Anton Root: “Crowdsourcing helps communities connect and organize, so it makes sense that governments are increasingly making use of crowd-powered technologies and processes.
Just recently, for instance, we wrote about the Malaysian government’s initiative to crowdsource the national budget. Closer to home, we’ve seen government agencies from U.S. AID to NASA make use of the crowd.
Daren Brabham, professor at the University of Southern California, recently published a report titled “Using Crowdsourcing In Government” that introduces readers to the basics of crowdsourcing, highlights effective use cases, and establishes best practices when it comes to governments opening up to the crowd. Below, we take a look at a few of the suggestions Brabham makes to those considering crowdsourcing.
Brabham splits up his ten best practices into three phases: planning, implementation, and post-implementation. The first suggestion in the planning phase he makes may be the most critical of all: “Clearly define the problem and solution parameters.” If the community isn’t absolutely clear on what the problem is, the ideas and solutions that users submit will be equally vague and largely useless.
This applies not only to government agencies, but also to SMEs and large enterprises making use of crowdsourcing. At Massolution NYC 2013, for instance, we heard again and again the importance of meticulously defining a problem. And open innovation platform InnoCentive’s CEO Andy Zynga stressed the big role his company plays in helping organizations do away with the “curse of knowledge.”
Brabham also has advice for projects in their implementation phase, the key bit being: “Launch a promotional plan and a plan to grow and sustain the community.” Simply put, crowdsourcing cannot work without a crowd, so it’s important to build up the community before launching a campaign. It does take some balance, however, as a community that’s too large by the time a campaign launches can turn off newcomers who “may not feel welcome or may be unsure how to become initiated into the group or taken seriously.”
Brabham’s key advice for the post-implementation phase is: “Assess the project from many angles.” The author suggests tracking website traffic patterns, asking users to volunteer information about themselves when registering, and doing original research through surveys and interviews. The results of follow-up research can help to better understand the responses submitted, and also make it easier to show the successes of the crowdsourcing campaign. This is especially important for organizations partaking in ongoing crowdsourcing efforts.”
The Solution Revolution
New book by William D. Eggers and Paul Macmillan from Deloitte: “Where tough societal problems persist, citizens, social enterprises, and yes, even businesses, are relying less and less on government-only solutions. More likely, they are crowd funding, ride-sharing, app- developing or impact- investing to design lightweight solutions for seemingly intractable problems. No challenge is too daunting, from malaria in Africa to traffic congestion in California.
These wavemakers range from edgy social enterprises growing at a clip of 15% a year, to mega-foundations that are eclipsing development aid, to Fortune 500 companies delivering social good on the path to profit. The collective force of these new problem solvers is creating dynamic and rapidly evolving markets for social good. They trade solutions instead of dollars to fill the gap between what government can provide and what citizens need. By erasing public-private sector boundaries, they are unlocking trillions of dollars in social benefit and commercial value.
The Solution Revolution explores how public and private are converging to form the Solution Economy. By examining scores of examples, Eggers and Macmillan reveal the fundamentals of this new – globally prevalent – economic and social order. The book is designed to help guide those willing to invest time, knowledge or capital toward sustainable, social progress.”
Imagining Data Without Division
Thomas Lin in Quanta Magazine: “As science dives into an ocean of data, the demands of large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations are growing increasingly acute…Seven years ago, when David Schimel was asked to design an ambitious data project called the National Ecological Observatory Network, it was little more than a National Science Foundation grant. There was no formal organization, no employees, no detailed science plan. Emboldened by advances in remote sensing, data storage and computing power, NEON sought answers to the biggest question in ecology: How do global climate change, land use and biodiversity influence natural and managed ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole?…
For projects like NEON, interpreting the data is a complicated business. Early on, the team realized that its data, while mid-size compared with the largest physics and biology projects, would be big in complexity. “NEON’s contribution to big data is not in its volume,” said Steve Berukoff, the project’s assistant director for data products. “It’s in the heterogeneity and spatial and temporal distribution of data.”
