The Upside of Slacktivism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in Pacific Standard: “When you think of meaningful political action, you probably think of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, or perhaps ACT-UP‘s 1990 protests in San Francisco. You probably don’t think of clicking “like” or “share” on Facetwitstagram—though a new study suggests that those likes and shares may be just as important as marching in the streets, singing songs, and carrying signs.

“The efficacy of online networks in disseminating timely information has been praised by many commentators; at the same time, users are often derided as ‘slacktivists’ because of the shallow commitment involved in clicking a forwarding button,” writes a team led by Pablo Barberá, a political scientist at New York University, in the journal PLoS One.

In other words, it’s easy to argue that sharing a post about climate change and whatnot has no value, since it involves no sacrifice—no standoffs with angry police, no going to jail over taxes you didn’t pay because you opposed the Mexican-American War, not even lost shoes.

On the other hand, maybe sacrifice isn’t the point. Maybe it’s getting attention, and, Barberá and colleagues suggest, slacktivism is actually pretty good at that part—a consequence of just how easy it is to spread the word with the click of a mouse.

The team reached that conclusion after analyzing tens of millions of tweets sent by nearly three million users during the May 2013 anti-government protests in Gezi Park, Istanbul. Among other things, the team identified which tweets were originals rather than retweets, who retweeted whom, and how many followers each user had. That meant Barberá and his team could identify not only how information flowed within the network of protesters, but also how many people that information reached.

Most original tweets came from a relatively small group of protestors using hashtags such as #gezipark, suggesting that information flowed from a core group of protestors toward a less-active periphery. Geographic data backed that up: Around 18 percent of core tweeters were physically present for the Gezi Park demonstrations, compared to a quarter of a percent of peripheral tweeters…..(More)”

Five Studies: How Behavioral Science Can Help in International Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in Pacific Standard: “In 2012, there were 896 million people around the world—12.7 percent of the global population—living on less than two dollars a day. The World Food Programestimates that 795 million people worldwide don’t have enough food to “lead a healthy life”; 25 percent of people living in Sub-Saharan Africa are undernourished. Over three million children die every year thanks to poor nutrition, and hunger is the leading cause of death worldwide. In 2012, just three preventable diseases (pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria) killed 4,600 children every day.

Last month, the World Bank announced the launch of the Global Insights Initiative (GINI). The initiative, which follows in the footsteps of so-called “nudge units” in the United Kingdom and United States, is the Bank’s effort to incorporate insights from the field of behavioral science into the design of international development programs; too often, those programs failed to account for how people behave in the real world. Development policy, according to the Bank’s 2015 World Development Report, is overdue for a “redesign based on careful consideration of human factors.” Researchers have applauded the announcement, but it raises an interesting question: What can nudges really accomplish in the face of the developing world’s overwhelming poverty and health-care deficits?

In fact, researchers have found that instituting small program changes, informed by a better understanding of people’s motivations and limitations, can have big effects on everything from savings rates to vaccination rates to risky sexual behavior. Here are five studies that demonstrate the benefits of bringing empirical social science into the developing world….(More)”

Crowdsourcing Apps to Report Bay Area Public Transportation Delays

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carolyn Said in the San Francisco Chronicle: “It’s the daily lament of the public transit rider: When will the bus show up?

The NextBus system is supposed to answer that for Muni riders. It displays anticipated arrival times through electronic signs in bus shelters, with a phone service for people who call 511, on a website and on a smartphone app, harvesting information from GPS devices in Muni’s fleet. Now a study by a San Francisco startup says it’s accurate about 70 percent of the time, with the worst performance during commute hours.

The researchers have their own plan to improve accuracy: They created a crowdsourced iOS app called Swyft. Some 40,000 Bay Area residents, about three-quarters of them in San Francisco, now use the app to report when their Muni bus, BART train or AC Transit bus is delayed, overcrowded or otherwise experiencing problems. That lets the app deliver real-time information to its users in conjunction with the NextBus predictions.

“The union of those two provides better context for riders” to figure out when their bus really will arrive, said Jonathan Simkin, co-founder and CEO of Swyft, which has raised a little over $500,000. “We built Swyft to optimize how you get around town.” Swyft has been tested since January in the Bay Area. An Android version is coming soon.

