4 things you didn't know about civic crowdfunding


Rodrigo Davies at opensource.com: “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. There’s a new crowdfunding site every week that may or may not have a few civic projects on it. If you’re interested in my methodology, check out Chapter 2. I don’t pretend to have captured every civic project that has ever existed, but I’m working with a representative sample.
Here are four things I found out about civic crowdfunding.

  1. Civic crowdfunding is small-scale but relatively successful, and it has big ambitions.
  2. Civic crowdfunding started as a hobby for green space projects by local non-profits, but larger organizations are getting involved.
  3. Civic crowdfunding is concentrated in cities (especially those where platforms are based).
  4. Civic crowdfunding has the same highly unequal distributional tendencies as other crowd markets. …”

Detroit and Big Data Take on Blight


Susan Crawford in Bloomberg View: “The urban blight that has been plaguing Detroit was, until very recently, made worse by a dearth of information about the problem. No one could tell how many buildings needed fixing or demolition, or how effectively city services were being delivered to them (or not). Today, thanks to the combined efforts of a scrappy small business, tech-savvy city leadership and substantial philanthropic support, the extent of the problem is clear.
The question now is whether Detroit has the heart to use the information to make hard choices about its future.
In the past, when the city foreclosed on properties for failure to pay back taxes, it had no sense of where those properties were clustered. The city would auction off the houses for the bargain-basement price of $500 each, but the auction was entirely undocumented, so neighbors were unaware of investment opportunities, big buyers were gaming the system, and, as often as not, arsonists would then burn the properties down. The result of this blind spot was lost population, lost revenue and even more blight.
Then along came Jerry Paffendorf, a San Francisco transplant, who saw what was needed. His company, Loveland Technologies, started mapping all the tax-foreclosed and auctioned properties. Impressed with Paffendorf’s zeal, the city’s Blight Task Force, established by President Barack Obama and funded by foundations and the state Housing Development Authority, hired his team to visit every property in the city. That led to MotorCityMapping.org, the first user-friendly collection of information about all the attributes of every property in Detroit — including photographs.
Paffendorf calls this map a “scan of the genome of the city.” It shows more than 84,000 blighted structures and vacant lots; in eight neighborhoods, crime, fires and other torments have led to the abandonment of more than a third of houses and businesses. To demolish all those houses, as recommended by the Blight Task Force, will cost almost $2 billion. Still more money will then be needed to repurpose the sites….”

Open Intellectual Property Casebook


New book by James Boyle & Jennifer Jenkins: “..This book, the first in a series of Duke Open Coursebooks, is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. It can also be purchased in a glossy paperback print edition for $29.99, $130 cheaper than other intellectual property casebooks.
This book is an introduction to intellectual property law, the set of private legal rights that allows individuals and corporations to control intangible creations and marks—from logos to novels to drug formulae—and the exceptions and limitations that define those rights. It focuses on the three main forms of US federal intellectual property—trademark, copyright and patent—but many of the ideas discussed here apply far beyond those legal areas and far beyond the law of the United States.
The book is intended to be a textbook for the basic Intellectual Property class, but because it is an open coursebook, which can be freely edited and customized, it is also suitable for an undergraduate class, or for a business, library studies, communications or other graduate school class. Each chapter contains cases and secondary readings and a set of problems or role-playing exercises involving the material. The problems range from a video of the Napster oral argument to counseling clients about search engines and trademarks, applying the First Amendment to digital rights management and copyright or commenting on the Supreme Court’s new rulings on gene patents.
Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society is current as of August 2014. It includes discussions of such issues as the Redskins trademark cancelations, the Google Books case and the America Invents Act. Its illustrations range from graphs showing the growth in patent litigation to comic book images about copyright. The best way to get some sense of its coverage is to download it. In coming weeks, we will provide a separate fuller webpage with a table of contents and individual downloadable chapters.
The Center has also published an accompanying supplement of statutory and treaty materials that is available for free download and low cost print purchase.”

Google's fact-checking bots build vast knowledge bank


Hal Hodson in the New Scientist: “The search giant is automatically building Knowledge Vault, a massive database that could give us unprecedented access to the world’s facts

GOOGLE is building the largest store of knowledge in human history – and it’s doing so without any human help. Instead, Knowledge Vault autonomously gathers and merges information from across the web into a single base of facts about the world, and the people and objects in it.

The breadth and accuracy of this gathered knowledge is already becoming the foundation of systems that allow robots and smartphones to understand what people ask them. It promises to let Google answer questions like an oracle rather than a search engine, and even to turn a new lens on human history.

Knowledge Vault is a type of “knowledge base” – a system that stores information so that machines as well as people can read it. Where a database deals with numbers, a knowledge base deals with facts. When you type “Where was Madonna born” into Google, for example, the place given is pulled from Google’s existing knowledge base.

