The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbo, Anders Olof Larsson, Christian Christensen: “Social media are now widely used for political protests, campaigns, and communication in developed and developing nations, but available research has not yet paid sufficient attention to experiences beyond the US and UK. This collection tackles this imbalance head-on, compiling cutting-edge research across six continents to provide a comprehensive, global, up-to-date review of recent political uses of social media.

Drawing together empirical analyses of the use of social media by political movements and in national and regional elections and referenda, The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics presents studies ranging from Anonymous and the Arab Spring to the Greek Aganaktismenoi, and from South Korean presidential elections to the Scottish independence referendum. The book is framed by a selection of keystone theoretical contributions, evaluating and updating existing frameworks for the social media age….(More)”

Swipe Right to Become an Organ Donor

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PSFK: ” Tinder is an app known for its match-making services, or at least, letting people find a good match for them. Its popularity and success lies on its easy user-interface and the amount of Tinder profile choices available, which is why the United Kingdom’s National Health Service knew that partnering with Tinder was a great idea to encourage people to sign up as organ donors.

The NHS wants to encourage Tinder users to sign up at the NHS Organ Donor Registry. Given the increasing number of patients that needs organ donors and the increasing number of deaths due to the waiting for donors, the NHS hopes that using Tinder as a platform can prove to be helpful in also increasing the number of organ donors in the country.

The NHS started by setting up bespoke profiles for their three main celebrity supporters, Jamie Laing from Made in Chelsea, Jade Jones (Olympic Gold Medalist) and Gemma Oaten of Emmerdale. Each of the profile has ‘The Wait’ logo on top, signifying that they support organ donation. So if the user swipes right on one of these profiles, that means the user supports the organ donation campaign and will be given the link to where he or she can sign up…..

Tinder’s most active users range from 18-to-35 year olds and this is exactly the demographic that the NHS is looking for when it comes to organ donors. Moreover, this partnership doesn’t just want people to support organ donation, but they actually want people to take the most necessary step, which is signing up as an organ donor. And as Johnson said, “Joining the register takes only a couple of minutes— about the same amount of time as a few swipes on Tinder.” See NHS Organ Donation/Tinder“

The Moral Failure of Computer Scientists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kaveh Waddell at the Atlantic: “Computer scientists and cryptographers occupy some of the ivory tower’s highest floors. Among academics, their work is prestigious and celebrated. To the average observer, much of it is too technical to comprehend. The field’s problems can sometimes seem remote from reality.

But computer science has quite a bit to do with reality. Its practitioners devise the surveillance systems that watch over nearly every space, public or otherwise—and they design the tools that allow for privacy in the digital realm. Computer science is political, by its very nature.

That’s at least according to Phillip Rogaway, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, who has helped create some of the most important tools that secure the Internet today. Last week, Rogaway took his case directly to a roomful of cryptographers at a conference in Auckland, New Zealand. He accused them of a moral failure: By allowing the government to construct a massive surveillance apparatus, the field had abused the public trust. Rogaway said the scientists had a duty to pursue social good in their work.
He likened the danger posed by modern governments’ growing surveillance capabilities to the threat of nuclear warfare in the 1950s, and called upon scientists to step up and speak out today, as they did then.

I spoke to Rogaway about why cryptographers fail to see their work in moral terms, and the emerging link between encryption and terrorism in the national conversation. A transcript of our conversation appears below, lightly edited for concision and clarity….(More)”

China’s Biggest Polluters Face Wrath of Data-Wielding Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bloomberg News: “Besides facing hefty fines, criminal punishments and the possibility of closing, the worst emitters in China risk additional public anger as new smartphone applications and lower-cost monitoring devices widen access to data on pollution sources.

The Blue Map app, developed by the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs with support from the SEE Foundation and the Alibaba Foundation, provides pollution data from more than 3,000 large coal-power, steel, cement and petrochemical production plants. Origins Technology Ltd. in July began sale of the Laser Egg, a palm-sized air quality monitor used to track indoor and outdoor air quality by measuring fine particulate matter in the air.

“Letting people know the sources of regional pollution will help the push for control over emissions of every chimney,” said Ma Jun, the founder and director of the Beijing-based IPE.

The phone map and Laser Egg are the latest levers in prying control over information on air quality from the hands of the few to the many, and they’re beginning to weigh on how officials respond to the issue. Numerous smartphone applications, including those developed by SINA Corp. and Moji Fengyun (Beijing) Software Technology Development Co., now provide people in China with real-time access to air quality readings, essentially democratizing what was once an information pipeline available only to the government.

