Anna Clark in NextCity: “Drawing from a practice pioneered 25 years ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil and imported to North America via progressive leaders in Toronto and Quebec, participatory budgeting cracks open the closed-door process of fiscal decision-making in cities, letting citizens vote on exactly how government money is spent in their community. It’s an auspicious departure from traditional ways of allocating tax dollars, let alone in Chicago, which has long been known for deeply entrenched machine politics. As Alderman Joe Moore puts it, in Chicago, “so many decisions are made from the top down.”
Participatory budgeting works pretty simply in the 49th Ward. Instead of Moore deciding how to spend $1.3 million in “menu money” that is allotted annually to each of Chicago’s 50 council members for capital improvements, the councilman opens up a public process to determine how to spend $1 million of the allotment. The remaining $300,000 is socked away in the bank for emergencies and cost overruns.
And the unusual vote on $1 million in menu money is open to a wider swath of the community than your standard Election Day: you don’t have to be a citizen to cast a ballot, and the voting age is sixteen.
Thanks to the process, Rogers Park can now boast of a new community garden, dozens of underpass murals, heating shelters at three transit stations, hundreds of tree plantings, an outdoor shower at Loyola Park, a $110,000 dog park, and eye-catching “You Are Here” neighborhood information boards at transit station entrances.
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Another prominent supporter of participatory budgeting? The White House. In December—about eight months after Joe Moore met with President Barack Obama about bringing participatory budgeting to the federal level—PB became an option for determining how to spend community development block-grant money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Obama administration also declared that, in a yet-to-be-detailed partnership, it will help create tools that can be used for participatory budgeting on a local level.
All this activity has so far added up to $45 million in tax dollars allocated to 203 voter-approved projects across the country. Some 46,000 people and 500 organizations nationwide have been part of the decision-making, according to the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project.
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But to fulfill this vision, the process needs resources behind it—enough funds for projects to demonstrate a visible community benefit, and ample capacity from the facilitators of the process (whether it’s district officials or city hall) to truly reach out to the community. Without intention and capacity, PB risks duplicating the process of elections for ordinary representative democracy, where white middle- and upper-class voters are far more likely to vote and therefore enjoy an outsized influence on their neighborhood.
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Participatory budgeting works differently for every city. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the process was created a generation ago by The Worker’s Party to give disadvantaged people a stronger voice in government, as many as 50,000 people vote on how to spend public money each year. More than $700 million has been funneled through the process since its inception. Vallejo, Calif., embraced participatory budgeting in 2012 after emerging from bankruptcy as part of its citywide reinvention. In its first PB vote in May 2013, 3,917 residents voted over the course of a week at 13 polling locations. That translated into four percent of the city’s eligible voters—a tiny number, but a much higher percentage than previous PB processes in Chicago and New York.
But the 5th Ward in Hyde Park, a South Side neighborhood that’s home to the University of Chicago, dropped PB in December, citing low turnout in neighborhood assemblies and residents who felt the process was too much work to be worthwhile. “They said it was very time consuming, a lot of meetings, and that they thought the neighborhood groups that they had were active enough to do it without having all of the expenses that were associated with it,” Alderman Leslie Hairston told the Hyde Park Herald. In 2013, its first year with participatory budgeting, the 5th Ward held a PB vote that saw only 100 ballots cast.
Josh Lerner of the Participatory Budgeting Project says low turnout is a problem that can be solved through outreach and promotion. “It is challenging to do this without capacity,” he said. Internationally, according to Lerner, PB is part of a city administration, with a whole office coordinating the process. Without the backing from City Hall in Porto Alegre, participatory budgeting would have a hard time attracting the tens of thousands who now count themselves as part of the process. And even with the support from City Hall, the 50,000 participants represent less than one percent of the city’s population of 1.4 million.
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So what’s next for participatory budgeting in Rogers Park and beyond?
Well, first off, Rahm Emanuel’s new Manager of Participatory Budgeting will be responsible for supporting council districts if and when they opt to go participatory. There won’t be a requirement to do so, but if a district wishes to follow the 49th, they will have high-level backup from City Hall.
But this new manager—as well as Chicago’s aldermen and engaged citizens—must understand that there is no one-size-fits-all formula for participatory budgeting. The process must be adapted to the unique needs and culture of each district if it is to resonate with locals. And timing is key for rolling out the process.
While still in the hazy early days, federal support through the new White House initiative may also prove crucial in streamlining the participatory budgeting process, easing the burden on local leaders and citizens, and ultimately generating better participation—and, therefore, better on-the-ground results in communities around the country.
