#BringBackOurGirls: Can Hashtag Activism Spur Social Change?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nancy Ngo at TechChange: “In our modern times of media cycles fighting for our short attention spans, it is easy to ride the momentum of a highly visible campaign that can quickly fizzle out once another competing story emerges. Since the kidnappings of approximately 300 Nigerian girls by militant Islamist group Boko Haram last month, the international community has embraced the hashtag, “#BringBackOurGirls”, in a very vocal and visible social media campaign demanding action to rescue the Chibok girls. But one month since the mass kidnapping without the rescue of the girls, do we need to take a different approach? Will #BringBackOurGirls be just another campaign we forget about once the next celebrity scandal becomes breaking news?

#BringBackOurGirls goes global starting in Nigeria

Most of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign activity has been highly visible on Twitter, Facebook, and international media outlets. In this fascinating Twitter heat map created using the tool, CartoDB, featured in TIME Magazine, we can see a time-lapsed digital map of how the hashtag, “#BringBackOurGirls” spread globally, starting organically from within Nigeria in mid April.

The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag has been embraced widely by many public figures and has garnered wide support across the world. Michelle Obama, David Cameron, and Malala Yusafzai have posted images with the hashtag, along with celebrities such as Ellen Degeneres, Angelina Jolie, and Dwayne Johnson. To date, nearly 1 million people signed the Change.org petition. Countries including the USA, UK, China, Israel have pledged to join the rescue efforts, and other human rights campaigns have joined the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter momentum, as seen on this Hashtagify map.

Is #BringBackOurGirls repeating the mistakes of #KONY2012?

Kony_2012_Poster_3

A great example of a past campaign where this happened was with the KONY2012 campaign, which brought some albeit short-lived urgency to addressing the child soldiers recruited by Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Michael Poffenberger, who worked on that campaign, will join us a guest expert in TC110: Social Media for Social Change online course in June 2013 and compare it the current #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Many have drawn parallels to both campaigns and warned of the false optimism that hyped social media messages can bring when context is not fully considered and understood.

According to Lauren Wolfe of Foreign Policy magazine, “Understanding what has happened to the Nigerian girls and how to rescue them means beginning to face what has happened to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of girls over years in global armed conflict.” To some critics, this hashtag trivializes the weaknesses of Nigerian democracy that have been exposed. Critics of using social media in advocacy campaigns have used the term “slacktivism” to describe the passive, minimal effort needed to participate in these movements. Others have cited such media waves being exploited for individual gain, as opposed to genuinely benefiting the girls. Florida State University Political Science professor, Will H. Moore, argues that this hashtag activism is not only hurting the larger cause of rescuing the kidnapped girls, but actually helping Boko Haram. Jumoke Balogun, Co-Founder of CompareAfrique, also highlights the limits of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag impact.

Hashtag activism, alone, is not enough

With all this social media activity and international press, what actual progress has been made in rescuing the kidnapped girls? If the objective is raising awareness of the issue, yes, the hashtag has been successful. If the objective is to rescue the girls, we still have a long way to go, even if the hashtag campaign has been part of a multi-pronged approach to galvanize resources into action.

The bottom line: social media can be a powerful tool to bring visibility and awareness to a cause, but a hashtag alone is not enough to bring about social change. There are a myriad of resources that must be coordinated to effectively implement this rescue mission, which will only become more difficult as more time passes. However, prioritizing and shining a sustained light on the problem, instead getting distracted by competing media cycles on celebrities getting into petty fights, is the first step toward a solution…”

Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rodrigo Davis: “Today I’m capping two years of studying the emergence of civic crowdfunding by submitting my master’s thesis to the MIT archives…You can read Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place in its entirety (173 pages) now,…
Crowdfunding is everywhere. People are using it to fund watches, comic books, even famous film directors are doing it. In what is now a $6 billion industry globally, I think the most interesting, disruptive and exciting work that’s happening is in donation-based crowdfunding. That’s worth, very roughly, $1.2 billion a year worldwide per year. Within that subset, I’ve been looking at civic projects, people who are producing shared goods for a community or broader public. These projects build on histories of community fundraising and resource pooling that long predate the Internet; what’s changed is that we’ve created a scalable, portable platform model to carry out these existing practices.
So how is civic crowdfunding doing? When I started this project very few people were using that term. No one had done any aggregated data collection and published it. So I decided to take on that task. I collected data on 1224 projects between 2010 and March 2014, which raised $10.74 million in just over three years. I focused on seven platforms: Catarse (Brazil), Citizinvestor (US), Goteo (Spain), IOBY (US), Kickstarter (US), Neighbor.ly (US) and Spacehive (UK). I didn’t collect everything. …
Here are four things I found out about civic crowdfunding.

  1. Civic crowdfunding is small-scale but relatively successful, and it has big ambitions.Currently the average civic crowdfunding project is small in scale: $6,357 is the median amount raised. But these civic projects seem to be doing pretty well. Projects tagged ‘civic’ on Kickstarter, for instance, succeed 81% of the time. If Civic were a separate category, it would be Kickstarter’s most successful category. Meanwhile, most platform owners and some incumbent institutions see civic crowdfunding as a new mechanism for public-private partnerships capable of realizing large-scale projects. In a small minority of cases, such as the three edge-case projects I explored in Chapter 3 of my thesis, civic crowdfunding has begun to fulfill some of those ambitions. For the center of gravity to shift further in the direction of these potential outcomes, though, existing institutions, including government, large non-profits and the for-profit sector, will need to engage more comprehensively with the process.
  2. Civic crowdfunding started as a hobby for green space projects by local non-profits, but larger organizations are getting involved. Almost a third of campaigners are using civic crowdfunding platforms for park and garden-related projects (29%). Event-based projects, and education and training are also popular. Sports and mobility projects are pretty uncommon. The frequency of garden and park projects is partly because these projects are not capital intensive, and they’re uncontroversial. That’s also changing. Organizations from governments to corporations and large foundations, are exploring ways to support crowdfunding for a much wider range of community-facing activities. Their modes of engagement include publicizing campaigns, match-funding campaigns on an ad-hoc basis, running their own campaigns and even building new platforms from the ground up.
  3. Civic crowdfunding is concentrated in cities (especially those where platforms are based). The genre is too new to have spread very effectively, it seems. Five states account for 80% of the projects, and this is partly a function of where the platforms are located. New York, California are our top two, followed by Illinois and Oregon. We know there’s a strong trend towards big cities. It’s hard work for communities to use crowdfunding to get projects off the ground, especially when it’s an unfamiliar process. The platforms have played a critical role in building participants’ understanding of crowdfunding and supporting them through the process.
  4. Civic crowdfunding has the same highly unequal distributional tendencies as other crowd markets. When we look at the size distribution of projects, the first thing we notice is something close to a Pareto distribution, or Long Tail. Most projects are small-scale, but a small number of high-value projects have taken a large share of the total revenue raised by civic crowdfunding. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. On Kickstarter most successful projects are between 5 and 10k, and 47% of civic projects I studied are in the same bracket. The problem is that we tend to remember the outliers, such as Veronica Mars and Spike Lee – because they show what’s possible. But they are still the outliers.

Now, here are two things we don’t know.

