Three Things Great Data Storytellers Do Differently

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jake Porway at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…At DataKind, we use data science and algorithms in the service of humanity, and we believe that communicating about our work using data for social impact is just as important as the work itself. There’s nothing worse than findings gathering dust in an unread report.

We also believe our projects should always start with a question. It’s clear from the questions above and others that the art of data storytelling needs some demystifying. But rather than answering each question individually, I’d like to pose a broader question that can help us get at some of the essentials: What do great data storytellers do differently and what can we learn from them?

1. They answer the most important question: So what?

Knowing how to compel your audience with data is more of an art than a science. Most people still have negative associations with numbers and statistics—unpleasant memories of boring math classes, intimidating technical concepts, or dry accounting. That’s a shame, because the message behind the numbers can be so enriching and enlightening.

The solution? Help your audience understand the “so what,” not the numbers. Ask: Why should someone care about your findings? How does this information impact them? My strong opinion is that most people actually don’t want to look at data. They need to trust that your methods are sound and that you’re reasoning from data, but ultimately they just want to know what it all means for them and what they should do next.

A great example of going straight to the “so what” is this beautiful, interactive visualization by Periscopic about gun deaths. It uses data sparingly but still evokes a very clear anti-gun message….

2. They inspire us to ask more questions.

The best data visualization helps people investigate a topic further, instead of drawing a conclusion for them or persuading them to believe something new.

For example, the nonprofit DC Action for Children was interested in leveraging publicly available data from government agencies and the US Census, as well as DC Action for Children’s own databases, to help policymakers, parents, and community members understand the conditions influencing child well-being in Washington, DC. We helped create a tool that could bring together data in a multitude of forms, and present it in a way that allowed people to delve into the topic themselves and uncover surprising truths, such as the fact that one out of every three kids in DC lives in a neighborhood without a grocery store….

3. They use rigorous analysis instead of just putting numbers on a page.

Data visualization isn’t an end goal; it’s a process. It’s often the final step in a long manufacturing chain, along which we poke, prod, and mold data to create that pretty graph.

Years ago, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks) approached us—armed with data about every single tree in the city, including when it was planted and how it was pruned—and wanted to know: Does pruning trees in one year reduce the number of hazardous tree conditions in the following year? This is one of the first things our volunteer data scientists came up with:

Visualization of NYC Parks’ Department data showing tree density in New York City.

This is a visualization of tree density New York—and it was met with oohs and aahs. It was interactive! You could see where different types of trees lived! It was engaging! But another finding that came out of this work arguably had a greater impact. Brian D’Alessandro, one of our volunteer data scientists, used statistical modeling to help NYC Parks calculate a number: 22 percent. It turns out that if you prune trees in New York, there are 22 percent fewer emergencies on those blocks than on the blocks where you didn’t prune. This number is helping the city become more effective by understanding how to best allocate its resources, and now other urban forestry programs are asking New York how they can do the same thing. There was no sexy visualization, no interactivity—just a rigorous statistical model of the world that’s shaping how cities protect their citizens….(More)”

Your City Needs a Local Data Intermediary Now

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Lawyue and Kathryn Pettit at Next City: “Imagine if every community nationwide had access to their own data — data on which children are missing too many days of school, which neighborhoods are becoming unaffordable, or where more mothers are getting better access to prenatal care.

This is a reality in some areas, where neighborhood data is analyzed to evaluate community health and to promote development. Cleveland is studying cases of lead poisoning and the impact on school readiness and educational outcomes for children. Detroit is tracking the extent of property blight and abandonment.

But good data doesn’t just happen.

These activities are possible because of local intermediaries, groups that bridge the gap between data and local stakeholders: nonprofits, government agencies, foundations and residents. These groups access data that are often confidential and indecipherable to the public and make them accessible and useful. And with the support of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), groups around the country are championing community development at the local level.

Without a local data intermediary in Baltimore, we might know less about what happened there last year and why.