This existing base, called Knowledge Graph, relies on crowdsourcing to expand its information. But the firm noticed that growth was stalling; humans could only take it so far. So Google decided it needed to automate the process. It started building the Vault by using an algorithm to automatically pull in information from all over the web, using machine learning to turn the raw data into usable pieces of knowledge.

Knowledge Vault has pulled in 1.6 billion facts to date. Of these, 271 million are rated as “confident facts”, to which Google’s model ascribes a more than 90 per cent chance of being true. It does this by cross-referencing new facts with what it already knows.

“It’s a hugely impressive thing that they are pulling off,” says Fabian Suchanek, a data scientist at Télécom ParisTech in France.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is currently bigger than the Knowledge Vault, but it only includes manually integrated sources such as the CIA Factbook.

Knowledge Vault offers Google fast, automatic expansion of its knowledge – and it’s only going to get bigger. As well as the ability to analyse text on a webpage for facts to feed its knowledge base, Google can also peer under the surface of the web, hunting for hidden sources of data such as the figures that feed Amazon product pages, for example.

Tom Austin, a technology analyst at Gartner in Boston, says that the world’s biggest technology companies are racing to build similar vaults. “Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and IBM are all building them, and they’re tackling these enormous problems that we would never even have thought of trying 10 years ago,” he says.

The potential of a machine system that has the whole of human knowledge at its fingertips is huge. One of the first applications will be virtual personal assistants that go way beyond what Siri and Google Now are capable of, says Austin…”

Our future government will work more like Amazon


Michael Case in The Verge: “There is a lot of government in the United States. Several hundred federal agencies, 535 voting members in two houses of Congress, more than 90,000 state and local governments, and over 20 million Americans involved in public service.

We say we have a government for and by the people. But the way American government conducts its day-to-day business does not feel like anything we, the people weaned on the internet, would design in 2014. Most interactions with the US government don’t resemble anything else we’re used to in our daily lives….

But if the government is ever going to completely retool itself to provide sensible services to a growing, aging, diversifying American population, it will have to do more than bring in a couple innovators and throw data at the public. At the federal level, these kinds of adjustments will require new laws to change the way money is allocated to executive branch agencies so they can coordinate the purchase and development of a standard set of tools. State and local governments will have to agree on standard tools and data formats as well so that the mayor of Anchorage can collaborate with the governor of Delaware.

Technology is the answer to a lot of American government’s current operational shortcomings. Not only are the tools and systems most public servants use outdated and suboptimal, but the organizations and processes themselves have also calcified around similarly out-of-date thinking. So the real challenge won’t be designing cutting edge software or high tech government facilities — it’s going to be conjuring the will to overcome decades of old thinking. It’s going to be convincing over 90,000 employees to learn new skills, coaxing a bitterly divided Congress to collaborate on something scary, and finding a way to convince a timid and distracted White House to put its name on risky investments that won’t show benefits for many years.

But! If we can figure out a way for governments across the country to perform their basic functions and provide often life-saving services, maybe we can move on to chase even more elusive government tech unicorns. Imagine voting from your smartphone, having your taxes calculated and filed automatically with a few online confirmations, or filing for your retirement at a friendly tablet kiosk at your local government outpost. Government could — feasibly — be not only more effective, but also a pleasure to interact with someday. Someday.”