Unlike the roughly 20 critical measurements in climate science or the vast but relatively structured data in particle physics, NEON will have more than 500 quantities to keep track of, from temperature, soil and water measurements to insect, bird, mammal and microbial samples to remote sensing and aerial imaging. Much of the data is highly unstructured and difficult to parse — for example, taxonomic names and behavioral observations, which are sometimes subject to debate and revision.
And, as daunting as the looming data crush appears from a technical perspective, some of the greatest challenges are wholly nontechnical. Many researchers say the big science projects and analytical tools of the future can succeed only with the right mix of science, statistics, computer science, pure mathematics and deft leadership. In the big data age of distributed computing — in which enormously complex tasks are divided across a network of computers — the question remains: How should distributed science be conducted across a network of researchers?
Part of the adjustment involves embracing “open science” practices, including open-source platforms and data analysis tools, data sharing and open access to scientific publications, said Chris Mattmann, 32, who helped develop a precursor to Hadoop, a popular open-source data analysis framework that is used by tech giants like Yahoo, Amazon and Apple and that NEON is exploring. Without developing shared tools to analyze big, messy data sets, Mattmann said, each new project or lab will squander precious time and resources reinventing the same tools. Likewise, sharing data and published results will obviate redundant research.
To this end, international representatives from the newly formed Research Data Alliance met this month in Washington to map out their plans for a global open data infrastructure.”
User-Generated Content Is Here to Stay
Azeem Khan in the Huffington Post: “The way media are transmitted has changed dramatically over the last 10 years. User-generated content (UGC) has completely changed the landscape of social interaction, media outreach, consumer understanding, and everything in between. Today, UGC is media generated by the consumer instead of the traditional journalists and reporters. This is a movement defying and redefining traditional norms at the same time. Current events are largely publicized on Twitter and Facebook by the average person, and not by a photojournalist hired by a news organization. In the past, these large news corporations dominated the headlines — literally — and owned the monopoly on public media. Yet with the advent of smartphones and spread of social media, everything has changed. The entire industry has been replaced; smartphones have supplanted how information is collected, packaged, edited, and conveyed for mass distribution. UGC allows for raw and unfiltered movement of content at lightening speed. With the way that the world works today, it is the most reliable way to get information out. One thing that is for certain is that UGC is here to stay whether we like it or not, and it is driving much more of modern journalistic content than the average person realizes.
Think about recent natural disasters where images are captured by citizen journalists using their iPhones. During Hurricane Sandy, 800,000 photos uploaded onto Instagram with “#Sandy.” Time magazine even hired five iPhoneographers to photograph the wreckage for its Instagram page. During the May 2013 Oklahoma City tornadoes, the first photo released was actually captured by a smartphone. This real-time footage brings environmental chaos to your doorstep in a chillingly personal way, especially considering the photographer of the first tornado photos ultimately died because of the tornado. UGC has been monumental for criminal investigations and man-made catastrophes. Most notably, the Boston Marathon bombing was covered by UGC in the most unforgettable way. Dozens of images poured in identifying possible Boston bombers, to both the detriment and benefit of public officials and investigators. Though these images inflicted considerable damage to innocent bystanders sporting suspicious backpacks, ultimately it was also smartphone images that highlighted the presence of the Tsarnaev brothers. This phenomenon isn’t limited to America. Would the so-called Arab Spring have happened without social media and UGC? Syrians, Egyptians, and citizens from numerous nations facing protests can easily publicize controversial images and statements to be shared worldwide….
This trend is not temporary but will only expand. The first iPhone launched in 2007, and the world has never been the same. New smartphones are released each month with better cameras and faster processors than computers had even just a few years ago….”
When the Government Shuts, Even Web Sites Go Down
The New York Times: “When the federal government last shutdown in 1995, most agencies and departments had either no presence on the Internet or a very basic Web site. Since then, agency Web sites have become the primary public face of the government for most Americans who do not live in or near Washington. So it’s perhaps not surprising that the decision by agencies such as NASA and the Library of Congress to take down their sites this week has gotten a lot of attention.
In keeping with the senseless nature of the shutdown, some Web sites are down while others are still up. The Federal Trade Commission, for instance, has blocked access to its site. It has posted a notice online saying that it’s closed indefinitely as are its systems for people to register complaints or enter telephone numbers on the do-not call list. By contrast, the Department of Education has left its site up with a notice informing visitors that it will not be updated during the shutdown. Sites for the White House, Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service, are being updated at least in part. (Here’s a pretty comprehensive list of which sites are up and which are not.)