Freddie Gray’s death prompted intense discussion about police brutality and discrimination against African-Americans. But the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (BNIA) helped root this incident and others like it within a particular place, highlighting what can happen when disadvantage is allowed to accumulate over decades.

BNIA, an NNIP member, was formed in 2000 to help community organizations use data shared by government agencies. By the time of Gray’s death, BNIA had 15 years of data across more than 150 indicators that demonstrated clear socioeconomic disadvantages for residents of Gray’s neighborhood, Sandtown-Winchester. The neighborhood had a 34 percent housing vacancy rate and 23 percent unemployment. The neighborhood lacks highway access and is poorly served by public transit, leaving residents cut off from jobs and services.

With BNIA’s help, national and local media outlets, including the New York Times,MSNBC and the Baltimore Sun portrayed a community beset by concentrated poverty, while other Baltimore neighborhoods benefited from economic investment and rising incomes. BNIA data, which is updated yearly, has also been used to develop policy ideas to revitalize the neighborhood, from increasing the use of housing choice vouchers to tackling unemployment.

Local data intermediaries like BNIA harness neighborhood data to make underserved people and unresolved issues visible. They work with government agencies to access raw data (e.g., crime reports, property records, and vital statistics) and facilitate their use to improve quality of life for residents.

But it’s not easy. Uncovering useful, actionable information requires trust, technical expertise, knowledge of the local context and coordination among multiple stakeholders.

This is why the NNIP is vital. NNIP is a peer network of more than two dozen local data intermediaries and the Urban Institute, working to democratize data by building local capacity and planning joint activities. Before NNIP’s founding partners, there were no advanced information systems documenting and tracking neighborhood indicators. Since 1996, NNIP has been a platform for sharing best practices, providing technical assistance, managing cross-site projects and analysis, and expanding the outreach of local data intermediaries to national networks and federal agencies. The partnership continues to grow. In order to foster this capacity in more places, NNIP has just released a guide for local communities to start a data intermediary….(More)”

The Spanish Town That Runs on Twitter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Scott at the New York Times: “…For the town’s residents, more than half of whom have Twitter accounts, their main way to communicate with local government officials is now the social network. Need to see the local doctor? Send a quick Twitter message to book an appointment. See something suspicious? Let Jun’s policeman know with a tweet.

People in Jun can still use traditional methods, like completing forms at the town hall, to obtain public services. But Mr. Rodríguez Salas said that by running most of Jun’s communications through Twitter, he not only has shaved on average 13 percent, or around $380,000, from the local budget each year since 2011, but he also has created a digital democracy where residents interact online almost daily with town officials.

“Everyone can speak to everyone else, whenever they want,” said Mr.Rodríguez Salas in his office surrounded by Twitter paraphernalia,while sporting a wristband emblazoned with #LoveTwitter. “We are onTwitter because that’s where the people are.”…

By incorporating Twitter into every aspect of daily life — even the localschool’s lunch menu is sent out through social media — this Spanishtown has become a test bed for how cities may eventually use socialnetworks to offer public services….

Using Twitter has also reduced the need for some jobs. Jun cut its police force by three-quarters, to just one officer, soon after turning to Twitter as its main form of communication when residents began tweeting potential problems directly to the mayor.

“We don’t have one police officer,” Mr. Rodríguez Salas said. “We have 3,500.”

For Justo Ontiveros, Jun’s remaining police officer, those benefits are up close and personal. He now receives up to 20, mostly private, messages from locals daily with concerns ranging from advice on filling out forms to reporting crimes like domestic abuse and speeding.

Mr. Ontiveros said his daily Twitter interactions have given him both greater visibility within the community and a higher level of personal satisfaction, as neighbors now regularly stop him in the street to discuss things that he has posted on Twitter.

“It gives people more power to come and talk to me about their problems,” said Mr. Ontiveros, whose department Twitter account has more than 3,500 followers.