America in Decay


Francis Fukuyama in Foreign Affairs:”… Institutions are “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behaviour”, as Huntington put it, the most important function of which is to facilitate collective action. Without some set of clear and relatively stable rules, human beings would have to renegotiate their interactions at every turn. Such rules are often culturally determined and vary across different societies and eras, but the capacity to create and adhere to them is genetically hard-wired into the human brain. A natural tendency to conformism helps give institutions inertia and is what has allowed human societies to achieve levels of social cooperation unmatched by any other animal species.
The very stability of institutions, however, is also the source of political decay. Institutions are created to meet the demands of specific circumstances, but then circumstances change and institutions fail to adapt. One reason is cognitive: people develop mental models of how the world works and tend to stick to them, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Another reason is group interest: institutions create favored classes of insiders who develop a stake in the status quo and resist pressures to reform.
In theory, democracy, and particularly the Madisonian version of democracy that was enshrined in the US Constitution, should mitigate the problem of such insider capture by preventing the emergence of a dominant faction or elite that can use its political power to tyrannize over the country. It does so by spreading power among a series of competing branches of government and allowing for competition among different interests across a large and diverse country.
But Madisonian democracy frequently fails to perform as advertised. Elite insiders typically have superior access to power and information, which they use to protect their interests. Ordinary voters will not get angry at a corrupt politician if they don’t know that money is being stolen in the first place. Cognitive rigidities or beliefs may also prevent social groups from mobilizing in their own interests. For example, in the United States, many working-class voters support candidates promising to lower taxes on the wealthy, despite the fact that such tax cuts will arguably deprive them of important government services.
Furthermore, different groups have different abilities to organize to defend their interests. Sugar producers and corn growers are geographically concentrated and focused on the prices of their products, unlike ordinary consumers or taxpayers, who are dispersed and for whom the prices of these commodities are only a small part of their budgets. Given institutional rules that often favor special interests (such as the fact that Florida and Iowa, where sugar and corn are grown, are electoral swing states), those groups develop an outsized influence over agricultural and trade policy. Similarly, middle-class groups are usually much more willing and able to defend their interests, such as the preservation of the home mortgage tax deduction, than are the poor. This makes such universal entitlements as Social Security or health insurance much easier to defend politically than programs targeting the poor only.
Finally, liberal democracy is almost universally associated with market economies, which tend to produce winners and losers and amplify what James Madison termed the “different and unequal faculties of acquiring property.” This type of economic inequality is not in itself a bad thing, insofar as it stimulates innovation and growth and occurs under conditions of equal access to the economic system. It becomes highly problematic, however, when the economic winners seek to convert their wealth into unequal political influence. They can do so by bribing a legislator or a bureaucrat, that is, on a transactional basis, or, what is more damaging, by changing the institutional rules to favor themselves — for example, by closing off competition in markets they already dominate, tilting the playing field ever more steeply in their favor.
Political decay thus occurs when institutions fail to adapt to changing external circumstances, either out of intellectual rigidities or because of the power of incumbent elites to protect their positions and block change. Decay can afflict any type of political system, authoritarian or democratic. And while democratic political systems theoretically have self-correcting mechanisms that allow them to reform, they also open themselves up to decay by legitimating the activities of powerful interest groups that can block needed change.
This is precisely what has been happening in the United States in recent decades, as many of its political institutions have become increasingly dysfunctional. A combination of intellectual rigidity and the power of entrenched political actors is preventing those institutions from being reformed. And there is no guarantee that the situation will change much without a major shock to the political order….”

Twitter Analytics Project HealthMap Outperforming WHO in Ebola Tracking


HIS Talk: “HealthMap, a collaborative data analytics project launched in 2006 between Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, has been quietly tracking the recent Ebola outbreak in Western Africa with notable accuracy, beating the World Health Organization’s own tracking efforts by two weeks in some instances.
HealthMap aggregates information from a variety of online sources to plot real-time disease outbreaks. Currently, the platform analyzes data from the World Health Organization, Google News, and GeoSentinel, a global disease tracking platform that tracks major geography changes in diseases carried through travelers, foreign visitors, and immigrants. The analytics project also got a new source of feeder-data this February when Twitter announced that the HealthMap project had been selected as a Twitter Data Grant recipient, which gives the 45 epidemiologists working on the project access to the “fire hose” of unfiltered data generated from Twitter’s 500 million daily tweets….”

RegData


“RegData, developed by Patrick A. McLaughlin, Omar Al-Ubaydli, and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, improves dramatically on the existing methods used to quantify regulations. Previous efforts to assess the extent of regulation in the United States have used imprecise variables such as the number of pages published in the Federal Register or the number of new rules created annually. However, not all regulations are equal in their effects on the economy or on different sectors of the economy. One page of regulatory text is often quite different from another page in content and consequence.
RegData improves upon existing metrics of regulation in three principal ways:

  1. RegData provides a novel measure that quantifies regulations based on the actual content of regulatory text. In other words, RegData examines the regulatory text itself, counting the number of binding constraints or “restrictions”—words that indicate an obligation to comply, such as “shall” or “must.” This is important because some regulatory programs can be hundreds of pages long with relatively few restrictions, while others only have a few paragraphs with a relatively high number of restrictions.
  2. RegData quantifies regulation by industry. It uses the same industry classes as the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS), which categorizes and describes each industry in the US economy. Using industry-specific quantifications of regulation, users can examine the growth of regulation relevant to a particular industry over time or compare growth rates across industries.
    There are several potential uses of a tool that measures regulation relevant to specific industries. Both the causes and consequences of regulation are likely to differ from one industry to the next, and by quantifying regulations for all industries, individuals can test whether industry characteristics, such as dynamism, unionization, or a penchant for lobbying, are correlated with industry-specific regulation levels.
    For example, if someone wanted to know whether high unionization rates are correlated with heavy regulation, the person could compare RegData’s measure of industry-specific regulation for highly unionized industries to industries with little to no unionization.
  3. *NEW* RegData 2.0 provides the user with the ability to quantify the regulation that specific federal regulators (including agencies, offices, bureaus, commissions, or administrations) have produced. For example, a user can now see how many restrictions a specific administration of the Department of Transportation (e.g., the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) has produced in each year.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies Announces Major New Investment In City Halls' Capacity To Innovate