  1. Will civic crowdfunding deter public investment or encourage it?
  2. Will civic crowdfunding widen wealth gaps?”

The merits of participatory budgeting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Hollie Russon Gilman at Aljazeera America: “For many Americans, government just isn’t working. In 2013, government dysfunction surpassed the economy as the top identified U.S. problem. A recent survey found that nearly 6 out of 10 Americans rate the health of our democracy as weak — and unlikely to get better anytime soon. But in small corners throughout the United States, democratic innovations are creating new opportunities for citizens to be a part of governance. Collectively known as open government or civic innovation, these projects are engaging policymakers, citizens and civil society and proving the skeptics wrong.
One particularly promising innovation in participatory budgeting, or PB — a process to directly empower citizens to make spending decisions on a defined public budget. PB was first attempted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989. Its success led to the World Bank calling PB a “best practice” in democratic innovation. Since then, PB has expanded to over 1,500 cities worldwide, including several in the U.S. Starting in 2009 in Chicago’s 49th Ward with a budget of just $1 million, PB in the United States has expanded to a $27 million-a-year experiment. Municipal leaders from Vallejo, California, to New York City have turned over a portion of their discretionary funds to neighborhood residents. Boston recently launched the first youth-driven PB. Nearly half of New York’s City Council members are slated to participate this fall, after newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio made it a cornerstone of his campaign. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel created a new manager of participatory budgeting who will help coordinate Council districts that want to participate. The White House recently included federally supported participatory budgeting as part of its international Open Government Partnership commitments.

Wants and needs

In PB, citizens are empowered to identify community needs, work with elected officials to craft budget proposals and vote upon where to spend public funds. The decisions are binding. And that’s important: Making democracy work is not just about making better citizens or changing policies. It is also about creating structures that create the conditions that make the effective exercise of democratic citizenship possible, and PB is uniquely structured to do that.

Chicago has been a particularly insightful petri dish to study PB in the U.S., mainly because the city is an unlikely candidate for democratic innovations. For decades its Democratic machine retained a strong and continuous hold over city government. The Daley family held the mayoralty for a combined 12 terms. While discretionary funds (known as “menu money”) are allocated equally — but not equitably, given different needs — to all 50 wards, the process of spending this money is at the discretion of locally elected aldermen. From 1972 to 2009, 30 Chicago aldermen were indicted and convicted of federal crimes ranging from income tax evasion to extortion, embezzlement and conspiracy. Clearly, Chicago has not always been a model of good governance.
Against this backdrop, PB has continued to expand in Chicago. This year three districts participated. The Fifth Ward, home to the University of Chicago, decided not to continue the process again this year. Instead, this year the ward had four groups of residents each allocate $250,000. The alderwoman noted that this enabled the transparency and engagement aspect of PB with fewer process resources — they had only 100 people come out to vote.
Different versions of PB are aimed to lower the current barriers to civic engagement. I have seen PB bring out people who have never before engaged in politics. Many longtime civic participants often cite PB as the single most meaningful civic engagement of their lives — far above, say, jury duty. Suddenly, citizens are empowered with real decision-making authority and leave with new relationships with their peers, community and elected officials.
However, PB is not a stand-alone endeavor. It must be part of a larger effort to improve governance. This must include greater transparency in public decision making and empowering citizens to hold their elected officials more accountable. The process provides an enormous education that can be translated into civic activity beyond PB. Ideally after engaging in PB, a citizen will be better equipped to volunteer in the community, vote or push for policy reform. What other infrastructure, both online and off, is needed to support citizens who want to further engage in more collaborative governance?  …”

