSD and SMS alternatives. This change enabled residents to directly notify the municipality of problems, track their resolution, and get updates on when and how their issue has been addressed…(More)”.

Delivering the digital state

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

William D. Eggers and Steve Hurst at Deloitte: “…Consumer surveys indicate that satisfaction with government services has fallen to an eight-year low. Recent Gallup polls show that Americans continue to name dissatisfaction with government as the nation’s second most-important problem, after the economy.

Many government officials, moreover, are entirely aware of this dissatisfaction. In our digital government survey of state and local government officials, 73 percent believed their organization’s digital capabilities were behind those in the private sector. In another recent survey, state IT personnel and decision makers identified the most critical areas needing better digital capabilities; these included health and human services, motor vehicles, employment, public safety, licensing, renewals, and permitting.

Clearly, there’s a huge gap between the service state and provincial governments offer today and that provided by companies such as Amazon, eBay, Uber, and Airbnb. To provide the same seamless experience these companies do, a state government would need a robust digital platform offering the equivalent of one-stop shopping, making a range of functions available in a few clicks. This government platform would “know you” based on past transactions, and anticipate your needs. It would be able to navigate the breadth of content to connect you with the right service or the answer you seek.

Most states can’t do that today, largely because of the way in which they organize and govern digital technology: with databases that can’t communicate with one another, limited information sharing, and overly complex rules and protocols. The 2017 Center for Digital Government survey identified some of the most significant obstacles: legacy systems, lack of qualified staff, poor procurement processes, security issues, inadequate funding, and current employee practices.

To deliver the customer experience their citizens want, states need to focus on three crucial elements:

  1. An end-to-end digital experience developed from the customer’s point of view, accessible anywhere, anytime, and from any device.
  2. A unique, uniform digital ID that grants agencies access to the appropriate data and services.
  3. Mechanisms that allow agencies to share data across the state enterprise….(More)”

Smart Cities, Smarter Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Free eBook courtesy of PTC.com: “The smart city movement is on a roll. Technology leaders are looking to transform major cities through advanced computer technologies, sensors, high-speed data networks, predictive analytics, big data, and IoT. But, as Mike Barlow explains in this O’Reilly report, the story goes beyond technology. Citizens, too, will need to play a large role in turning cities into smart, livable environments.

According to a United Nations report, by 2050 two-thirds of humanity will live in more than 40 mega-cities of 10 million people each. All of them will need to determine how to deliver more services with fewer resources. Cities will have to improve efficiency and reduce expenditures wherever possible, through new technologies and other means.

To create a thriving environment where innovation can blossom, citizens will not only be called upon to generate much of the data, but they’ll also need to be at the center of decision-making, based on what that data reveals.

Download this report today, and learn about the progress that various groups and organizations have already made in major cities around the world, and what lies ahead for all of us….(More)”.

The Unsung Role That Ordinary Citizens Played in the Great Crime Decline

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emily Badger in The New York Times: “Most theories for the great crime decline that swept across nearly every major American city over the last 25 years have focused on the would-be criminals.

Their lives changed in many ways starting in the 1990s: Strict new policing tactics kept closer watch on them. Mass incarceration locked them up in growing numbers. The crack epidemic that ensnared many began to recede. Even the more unorthodox theories — around the rise of abortion, the reduction in lead or the spread of A.D.H.D. medication — have argued that larger shifts in society altered the behavior (and existence) of potential criminals.

But none of these explanations have paid much attention to the communities where violence plummeted the most. New research suggests that people there were working hard, with little credit, to address the problem themselves.

Local nonprofit groups that responded to the violence by cleaning streets, building playgrounds, mentoring children and employing young men had a real effect on the crime rate. That’s what Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, argues in a new study and a forthcoming book. Mr. Sharkey doesn’t contend that community groups alone drove the national decline in crime, but rather that their impact is a major missing piece.

“This was a part that has been completely overlooked and ignored in national debates over the crime drop,” he said. “But I think it’s fundamental to what happened.”…(More)”.

Augmented CI and Human-Driven AI: How the Intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Collective Intelligence Could Enhance Their Impact on Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Stefaan Verhulst: “As the technology, research and policy communities continue to seek new ways to improve governance and solve public problems, two new types of assets are occupying increasing importance: data and people. Leveraging data and people’s expertise in new ways offers a path forward for smarter decisions, more innovative policymaking, and more accountability in governance. Yet, unlocking the value of these two assets not only requires increased availability and accessibility (through, for instance, open data or open innovation), it also requires innovation in methodology and technology.

