3 Ways data has made a splash in Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Madolyn Smith at Data Driven Journalism: “impactAFRICA, the continent’s largest fund for data driven storytelling, has announced the winners of its water and sanitation contest. Journalists from Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Zambia made waves with their stories, but three in particular stood out against the tide.

1. South Africa All At Sea

Sipho Kings‘ story on illegal fishing along South Africa’s coast for the Mail & Guardian shows how data from nanosatellites could solve the tricky problem of tracking illegal activities….

As well as providing a data driven solution to South Africa’s problem, this story has been credited with prompting increased naval patrols, which has uncovered a string of illegal fishing trawlers.

Read the story here.

2. Water Data for Nigeria

This tool, developed by Abiri Oluwatosin Niyi for CMapIT, tracks the supply and consumption of water in Nigeria. To combat a scarcity of data on public water resources, the project crowdsources data from citizens and water point operators. Data is updated in real-time and can be explored via an interactive map.

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Image: Water Data for Nigeria.

In addition, the underlying data is also available for free download and reuse.

Explore the project here.

3. Ibadan: A City of Deep Wells and Dry Taps

Writing for the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, Kolawole Talabi demonstrates a relationship between declining oil revenues and government water expenditure in Ibadan, Nigeria’s third largest city, with detrimental impacts on its inhabitants health.

The investigation draws on data from international organisations, like UNICEF, and government budgetary allocations, as well as qualitative interview data.

Following the story’s publication, there has been extensive online debate and numerous calls for governmental action.

Read the story here….(More)”

Innovation Labs: 10 Defining Features

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Lidia Gryszkiewicz, Tuukka Toivonen, & Ioanna Lykourentzou: “Innovation labs, with their aspirations to foster systemic change, have become a mainstay of the social innovation scene. Used by city administrations, NGOs, think tanks, and multinational corporations, labs are becoming an almost default framework for collaborative innovation. They have resonance in and across myriad fields: London’s pioneering Finance Innovation Lab, for example, aims to create a system of finance that benefits “people and planet”; the American eLab is searching for the future of the electricity sector; and the Danish MindLab helps the government co-create better social services and solutions. Hundreds of other, similar initiatives around the world are taking on a range of grand challenges (or, if you prefer, wicked problems) and driving collective social impact.

Yet for all their seeming popularity, labs face a basic problem that closely parallels the predicament of hub organizations: There is little clarity on their core features, and few shared definitions exist that would make sense amid their diverse themes and settings. …

Building on observations previously made in the SSIR and elsewhere, we contribute to the task of clarifying the logic of modern innovation labs by distilling 10 defining features. …

1. Imposed but open-ended innovation themes…

2. Preoccupation with large innovation challenges…

3. Expectation of breakthrough solutions…

4. Heterogeneous participants…

5. Targeted collaboration…

6. Long-term perspectives…

7. Rich innovation toolbox…

8. Applied orientation…

9. Focus on experimentation…

10. Systemic thinking…

In a recent academic working paper, we condense the above into this definition: An innovation lab is a semi-autonomous organization that engages diverse participants—on a long-term basis—in open collaboration for the purpose of creating, elaborating, and prototyping radical solutions to pre-identified systemic challenges…(More)”

The Risk to Civil Liberties of Fighting Crime With Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Quentin Hardy  in the New York Times: “…Sharing data, both among the parts of a big police department and between the police and the private sector, “is a force multiplier,” he said.

Companies working with the military and intelligence agencies have long practiced these kinds of techniques, which the companies are bringing to domestic policing, in much the way surplus military gear has beefed upAmerican SWAT teams.

Palantir first built up its business by offering products like maps of social networks of extremist bombers and terrorist money launderers, and figuring out efficient driving routes to avoid improvised explosive devices.

Palantir used similar data-sifting techniques in New Orleans to spot individuals most associated with murders. Law enforcement departments around Salt Lake City used Palantir to allow common access to 40,000 arrest photos, 520,000 case reports and information like highway and airport data — building human maps of suspected criminal networks.

People in the predictive business sometimes compare what they do to controlling the other side’s “OODA loop,” a term first developed by a fighter pilot and military strategist named John Boyd.