One of the key lessons of participatory budgeting—as with democracy more broadly—is that efficiency is not the highest value in the public sphere. It would be much easier and more cost-effective for aldermen to return to the old days and simply check off the boxes for where he or she thinks menu money should be spent. “We could sign off on menu money in a couple hours, a couple days,” Vandercook said. By choosing the participatory path, aldermen effectively create more work for themselves. They risk low rates of participation and the possibility that winning projects may not be the most worthy. Scalability, too, is a problem — the larger the community served by the process, the more difficult it is to ensure that both the process and the resulting projects reflect the needs of the entire community.
Nonetheless, participatory budgeting serves a harder-to-measure purpose that may well be, in the final accounting, more important. It is a profound civic education for citizens, who dig into both the limits and possibilities of public money. They experience what their elected leaders must navigate every day. But it’s also a civic education for council members and city staff who may find that they are engaging with those they represent more than they ever had before, learning about what they value most. Owen Burgh, chief of staff for Alderman Joe Arena in Chicago’s 45th Ward, told the Participatory Budgeting Project, “I was really surprised by the amazing knowledge base we have among our volunteers. So many of our volunteers came to the process with a background where they understood some principles of traffic management, community development and urban planning. It was very refreshing. Usually, in an alderman’s office, people contact us to fix an isolated problem. Through this process, we discussed not just what needed to be fixed but what we wanted our community to be.”
The participatory budgeting process expands the scope and depth of civic spaces in the community, where elected leaders work with—not for—residents. Even for those who do not show up to vote, there is an empowerment that comes simply in knowing that they could; the sincere invitation to participate matters, whether or not it is accepted…”
Paying Farmers to Welcome Birds
Jim Robbins in The New York Times: “The Central Valley was once one of North America’s most productive wildlife habitats, a 450-mile-long expanse marbled with meandering streams and lush wetlands that provided an ideal stop for migratory shorebirds on their annual journeys from South America and Mexico to the Arctic and back.
Farmers and engineers have long since tamed the valley. Of the wetlands that existed before the valley was settled, about 95 percent are gone, and the number of migratory birds has declined drastically. But now an unusual alliance of conservationists, bird watchers and farmers have joined in an innovative plan to restore essential habitat for the migrating birds.
The program, called BirdReturns, starts with data from eBird, the pioneering citizen science project that asks birders to record sightings on a smartphone app and send the information to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in upstate New York.
By crunching data from the Central Valley, eBird can generate maps showing where virtually every species congregates in the remaining wetlands. Then, by overlaying those maps on aerial views of existing surface water, it can determine where the birds’ need for habitat is greatest….
BirdReturns is an example of the growing movement called reconciliation ecology, in which ecosystems dominated by humans are managed to increase biodiversity.
“It’s a new ‘Moneyball,’ ” said Eric Hallstein, an economist with the Nature Conservancy and a designer of the auctions, referring to the book and movie about the Oakland Athletics’ data-driven approach to baseball. “We’re disrupting the conservation industry by taking a new kind of data, crunching it differently and contracting differently.”
The Transformative Impact of Data and Communication on Governance
Steven Livingston at Brookings: “How do digital technologies affect governance in areas of limited statehood – places and circumstances characterized by the absence of state provisioning of public goods and the enforcement of binding rules with a monopoly of legitimate force? In the first post in this series I introduced the limited statehood concept and then described the tremendous growth in mobile telephony, GIS, and other technologies in the developing world. In the second post I offered examples of the use of ICT in initiatives intended to fill at least some of the governance vacuum created by limited statehood. With mobile phones, for example, farmers are informed of market conditions, have access to liquidity through M-Pesa and similar mobile money platforms….
This brings to mind another type of ICT governance initiative. Rather than fill in for or even displace the state some ICT initiatives can strengthen governance capacity. Digital government – the use of digital technology by the state itself — is one important possibility. Other initiatives strengthen the state by exerting pressure. Countries with weak governance sometimes take the form of extractive states or those, which cater to the needs of an elite, leaving the majority of the population in poverty and without basic public services. This is what Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson call extractive political and economic institutions. Inclusive states, on the other hand, are pluralistic, bound by the rule of law, respectful of property rights, and, in general, accountable. Accountability mechanisms such as a free press and competitive multiparty elections are instrumental to discourage extractive institutions. What ICT-based initiatives might lend a hand in strengthening accountability? We can point to three examples.
