National Democratic Institute: “Throughout Latin America, political and civic leaders are under increasing pressure to solve pervasive problems such as poverty, insecurity, corruption and lack of government transparency. Some of that pressure is generated by social media and other new communications tools available to constituents. But new technology is also aiding the response.
Revolutionary developments such as georeferencing and low-cost video conferencing have spawned new ways for political and civic leaders to address some of these problems. Georeferencing, for example, helps combat corruption by making it possible to track the location of individuals, such as government employees, at a given time to ensure they are performing work when and where they say they are.
Leaders are using new technology to push for campaign finance transparency in Colombia, and to improve how political parties in Argentina and Uruguay prepare their members to tackle public policy challenges by using web-based tools for virtual trainings. In Honduras, where it is common for corrupt teachers to claim pay for work in multiple districts, the government is using georeferencing to ensure that these teachers aren’t paid for work they didn’t do.
But despite the innovations, there is little communication among countries in the region, so new methods developed in one country are often unknown in another. To overcome that gap, NDI has supported the creation of Red Innovación (RI), or “Innovation Network,” a virtual online Spanish-language forum where social and political innovators from throughout the region can highlight initiatives, solicit feedback and harvest new ideas to help governments become more responsive, transparent and effective.
Red Innovación uses platforms such as Google Hangout videoconferences to help put political parties and civil society organizations in touch with experts on such topics as how to communicate more effectively, how cyberactivism works and how to use technology to promote transparency.”
Operation Decode San Francisco Will Hack the City's Legal Code
Motherboard: “The city of San Francisco is set to be hacked tonight. Legally, of course. It’s all part of the Operation Decode San Francisco effort, which will unwrap and simplify the city’s dense, labyrinthine laws and re-package them in a fresh, easy-to-use and searchable format.
The crew behind this, OpenGov, originally cut its teeth on KeepTheWebOpen.org. Founded by Rep. Darrell Issa and others to combat SOPA/PIPA, and running on a $5,000 piece of software called the Madison Project, the site also offered up an alternative bill: Issa’s Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN). Characterized as the first technological crowd-sourcing of legislation, the bill is still stuck in committee, but the site was certainly one of the many tentacles that helped suffocate SOPA/PIPA.
…The immediate hope with these beta Decoded sites is that they will appeal to individuals and organizations that regularly interact with the law. Lawyers and public interest groups are prime targets. However, the developers would like to make the sites attractive to all sorts of individuals who want to better understand city laws, and involve themselves in the debate process. The Decoded sites will first educate constituents, whereupon the Madison technology will takeover, allowing citizens to critique bills line-by-line with track changes. ”
Empirically Informed Regulation
Paper by Cass Sunstein: “In recent years, social scientists have been incorporating empirical findings about human behavior into economic models. These findings offer important insights for thinking about regulation and its likely consequences. They also offer some suggestions about the appropriate design of effective, low-cost, choice-preserving approaches to regulatory problems, including disclosure requirements, default rules, and simplification. A general lesson is that small, inexpensive policy initiatives can have large and highly beneficial effects. In the United States, a large number of recent practices and reforms reflect an appreciation of this lesson. They also reflect an understanding of the need to ensure that regulations have strong empirical foundations, both through careful analysis of costs and benefits in advance and through retrospective review of what works and what does not.”
The Shame Game: U.S. Department of Labor Smartphone App Will Allow Public to Effortlessly Scrutinize Business Employment Practices
Charles B. Palmer in National Law Review: “The United States Department of Labor (DOL) recently launched a contest to find a new smartphone app that will allow the general public to effortlessly search for and scrutinize businesses and employers that have faced DOL citations. Dubbed the DOL Fair Labor Data Challenge, the contest seeks app entries that integrate information from consumer ratings websites, location tracking services, DOL Wage & Hour Division (WHD) citation data, and Occupational Safety & Health Administration (OSHA) citation data, into one software platform. In addition, the contest also encourages app developers to include other features in their respective app entries, such as information from state health boards and various licensing agencies.
