Open data aims to boost food security prospects

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Kinver at BBC News: “Rothamsted Research, a leading agricultural research institution, is attempting to make data from long-term experiments available to all.

In partnership with a data consultancy, is it developing a method to make complex results accessible and useable.

The institution is a member of the Godan Initiative that aims to make data available to the scientific community.

In September, Godan called on the public to sign its global petition to open agricultural research data.

“The continuing challenge we face is that the raw data alone is not sufficient enough on its own for people to make sense of it,” said Chris Rawlings, head of computational and systems biology at Rothamsted Research.

“This is because the long-term experiments are very complex, and they are looking at agriculture and agricultural ecosystems so you need to know a lot of about what the intention of the studies are, how they are being used, and the changes that have taken place over time.”

However, he added: “Even with this level of complexity, we do see significant number of users contacting us or developing links with us.”

One size fits all

The ability to provide open data to all is one of the research organisation’s national capabilities, and forms a defining principle of its web portal to the experiments carried out at its North Wyke Farm Platform in North Devon.

Rothamsted worked in partnership with Tessella, a data consultancy, on the data collected from the experiments, which focused on livestock pastures.

The information being collected, as often as every 15 minutes, includes water run-off levels, soil moisture, meteorological data, and soil nutrients, and this is expected to run for decades.

“The data is quite varied and quite diverse, and [Rothamsted] wants to make to make this data available to the wider research community,” explained Tessella’s Andrew Bowen.

“What Rothamsted needed was a way to store it and a way to present it in a portal in which people could see what they had to offer.”

He told BBC News that there were a number of challenges that needed to be tackled.

One was the management of the data, and the team from Tessella adopted an “agile scrum” approach.

“Basically, what you do is draw up a list of the requirements, of what you need, and we break the project down into short iterations, starting with the highest priority,” he said.

“This means that you are able to take a more exploratory approach to the process of developing software. This is very well suited to the research environment.”…(More)”

Self-organised scientific crowds to remedy research bureaucracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at EuroScientist: “Imagine a world without peer review committees, project proposals or activity reports. Imagine a world where research funds seamlessly flow where they are best employed, like nutrients in a food-web or materials in a river network. Many scientists would immediately signup to live in such a world.

The Netherlands is set to become the place where this academic paradise will be tested, in the next few years. In July 2016, the Dutch parliament approved a motion related to implementing alternative funding procedures to alleviate the research bureaucracy, which is increasingly burdening scientists. Here EuroScientistinvestigates whether the self-organisation power of the scientific community could help resolve one of researchers’ worse burden.

Self-organisation

The Dutch national funding agency is planning to adopt a radically new system to allocate part of its funding, promoted by ecologist Marten Sheffer, who is professor of aquatic ecology and water quality management at Wageningen University and Research Centre. Under the proposed approach, funds would intially be evenly divided among all scientists in the country. Then, they would each have to allocate half of what they have received to the person who, in their opinion, is the most deserving scientist in their network. Then, the process would be iterated.

The promoters of the system believe that the “wisdom of the crowd” of the scientific community would assigning more funds to the most deserving scientists among them; with minimal amount of paperwork. The Dutch initiative is part of a broader effort to use a scientific approach to improve science.

In other words, it is part of a trend aiming to employ scientific evidence to tweak the social mechanisms of academia. Specifically, findings from what is known as complexity research are increasingly brought forward as a way of reducing bureaucracy, removing red tape, and maximising the time scientists spend in thinking….

Abandoning the current bureaucratic, top-down system to evaluate and fund research, based on labour-intensive peer-review, may not be too much of a loss. “Peer-review is an imperfect, fragile mechanism. Our simulations show that assigning funds at random would not distort too much the results of the traditional mechanism,” says Flaminio Squazzoni, an economist at the University of Brescia, Italy, and the coordinator of the PEERE-New Frontiers of Peer Review COST action.