Example One: Using ICT to Protect Human Rights
Nonstate actors now use commercial, high-resolution remote sensing satellites to monitor weapons programs and human rights violations. Amnesty International’s Remote Sensing for Human Rights offers one example, and Satellite Sentinel offers another. Both use imagery from DigitalGlobe, an American remote sensing and geospatial content company. Other organizations have used commercially available remote sensing imagery to monitor weapons proliferation. The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based NGO, revealed the Iranian nuclear weapons program in 2003 using commercial satellite imagery…
Example Two: Crowdsourcing Election Observation
Others have used mobile phones and GIS to crowdsource election observation. For the 2011 elections in Nigeria, The Community Life Project, a civil society organization, created ReclaimNaija, an elections process monitoring system that relied on GIS and amateur observers with mobile phones to monitor the elections. Each of the red dots represents an aggregation of geo-located incidents reported to the ReclaimNaija platform. In a live map, clicking on a dot disaggregates the reports, eventually taking the reader to individual reports. Rigorous statistical analysis of ReclaimNaija results and the elections suggest it contributed to the effectiveness of the election process.
ReclaimNaija: Election Incident Reporting System Map
Example Three: Using Genetic Analysis to Identify War Crimes
In recent years, more powerful computers have led to major breakthroughs in biomedical science. The reduction in cost of analyzing the human genome has actually outpaced Moore’s Law. This has opened up new possibilities for the use of genetic analysis in forensic anthropology. In Guatemala, the Balkans, Argentina, Peru and in several other places where mass executions and genocides took place, forensic anthropologists are using genetic analysis to find evidence that is used to hold the killers – often state actors – accountable…”
How Civil Society Organizations Close the Gap between Transparency and Accountability
In a research note in the current issue of Governance, Albert Van Zyl poses “the most critical question for activists and scholars of accountability: How and when does transparency lead to greater accountability?” Van Zyl’s note looks particularly at the role of civil society organizations (CSOs) in demanding and using government budget information, drawing on case studies of CSO activity in eleven countries in Africa, Latin America and South Asia. Accountability is achieved, Van Zyl suggests, when CSOs are active and closely engaged with legislators, auditors, and other formal oversight institutions. But research is still needed on the kinds of engagement that are most likely to enhance accountability. Read the research note.
PatientsLikeMe Gives Genentech Full Access
Susan Young Rojahn in MIT Technology Review: “PatientsLikeMe, the largest online network for patients, has established its first broad partnership with a drug company. Genentech, the South San Francisco biotechnology company bought by Roche in 2009, now has access to PatientsLikeMe’s full database for five years.
PatientsLikeMe is an online network of some 250,000 people with chronic diseases who share information about symptoms, treatments, and coping mechanisms. The largest communities within the network are built around fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), but as many as 2,000 conditions are represented in the system. The hope is that the information shared by people with chronic disease will help the life sciences industry identify unmet needs in patients and generate medical evidence, says co-founder Ben Heywood.
The agreement with Genentech is not the first collaboration between a life sciences company and PatientsLikeMe, named one of 50 Disruptive Companies in 2012 by MIT Technology Review, but it is the broadest. Previous collaborations were more limited in scope, says Heywood, focusing on a particular research question or a specific disease area. The deal with Genentech is an all-encompassing subscription to information posted by the entire PatientsLikeMe population, without the need for new contracts and new business deals if a research program shifts direction from its original focus. “This allows for a much more rapid real-time use of the data,” says Heywood.
In 2010, PatientsLikeMe demonstrated some of its potential to advance medicine. With data from its community of ALS patients, who suffer from a progressive and fatal neurological disease, the company could see that a drug under study was not effective (see “Patients’ Social Network Predicts Drug Outcomes”). Those findings were corroborated by an academic study published that year. Another area of medicine the network can shed light on is the quality of care patients receive, including whether or not doctors are following guidelines established by medical societies for how patients are treated. “As we try to shift to patient-centered health care, we have to understand what [patients] value,” says Heywood.
In exchange for an undisclosed payment to PatientsLikeMe, Genentech has a five-year subscription to the data in the online network. The data will be de-identified– that is, Genentech will not see patient names or email addresses. Heywood says his company is hoping to establish broad agreements with other life sciences companies soon.”
'Hackathons' Aim to Solve Health Care's Ills
Amy Dockser Marcus in the Wall Street Journal: “Hackathons, the high-octane, all-night problem-solving sessions popularized by the software-coding community, are making their way into the more traditional world of health care. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a recent event called Hacking Medicine’s Grand Hackfest attracted more than 450 people to work for one weekend on possible solutions to problems involving diabetes, rare diseases, global health and information technology used at hospitals.