“China’s continuing struggle to control and reduce air pollution exemplifies the government’s fear that lifestyle issues will mutate into demands for political change,” said Mary Gallagher, an associate professor of political science at the University of Michigan.

Even the government is getting in on the act. The Ministry of Environmental Protection rolled out a smartphone application called “Nationwide Air Quality” with the help ofWuhan Juzheng Environmental Science & Technology Co. at the end of 2013.

“As citizens know more about air pollution, more pressure will be put on the government,” said Xu Qinxiang, a technology manager at Wuhan Juzheng. “This will urge the government to control pollutant sources and upgrade heavy industries.”

 Laser Egg

Sources of air quality data come from the China National Environment Monitoring Center, local environmental protection bureaus and non-Chinese sources such as the U.S. Embassy’s website in Beijing, Xu said.

Air quality is a controversial subject in China. Since 2012, the public has pushed the government to move more quickly than planned to begin releasing data measuring pollution levels — especially of PM2.5, the particulates most harmful to human health.

The reading was 267 micrograms per cubic meter at 10 a.m. Monday near Tiananmen Square, according to the Beijing Municipal Environmental Monitoring Center. The World Health Organization cautions against 24-hour exposure to concentrations higher than 25.

The availability of data appears to be filling a need, especially with the arrival of colder temperatures and the associated smog that blanketed Beijing and northern Chinarecently….

“With more disclosure of the data, everyone becomes more sensitive, hoping the government can do something,” Li Yajuan, a 27-year-old office secretary, said in an interview in Beijing’s Fuchengmen area. “It’s our own living environment after all.”

Efforts to make products linked to air data continue. IBM has been developing artificial intelligence to help fight Beijing’s toxic air pollution, and plans to work with other municipalities in China and India on similar projects to manage air quality….(More)”

Open Data Index 2015

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Knowledge: “….This year’s Index showed impressive gains from non-OECD countries with Taiwan topping the Index and Colombia and Uruguay breaking into the top ten at four and seven respectively. Overall, the Index evaluated 122 places and 1586 datasets and determined that only 9%, or 156 datasets, were both technically and legally open.

The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of data in thirteen key categories, including government spending, election results, procurement, and pollution levels. Over the summer, we held a public consultation, which saw contributions from individuals within the open data community as well as from key civil society organisations across an array of sectors. As a result of this consultation, we expanded the 2015 Index to include public procurement data, water quality data, land ownership data and weather data; we also decided to removed transport timetables due to the difficulties faced when comparing transport system data globally.

Open Knowledge International began to systematically track the release of open data by national governments in 2013 with the objective of measuring if governments were releasing the key datasets of high social and democratic value as open data. That enables us to better understand the current state of play and in turn work with civil society actors to address the gaps in data release. Over the course of the last three years, the Global Open Data Index has become more than just a benchmark – we noticed that governments began to use the Index as a reference to inform their open data priorities and civil society actors began to use the Index advocacy tool to encourage governments to improve their performance in releasing key datasets.

Furthermore, indices such as the Global Open Data Index are not without their challenges. The Index measures the technical and legal openness of datasets deemed to be of critical democratic and social value – it does not measure the openness of a given government. It should be clear that the release of a few key datasets is not a sufficient measure of the openness of a government. The blurring of lines between open data and open government is nothing new and has been hotly debated by civil society groups and transparency organisations since the sharp rise in popularity of open data policies over the last decade. …Index at http://index.okfn.org/”

Smart Urbanism: Utopian vision or false dawn?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Simon Marvin, Andrés Luque-Ayala, and Colin McFarlane: “Smart Urbanism (SU) – the rebuilding of cities through the integration of digital technologies with buildings, neighbourhoods, networked infrastructures and people – is being represented as a unique emerging ‘solution’ to the majority of problems faced by cities today. SU discourses, enacted by technology companies, national governments and supranational agencies alike, claim a supremacy of urban digital technologies for managing and controlling infrastructures, achieving greater effectiveness in managing service demand and reducing carbon emissions, developing greater social interaction and community networks, providing new services around health and social care etc. Smart urbanism is being represented as the response to almost every facet of the contemporary urban question.