OODA stands for “observe, orient, decide, act” and is a means of managing information in battle.

“Whether it’s war or crime, you have to get inside the other side’s decision cycle and control their environment,” said Robert Stasio, a project manager for cyberanalysis at IBM, and a former United States government intelligence official. “Criminals can learn to anticipate what you’re going to do and shift where they’re working, employ more lookouts.”

IBM sells tools that also enable police to become less predictable, for example, by taking different routes into an area identified as a crime hotspot. It has also conducted studies that show changing tastes among online criminals — for example, a move from hacking retailers’ computers to stealing health care data, which can be used to file for federal tax refunds.

But there are worries about what military-type data analysis means for civil liberties, even among the companies that get rich on it.

“It definitely presents challenges to the less sophisticated type of criminal,but it’s creating a lot of what is called ‘Big Brother’s little helpers,’” Mr.Bowman said. For now, he added, much of the data abundance problem is that “most police aren’t very good at this.”…(More)’

Thinking about Smart Cities: The Travels of a Policy Idea that Promises a Great Deal, but So Far Has Delivered Modest Results

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Amy K. Glasmeier and Molly Nebiolo in Sustainability: “… explores the unique challenge of contemporary urban problems and the technologies that vendors have to solve them. An acknowledged gap exists between widely referenced technologies that city managers utilize to optimize scheduled operations and those that reflect the capability of spontaneity in search of nuance–laden solutions to problems related to the reflexivity of entire systems. With regulation, the first issue type succumbs to rehearsed preparation whereas the second hinges on extemporaneous practice. One is susceptible to ready-made technology applications while the other requires systemic deconstruction and solution-seeking redesign. Research suggests that smart city vendors are expertly configured to address the former, but less adept at and even ill-configured to react to and address the latter. Departures from status quo responses to systemic problems depend on formalizing metrics that enable city monitoring and data collection to assess “smart investments”, regardless of the size of the intervention, and to anticipate the need for designs that preserve the individuality of urban settings as they undergo the transformation to become “smart”….(More)”

What We Should Mean When We Talk About Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Gordon in Governing: “…But here’s the problem: The institutional language of engagement has been defined by its measurement. Chief engagement officers in corporations are measuring milliseconds on web pages, and clicks on ads, and not relations among people. This is disproportionately influencing the values of democracy and the responsibility of public institutions to protect them.

Too often, when government talks about engagement, it is talking those things that are measurable, but it is providing mandates to employees imbued with ambiguity. For example, the executive order issued by Mayor Murray in Seattle is a bold directive for the “timely implementation by all City departments of equitable outreach and engagement practices that reaffirm the City’s commitment to inclusive participation.”

This extraordinary mayoral mandate reflects clear democratic values, but it lacks clarity of methods. It reflects a need to use digital technology to enhance process, but it doesn’t explain why. This in no way is meant as a criticism of Seattle’s effort; rather, it is simply meant to illustrate the complexity of engagement in practice. Departments are rewarded for quantifiable efficiency, not relationships. Just because something is called engagement, this fundamental truth won’t change.

Government needs to be much more clear about what it really means when it talks about engagement. In 2015, Living Cities and the Citi Foundation launched the City Accelerator on Public Engagement, which was an effort to source and support effective practices of public engagement in city government. This 18-month project, based on a cohort of five cities throughout the United States, is just now coming to an end. Out of it came several lasting insights, one of which I will share here. City governments are institutions in transition that need to ask why people should care.

After the election, who is going to care about government? How do you get people to care about the services that government provides? How do you get people to care about the health outcomes in their neighborhoods? How do you get people to care about ensuring accessible, high-quality public education?

I want to propose that when government talks about civic engagement, it is really talking about caring. When you care about something, you make a decision to be attentive to that thing. But “caring about” is one end of what I’ll call a spectrum of caring. On the other end, there is “caring for,” when, as described by philosopher Nel Noddings, “what we do depends not upon rules, or at least not wholly on rules — not upon a prior determination of what is fair or equitable — but upon a constellation of conditions that is viewed through both the eyes of the one-caring and the eyes of the cared-for.”