Health institutions such as New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston have held hackathons. MIT, meantime, has co-sponsored health hackathons in India, Spain and Uganda.
Hackathons of all kinds are increasingly popular. Intel Corp. recently bought a group that organizes them. Companies hoping to spark creative thinking sponsor them. And student-run hackathons have turned into intercollegiate competitions.
But in health care, where change typically comes much more slowly than in Silicon Valley, they represent a cultural shift. To solve a problem, scientists and doctors can spend years painstakingly running experiments, gathering data, applying for grants and publishing results. So the idea of an event where people give two-minute pitches describing a problem, then join a team of strangers to come up with a solution in the course of one weekend is radical.
“We are not trying to replace the medical culture with Facebook culture,” said Elliot Cohen, who wore a hoodie over a button-down dress shirt at the MIT event in March and helped start MIT Hacking Medicine while at business school. “But we want to try to blend them more.”
Mr. Cohen co-founded and is chief technology officer at PillPack, a pharmacy that sends customers personalized packages of their medications, a company that started at a hackathon.
At MIT’s health-hack, physicians, researchers, students and a smattering of people wearing Google Glass sprawled on the floor of MIT’s Media Lab and at tables with a view of the Boston skyline. At one table, a group of college students, laptops plastered with stickers, pulled juice boxes and snacks out of backpacks, trash piling up next to them as they feverishly wrote code.
Nupur Garg, an emergency-room physician and one of the eventual winners, finished her hospital shift at 2 a.m. Saturday in New York, drove to Boston and arrived at MIT in time to pitch the need for a way to capture images of patients’ ears and throats that can be shared with specialists to help make diagnoses. She and her team immediately started working on a prototype for the device, testing early versions on anyone who stopped by their table.
Dr. Garg and teammate Nancy Liang, who runs a company that makes Web apps for 3-D printers, caught a few hours of sleep in a dorm room Saturday night. They came up with the idea for their product’s name—MedSnap—later that night while watching students use cellphone cameras to send SnapChats to one another. “There was no time to conduct surveys on what was the best name,” said Ms. Liang. “Many ideas happen after midnight.”
Winning teams in each category won $1,000, as well as access to the hackathons sponsors for advice and pilot projects.
Yet even supporters say hackathons can’t solve medicine’s challenges overnight. Harlan Krumholz, a professor at Yale School of Medicine who ran a many-months trial that found telemonitoring didn’t reduce hospitalizations or deaths of cardiology patients, said he supports the problem-solving ethos of hackathons. But he added that “improvements require a long-term commitment, not just a weekend.”
Ned McCague, a data scientist at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, served as a mentor at the hackathon. He said he wasn’t representing his employer, but he used his professional experiences to push groups to think about the potential customer. “They have a good idea and are excited about it, but they haven’t thought about who is paying for it,” he said.
Zen Chu, a senior lecturer in health-care innovation and entrepreneur-in-residence at MIT, and one of the founders of Hacking Medicine, said more than a dozen startups conceived since the first hackathon, in 2011, are still in operation. Some received venture-capital funding.
The upsides of hackathons were made clear to Sharon Moalem, a physician who studies rare diseases. He had spent years developing a mobile app that can take pictures of faces to help diagnose rare genetic conditions, but was stumped on how to give the images a standard size scale to make comparisons. At the hackathon, Dr. Moalem said he was approached by an MIT student who suggested sticking a coin on the subjects’ forehead. Since quarters have a standard measurement, it “creates a scale,” said Dr. Moalem.
Dr. Moalem said he had never considered such a simple, elegant solution. The team went on to write code to help standardize facial measurements based on the dimensions of a coin and a credit card.
“Sometimes when you are too close to something, you stop seeing solutions, you only see problems,” Dr. Moalem said. “I needed to step outside my own silo.”
Smart cities are here today — and getting smarter
Computer World: “Smart cities aren’t a science fiction, far-off-in-the-future concept. They’re here today, with municipal governments already using technologies that include wireless networks, big data/analytics, mobile applications, Web portals, social media, sensors/tracking products and other tools.
These smart city efforts have lofty goals: Enhancing the quality of life for citizens, improving government processes and reducing energy consumption, among others. Indeed, cities are already seeing some tangible benefits.
But creating a smart city comes with daunting challenges, including the need to provide effective data security and privacy, and to ensure that myriad departments work in harmony.