Still, Jun’s reliance on Twitter has not been universally embraced….(More)”

White House Challenges Artificial Intelligence Experts to Reduce Incarceration Rates

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Shueh at GovTech: “The U.S. spends $270 billion on incarceration each year, has a prison population of about 2.2 million and an incarceration rate that’s spiked 220 percent since the 1980s. But with the advent of data science, White House officials are asking experts for help.

On Tuesday, June 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Lynn Overmann, who also leads the White House Police Data Initiative, stressed the severity of the nation’s incarceration crisis while asking a crowd of data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists for aid.

“We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair and too costly — in every sense of the word — and we need to start to change it,” Overmann said, speaking at a Computing Community Consortium public workshop.

She argued that the U.S., a country that has the highest amount incarcerated citizens in the world, is in need of systematic reforms with both data tools to process alleged offenders and at the policy level to ensure fair and measured sentences. As a longtime counselor, advisor and analyst for the Justice Department and at the city and state levels, Overman said she has studied and witnessed an alarming number of issues in terms of bias and unwarranted punishments.

For instance, she said that statistically, while drug use is about equal between African-Americans and Caucasians, African-Americans are more likely to be arrested and convicted. They also receive longer prison sentences compared to Caucasian inmates convicted of the same crimes….

Data and digital tools can help curb such pitfalls by increasing efficiency, transparency and accountability, she said.

“We think these types of data exchanges [between officials and technologists] can actually be hugely impactful if we can figure out how to take this information and operationalize it for the folks who run these systems,” Obermann noted.

The opportunities to apply artificial intelligence and data analytics, she said, might include using it to improve questions on parole screenings, using it to analyze police body camera footage, and applying it to criminal justice data for legislators and policy workers….

If the private sector is any indication, artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques could be used to interpret this new and vast supply of law enforcement data. In an earlier presentation by Eric Horvitz, the managing director at Microsoft Research, Horvitz showcased how the company has applied artificial intelligence to vision and language to interpret live video content for the blind. The app, titled SeeingAI, can translate live video footage, captured from an iPhone or a pair of smart glasses, into instant audio messages for the seeing impaired. Twitter’s live-streaming app Periscope has employed similar technology to guide users to the right content….(More)”

Open Data For Social Good: The Case For Better Transport Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at TechWeek Europe: “The growing focus on data protection, driven partly by stronger legislation and partly by consumer pressure, has put the debate on the benefits of open data somewhat on the back burner.

The continuing spate of high-profile data breaches and the abuse of public trust in the form of constant bombardment of automated calls, spam emails and clumsily ‘personalised’ advertising has done little to further the open data agenda. In fact it left many consumers feeling lukewarm about the prospects of organisations opening up their data feeds, even at a promise of a better service in return.

That’s a worrying trend. In many industries effective use of open data can lead to development of solutions that address some of the major challenges populations are faced with today, allowing for faster innovation and adaptability to change. There are significant ways in which individuals, and society as a whole could benefit from open data, if organisations and governments get data sharing right.

Open data for transport

A good example is city transportation. Many metropolises face a major challenge – growing populations are placing pressure on current infrastructure systems, leading to congestion and inefficiency.

An open data system, where commuters use a single travel account for all travel transactions and information – whether that’s public transport, walking, using the bike, using Uber, and so on, would give the city unprecedented insight into how people commute and what’s behind their travel choices.

The key to engaging the public with this is the condition that data is used responsibly and for the greater good. Currently, Transport for London (TfL) operates a meet-in-the-middle model. Consumers can travel anonymously on the TfL network, with only the point of entry and point of exit being recorded, and the company provides that anonymised data to third-party app developers who can then use it to release useful travel applications.

TfL doesn’t profit from sharing consumer data but it does enjoy the benefits that come with it. Third-party travel applications make it easier for commuters to use TfL’s network and make the service itself appear more efficient – in short, everyone benefits.

Mutual benefit

Let’s now imagine a scenario that takes this mutually beneficial relationship a step forward, with consumers willingly giving up some information about themselves to the responsible parties (in this case, the city) and receiving personalised service in return. In this scenario, the more information commuters can provide to the system, the more useful the system can be to them.