New crowdsourcing site like ‘Yelp’ for philanthropy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Vanessa Small in the Washington Post: “Billionaire investor Warren Buffett once said that there is no market test for philanthropy. Foundations with billions in assets often hand out giant grants to charity without critique. One watchdog group wants to change that.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has created a new Web site that posts public feedback about a foundation’s giving. Think Yelp for the philanthropy sector.
Along with public critiques, the new Web site, Philamplify.org, uploads a comprehensive assessment of a foundation conducted by researchers at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
The assessment includes a review of the foundation’s goals, strategies, partnerships with grantees, transparency, diversity in its board and how any investments support the mission.
The site also posts recommendations on what would make the foundation more effective in the community. The public can agree or disagree with each recommendation and then provide feedback about the grantmaker’s performance.
People who post to the site can remain anonymous.
NCRP officials hope the site will stir debate about the giving practices of foundations.
“Foundation leaders rarely get honest feedback because no one wants to get on the wrong side of a foundation,” said Lisa Ranghelli, a director at NCRP. “There’s so much we need to do as a society that we just want these philanthropic resources to be used as powerfully as possible and for everyone to feel like they have a voice in how philanthropy operates.”
With nonprofit rating sites such as Guidestar and Charity Navigator, Philamplify is just one more move to create more transparency in the nonprofit sector. But the site might be one of the first to force transparency and public commentary exclusively about the organizations that give grants.
Foundation leaders are open to the site, but say that some grantmakers already use various evaluation methods to improve their strategies.
Groups such as Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the Center for Effective Philanthropy provide best practices for foundation giving.
The Council on Foundations, an Arlington-based membership organization of foundation groups, offers a list of tools and ideas for foundations to make their giving more effective.
“We will be paying close attention to Philamplify and new developments related to it as the project unfolds,” said Peter Panepento, senior vice president of community and knowledge at the Council on Foundations.
Currently there are three foundations up for review on the Web site: the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, which focuses on improving the Greater Philadelphia community; the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation in Atlanta, which gives grants in science and education; and the Lumina Foundation for Education in Indianapolis, which focuses on access to higher learning….”
Officials say Philamplify will focus on the top 100 largest foundations to start. Large foundations would include groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the foundations of companies such as Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline.
Although there are concerns about the site’s ability to keep comments objective, grantees hope it will start a dialogue that has been absent in philanthropy.

The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post: “What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world’s most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them?
According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. The bank is one of those high-minded organizations — Washington is full of them — that release hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports a year on policy issues big and small. Many of these reports are long and highly technical, and just about all of them get released to the world as a PDF report posted to the organization’s Web site.
The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. Since most World Bank reports have a stated objective of informing public debate or government policy, this seems like a pretty lousy track record.
pdfs
Now, granted, the bank isn’t Buzzfeed. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect thousands of downloads for reports with titles like “Detecting Urban Expansion and Land Tenure Security Assessment: The Case of Bahir Dar and Debre Markos Peri-Urban Areas of Ethiopia.” Moreover, downloads aren’t the be-all and end-all of information dissemination; many of these reports probably get some distribution by e-mail, or are printed and handed out at conferences. Still, it’s fair to assume that many big-idea reports with lofty goals to elevate the public discourse never get read by anyone other than the report writer and maybe an editor or two. Maybe the author’s spouse. Or mom.
I’m not picking on the World Bank here. In fact, they’re to be commended, strongly, for not only taking a serious look at the question but making their findings public for the rest of us to learn from. And don’t think for a second that this is just a World Bank problem. PDF reports are basically the bread and butter of Washington’s huge think tank industry, for instance. Every single one of these groups should be taking a serious look at their own PDF analytics the way the bank has.
Government agencies are also addicted to the PDF. As The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reported this week, federal agencies spend thousands of dollars and employee-hours each year producing Congressionally-mandated reports that nobody reads. And let’s not even get started on the situation in academia, where the country’s best and brightest compete for the honor of seeing their life’s work locked away behind some publisher’s paywall.”
Not every policy report is going to be a game-changer, of course. But the sheer numbers dictate that there are probably a lot of really, really good ideas out there that never see the light of day. This seems like an inefficient way for the policy community to do business, but what’s the alternative?
One final irony to ponder: You know that World Bank report, about how nobody reads its PDFs? It’s only available as a PDF. Given the attention it’s receiving, it may also be one of their most-downloaded reports ever.