The global urban population is expected to grow approximately 1.5% per year between 2025 and 2030, mostly in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization.
What makes a city smart? As with any buzz term, the definition varies. But in general, it refers to using information and communications technologies to deliver sustainable economic development and a higher quality of life, while engaging citizens and effectively managing natural resources.
Making cities smarter will become increasingly important. For the first time ever, the majority of the world’s population resides in a city, and this proportion continues to grow, according to the World Health Organization, the coordinating authority for health within the United Nations.
A hundred years ago, two out of every 10 people lived in an urban area, the organization says. As recently as 1990, less than 40% of the global population lived in a city — but by 2010 more than half of all people lived in an urban area. By 2050, the proportion of city dwellers is expected to rise to 70%.
As many city populations continue to grow, here’s what five U.S. cities are doing to help manage it all:
Scottsdale, Ariz.
The city of Scottsdale, Ariz., has several initiatives underway.
One is MyScottsdale, a mobile application the city deployed in the summer of 2013 that allows citizens to report cracked sidewalks, broken street lights and traffic lights, road and sewer issues, graffiti and other problems in the community….”
HarassMap: Using Crowdsourced Data to Map Sexual Harassment in Egypt
Chelsea Young in Technology Innovation Management Review: “Through a case study of HarassMap, an advocacy, prevention, and response tool that uses crowdsourced data to map incidents of sexual harassment in Egypt, this article examines the application of crowdsourcing technology to drive innovation in the field of social policy. This article applies a framework that explores the potential, limitations, and future applications of crowdsourcing technology in this sector to reveal how crowdsourcing technology can be applied to overcome cultural and environmental constraints that have traditionally impeded the collection of data. Many of the lessons emerging from this case study hold relevance beyond the field of social policy. Applied to specific problems, this technology can be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of mitigation strategies, while facilitating rapid and informed decision making based on “good enough” data. However, this case also illustrates a number of challenges arising from the integrity of crowdsourced data and the potential for ethical conflict when using this data to inform policy formulation.”
Ten Innovations to Compete for Global Innovation Award
Making All Voices Count: “The Global Innovation Competition was launched at the Open Government Partnership Summit in November, 2013 and set out to scout the globe for fresh ideas to enhance government accountability and boost citizen engagement. The call was worldwide and in response, nearly 200 innovative ideas were submitted. After a process of public voting and peer review, these have been reduced to ten.
Below, we highlight the innovations that will now compete for a prize of £65,000 plus six months mentorship at the Global Innovation Week March 31 – April 4, 2014 in Kenya.
The first seven emerged from a process of peer review and the following three were selected by the Global Innovation Jury.
An SMS gateway, connected to local hospitals and the web, to channel citizens’ requests for pregnancy services. At risk women, in need of information such as hospital locations and general advice, will receive relevant and targeted updates utilising both an SMS and a GIS-based system. The aim is to reduce maternal mortality by targeting at risk women in poorer communities in Indonesia.
“One of the causes of high maternal mortality rate in Indonesia is late response in childbirth treatment and lack of pregnancy care information.”
This project, led by a civil servant, aims to engage citizens in Pakistan in service delivery governance. The project aims to enable and motivate citizens to collect, analyze and disseminate service delivery performance data in order to drive performance and help effective decision making.
“BSDU will serve as a model of better management aided by the citizens, for the citizens.”
A Geographic Information System that gives Indonesian citizens access to information regarding government funded projects. The idea is to enable and motivate citizens to compare a project’s information with its real-world implementation and to provide feedback on this. The ultimate aim is to fight corruption in the public sector by making it easier for citizens to monitor, and provide feedback on, government-funded projects.
“On-the-map information about government-funded projects, where citizens are able to submit their opinions, should became a global standard in budget transparency!”
A digital payment system in South Africa that rewards citizens who participate in activities such as waste separation and community gardening. Citizens are able to ‘spend’ rewards on airtime, pre-paid electricity and groceries. By rewarding social volunteers this project aims to boost citizen engagement, build trust and establish the link between government and citizen actors.
“GEM offers a direct channel for communication and rewards between governments and citizens.”
An app created by a team of software developers to provide Ghanaian citizens with information about the oil and gas industry, with the aim of raising awareness of the revenue generated and to spark debate about how this could be used to improve national development.
“The idea is to bring citizens, the oil and gas companies and the government all onto one platform.”
Ghana Petrol Watch seeks to deliver basic facts and figures associated with oil and gas exploration to the average Ghanaian. The solution employs mobile technology to deliver this information. The audience can voice their concerns as comments on the issue via replies to the SMS. These would then be published on the web portal for further exposure and publicity.