This book explores this common conception of the problematic of smart urbanism and critically address what new capabilities are being created by whom and with what exclusions; how these are being developed – and contested; where is this happening both within and between cities; and, with what sorts of social and material consequences. The aim of the book is to identify and convene a currently fragmented and disconnected group of researchers, commentators, developers and users from both within and outside the mainstream SU discourse, including several of those that adopt a more critical perspective, to assess ‘what’ problems of the city smartness can address

The volume provides the first internationally comparative assessment of SU in cities of the global north and south, critically evaluates whether current visions of SU are able to achieve their potential; and then identifies alternative trajectories for SU that hold radical promise for reshaping cities….(More)”

Creating Value through Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Capgemini Consulting, the global strategy and transformation consulting arm of the Capgemini Group, today published two new reports on the state of play of Open Data in Europe, to mark the launch of the European Open Data Portal. The first report addresses “Open Data Maturity in Europe 2015: Insights into the European state of play” and the second focuses on “Creating Value through Open Data: Study on the Impact of Re-use of Public Data Resources.” The countries covered by these assessments include the EU28 countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland – commonly referred to as the EU28+ countries. The reports were requested by the European Commission within the framework of the Connecting Europe Facility program, supporting the deployment of European Open Data infrastructure.

Open Data refers to the information collected, produced or paid for by public bodies and can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone.. For the period 2016-2020, the direct market size for Open Data is estimated at EUR 325 billion for Europe. Capgemini’s study “Creating Value through Open Data” illustrates how Open Data can create economic value in multiple ways including increased market transactions, job creation from producing services and products based on Open Data, to cost savings and efficiency gains. For instance, effective use of Open Data could help save 629 million hours of unnecessary waiting time on the roads in the EU; and help reduce energy consumption by 16%. The accumulated cost savings for public administrations making use of Open Data across the EU28+ in 2020 are predicted to equal 1.7 bn EUR. Reaping these benefits requires reaching a high level of Open Data maturity.

In order to address the accessibility and the value of Open Data across European countries, the European Union has launched the Beta version of the European Data Portal. The Portal addresses the whole Data Value Chain, from data publishing to data re-use. Over 240,000 data sets are referenced on the Portal and 34 European countries. It offers seamless access to public data across Europe, with over 13 content categories to categorize data, ranging from health or education to transport or even science and justice. Anyone, citizens, businesses, journalists or administrations can search, access and re-use the full data collection. A wide range of data is available, from crime records in Helsinki, labor mobility in the Netherlands, forestry maps in France to the impact of digitization in Poland…..The study, “Open Data Maturity in Europe 2015: Insights into the European state of play”, uses two key indicators: Open Data Readiness and Portal Maturity. These indicators cover both the maturity of national policies supporting Open Data as well as an assessment of the features made available on national data portals. The study shows that the EU28+ have completed just 44% of the journey towards achieving full Open Data Maturity and there are large discrepancies across countries. A third of European countries (32%), recognized globally, are leading the way with solid policies, licensing norms, good portal traffic and many local initiatives and events to promote Open Data and its re-use….(More)”

Decoding the Future for National Security

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

George I. Seffers at Signal: “U.S. intelligence agencies are in the business of predicting the future, but no one has systematically evaluated the accuracy of those predictions—until now. The intelligence community’s cutting-edge research and development agency uses a handful of predictive analytics programs to measure and improve the ability to forecast major events, including political upheavals, disease outbreaks, insider threats and cyber attacks.

The Office for Anticipating Surprise at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is a place where crystal balls come in the form of software, tournaments and throngs of people. The office sponsors eight programs designed to improve predictive analytics, which uses a variety of data to forecast events. The programs all focus on incidents outside of the United States, and the information is anonymized to protect privacy. The programs are in different stages, some having recently ended as others are preparing to award contracts.

But they all have one more thing in common: They use tournaments to advance the state of the predictive analytic arts. “We decided to run a series of forecasting tournaments in which people from around the world generate forecasts about, now, thousands of real-world events,” says Jason Matheny, IARPA’s new director. “All of our programs on predictive analytics do use this tournament style of funding and evaluating research.” The Open Source Indicators program used a crowdsourcing technique in which people across the globe offered their predictions on such events as political uprisings, disease outbreaks and elections.