Apart from providing personalised travel information and recommendations, such a system would have one more important benefit – it would enable cities to encourage greater social responsibility, extending the benefits from the individual to the community as a whole….(More)”

Soon Your City Will Know Everything About You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Philip N. Howard at Yahoo Tech: “They call it “the Internet of Things” — the rapidly growing network of everyday objects equipped with sensors, tiny power supplies, and internet addresses. Within a few years, we will be immersed in a world of these connected devices. The best estimatessuggest that there will be about 60 billion of them by the year 2020. We’ve already seen internet-accessible sensors implanted in dolls, cars, and cows.

Currently, the biggest users of these sensor arrays are in cities, where city governments use them to collect large amounts of policy-relevant data. In Los Angeles, the crowdsourced traffic and navigation app Waze collects data that helps residents navigate the city’s choked highway networks. In Chicago, an ambitious program makes public data available to startups eager to build apps for residents. The city’s 49th ward has been experimenting with participatory budgeting and online votingto take the pulse of the community on policy issues. Chicago has also been developing the “Array of Things,” a network of sensors that track, among other things, the urban conditions that affect bronchitis.

Edmonton uses the cloud to track the condition of playground equipment. And a growing number of countries have purpose-built smart cities, like South Korea’s high tech utopia city of Songdo, where pervasive sensor networks and ubiquitous computing generate immense amounts of civic data for public services.

The drive for smart cities isn’t restricted to the developed world. Rio de Janeiro coordinates the information flows of 30 different city agencies. In Beijing and Da Nang (Vietnam), mobile phone data is actively tracked in the name of real-time traffic management. Urban sensor networks, in other words, are also developing in countries with few legal protections governing the usage of data.

These services are promising and useful. But you don’t have to look far to see why the Internet of Things has serious privacy implications. Public data is used for “predictive policing” in at least 75 cities across the U.S., including New York City, where critics maintain that using social media or traffic data to help officers evaluate probable cause is a form of digital stop-and-frisk. In Los Angeles, the security firm Palantir scoops up publicly generated data on car movements, merges it with license plate information collected by the city’s traffic cameras, and sells analytics back to the city so that police officers can decide whether or not to search a car. In Chicago, concern is growing about discriminatory profiling because so much information is collected and managed by the police department — an agency with a poor reputation for handling data in consistent and sensitive ways. In 2015, video surveillance of the police shooting Laquan McDonald outside a Burger King was erased by a police employee who ironically did not know his activities were being digitally recorded by cameras inside the restaurant.

Since most national governments have bungled privacy policy, cities — which have a reputation for being better with administrative innovations — will need to fill this gap. A few countries, such as Canada and the U.K., have independent “privacy commissioners” who are responsible for advocating for the public when bureaucracies must decide how to use or give out data. It is pretty clear that cities need such advocates too.

What would Urban Privacy Commissioners do? They would teach the public — and other government staff — about how policy algorithms work. They would evaluate the political context in which city agencies make big data investments. They would help a city negotiate contracts that protect residents’ privacy while providing effective analysis to policy makers and ensuring that open data is consistently serving the public good….(more)”.

While governments talk about smart cities, it’s citizens who create them

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carlo Ratti at the Conversation: “The Australian government recently released an ambitious Smart Cities Plan, which suggests that cities should be first and foremost for people:

If our cities are to continue to meet their residents’ needs, it is essential for people to engage and participate in planning and policy decisions that have an impact on their lives.

Such statements are a good starting point – and should probably become central to Australia’s implementation efforts. A lot of knowledge has been collected over the past decade from successful and failed smart cities experiments all over the world; reflecting on them could provide useful information for the Australian government as it launches its national plan.

What is a smart city?

But, before embarking on such review, it would help to start from a definition of “smart city”.

The term has been used and abused in recent years, so much so that today it has lost meaning. It is often used to encompass disparate applications: we hear people talk and write about “smart city” when they refer to anything from citizen engagement to Zipcar, from open data to Airbnb, from smart biking to broadband.