In short, caring-for is relational. When one cares for another, the outcomes of an encounter are not predetermined, but arise through relation….(More)”.

The Digital City and Mediated Urban Ecologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
 Book by Kristin Scott: “…This book examines the phenomenon of the “digital city” in the US by looking at three case studies: New York City, San Antonio, and Seattle. Kristin Scott considers how digital technologies are increasingly built into the logic and organization of urban spaces and argues that while each city articulates ideals such as those of open democracy, civic engagement, efficient governance, and enhanced security, competing capitalist interests attached to many of these digital technological programs make the “digital city” problematic….(More)”

How to ensure smart cities benefit everyone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation Global: “By 2030, 60 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in mega-cities. How all those people live, and what their lives are like, will depend on important choices leaders make today and in the coming years.

Technology has the power to help people live in communities that are more responsive to their needs and that can actually improve their lives. For example, Beijing, notorious for air pollution, is testing a 23-foot-tall air purifier that vacuums up smog, filters the bad particles and releases clear air.

This isn’t a vision of life like on “The Jetsons.” It’s real urban communities responding in real-time to changing weather, times of day and citizen needs. These efforts can span entire communities. They can vary from monitoring traffic to keep cars moving efficiently or measuring air quality to warn residents (or turn on massive air purifiers) when pollution levels climb.

Using data and electronic sensors in this way is often referred to as building “smart cities,” which are the subject of a major global push to improve how cities function. In part a response to incoherent infrastructure design and urban planning of the past, smart cities promise real-time monitoring, analysis and improvement of city decision-making. The results, proponents say, will improve efficiency, environmental sustainability and citizen engagement.

Smart city projects are big investments that are supposed to drive social transformation. Decisions made early in the process determine what exactly will change. But most research and planning regarding smart cities is driven by the technology, rather than the needs of the citizens. Little attention is given to the social, policy and organizational changes that will be required to ensure smart cities are not just technologically savvy but intelligently adaptive to their residents’ needs. Design will make the difference between smart city projects offering great promise or actually reinforcing or even widening the existing gaps in unequal ways their cities serve residents.

City benefits from efficiency

A key feature of smart cities is that they create efficiency. Well-designed technology tools can benefit government agencies, the environment and residents. Smart cities can improve the efficiency of city services by eliminating redundancies, finding ways to save money and streamlining workers’ responsibilities. The results can provide higher-quality services at lower cost….

Environmental effects

Another way to save money involves real-time monitoring of energy use, which can also identify opportunities for environmental improvement.

The city of Chicago has begun implementing an “Array of Things” initiative by installing boxes on municipal light poles with sensors and cameras that can capture air quality, sound levels, temperature, water levels on streets and gutters, and traffic.

The data collected are expected to serve as a sort of “fitness tracker for the city,” by identifying ways to save energy, to address urban flooding and improve living conditions.

Helping residents

Perhaps the largest potential benefit from smart cities will come from enhancing residents’ quality of life. The opportunities cover a broad range of issues, including housing and transportation, happiness and optimism, educational services, environmental conditions and community relationships.

Efforts along this line can include tracking and mapping residents’ health, using data to fight neighborhood blight, identifying instances of discrimination and deploying autonomous vehicles to increase residents’ safety and mobility….(More)“.

Civic Crowd Analytics: Making sense of crowdsourced civic input with big data tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by  that: “… examines the impact of crowdsourcing on a policymaking process by using a novel data analytics tool called Civic CrowdAnalytics, applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods such as concept extraction, word association and sentiment analysis. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced urban planning process in the City of Palo Alto in California, we examine the influence of civic input on the city’s Comprehensive City Plan update. The findings show that the impact of citizens’ voices depends on the volume and the tone of their demands. A higher demand with a stronger tone results in more policy changes. We also found an interesting and unexpected result: the city government in Palo Alto mirrors more or less the online crowd’s voice while citizen representatives rather filter than mirror the crowd’s will. While NLP methods show promise in making the analysis of the crowdsourced input more efficient, there are several issues. The accuracy rates should be improved. Furthermore, there is still considerable amount of human work in training the algorithm….(More)”

Kenyans have launched a campaign on Twitter to fix their roads

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lily Kuo in Quartz: “Traffic is a problem in Nairobi. A short commute can last for hours during morning or evening rush hour. Buses and motorbikes cut in and out of traffic, worsening congestion. It’s estimated that road congestion costs Kenya’s capital as much as $570,000 a day in lost productivity.