The data analyzed included social media trends, Web search queries and even cancelled dinner reservations—an indication that people are sick. “The methods applied to this were all automated. They used machine learning to comb through billions of pieces of data to look for that signal, that leading indicator, that an event was about to happen,” Matheny explains. “And they made amazing progress. They were able to predict disease outbreaks weeks earlier than traditional reporting.” The recently completed Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) program also used a crowdsourcing competition in which people predicted events, including whether weapons would be tested, treaties would be signed or armed conflict would break out along certain borders. Volunteers were asked to provide information about their own background and what sources they used. IARPA also tested participants’ cognitive reasoning abilities. Volunteers provided their forecasts every day, and IARPA personnel kept score. Interestingly, they discovered the “deep domain” experts were not the best at predicting events. Instead, people with a certain style of thinking came out the winners. “They read a lot, not just from one source, but from multiple sources that come from different viewpoints. They have different sources of data, and they revise their judgments when presented with new information. They don’t stick to their guns,” Matheny reveals. …

The ACE research also contributed to a recently released book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, according to the IARPA director. The book was co-authored, along with Dan Gardner, by Philip Tetlock, the Annenberg University professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a principal investigator for the ACE program. Like ACE, the Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation program uses the forecasting tournament format, but it also requires participants to explain and defend their reasoning. The initiative aims to improve analytic thinking by combining structured reasoning techniques with crowdsourcing.

Meanwhile, the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) program forecasts science and technology breakthroughs….(More)”

Freedom of Information, Right to Access Information, Open Data: Who is at the Table?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Shepherd in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs: “Many national governments have adopted the idea of the ‘right to access information’ (RTI) or ‘freedom of information’ (FOI) as an essential element of the rights of citizens to freedom of opinion and expression, human rights, trust in public discourse and transparent, accountable and open government. Over 100 countries worldwide have introduced access to information legislation: 50+ in Europe; a dozen in Africa; 20 in the Americas and Caribbean; more than 15 in Asia and the Pacific; and two in the Middle East (Banisar, 2014). This article will provide an overview of access to information legislation and focus on the UK Freedom of Information Act 2000 as a case example. It will discuss the impact of the UK FOI Act on public authorities, with particular attention to records management implications, drawing on research undertaken by University College London. In the final section, it will reflect on relationships between access to information and open government data. If governments are moving to more openness, what implications might this have for those charged with implementing FOI and RTI policies, including for records management professionals?…(More)”

Tech and Innovation to Re-engage Civic Life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Sometimes even the best-intentioned policymakers overlook the power of people. And even the best-intentioned discussions on social impact and leveraging big data for the social sector can obscure the power of every-day people in their communities.

But time and time again, I’ve seen the transformative power of civic engagement when initiatives are structured well. For example, the other year I witnessed a high school student walk into a school auditorium one evening during Boston’s first-ever youth-driven participatory budgeting project. Participatory budgeting gives residents a structured opportunity to work together to identify neighborhood priorities, work in tandem with government officials to draft viable projects, and prioritize projects to fund. Elected officials in turn pledge to implement these projects and are held accountable to their constituents. Initially intrigued by an experiment in democracy (and maybe the free pizza), this student remained engaged over several months, because she met new members of her community; got to interact with elected officials; and felt like she was working on a concrete objective that could have a tangible, positive impact on her neighborhood.

For many of the young participants, ages 12-25, being part of a participatory budgeting initiative is the first time they are involved in civic life. Many were excited that the City of Boston, in collaboration with the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project, empowered young people with the opportunity to allocate $1 million in public funds. Through participating, young people gain invaluable civic skills, and sometimes even a passion that can fuel other engagements in civic and communal life.

This is just one example of a broader civic and social innovation trend. Across the globe, people are working together with their communities to solve seemingly intractable problems, but as diverse as those efforts are, there are also commonalities. Well-structured civic engagement creates the space and provides the tools for people to exert agency over policies. When citizens have concrete objectives, access to necessary technology (whether it’s postcards, trucks, or open data portals), and an eye toward outcomes, social change happens.

Using Technology to Distribute Expertise

Technology is allowing citizens around the world to participate in solving local, national, and global problems. When it comes to large, public bureaucracies, expertise is largely top-down and concentrated. Leveraging technology creates opportunities for people to work together in new ways to solve public problems. One way is through civic crowdfunding platforms like Citizinvestor.com, which cities can use to develop public sector projects for citizen support; several cities in Rhode Island, Oregon, and Philadelphia have successfully pooled citizen resources to fund new public works. Another way is through citizen science. Old Weather, a crowdsourcing project from the National Archives and Zooniverse, enrolls people to transcribe old British ship logs to identify climate change patterns. Platforms like these allow anyone to devote a small amount of time or resources toward a broader public good. And because they have a degree of transparency, people can see the progress and impact of their efforts. ….(More)”