The first of these innovations involves Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI offers unprecedented abilities to quickly process vast quantities of data that can provide data-driven insights to address public needs. This is the role it has for example played in New York City, where FireCast, leverages data from across the city government to help the Fire Department identify buildings with the highest fire risks. AI is also considered to improve education, urban transportation,  humanitarian aid and combat corruption, among other sectors and challenges.

The second area is Collective Intelligence (CI). Although it receives less attention than AI, CI offers similar potential breakthroughs in changing how we govern, primarily by creating a means for tapping into the “wisdom of the crowd” and allowing groups to create better solutions than even the smartest experts working in isolation could ever hope to achieve. For example, in several countries patients’ groups are coming together to create new knowledge and health treatments based on their experiences and accumulated expertise. Similarly, scientists are engaging citizens in new ways to tap into their expertise or skills, generating citizen science – ranging from mapping our solar system to manipulating enzyme models in a game-like fashion.

Neither AI nor CI offer panaceas for all our ills; they each pose certain challenges, and even risks.  The effectiveness and accuracy of AI relies substantially on the quality of the underlying data as well as the human-designed algorithms used to analyse that data. Among other challenges, it is becoming increasingly clear how biases against minorities and other vulnerable populations can be built into these algorithms. For instance, some AI-driven platforms for predicting criminal recidivism significantly over-estimate the likelihood that black defendants will commit additional crimes in comparison to white counterparts. (for more examples, see our reading list on algorithmic scrutiny).

In theory, CI avoids some of the risks of bias and exclusion because it is specifically designed to bring more voices into a conversation. But ensuring that that multiplicity of voices adds value, not just noise, can be an operational and ethical challenge. As it stands, identifying the signal in the noise in CI initiatives can be time-consuming and resource intensive, especially for smaller organizations or groups lacking resources or technical skills.

Despite these challenges, however, there exists a significant degree of optimism  surrounding both these new approaches to problem solving. Some of this is hype, but some of it is merited—CI and AI do offer very real potential, and the task facing both policymakers, practitioners and researchers is to find ways of harnessing that potential in a way that maximizes benefits while limiting possible harms.

In what follows, I argue that the solution to the challenge described above may involve a greater interaction between AI and CI. These two areas of innovation have largely evolved and been researched separately until now. However, I believe that there is substantial scope for integration, and mutual reinforcement. It is when harnessed together, as complementary methods and approaches, that AI and CI can bring the full weight of technological progress and modern data analytics to bear on our most complex, pressing problems.

To deconstruct that statement, I propose three premises (and subsequent set of research questions) toward establishing a necessary research agenda on the intersection of AI and CI that can build more inclusive and effective approaches to governance innovation.

Premise I: Toward Augmented Collective Intelligence: AI will enable CI to scale

Premise II: Toward Human-Driven Artificial Intelligence: CI will humanize AI

Premise III: Open Governance will drive a blurring between AI and CI

…(More)”.

Crowdsourced Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Robert A Iannucci and Anthony Rowe: “The vision of applying computing and communication technologies to enhance life in our cities is fundamentally appealing. Pervasive sensing and computing can alert us to imminent dangers, particularly with respect to the movement of vehicles and pedestrians in and around crowded streets. Signaling systems can integrate knowledge of city-scale traffic congestion. Self-driving vehicles can borrow from and contribute to a city-scale information collaborative. Achieving this vision will require significant coordination among the creators of sensors, actuators, and application-level software systems. Cities will invest in such smart infrastructure if and only if they are convinced that the value can be realized. Investment by technology providers in creation of the infrastructure depends to a large degree on their belief in a broad and ready market. To accelerate innovation, this stalemate must be broken. Borrowing a page from the evolution of the internet, we put forward the notion that an initially minimalist networking infrastructure that is well suited to smart city concepts can break this cycle and empower co-development of both clever city-sensing devices and valuable city-scale applications, with players large and small being empowered in the process. We call this the crowdsourced smart city concept. We illustrate the concept via an examination of our ongoing project to crowdsource real-time traffic data, arguing that this can rapidly generalize to many more smart city applications. This exploration motivates study of a number of smart city challenges, crowdsourced or otherwise, leading to a paradigm shift we call edgeless computing….(More)”.

No risk, no innovation: the double-bind for the public sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Apolitical: “The political incentives to risk public money are non-existent – it’s too easy to see the short-term political consequences of initiatives gone wrong and debate whether taxpayers’ money is going down the drain. Public money is to be spent according to rules and regulations.”

This is how Jon Simonsson, Head of Innovation, Research and Capital at Sweden’s Ministry for Enterprise and Innovation, sees the potential for public servants to take risks. You may think that someone in Simonsson’s line of work – government innovation – would assume a more entrepreneurial mindset, but he’s hardly alone….