One of the reasons for the city’s bad traffic is the state of the roads: drivers swerve to avoid potholes, bumps, or breaks in the roads, causing a buildup of traffic. To help, an online campaign called “What is a Road” is crowdsourcing the location and condition of potholes around the city in an effort to push local officials to fix them.

Nairobians tweet a photo and location of a pothole under the hashtag #whatisaroad. Those reports are uploaded to a map, used to analyze where the city’s potholes are located and track which ones have been fixed. “We decided to take a more data driven approach to track progress, promises made and projects delivered,” says Muthuri Kinyamu, one of the organizers.

A map showing crowdsourced reports of potholes across Nairobi. (What Is a Road)

The campaign is also about addressing some of the fundamental problems that hold cities like Nairobi back. In Nairobi, branded the center of “Silicon Savannah” in recent years, there’s often more focus on entrepreneurship and innovation than resolving simpler problems like the state of the roads. …The

The campaign, started in August, will continue until January. Chris Orwa, a data analyst helping with the project, says that they can’t take credit for all the repairs they have been documented around the city, but they have noticed that roads are being fixed within days of a #Whatisaroad report. The average response time for fixing a road reported by a What is a Road user is three days, according to Orwa….(More)”

There isn’t always an app for that: How tech can better assist refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alex Glennie and Meghan Benton at Nesta: “Refugees are natural innovators. Often armed with little more than a smartphone, they must be adaptable and inventive if they are to navigate unpredictable, dangerous environments and successfully establish themselves in a new country.

Take Mojahed Akil, a young Syrian computer science student whose involvement in street protests in Aleppo brought him to the attention – and torture chambers – of the regime. With the support of his family, Mojahed was able to move across the border to the relative safety of Gaziantep, a city in southwest Turkey. Yet once he was there, he found it very difficult to communicate with those around him (most of whom only spoke Turkish but not Arabic or English) and to access essential information about laws, regulations and local services.

To overcome these challenges, Mojahed used his software training to develop a free smartphone app and website for Syrians living in Turkey. The Gherbetna platform offers both information (for example, about job listings) and connections (through letting users ask for help from the app’s community of contributors). Since its launch in 2014, it is estimated that Gherbetna has been downloaded by more than 50,000 people.

Huge efforts, but mixed results

Over the last 18 months, an explosion of creativity and innovation from tech entrepreneurs has tried to make life better for refugees. A host of new tools and resources now exists to support refugees along every stage of their journey. Our new report for the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration explores some of these tools trying to help refugees integrate, and examines how policymakers can support the best new initiatives.

Our report finds that the speed of this ‘digital humanitarianism’ has been a double-edged sword, with a huge amount of duplication in the sector and some tools failing to get off the ground. ‘Failing fast’ might be a badge of honour in Silicon Valley, but what are the risks if vulnerable refugees rely on an app that disappears from one day to the next?

For example, consider Migreat, a ‘skyscanner for migration’, which pivoted at the height of the refugee crisis to become an asylum information app. Its selling point was that it was obsessively updated by legal experts, so users could trust the information — and rely less on smugglers or word of mouth. At its peak, Migreat had two million users a month, but according to an interview with Josephine Goube (one of the cofounders of the initiative) funding challenges meant the platform had to fold. Its digital presence still exists, but is no longer being updated, a ghost of February 2016.

Perhaps an even greater challenge is that few of these apps were designed with refugees, so many do not meet their needs. Creating an app to help refugees navigate local services is a bit like putting a sticking plaster on a deep wound: it doesn’t solve the problem that most services, and especially digital services, are not attuned to refugee needs. Having multilingual, up-to-date and easy-to-navigate government websites might be more helpful.

A new ‘digital humanitarianism’…(More)”