Where to start with a definition? It is a truism to say the internet has transformed our lives over the past 20 years. Everything in the way we work, meet, mate and so on is very different today than it was just a few decades ago, thanks to a network of connectivity that now encompasses most people on the planet.

In a similar way, we are today at the beginning of a new technological revolution: the internet is entering physical space – the very space of our cities – and is becoming the Internet of Things; it is opening the door to a new world of applications that, as with the first wave of the internet, can incorporate many domains….

What should governments do?

In the above technological context, what should governments do? Over the past few years, the first wave of smart city applications followed technological excitement.

For instance, some of Korea’s early experiments such as Songdo City were engineered by the likes of Cisco, with technology deployment assisted by top-down policy directives.

In a similar way, in 2010, Rio de Janeiro launched the Integrated Centre of Command and Control, engineered by IBM. It’s a large control room for the city, which collects real-time information from cameras and myriad sensors suffused in the urban fabric.

Such approaches revealed many shortcomings, most notably the lack of civic engagement. It is as if they thought of the city simply as a “computer in open air”. These approaches led to several backlashes in the research and academic community.

A more interesting lesson can come from the US, where the focus is more on developing a rich Internet of Things innovation ecosystem. There are many initiatives fostering spaces – digital and physical – for people to come together and collaborate on urban and civic innovations….

That isn’t to say that governments should take a completely hands-off approach to urban development. Governments certainly have an important role to play. This includes supporting academic research and promoting applications in fields that might be less appealing to venture capital – unglamorous but nonetheless crucial domains such as municipal waste or water services.

The public sector can also promote the use of open platforms and standards in such projects, which would speed up adoption in cities worldwide.

Still, the overarching goal should always be to focus on citizens. They are in the best position to determine how to transform their cities and to make decisions that will have – as the Australian Smart Cities Plan puts it – “an impact on their lives”….(more)”

Private Data and the Public Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gideon Mann‘s remarks on the occasion of the Robert Khan distinguished lecture at The City College of New York on 5/22/16: and opportunities about a specific aspect of this relationship, the broader need for computer science to engage with the real world. Right now, a key aspect of this relationship is being built around the risks and opportunities of the emerging role of data.

Ultimately, I believe that these relationships, between computer science andthe real world, between data science and real problems, hold the promise tovastly increase our public welfare. And today, we, the people in this room,have a unique opportunity to debate and define a more moral dataeconomy….

The hybrid research model proposes something different. The hybrid research model, embeds, as it were, researchers as practitioners.The thought was always that you would be going about your regular run of business,would face a need to innovate to solve a crucial problem, and would do something novel. At that point, you might choose to work some extra time and publish a paper explaining your innovation. In practice, this model rarely works as expected. Tight deadlines mean the innovation that people do in their normal progress of business is incremental..

This model separated research from scientific publication, and shortens thetime-window of research, to what can be realized in a few year time zone.For me, this always felt like a tremendous loss, with respect to the older so-called “ivory tower” research model. It didn’t seem at all clear how this kindof model would produce the sea change of thought engendered byShannon’s work, nor did it seem that Claude Shannon would ever want towork there. This kind of environment would never support the freestanding wonder, like the robot mouse that Shannon worked on. Moreover, I always believed that crucial to research is publication and participation in the scientific community. Without this engagement, it feels like something different — innovation perhaps.

It is clear that the monopolistic environment that enabled AT&T to support this ivory tower research doesn’t exist anymore. .

Now, the hybrid research model was one model of research at Google, butthere is another model as well, the moonshot model as exemplified byGoogle X. Google X brought together focused research teams to driveresearch and development around a particular project — Google Glass and the Self-driving car being two notable examples. Here the focus isn’t research, but building a new product, with research as potentially a crucial blocking issue. Since the goal of Google X is directly to develop a new product, by definition they don’t publish papers along the way, but they’re not as tied to short-term deliverables as the rest of Google is. However, they are again decidedly un-Bell-Labs like — a secretive, tightly focused, non-publishing group. DeepMind is a similarly constituted initiative — working, for example, on a best-in-the-world Go playing algorithm, with publications happening sparingly.