In reality peer-review is never quite neutral. “If scientists behave perfectly, then peer review works,” Squazzoni explains, “but if strategic motivations are taken into account, like saving time or competition, then the results are worse than random.” Squazzoni believes that automation, economic incentives, or the creation of professional reviewers may improve the situation….(More)”

Portugal has announced the world’s first nationwide participatory budget

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Graça Fonseca at apolitical:”Portugal has announced the world’s first participatory budget on a national scale. The project will let people submit ideas for what the government should spend its money on, and then vote on which ideas are adopted.

Although participatory budgeting has become increasingly popular around the world in the past few years, it has so far been confined to cities and regions, and no country that we know of has attempted it nationwide. To reach as many people as possible, Portugal is also examining another innovation: letting people cast their votes via ATM machines.

‘It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK?’ Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible, told Apolitical. ‘And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.’

Although the official window for proposals begins in January, some have already been submitted to the project’s website. One suggests equipping kindergartens with technology to teach children about robotics. Using the open-source platform Arduino, the plan is to let children play with the tech and so foster scientific understanding from the earliest age.

Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture and lifelong learning, and there will be more than forty events in the new year for people to present and discuss their ideas.

The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens. Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails. Moreover, those who make the proposals often become passionate about them, campaigning for votes, flyering, making YouTube videos, going door-to-door and so fuelling a public discussion that involves ever more people in the process.

On the other side, it can bring public servants nearer to their fellow citizens by sharpening their understanding of what people want and what their priorities are. It can also raise the quality of public services by directing them more precisely to where they’re needed as well as by tapping the collective intelligence and imagination of thousands of participants….

Although it will not be used this year, because the project is still very much in the trial phase, the use of ATMs is potentially revolutionary. As Fonseca puts it, ‘In every remote part of the country, you might have nothing else, but you have an ATM.’ Moreover, an ATM could display proposals and allow people to vote directly, not least because it already contains a secure way of verifying their identity. At the moment, for comparison, people can vote by text or online, sending in the number from their ID card, which is checked against a database….(More)”.

Why citizen input is crucial to the government design process

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Forman in NextGov: “…Whether agencies are implementing an application or enterprisewide solution, end-user input (from both citizens and government workers) is a requirement for success. In fact, the only path to success in digital government is the “moment of truth,” the point of interaction when a government delivers a service or solves a problem for its citizens.

A recent example illustrates this challenge. A national government recently deployed a new application that enables citizens to submit questions to agency offices using their mobile devices. The mobile application, while functional and working to specifications, failed to address the core issue: Most citizens prefer asking questions via email, an option that was terminated when the new app was deployed.

Digital technologies offer government agencies numerous opportunities to cut costs and improve citizen services. But in the rush to implement new capabilities, IT professionals often neglect to consider fully their users’ preferences, knowledge, limitations and goals.

When developing new ways to deliver services, designers must expand their focus beyond the agency’s own operating interests to ensure they also create a satisfying experience for citizens. If not, the applications will likely be underutilized or even ignored, thus undermining the anticipated cost-savings and performance gains that set the project in motion.

Government executives also must recognize merely relying on user input creates a risk of “paving the cowpath”: innovations cannot significantly improve the customer experience if users do not recognize the value of new technologies in simplifying, making more worthwhile, or eliminating a task.

Many digital government playbooks and guidance direct IT organizations to create a satisfying citizen experience by incorporating user-centered design methodology into their projects. UCD is a process for ensuring a new solution or tool is designed from the perspective of users. Rather than forcing government workers or the public to adapt to the new solution, UCD helps create a solution tailored to their abilities, preferences and needs….effective UCD is built upon four primary principles or guidelines:

  • Focus on the moment of truth. A new application or service must actually be something that citizens want and need via the channel used, and not just easy to use.
  • Optimize outcomes, not just processes. True transformation occurs when citizens’ expectations and needs remain the constant center of focus. Merely overlaying new technology on business as usual may provide a prettier interface, but success requires a clear benefit for the public at the moment of truth in the interaction with government.
  • Evolve processes over time to help citizens adapt to new applications. In most instances, citizens will make a smoother transition to new services when processes are changed gradually to be more intuitive rather than with an abrupt, flip-of-the-switch approach.
  • Combine UCD with robust DevOps. Agencies need a strong DevOps process to incorporate what they learn about citizens’ preferences and needs as they develop, test and deploy new citizen services….(More)”

Three ways to grow the open data economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nigel Shadbolt in The Guardian: “…here are three areas where action by the UK government can help to support and promote a flourishing open data economy

Strengthen our data infrastructure

We are used to thinking of areas like transport and energy requiring physical infrastructure. From roads and rail networks to the national grid and power stations, we understand that investment and management of these vital parts of an infrastructure are essential to the economic wellbeing and future prosperity of the nation.

This is no less true of key data assets. Our data infrastructure is a core part of our national infrastructure. From lists of legally constituted companies to the country’s geospatial data, our data infrastructure needs to be managed, maintained, in some cases built and in all cases made as widely available as possible.

To maximise the benefits to the UK’s economy and to reduce costs in delivery of public services, the data we rely on needs to be adaptable, trustworthy, and as open as possible….

While we do have some excellent examples of infrastructure data from the likes of Companies House, Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Defra, core parts of the data infrastructure that we need within the UK are missing, unreliable, or of a low quality. The government must invest here just as it invests in our other traditional infrastructure.

Support and promote data innovation

If we are to make best use of data, we need a bridge between academic research, public, private and third sectors, and a thriving startup ecosystem where new ideas and approaches can grow.

We have learned that properly targeted challenges could identify potential savings for government – similar to Prescribing Analytics, an ODI-incubated startup which used publicly available data to identify £200m in prescriptions savings per year for the NHS – but, more importantly, translate that potential into procurable products and services that could deliver those savings.

A data challenge series run at a larger scale, funded by Innovate UK, openly contested and independently managed, would stimulate the creation of new companies, jobs, products and services. It would also act as a forcing function to strengthen data infrastructure around key challenges, and raise awareness and capacity for those working to solve them. The data needed to satisfy the challenges would have to be made available and usable, bringing data innovation into government and bolstering the offer of the startups and SMEs who take part.

Invest in data literacy

In order to take advantage of the data revolution, policymakers, businesses and citizens need to understand how to make use of data. In other words, they must become data literate.

Data literacy is needed through our whole educational system and society more generally. Crucially, policymakers are going to need to be informed by insights that can only be gleaned through understanding and analysing data effectively….(More)”

Iceland’s crowd-sourced constitution: hope for disillusioned voters everywhere

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 et al in The Conversation Global: “Western democracies are in turmoil. From Brexit to Donald Trump, to a general lack of trust in politics, disillusioned voters are expressing their frustration in strange ways. In Iceland, they are taking a more proactive, hopeful approach – and it’s a lesson to the rest of the world. It looks as though a crowd-sourced constitution, developed in 2012, could finally be about to make its way through parliament.

The document – the result of four months of consultation – was approved by a two-thirds majority in a national referendum but was ultimately rejected by the government of the time. It includes clauses on environmental protection, puts international human rights law and the rights of refugees and migrants front and centre, and proposes redistributing the fruits of Iceland’s natural resources – notably fishing.

The Pirate Party has made getting the constitution through parliament a priority. And a pre-election agreement between five parties to make that happen within two years suggests a strong commitment on almost every side.

As important as the content is how the constitution was produced. The participatory nature of its writing sets it apart from other similar documents. The soul-searching prompted by the economic crash offered a chance to reassess what Icelandic society stands for and provides the perfect moment to change the way the country operates. This existential reimagining is the heart of the constitution and cannot be underestimated.

The process has been reminiscent of the Occupy movement that sprang up across the world in 2011. For radical politics, legitimacy comes not simply through single-shot participation, such as through elections, but through a continued involvement in “constitutionalising” – in the processes of rule-making and defining the identity or ethos of a particular community.