Government incentives for risk, meanwhile, don’t really exist. If you pull off a major improvement in service delivery, you don’t get a bump in compensation or promoted faster. It can feel really scary because any time you take a risk, you know that if you fail you’ll deal with criticism from the public,” said Reed.

Reed believes that the best way for governments to champion innovation is for them to institute programs and spaces designated for experimentation. San Francisco does this with several projects designed for collaboration between startups and government employees, like Startup in Residence, through which public agencies work with entrepreneurs. The startup employees give city officials a fresh perspective on long-standing civic problems, and help them prototype and user-test solutions. “[The government] tells public servants that this is sanctioned risk, and they’ll have moral support,” said Reed.

The City of West Hollywood, in Los Angeles, takes a similar approach. It recently instituted a two-person innovation division to act as consultants for its entire staff.

“Working with an innovation lab challenges your assumptions. That journey can be confronting and quite challenging to many people”

“I think government has a responsibility to take risks – we need to cultivate a culture of innovation, and sometimes that means spending money on projects that support staff ideas,” said Kate Mayerson, the city’s Innovation Analyst. “There’s something a little magical here: leadership that supports innovation and risk-taking from the top down.”…(More)”.

How Americans Perceive Government in 2017

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gallup: “Overall, Americans’ views of government remain negative. Most U.S. adults are dissatisfied with how the executive and legislative branches are doing their jobs, and majorities hold unfavorable views of both major political parties. Even Republicans rate Congress negatively, despite their party being in control of both chambers.

  1. Americans’ frustration with government is focused on Washington, D.C. This is seen in trust and approval ratings they give to the executive and legislative branches — especially Congress. U.S. adults maintain higher levels of trust in the judicial branch as well as state and local government.
  2. Barely a quarter of Americans, 28%, currently say they are satisfied with the way the nation is being governed. This is below the average of 38% found in the 22 times Gallup has asked this question since 1971 but still above the low point of 18%, recorded during the federal government shutdown in October 2013.
  3. Americans’ low trust in many aspects of their government is part of a general trend of declining trust in U.S. institutions. But even in this broad context, the government is particularly suspect in the public’s eyes. The federal government has the least positive image of any business or industry sector measured, Congress engenders the lowest confidence of any institution that Gallup tests, and Americans rate the honesty and ethics of members of Congress as the lowest among 22 professions in Gallup’s most recent update.
  4. Another longtime indicator of citizen frustration with government comes from Gallup’s monthly updates on the most important problem facing the nation. Government was the most frequently occurring single problem mentioned during all of 2014 and 2015, was the second most frequently mentioned problem in 2016, and has been at the top or near the top of the list throughout 2017.
  5. The issues that Americans raise when they talk about government as the top problemcenter more on the process of government and political personalities — particularly infighting and bickering — than on worries about government power, size, or specific policies or tendencies.
  6. Americans continue to have more trust in the government to handle international than domestic problems, although both are down substantially since Gallup began measuring them routinely 17 years ago. Even with these overall declines, a majority continue to have at least a fair amount of trust in the government to handle international issues.
  7. Americans’ declining trust in the government is also reflected in the finding that both presidential and congressional job approval ratings are low on a historical basis. Just 13% say they approve of Congress, slightly above the all-time low of 9% recorded in the fall of 2013. Rank-and-file Republicans are essentially as down on the legislative branch of government as are Democrats, even though the GOP is in control of both houses. Presidential job approval is in the 35% to 40% range, well below historical averages as well as averages for elected presidents in their first year in office.
  8. One consistent finding in recent decades: Americans have a relatively higher level of trust in the judicial branch than either the executive or legislative branch. The higher regard in which Americans hold the judicial branch is also reflected in the approval rating they give the Supreme Court — now 49%, and the highest in five years. Still, trust in all three branches is down on a longer-term basis.
  9. Trust in the men and women in political office is also low. The majority of Americans, however, continue to have trust in the people of the country themselves, in essence the bedrock of democracy, and this is up slightly this year….(More)”.

Crowded Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Crowded Cities: “In the Netherlands every year more than 6 billion cigarette filters are tossed onto the street. It’s easy to toss, but it’s not easy to pick them up. Since each filter takes 12 years to degrade we realised it’s time to take action.

Through observation we concluded crows are the smartest around us to reach any spot in the city. What if crows can bring cigarette filters to one of our Crowbars to exchange the filter for food? This is how our adventure started.

The Crowbar

Cigarette filters, you find them in the park next to you in the grass, in dirty ditches and under your shoes. What if we could find a way to collect these butts from all corners of our city and precious parks? With crows, that have become perfectly adapted to city life, we can! By training crows to recognize and pick up cigarette filters we can solve this tenacious problem of city pollution. It is the Crowbar that does the training for us and gives out food as a reward….(More)”.