Unfortunately, both of these approaches, the hybrid research model and the moonshot model stack the deck towards a particular kind of research — research that leads to relatively short term products that generate corporate revenue. While this kind of research is good for society, it isn’t the only kind of research that we need. We urgently need research that is longterm, and that is undergone even without a clear financial local impact. Insome sense this is a “tragedy of the commons”, where a shared public good (the commons) is not supported because everyone can benefit from itwithout giving back. Academic research is thus a non-rival, non-excludible good, and thus reasonably will be underfunded. In certain cases, this takes on an ethical dimension — particularly in health care, where the choice ofwhat diseases to study and address has a tremendous potential to affect human life. Should we research heart disease or malaria? This decisionmakes a huge impact on global human health, but is vastly informed by the potential profit from each of these various medicines….

Private Data means research is out of reach

The larger point that I want to make, is that in the absence of places where long-term research can be done in industry, academia has a tremendous potential opportunity. Unfortunately, it is actually quite difficult to do the work that needs to be done in academia, since many of the resources needed to push the state of the art are only found in industry: in particular data.

Of course, academia also lacks machine resources, but this is a simpler problem to fix — it’s a matter of money, resources form the government could go to enabling research groups building their own data centers or acquiring the computational resources from the market, e.g. Amazon. This is aided by the compute philanthropy that Google and Microsoft practice that grant compute cycles to academic organizations.

But the data problem is much harder to address. The data being collected and generated at private companies could enable amazing discoveries and research, but is impossible for academics to access. The lack of access to private data from companies actually is much more significant effects than inhibiting research. In particular, the consumer level data, collected by social networks and internet companies could do much more than ad targeting.

Just for public health — suicide prevention, addiction counseling, mental health monitoring — there is enormous potential in the use of our online behavior to aid the most needy, and academia and non-profits are set-up to enable this work, while companies are not.

To give a one examples, anorexia and eating disorders are vicious killers. 20 million women and 10 million men suffer from a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in their life, and sufferers of eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any other mental health disorder — with a jaw-dropping estimated mortality rate of 10%, both directly from injuries sustained by the disorder and by suicide resulting from the disorder.

Eating disorders are particular in that sufferers often seek out confirmatory information, blogs, images and pictures that glorify and validate what sufferers see as “lifestyle” choices. Browsing behavior that seeks out images and guidance on how to starve yourself is a key indicator that someone is suffering. Tumblr, pinterest, instagram are places that people host and seek out this information. Tumblr has tried to help address this severe mental health issue by banning blogs that advocate for self-harm and by adding PSA announcements to query term searches for queries for or related to anorexia. But clearly — this is not the be all and end all of work that could be done to detect and assist people at risk of dying from eating disorders. Moreover, this data could also help understand the nature of those disorders themselves…..

There is probably a role for a data ombudsman within private organizations — someone to protect the interests of the public’s data inside of an organization. Like a ‘public editor’ in a newspaper according to how you’ve set it up. There to protect and articulate the interests of the public, which means probably both sides — making sure a company’s data is used for public good where appropriate, and making sure the ‘right’ to privacy of the public is appropriately safeguarded (and probably making sure the public is informed when their data is compromised).

Next, we need a platform to make collaboration around social good between companies and between companies and academics. This platform would enable trusted users to have access to a wide variety of data, and speed process of research.

Finally, I wonder if there is a way that government could support research sabbaticals inside of companies. Clearly, the opportunities for this research far outstrip what is currently being done…(more)”

Legal Aid With a Digital Twist

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times: “Matthew Stubenberg was a law student at the University of Maryland in 2010 when he spent part of a day doing expungements. It was a standard law school clinic where students learn by helping clients — in this case, he helped them to fill out and file petitions to erase parts of their criminal records. (Last week I wrote about the lifelong effects of these records, even if there is no conviction, and the expungement process that makes them go away.)