Press Release: “Bloomberg Philanthropies today announced a new $45 million investment to boost the capacity of city halls to use innovation to tackle major challenges and improve urban life. The foundation will direct significant funding and other assistance to help dozens of cities adopt the Innovation Delivery model, an approach to generating and implementing new ideas that has been tested and refined over the past three years in partnership with city leaders in Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans. …

The foundation has invited over 80 American cities to apply for Innovation Delivery grants. Eligible cities have at least 100,000 residents and mayors with at least two years left in office. Grantees will be selected in the fall. They will receive from $250,000 to $1,000,000 annually over three years, as well as implementation support and peer-to-peer learning opportunities. Newly formed Innovation Delivery Teams will hit the ground running in each city no later than spring 2015.
Innovation Delivery Teams use best-in-class idea generation techniques with a structured, data-driven approach to delivering results. Operating as an in-house innovation consultancy, they have enabled mayors in the original five cities to produce clear results, such as:

  • New Orleans reduced murder in 2013 by 19% compared to the previous year, resulting in the lowest number of murders in New Orleans since 1985.
  • Memphis reduced retail vacancy rates by 30% along key commercial corridors.
  • Louisville redirected 26% of low-severity 911 medical calls to a doctor’s office or immediate care center instead of requiring an ambulance trip to the emergency room.
  • Chicago cut the licensing time for new restaurants by 33%; more than 1,000 new restaurants have opened since the Team began its work.
  • Atlanta moved 1,022 chronically homeless individuals into permanent housing, quickly establishing itself as a national leader.

“Innovation Delivery has been an essential part of our effort to bring innovation, efficiency and improved services to our customers,” said Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer. “Philanthropy can play an important role in expanding the capacity of cities to deliver better, bolder results. Bloomberg Philanthropies is one of few foundations investing in this area, and it has truly been a game changer for our city.”
In addition to direct investments in cities, Bloomberg Philanthropies will fund technical assistance, research and evaluation, and partnerships with organizations to further spread the Innovation Delivery approach. The Innovation Delivery Playbook, which details the approach and some experiences of the original cities with which Bloomberg Philanthropies partnered, is available at: www.bloomberg.org …”

How technology is beating corruption


Jim Yong Kim at World Economic Forum: “Good governance is critical for all countries around the world today. When it doesn’t exist, many governments fail to deliver public services effectively, health and education services are often substandard and corruption persists in rich and poor countries alike, choking opportunity and growth. It will be difficult to reduce extreme poverty — let alone end it — without addressing the importance of good governance.
But this is not a hopeless situation. In fact, a new wave of progress on governance suggests we may be on the threshold of a transformational era. Countries are tapping into some of the most powerful forces in the world today to improve services and transparency. These forces include the spread of information technology and its convergence with grassroots movements for transparency, accountability and citizen empowerment. In some places, this convergence is easing the path to better-performing and more accountable governments.
The Philippines is a good example of a country embracing good governance. During a recent visit, I spoke with President Benigno Aquino about his plans to reduce poverty, create jobs, and ensure that economic growth is inclusive. He talked in great detail about how improving governance is a fundamentally important part of their strategy. The government has opened government data and contract information so citizens can see how their tax money is spent. The Foreign Aid Transparency Hub, launched after Typhoon Yolanda, offers a real-time look at pledges made and money delivered for typhoon recovery. Geo-tagging tools monitor assistance for people affected by the typhoon.
Opening budgets to scrutiny
This type of openness is spreading. Now many countries that once withheld information are opening their data and budgets to public scrutiny.
Late last year, my organization, the World Bank Group, established the Open Budgets Portal, a repository for budget data worldwide. So far, 13 countries have posted their entire public spending datasets online — including Togo, the first fragile state to do so.
In 2011, we helped Moldova become the first country in central Europe to launch an open data portal and put its expenditures online. Now the public and media can access more than 700 datasets, and are asking for more.
The original epicenter of the Arab Spring, Tunisia, recently passed a new constitution and is developing the first open budget data portal in the Middle East and North Africa. Tunisia has taken steps towards citizen engagement by developing a citizens’ budget and civil society-led platforms such as Marsoum41, to support freedom of information requests, including via mobile.
Using technology to improve services
Countries also are tapping into technology to improve public and private services. Estonia is famous for building an information technology infrastructure that has permitted widespread use of electronic services — everything from filing taxes online to filling doctors’ drug prescriptions.
In La Paz, Bolivia, a citizen feedback system known as OnTrack allows residents of one of the city’s marginalized neighbourhoods to send a text message on their mobile phones to provide feedback, make suggestions or report a problem related to public services.
In Pakistan, government departments in Punjab are using smart phones to collect real-time data on the activities of government field staff — including photos and geo-tags — to help reduce absenteeism and lax performance….”