“The information on the petroleum industry is publicly available, but not readily accessible and often does not reach the grassroots community in an easily comprehensible manner.”
A common platform to be implemented in Khulna City, Bangladesh, where citizens and elected officials will interact on budget, expenditure and information.
“The concept of citizen engagement for the fulfillment of pre-election commitment is an innovation in establishing governance.”
The aim of this project is an increase in child engagement in governmental budgeting and policy formulation in Mwanza City, Tanzania. This project was selected as a wildcard by the Global Innovation Jury.
“In many projects I have seen, children are always the perceived beneficiaries, rarely do you see innovations where children are active participants in achieving a goal in their society. It was great to see children as active contributors to their own discourse.” – Jury Member, Shikoh Gitau.
A ‘watchdog’ newsletter in Kenya focusing on monitoring the actions of officials with the aim of educating, empowering and motivating citizens to hold their leaders to account. This project was selected as a wildcard by the Global Innovation Jury.
“We endeavor to bridge the information gap in northern Kenya by giving voice to the voiceless and also highlighting their challenges. The aim is an increase in the educational level of the people through information.”
Citizen Desk is an open-source tool that combines the ability of citizens to share eyewitness reports with the public need for verified information in real time. Citizen Desk lets citizen journalists file reports via SMS or social media, with no need for technical training. This project was selected as a wildcard by the Global Innovation Jury.
“It has become evident for some time now that good technical innovation must rest on a strong bedrock of social and political activity, on the ground, deeply in touch with local conditions, and sometimes in the face of power and privilege.” – Jury Member Bright Simons.”
Potholes and Big Data: Crowdsourcing Our Way to Better Government
Phil Simon in Wired: “Big Data is transforming many industries and functions within organizations with relatively limited budgets.
Consider Thomas M. Menino, up until recently Boston’s longest-serving mayor. At some point in the past few years, Menino realized that it was no longer 1950. Perhaps he was hobnobbing with some techies from MIT at dinner one night. Whatever his motivation, he decided that there just had to be a better, more cost-effective way to maintain and fix the city’s roads. Maybe smartphones could help the city take a more proactive approach to road maintenance.
To that end, in July 2012, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics launched a new project called Street Bump, an app that allows drivers to automatically report the road hazards to the city as soon as they hear that unfortunate “thud,” with their smartphones doing all the work.
The app’s developers say their work has already sparked interest from other cities in the U.S., Europe, Africa and elsewhere that are imagining other ways to harness the technology.
Before they even start their trip, drivers using Street Bump fire up the app, then set their smartphones either on the dashboard or in a cup holder. The app takes care of the rest, using the phone’s accelerometer — a motion detector — to sense when a bump is hit. GPS records the location, and the phone transmits it to an AWS remote server.
But that’s not the end of the story. It turned out that the first version of the app reported far too many false positives (i.e., phantom potholes). This finding no doubt gave ammunition to the many naysayers who believe that technology will never be able to do what people can and that things are just fine as they are, thank you. Street Bump 1.0 “collected lots of data but couldn’t differentiate between potholes and other bumps.” After all, your smartphone or cell phone isn’t inert; it moves in the car naturally because the car is moving. And what about the scores of people whose phones “move” because they check their messages at a stoplight?
To their credit, Menino and his motley crew weren’t entirely discouraged by this initial setback. In their gut, they knew that they were on to something. The idea and potential of the Street Bump app were worth pursuing and refining, even if the first version was a bit lacking. Plus, they have plenty of examples from which to learn. It’s not like the iPad, iPod, and iPhone haven’t evolved considerably over time.
Enter InnoCentive, a Massachusetts-based firm specializing in open innovation and crowdsourcing. The City of Boston contracted InnoCentive to improve Street Bump and reduce the amount of tail chasing. The company accepted the challenge and essentially turned it into a contest, a process sometimes called gamification. InnoCentive offered a network of 400,000 experts a share of $25,000 in prize money donated by Liberty Mutual.
Almost immediately, the ideas to improve Street Bump poured in from unexpected places. This crowd had wisdom. Ultimately, the best suggestions came from:
- A group of hackers in Somerville, Massachusetts, that promotes community education and research
- The head of the mathematics department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI.
- An anonymous software engineer
…Crowdsourcing roadside maintenance isn’t just cool. Increasingly, projects like Street Bump are resulting in substantial savings — and better government.”