Continued Progress and Plans for Open Government Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steve VanRoekel, and Todd Park at the White House:  “One year ago today, President Obama signed an executive order that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. This historic step is helping to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs while appropriately safeguarding sensitive information and rigorously protecting privacy.
Freely available data from the U.S. government is an important national resource, serving as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and economic growth. Making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government. This initiative is a key component of the President’s Management Agenda and our efforts to ensure the government is acting as an engine to expand economic growth and opportunity for all Americans. The Administration is committed to driving further progress in this area, including by designating Open Data as one of our key Cross-Agency Priority Goals.
Over the past few years, the Administration has launched a number of Open Data Initiatives aimed at scaling up open data efforts across the Health, Energy, Climate, Education, Finance, Public Safety, and Global Development sectors. The White House has also launched Project Open Data, designed to share best practices, examples, and software code to assist federal agencies with opening data. These efforts have helped unlock troves of valuable data—that taxpayers have already paid for—and are making these resources more open and accessible to innovators and the public.
Other countries are also opening up their data. In June 2013, President Obama and other G7 leaders endorsed the Open Data Charter, in which the United States committed to publish a roadmap for our nation’s approach to releasing and improving government data for the public.
Building upon the Administration’s Open Data progress, and in fulfillment of the Open Data Charter, today we are excited to release the U.S. Open Data Action Plan. The plan includes a number of exciting enhancements and new data releases planned in 2014 and 2015, including:

  • Small Business Data: The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) database of small business suppliers will be enhanced so that software developers can create tools to help manufacturers more easily find qualified U.S. suppliers, ultimately reducing the transaction costs to source products and manufacture domestically.
  • Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection: The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s entire digitized collection will be opened to software developers to make educational apps and tools. Today, even museum curators do not have easily accessible information about their art collections. This information will soon be available to everyone.
  • FDA Adverse Drug Event Data: Each year, healthcare professionals and consumers submit millions of individual reports on drug safety to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These anonymous reports are a critical tool to support drug safety surveillance. Today, this data is only available through limited quarterly reports. But the Administration will soon be making these reports available in their entirety so that software developers can build tools to help pull potentially dangerous drugs off shelves faster than ever before.

We look forward to implementing the U.S. Open Data Action Plan, and to continuing to work with our partner countries in the G7 to take the open data movement global”.

United States federal government use of crowdsourcing grows six-fold since 2011

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at E Pluribus Unum: “Citizensourcing and open innovation can work in the public sector, just as crowdsourcing can in the private sector. Around the world, the use of prizes to spur innovation has been booming for years. The United States of America has been significantly scaling up its use of prizes and challenges to solving grand national challenges since January 2011, when, President Obama signed an updated version of the America COMPETES Act into law.
According to the third congressionally mandated report released by the Obama administration today (PDF/Text), the number of prizes and challenges conducted under the America COMPETES Act has increased by 50% since 2012, 85% since 2012, and nearly six-fold overall since 2011. 25 different federal agencies offered prizes under COMPETES in fiscal year 2013, with 87 prize competitions in total. The size of the prize purses has also grown as well, with 11 challenges over $100,000 in 2013. Nearly half of the prizes conducted in FY 2013 were focused on software, including applications, data visualization tools, and predictive algorithms. Challenge.gov, the award-winning online platform for crowdsourcing national challenges, now has tens of thousands of users who have participated in more than 300 public-sector prize competitions. Beyond the growth in prize numbers and amounts, Obama administration highlighted 4 trends in public-sector prize competitions:

  • New models for public engagement and community building during competitions
  • Growth software and information technology challenges, with nearly 50% of the total prizes in this category
  • More emphasis on sustainability and “creating a post-competition path to success”
  • Increased focus on identifying novel approaches to solving problems

The growth of open innovation in and by the public sector was directly enabled by Congress and the White House, working together for the common good. Congress reauthorized COMPETES in 2010 with an amendment to Section 105 of the act that added a Section 24 on “Prize Competitions,” providing all agencies with the authority to conduct prizes and challenges that only NASA and DARPA has previously enjoyed, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which has been guiding its implementation and providing guidance on the use of challenges and prizes to promote open government.
“This progress is due to important steps that the Obama Administration has taken to make prizes a standard tool in every agency’s toolbox,” wrote Cristin Dorgelo, assistant director for grand challenges in OSTP, in a WhiteHouse.gov blog post on engaging citizen solvers with prizes:

In his September 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, President Obama called on all Federal agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges. Those efforts have expanded since the signing of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, which provided all agencies with expanded authority to pursue ambitious prizes with robust incentives.
To support these ongoing efforts, OSTP and the General Services Administration have trained over 1,200 agency staff through workshops, online resources, and an active community of practice. And NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (COECI) provides a full suite of prize implementation services, allowing agencies to experiment with these new methods before standing up their own capabilities.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy famously once said that “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” This rings true, in and outside of government. The idea of governments using prizes like this to inspire technological innovation, however, is not reliant on Web services and social media, born from the fertile mind of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. As the introduction to the third White House prize report  notes:

“One of the most famous scientific achievements in nautical history was spurred by a grand challenge issued in the 18th Century. The issue of safe, long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail was of such great importance that the British government offered a cash award of £20,000 pounds to anyone who could invent a way of precisely determining a ship’s longitude. The Longitude Prize, enacted by the British Parliament in 1714, would be worth some £30 million pounds today, but even by that measure the value of the marine chronometer invented by British clockmaker John Harrison might be a deal.”

Centuries later, the Internet, World Wide Web, mobile devices and social media offer the best platforms in history for this kind of approach to solving grand challenges and catalyzing civic innovation, helping public officials and businesses find new ways to solve old problem. When a new idea, technology or methodology that challenges and improves upon existing processes and systems, it can improve the lives of citizens or the function of the society that they live within….”

Open Data Could Unlock $230 Billion In Energy-Efficiency Savings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeff McMahon at Forbes: “Energy-efficiency startups just need access to existing data—on electricity usage, housing characteristics, renovations and financing—to unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, two founders of  startups said in Chicago Tuesday.
“One of the big barriers to scaling energy efficiency is the lack of data in the market,” said Andy Frank of Sealed, a startup that encourages efficiency improvements by guaranteeing homeowners a lower bill than they’re paying now.
In a forum hosted by the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, Frank and Matt Gee, founder of Effortless Energy, advocated an open-energy-data warehouse that would collect anonymized data from utilities, cities, contractors, and financiers, to make the data available for research, government, and industry.
“There needs to be some sort of entity that organizes all this information and has it in some sort of standard format,” said Gee, whose startup pays for home improvements up front and then splits the savings with investors and the homeowner.
According to Gee, the current $9.5 billion energy-efficiency market operates without data on the actual savings it produces for homeowners. He outlined the current market like this:

  1. A regulatory body, usually a public utility commission, mandates that a utility spend money on efficiency.
  2. The utility passes on the cost to customers through an efficiency surcharge (this is how the $9.5 billion is raised).
  3. The utility hires a program implementer.
  4. The program implementer sends auditors to customer homes.
  5. Potential savings from improvements like new insulation or new appliances are estimated based on models.
  6. Those modeled estimates determine what the contractor can do in the home.
  7. The modeled estimates determine what financing is available.

In some cases, utilities will hire consultants to estimate the savings generated from these improvements. California utilities spend $40 million a year estimating savings, Gee said, but actual savings are neither verified nor integrated in the process.
“Nowhere in this process do actual savings enter,” Gee said. “They don’t drive anyone’s incentives, which is just absolutely astounding, right? The opportunity here is that energy efficiency actually pays for itself. It should be something that’s self-financed.”
For that to happen, the market needs reliable information on how much energy is currently being wasted and how much is saved by improvements….”