An app for iOS and Android called Moovit also uses crowdsourcing combined with transit information to predict bus or train arrivals. Moovit, released in 2012, now has 35 million users in more than 800 cities in 60 countries, giving it a bigger user base than Google Maps, it said. The company couldn’t say how many users it has in San Francisco. The Israeli company has more than $81 million in venture backing.
When users ride public transit with the Moovit app open, it anonymously tracks their speed and location, and integrates that with schedules to predict when a bus will arrive. It also lets users report problems such as how crowded or clean a vehicle is, for instance….(More)”

ClearGov aims to bring town finances into the 21st century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Boston Globe: “Earlier this year, Hopkinton resident Chris Bullock was deciding how to vote on a tax increase that would fund a new school. He wanted to know how much the town spent on education, and how that compared to other nearby towns — reasonable questions that any engaged voter might ask.

But the information was surprisingly hard to find. Charts buried in the town’s 230-page annual report were inscrutable, the money scattered across various funds labeled with jargon. Even after piecing together a few figures, Bullock had no way to make sense of them. Was his town spending a lot or only a little on education?
That frustrating exercise was the genesis of ClearGov , a startup founded by Bullock that takes towns’ raw financial data and turns them into visually appealing online infographics, along with comparisons to similar towns nearby.

For residents, Bullock said, ClearGov aims to make local governments more approachable, transparent, and accountable.

And for officials, the software should help them parse voluminous budget spreadsheets to better compare their finances to those of nearby towns.

The site also encourages officials to answer questions posted on the site by residents and annotate their numbers with plain-English explanations of the policies behindthem….

Easton is one of five Massachusetts municipalities — along with Athol, Northfield, Oxford, and Warwick — to sign up for new paid service, inking a $1,500 deal with ClearGov in September that runs through June 2016, according to town officials.

The town’s ClearGov page gives a snapshot of its population and median home values and incomes, plus graphs of Easton’s debt load and rainy day reserve fund. There’s also a detailed, per-capita breakdown of where Easton’s revenues come from…(More).

New York City BigApps Winners Show How Civic Tech Is Maturing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alexander Howard at Huffington Post: “Winners of the latest version of New York City’s BigApps Challenge, announced Thursday, show how tough lessons from the first generation of city apps contests are now helping to creating civic value and community.

New York’s experience will help demonstrate to mayors around the world how to get the most social impact and economic value from government data: Start with the civic problem you want to target, then find the data, partners and community to make the changes….

The evolution brings civic apps contests a long way from the Washington, D.C., local government’s “Apps for Democracy” contest in 2008, which hinted at the promise of opening up data for public benefit, but failed to deliver meaningful long-term social change or services.

Below are this year’s BigApps winners for affordable housing, zero waste, connecting cities, and civic engagement, each of which will receive $25,000, and two judge’s choice winners, each of which will receive $10,000.

….Winning BigApps doesn’t mean that a given idea will work out in the long term. Some past winners of New York’s contest, including Embark,HealthyOut, Ontodia and Poncho, have endured. Many others have not — as is the case for many startups.

When asked about the longer-term sustainability issues that have plagued apps developed in these kinds of contests, Springer emphasized the endurance of apps like Hopscotch, which helps kids learn how to code, and HeatSeak, which is being installed in buildings across the city. ….(More)

Forging Trust Communities: How Technology Changes Politics

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Book by Irene S. Wu: “Bloggers in India used social media and wikis to broadcast news and bring humanitarian aid to tsunami victims in South Asia. Terrorist groups like ISIS pour out messages and recruit new members on websites. The Internet is the new public square, bringing to politics a platform on which to create community at both the grassroots and bureaucratic level. Drawing on historical and contemporary case studies from more than ten countries, Irene S. Wu’s Forging Trust Communities argues that the Internet, and the technologies that predate it, catalyze political change by creating new opportunities for cooperation. The Internet does not simply enable faster and easier communication, but makes it possible for people around the world to interact closely, reciprocate favors, and build trust. The information and ideas exchanged by members of these cooperative communities become key sources of political power akin to military might and economic strength.

Wu illustrates the rich world history of citizens and leaders exercising political power through communications technology. People in nineteenth-century China, for example, used the telegraph and newspapers to mobilize against the emperor. In 1970, Taiwanese cable television gave voice to a political opposition demanding democracy. Both Qatar (in the 1990s) and Great Britain (in the 1930s) relied on public broadcasters to enhance their influence abroad. Additional case studies from Brazil, Egypt, the United States, Russia, India, the Philippines, and Tunisia reveal how various technologies function to create new political energy, enabling activists to challenge institutions while allowing governments to increase their power at home and abroad.