Although Maryland has a public database called Case Search, using that data to fill out the forms was tedious. “We spent all this time moving data from Case Search onto our forms,” Stubenberg said. “We spent maybe 30 seconds on the legal piece. Why could this not be easier? This was a problem that could be fixed by a computer.”

Stubenberg knew how to code. After law school, he set out to build software that automatically did that tedious work. By September 2014 he had a prototype for MDExpungement, which went live in January 2015. (The website is not pretty — Stubenberg is a programmer, not a designer.)

With MDExpungement, entering a case number brings it up on Case Search. The software then determines whether the case is expungeable. If so, the program automatically transfers the information from Case Search to the expungement form. All that’s left is to print, sign and file it with the court.

In October 2015 a change in Maryland law made more cases eligible for expungement. Between then and March 2016, people filed 7,600 petitions to have their criminal records removed in Baltimore City District Court. More than two-thirds of them came from MDExpungement.

“With the ever-increasing amount of expungements we’re all doing, the app has just made it a lot easier,” said Mary-Denise Davis, a public defender in Baltimore. “I put in a case number and it fills the form out for me. Like magic.”

The rise of online legal forms may not be a gripping subject, but it matters. Tens of millions of Americans need legal help for civil problems — they need a divorce, child support or visitation, protection from abuse or a stay of eviction. They must hold off debt collectors or foreclosure, or get government benefits….(more)“

These Online Platforms Make Direct Democracy Possible

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Ladendorf in InTheseTimes: “….Around the world, organizations from political parties to cooperatives are experimenting with new modes of direct democracy made possible by the internet.

“The world has gone through extraordinary technological innovation,” says Agustín Frizzera of Argentina’s Net Party. “But governments and political institutions haven’t innovated enough.”

The founders of the four-year-old party have also built an online platform, DemocracyOS, that lets users discuss and vote on proposals being considered by their legislators.

Anyone can adopt the technology, but the Net Party uses it to let Buenos Aires residents debate City Council measures. A 2013 thread, for example, concerned a plan to require bars and restaurants to make bathrooms free and open to the public.

“I recognize the need for freely available facilities, but it is the state who should be offering this service,” reads the top comment, voted most helpful by users. Others argued that private bathrooms open the door to discrimination. Ultimately, 56.9 percent of participants supported the proposal, while 35.3 percent voted against and 7.8 percent abstained….

A U.S. company called PlaceAVote, launched in 2014, takes what it calls a more pragmatic approach. According to cofounder Job Melton, PlaceAVote’s goal is to “work within the system we have now and fix it from the inside out” instead of attempting the unlikely feat of building a third U.S. party.

Like the Net Party and its brethren, PlaceAVote offers an online tool that lets voters participate in decision making. Right now, the technology is in public beta at PlaceAVote.com, allowing users nationwide to weigh in on legislation before Congress….

But digital democracy has applications that extend beyond electoral politics. A wide range of groups are using web-based decision-making tools internally. The Mexican government, for example, has used DemocracyOS to gather citizen feedback on a data-protection law, and Brazilian civil society organizations are using it to encourage engagement with federal and municipal policy-making.

Another direct-democracy tool in wide use is Loomio, developed by a cooperative in New Zealand. Ben Knight, one of Loomio’s cofounders, sums up his experience with Occupy as one of “seeing massive potential of collective decision making, and then realizing how difficult it could be in person.” After failing to find an online tool to facilitate the process, the Loomio team created a platform that enables online discussion with a personal element: Votes are by name and voters can choose to “disagree” with or even “block” proposals. Provo, Utah, uses Loomio for public consultation, and a number of political parties use Loomio for local decision making, including the Brazilian Pirate Party, several regional U.K. Green Party chapters and Spain’s Podemos. Podemos has enthusiastically embraced digital-democracy tools for everything from its selection of European Parliament candidates to the creation of its party platform….(More)”