Sharing in a Changing Climate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Helen Goulden in the Huffington Post: “Every month, a social research agency conducts a public opinion survey on 30,000 UK households. As part of this households are asked about what issues they think are the most important; things such as crime, unemployment, inequality, public health etc. Climate change has ranked so consistently low on these surveys that they don’t both asking any more.
On first glance, it would appear that most people don’t care about a changing climate.
Yet, that’s simply not true. Many people care deeply, but fleetingly – in the same way they may consider their own mortality before getting back to thinking about what to have for tea. And others care, but fail to change their behaviour in a way that’s proportionate to their concerns. Certainly that’s my unhappy stomping ground.
Besides what choices do we really have? Even the most progressive, large organisations have been glacial to move towards any form of real form of sustainability. For many years we have struggled with the Frankenstein-like task of stitching ‘sustainability’ onto existing business and economic models and the results, I think, speak for themselves.
That the Collaborative Economy presents us with an opportunity – in Napster-like ways – to disrupt and evolve toward something more sustainable is compelling idea. Looking out to a future filled with opportunities to reconfigure how we produce, consume and dispose of the things we want and need to live, work and play.
Whether the journey toward sustainability is short or long, it will be punctuated with a good degree of turbulence, disruption and some largely unpredictable events. How we deal with those events and what role communities, collaboration and technology play may set the framework and tone for how that future evolves. Crises and disruption to our entrenched living patterns present ripe opportunities for innovation and space for adopting new behaviours and practices.
No-one is immune from the impact of erratic and extreme weather events. And if we accept that these events are going to increase in frequency, we must draw the conclusion that emergency state and government resources may be drawn more thinly over time.
Across the world, there is a fairly well organised state and international infrastructure for dealing with emergencies , involving everyone from the Disaster Emergency Committee, the UN, central and local government and municipalities, not for profit organisations and of course, the military. There is a clear reason why we need this kind of state emergency response; I’m not suggesting that we don’t.
But through the rise of open data and mass participation in platforms that share location, identity and inventory, we are creating a new kind of mesh; a social and technological infrastructure that could considerably strengthen our ability to respond to unpredictable events.
In the last few years we have seen a sharp rise in the number of tools and crowdsourcing platforms and open source sensor networks that are focused on observing, predicting or responding to extreme events:
• Apps like Shake Alert, which emits a minute warning that an earthquake is coming
• Rio’s sensor network, which measures rainfall outside the city and can predict flooding
• Open Source sensor software Arduino which is being used to crowd-source weather and pollution data
• Propeller Health, which is using Asthma sensors on inhalers to crowd-source pollution hotspots
• Safecast, which was developed for crowdsourcing radiation levels in Japan
Increasingly we have the ability to deploy open source, distributed and networked sensors and devices for capturing and aggregating data that can help us manage our responses to extreme weather (and indeed, other kinds of) events.
Look at platforms like LocalMind and Foursquare. Today, I might be using them to find out whether there’s a free table at a bar or finding out what restaurant my friends are in. But these kind of social locative platforms present an infrastructure that could be life-saving in any kind of situation where you need to know where to go quickly to get out of trouble. We know that in the wake of disruptive events and disasters, like bombings, riots etc, people now intuitively and instinctively take to technology to find out what’s happening, where to go and how to co-ordinate response efforts.
During the 2013 Bart Strike in San Francisco, ventures like Liquid Space and SideCar enabled people to quickly find alternative places to work, or alternatives to public transport, to mitigate the inconvenience of the strike. The strike was a minor inconvenience compared to the impact of a hurricane and flood but nevertheless, in both those instances, ventures decided waive their fees; as did AirBnB when 1,400 New York AirBnB hosts opened their doors to people who had been left homeless through Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The impulse to help is not new. The matching of people’s offers of help and resources to on-the-ground need, in real time, is.”

Sammies finalists are harnessing technology to help the public

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lisa Rein in the Washington Post: “One team of federal agents led Medicare investigations that resulted in more than 600 convictions in South Florida, recovering hundreds of millions of dollars. Another official boosted access to burial sites for veterans across the country. And one guided an initiative to provide safe drinking water to 5 million people in Uganda and Kenya. These are some of the 33 individuals and teams of federal employees nominated for the 13th annual Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals, among the highest honors in government. The 2014 finalists reflect the achievements of public servants in fields from housing to climate change, their work conducted in Washington and locations as far-flung as Antarctica and Alabama…
Many of them have excelled in harnessing new technology in ways that are pushing the limits of what government thought was possible even a few years ago. Michael Byrne of the Federal Communications Commission, for example, put detailed data about broadband availability in the hands of citizens and policymakers using interactive online maps and other visualizations. At the Environmental Protection Agency, Douglas James Norton made water quality data that had never been public available on the Web for citizens, scientists and state agencies.”