In mainstream politics, constitutions bring social order. They represent the agreement of a single set of principles and associated rules. But once these are decided on, they are often fixed (think of the way the US Constitution is used as an unquestionable governing rule-book and how hard it is to pass amendments). Popular change is often virtually impossible. Elites can even sometimes overrule or ignore constitutional provisions…

Constitutionalising does not stop after a certain point, but ought to continue as a fundamental part of social and political activity. The problem with the nation state, potentially with the exception of Iceland, is that it has become ossified. So what might an alternative look like?

Rather than handing collective responsibility to institutions such as parliaments and courts, no matter how well-intentioned, protection is assured via a set of rules to which everyone consents and has a hand in designing…

In Iceland the crowd-sourced constitution contains a provision for citizen-led initiatives to propose and alter legislation. So the great promise of this next phase in Iceland’s politics is not simply a social democratic consensus around financial and industrial regulation and human rights, but also an attempt to redress the balance of power between citizens and government. Beyond being given a chance to help write the constitution or to vote every few years, the people are being given the chance to remain constantly involved in the shaping of the rules that govern their society….(More)”

Show, Don’t Tell

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thomas Kohnstamm on Alberto Cairo, Power BI & the rise of data journalism for Microsoft Stories: “From the election of Pope Francis to the passing of Nelson Mandela to Miley Cyrus’ MTV #twerk heard ’round the world, 2013 was full of big headlines and viral hits. Yet The New York Times’ top story of the year was the humble result of a vocabulary survey of 350,000 randomly selected Americans conducted by a then-intern at the paper.

Instead of presenting these findings in a written article, “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk” achieved breakout success as an interactive data visualization. It asked readers 25 questions such as “How would you address a group of two or more people?” or “How do you pronounce ‘aunt’?” and then heat-mapped their responses to the most similar regional dialect in the U.S. The interactivity and colorful visuals transmuted survey data into a fun, insightful tour through the contours of contemporary AmericanEnglish.

Visualization no longer just complements a written story. It is the story. In our increasingly data-driven world, visualization is becoming an essential tool for journalists from national papers to blogs with a staff of one.

I recently spent two days discussing the state of data journalism with Alberto Cairo, the Knight Chair of Visual Journalism at the School of Communication at the University of Miami. While he stressed the importance of data visualization for efficient communication and audience engagement, Cairo argued that “Above all else, visualizations — when done right — are a vehicle of clarification and truth.”…(More)”

Crowdsourcing Gun Violence Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Penn Engineering: “Gun violence is often described as an epidemic, but as visible and shocking as shooting incidents are, epidemiologists who study that particular source of mortality have a hard time tracking them. The Centers for Disease Control is prohibited by federal law from conducting gun violence research, so there is little in the way of centralized infrastructure to monitor where, how,when, why and to whom shootings occur.

Chris Callison-Burch, Aravind K.Joshi Term Assistant Professor in Computer and InformationScience, and graduate studentEllie Pavlick are working to solve this problem.

They have developed the GunViolence Database, which combines machine learning and crowdsourcing techniques to produce a national registry of shooting incidents. Callison-Burch and Pavlick’s algorithm scans thousands of articles from local newspaper and television stations,determines which are about gun violence, then asks everyday people to pullout vital statistics from those articles, compiling that information into a unified, open database.

For natural language processing experts like Callison-Burch and Pavlick, the most exciting prospect of this effort is that it is training computer systems to do this kind of analysis automatically. They recently presented their work on that front at Bloomberg’s Data for Good Exchange conference.

The Gun Violence Database project started in 2014, when it became the centerpiece of Callison-Burch’s “Crowdsourcing and Human Computation”class. There, Pavlick developed a series of homework assignments that challenged undergraduates to develop a classifier that could tell whether a given news article was about a shooting incident.

“It allowed us to teach the things we want students to learn about datascience and natural language processing, while giving them the motivation to do a project that could contribute to the greater good,” says Callison-Burch.