Forging Trust Communities demonstrates that the way people receive and share information through network communities reveals as much about their political identity as their socioeconomic class, ethnicity, or religion. Scholars and students in political science, public administration, international studies, sociology, and the history of science and technology will find this to be an insightful and indispensable work….(More)”

New frontiers in social innovation research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Geoff Mulgan: “Nesta has published a new book with Palgrave which contains an introduction by me and many important chapters from leading academics around the world. I hope that many people will read it, and think about it, because it challenges, in a highly constructive way, many of the rather tired assumptions of the London media/political elite of both left and right.

The essay is by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, perhaps the world’s most creative and important contemporary intellectual. He is Professor of Law at Harvard (where he taught Obama); a philosopher and political theorist; author of one of the most interesting recent books on religion; co-author of an equally ground-breaking recent book on theoretical physics; and serves as strategy minister in the Brazilian government.

His argument is that a radically different way of thinking about politics, government and social change is emerging, which has either not been noticed by many political leaders, or misinterpreted. The essence of the argument is that practice is moving faster than theory; that systematic experimentation is a faster way to solve problems than clever authorship of pamphlets, white papers and plans; and that societies have the potential to be far more active agents of their own future than we assume.

The argument has implications for many fields. One is think-tanks. Twenty years ago I set up a think-tank, Demos. At that time the dominant model for policy making was to bring together some clever people in a capital city to write pamphlets, white papers and then laws. In the 1950s to 1970s a primary role was played by professors in universities, or royal commissions. Then it shifted to think-tanks. Sometimes teams within governments played a similar role – and I oversaw several of these, including the Strategy Unit in government. All saw policy as an essentially paper-based process, involving a linear transmission from abstract theories and analyses to practical implementation.

There’s still an important role to be played by think-tanks. But an opposite approach has now become common, and is promoted by Unger. In this approach, practice precedes theory. Experiment in the real world drives the development of new ideas – in business, civil society, and on the edges of the public sector. Learning by doing complements, and often leads analysis. The role of the academics and think-tanks shifts from inventing ideas to making sense of what’s emerging, and generalising it. Policies don’t try to specify every detail but rather set out broad directions and then enable a process of experiment and discovery.

As Unger shows, this approach has profound philosophical roots (reaching back to the 19th century pragmatists and beyond), and profound political implications (it’s almost opposite to the classic Marxist view, later adopted by the neoliberal right, in which intellectuals define solutions in theory which are then translated into practice). It also has profound implications for civil society – which he argues should adopt a maximalist rather than a minimalist view of social innovation.

The Unger approach doesn’t work for everything – for example, constitutional reform. But it is a superior method for improving most of the fields where governments have power – from welfare and health, to education and economic policy, and it has worked well for Nesta – evolving new models of healthcare, working with dozens of governments to redesign business policy, testing out new approaches to education.

The several hundred public sector labs and innovation teams around the world – from Chile to China, south Africa to Denmark – share this ethos too, as do many political leaders. Michael Bloomberg has been an exemplar, confident enough to innovate and experiment constantly in his time as New York Mayor. Won Soon Park in Korea is another…..

Unger’s chapter should be required reading for anyone aspiring to play a role in 21st century politics. You don’t have to agree with what he says. But you do need to work out where you disagree and why….(New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research)

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)”

How to build customer-focused government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GCN: “What: A report on improving government responsiveness, “A Customer-Centric Upgrade for California Government,”   from the state’s Little Hoover Commission, an independent state agency charged with recommending ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of state programs…..The Commission believes state agencies can improve the public’s trust and confidence in government by that focusing on the customer. Delivering fast and convenient services when residents apply for benefits, pay utility bills, register their vehicles and view taxes and all from one personalized log-in account, could be a step towards becoming more customer focused.

Among the Commission’s recommendations:

  • Create a digital services team to recruit top technologists, engineers and designers into public service for the state.
  • Research customer experiences for continuous improvement and use the data to refine how agencies deliver services
  • Build multiple service pathways, including mail, email, telephone, fax, in person, online or on a mobile device.
  • Move beyond mobile apps with the goal of offering the most options for Californians to conveniently access government services whatever the platform they choose to use (including in-person and on paper).
  • Unlock the promise of government data to improve transparency and inform decision making.
  • Leverage data resources by ensuring information is available in formats that can be leveraged by others to get information to Californians where they already go to seek it.
  • Connect the state’s technology sector with state government leaders and welcome innovators to help address some of the state’s most pressing challenges.

Takeaway: The Commission believes engaging with the public in a way that makes sense in the 21st century will improve each Californian’s interactions with government, which will in turn improve residents’ trust in the state and the efficiency of government processes. Read the full report here.”

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)”