The DOL Fair Labor Data Challenge is part of the DOL’s plan to amplify its enforcement efforts through increased public awareness and ease of access to citation data. Consumers and job applicants will soon be able to search for and publicly shame employers that hold one or more citations in the DOL database, all by just using their smartphones.”
Peers.org
Launch of new site Peers.org: “In many cities around the world, people whose lives have been enriched by the sharing economy were getting together to work out how to find new opportunities to share or overcome barriers. We realized that, with the right tools and support, we could achieve more by working together, across communities, cities, counties and the globe.
We started meeting with small groups of people who share their cars, homes, skills and time to build a grassroots organization, from the ground up. Within a few months, we had meetups and house parties happening in cities across the globe, from Boston to Barcelona and San Francisco to Seoul.
In summer 2013 we launched Peers to provide support and tools for people who want to see the sharing economy thrive. We support the movement in three ways:
- Mainstream the sharing economy By raising the profile and visibility of sharing
- Protect the sharing economy Through policy campaigns for smart regulation
- Grow the sharing economy By discovering, joining and using new peer and sharing services”
If Your Government Fails, Can You Create a New One With Your Phone?
Philip Howard in the Atlantic: “Wherever governments are in crisis, in transition, or in absentia, people are using digital media to try to improve their condition, to build new organizations, and to craft new institutional arrangements. Technology is, in a way, enabling new kinds of states.
It is out of vogue in Washington to refer to failed states. But regardless of the term, there are an unfortunate number of places where governments have ceased to function, creating openings for these new institutional arrangements to flourish. Indeed, state failure doesn’t always take the form of a catastrophic and complete collapse in government. States can fail at particular moments, such as during a natural disaster or an election. States can also fail in particular domains, such as in tax collection.
Information technologies like cellphones and the Internet are generating small acts of self-governance in a wide range of domains and in surprising places.”
Why you should never trust a data visualisation
John Burn-Murdoch in The Guardian: “An excellent blogpost has been receiving a lot of attention over the last week. Pete Warden, an experienced data scientist and author for O’Reilly on all things data, writes:
The wonderful thing about being a data scientist is that I get all of the credibility of genuine science, with none of the irritating peer review or reproducibility worries … I thought I was publishing an entertaining view of some data I’d extracted, but it was treated like a scientific study.
This is an important acknowledgement of a very real problem, but in my view Warden has the wrong target in his crosshairs. Data presented in any medium is a powerful tool and must be used responsibly, but it is when information is expressed visually that the risks are highest.
The central example Warden uses is his visualisation of Facebook friend networks across the United States, which proved extremely popular and was even cited in the New York Times as evidence for growing social division.
As he explains in his post, the methodology behind his underlying network graph is perfectly defensible, but the subsequent clustering process was “produced by me squinting at all the lines, coloring in some areas that seemed more connected in a paint program, and picking silly names for the areas”. The exercise was only ever intended as a bit of fun with a large and interesting dataset, so there really shouldn’t be any problem here.
But there is: humans are visual creatures. Peer-reviewed studies have shown that we can consume information more quickly when it is expressed in diagrams than when it is presented as text.
Even something as simple as colour scheme can have a marked impact on the perceived credibility of information presented visually – often a considerably more marked impact than the actual authority of the data source.
Another great example of this phenomenon was the Washington Post’s ‘map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries‘, which went viral back in May of this year. It was widely accepted as an objective, scientific piece of work, despite a number of social scientists identifying flaws in the methodology and the underlying data itself.”
New York City liberates map data trove
The Newyorkworld: New York City streets are free to walk, but until now getting the city’s master map database cost dearly.
That changed on Thursday, when the Department of City Planning made MapPLUTO — an extensive database full of information about each of the city’s parcels of land — available to the public on its website, free of charge.
Previously, the same files came at a steep price of $300 per borough, and a required license barred users from posting any of the data, including maps, on the Internet.