The articles students used to train their classifiers were sourced from “TheGun Report,” a daily blog from New York Times reporters that attempted to catalog shootings from around the country in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. Realizing that their algorithmic approach could be scaled up to automate what the Times’ reporters were attempting, the researchers began exploring how such a database could work. They consulted with DouglasWiebe, a Associate Professor of Epidemiology in Biostatistics andEpidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine, to learn more about what kind of information public health researchers needed to better study gun violence on a societal scale.

From there, the researchers enlisted people to annotate the articles their classifier found, connecting with them through Mechanical Turk, Amazon’scrowdsourcing platform, and their own website, http://gun-violence.org/…(More)”

Open Innovation: Practices to Engage Citizens and Effectively Implement Federal Initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

United States Government Accountability Office: “Open innovation involves using various tools and approaches to harness the ideas, expertise, and resources of those outside an organization to address an issue or achieve specific goals. GAO found that federal agencies have frequently used five open innovation strategies to collaborate with citizens and external stakeholders, and encourage their participation in agency initiatives.

Screen Shot 2016-10-14 at 10.13.38 AM

GAO identified seven practices that agencies can use to effectively implement initiatives that involve the use of these strategies:

  • Select the strategy appropriate for the purpose of engaging the public and the agency’s capabilities.
  • Clearly define specific goals and performance measures for the initiative.
  • Identify and engage external stakeholders and potential partners.
  • Develop plans for implementing the initiative and recruiting participants.
  • Engage participants and partners while implementing the initiative.
  • Collect and assess relevant data and report results.
  • Sustain communities of interested partners and participants.

Aspects of these practices are illustrated by the 15 open innovation initiatives GAO reviewed at six selected agencies: the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation (DOT); the Environmental Protection Agency; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

For example:

• With the Asteroid Data Hunter challenge, NASA used a challenge and citizen science effort, beginning in 2014, to improve the accuracy of its asteroid detection program and develop an application for citizen scientists.

• Since 2009, DOT’s Federal Highway Administration has used an ideation initiative called Every Day Counts to identify innovations to improve highway project delivery. Teams of federal, state, local, and industry experts then implement the ideas chosen through this process….(More)”

Crowdsourcing investigative journalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Convoca in Peru: “…collaborative effort is the essence of Convoca. We are a team of journalists and programmers who work with professionals from different disciplines and generations to expose facts that are hidden by networks of power and affect the life of citizens. We bet on the work in partnership to publish findings of high impact from Peru, where the Amazon survives in almost 60% of the country, in the middle of oil exploitation, minerals and criminal activities such as logging, illegal mining and human trafficking. Fifty percent of social conflicts have as epicenter extractives areas of natural resources where the population and communities with the highest poverty rates live.

Over one year and seven months, Convoca has uncovered facts of public relevance such as the patterns of corruption and secrecy networking with journalists from Latin America and the world. The series of reports with the BRIO platform revealed the cost overruns of highways and public works in Latin American countries in the hands of Brazilian companies financed by the National Bank of Economic and Social Development (BNDES), nowadays investigated in the most notorious corruption scandal in the region, ‘Lava Jato’. This research won the 2016 Journalistic Excellence Award granted by the Inter American Press Association (SIP). On a global scale, we dove into 11 million and a half files of the ‘Panama Papers’ with more than a hundred media and organizations led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which allowed to undress the world of tax havens where companies and characters hide their fortune.

Our work on extractive industries ‘Excesses unpunished’ won the most important award of data journalism in the world, the Data Journalism Awards 2016, and is a finalist of the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Award which recognized the best of journalism in Latin America. We invite you to be the voice of this effort to keep publishing new reports that allow citizens to make better decisions about their destinies and compel groups of power to come clean about their activities and fulfill their commitments. So join ConBoca: The Power of Citizens Call, our first fundraising campaign alongside our readers. We believe that journalism is a public service….(More)”