“We revised our policy on the sale of PLUTO and MapPLUTO data in keeping with the Mayor’s ongoing commitment to using technology to improve customer service and transparency,” a Department of Planning spokesperson wrote in an email on Thursday.
In April, The New York World reported that even as the city moved to put vital government data online for free download, MapPLUTO remained a glaring exception.”
The Internet generation will learn to let go
Julian B. Gewirtz and Adam B. Kern in The Washington Post: “Ours is the first generation to have grown up with the Internet. The first generation that got suspended from school because of a photo of underage drinking posted online. The first generation that could talk in chat rooms to anyone, anywhere, without our parents knowing. The first generation that has been “tracked” and “followed” and “shared” since childhood.
All this data will remain available forever — both to the big players (tech companies, governments) and to our friends, our sort-of friends and the rest of civil society. This fact is not really new, but our generation will confront the latter on a scale beyond that experienced by previous generations…
Certainly there will be many uses for information, such as health data, that will wind up governed by law. But so many other uses cannot be predicted or legislated, and laws themselves have to be informed by values. It is therefore critical that people establish, with their actions and expectations, cultural norms that prevent their digital selves from imprisoning their real selves.
We see three possible paths: One, people become increasingly restrained about what they share and do online. Two, people become increasingly restrained about what they do, period. Three, we learn to care less about what people did when they were younger, less mature or otherwise different.
The first outcome seems unproductive. There is no longer much of an Internet without sharing, and one of the great benefits of the Internet has been its ability to nurture relationships and connections that previously had been impossible. Withdrawal is unacceptable. Fear of the digital future should not drive us apart.
The second option seems more deeply unsettling. Childhood, adolescence, college — the whole process of growing up — is, as thinkers from John Locke to Dr. Spock have written, a necessarily experimental time. Everyone makes at least one mistake, and we’d like to think that process continues into adulthood. Creativity should not be overwhelmed by the fear of what people might one day find unpalatable.
This leaves the third outcome: the idea that we must learn to care less about what people did when they were younger or otherwise different. In an area where regulations, privacy policies and treaties may take decades to catch up to reality, our generation needs to take the lead in negotiating a “cultural treaty” endorsing a new value, related to privacy, that secures our ability to have a past captured in data that is not held to be the last word but seen in light of our having grown up in a way that no one ever has before.
Growing up, that is, on the record.”
Quantifying cities’ emotional effects
MIT Press: “A color-coded map of the perceived safety of New York City neighborhoods, based on Web volunteers’ comparisons of images extracted from Google Maps’ “street view” archive.
Image: Macro Connections Group
Image: Macro Connections Group
July 24, 2013
The “broken-windows theory,” which was propounded by two Harvard University researchers in the early 1980s, holds that urban “disorder” — visible signs of neglect, such as broken windows — actually promotes crime, initiating a vicious feedback loop. The theory was the basis for former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s crackdown on petty crime, but it’s come under sharp criticism from some social scientists. One of the difficulties in evaluating the theory is that it’s hard to quantify something as subjective as visible disorder.
In the latest issue of the journal PLoS One, researchers from MIT’s Media Lab present a new online tool that they hope will help social scientists take a more rigorous look at city dwellers’ emotional responses to their environments. The tool presents online volunteers with pairs of images randomly drawn from Google Maps’ compendium of street-level photographs; each volunteer selects the image that better represents some qualitative attribute. Algorithms use the results of the pairwise comparisons to assign geographical areas scores, from one to 10, on each attribute.
In the experiments reported in the PLoS One paper, volunteers ranked the neighborhoods depicted in the images according to how safe they looked, how “upper-class,” and how “unique” — an attribute selected in the hope that it would not be strongly correlated with the other two. The researchers found that the scores for the U.S. cities selected for the study — New York and Boston — showed greater disparity between the extremes for both class and safety than did those for the two Austrian cities selected, Linz and Salzburg.
They also found that, controlled for income, area, and population, the perceived-safety scores for neighborhoods in New York correlated very well with incidence of violent crime”.