Each department and agency has had to decide what to do with its Web site based on its interpretation of federal laws and rules. In a memo (PDF) written last month, the Office of Management and Budget offered some guidance to officials trying to figure out what to do. ..In further keeping with the truly bizarre nature of government shutdowns, the O.M.B. also reminded government officials that they should pay no attention to whether it will cost more to shut down their Web site than it does to keep it going.”
See also: Blacked Out Government Websites Available Through Wayback Machine
5 Ways Cities Are Using Big Data
Eric Larson in Mashable: “New York City released more than 200 high-value data sets to the public on Monday — a way, in part, to provide more content for open-sourced mapping projects like OpenStreetMap.
It’s one of the many releases since the Local Law 11 of 2012 passed in February, which calls for more transparency of the city government’s collected data.
But it’s not just New York: Cities across the world, large and small, are utilizing big data sets — like traffic statistics, energy consumption rates and GPS mapping — to launch projects to help their respective communities.
We rounded up a few of our favorites below….
1. Seattle’s Power Consumption
The city of Seattle recently partnered with Microsoft and Accenture on a pilot project to reduce the area’s energy usage. Using Microsoft’s Azure cloud, the project will collect and analyze hundreds of data sets collected from four downtown buildings’ management systems.
With predictive analytics, then, the system will work to find out what’s working and what’s not — i.e. where energy can be used less, or not at all. The goal is to reduce power usage by 25%.
2. SpotHero
Finding parking spots — especially in big cities — is undoubtably a headache.
SpotHero is an app, for both iOS and Android devices, that tracks down parking spots in a select number of cities. How it works: Users type in an address or neighborhood (say, Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C.) and are taken to a listing of available garages and lots nearby — complete with prices and time durations.
The app tracks availability in real-time, too, so a spot is updated in the system as soon as it’s snagged.
Seven cities are currently synced with the app: Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Milwaukee and Newark, N.J.
3. Adopt-a-Hydrant
Anyone who’s spent a winter in Boston will agree: it snows.
In January, the city’s Office of New Urban Mechanics released an app called Adopt-a-Hydrant. The program is mapped with every fire hydrant in the city proper — more than 13,000, according to a Harvard blog post — and lets residents pledge to shovel out one, or as many as they choose, in the almost inevitable event of a blizzard.
Once a pledge is made, volunteers receive a notification if their hydrant — or hydrants — become buried in snow.
4. Adopt-a-Sidewalk
Similar to Adopt-a-Hydrant, Chicago’s Adopt-a-Sidewalk app lets residents of the Windy City pledge to shovel sidewalks after snowfall. In a city just as notorious for snowstorms as Boston, it’s an effective way to ensure public spaces remain free of snow and ice — especially spaces belonging to the elderly or disabled.
If you’re unsure which part of town you’d like to “adopt,” just register on the website and browse the map — you’ll receive a pop-up notification for each street you swipe that’s still available.
5. Less Congestion for Lyon
Last year, researchers at IBM teamed up with the city of Lyon, France (about four hours south of Paris), to build a system that helps traffic operators reduce congestion on the road.
The system, called the “Decision Support System Optimizer (DSSO),” uses real-time traffic reports to detect and predict congestions. If an operator sees that a traffic jam is likely to occur, then, she/he can adjust traffic signals accordingly to keep the flow of cars moving smoothly.
It’s an especially helpful tool for emergencies — say, when an ambulance is en route to the hospital. Over time, the algorithms in the system will “learn” from its most successful recommendations, then apply that knowledge when making future predictions.”
Data Swap
GlobeLab @ The Boston GlobeData: “Data swap 2013 is an exclusive opportunity to work on complex, real-world problems, with rich and large-scale datasets and individuals with diverse skills and backgrounds from research, government, and civic organizations throughout Boston.
This isn’t your mother’s hackathon.
There’s no conference room full over over-caffeinated and under-deodorized engineers, no 72 hour time limit, and no room for shoddy prototypes. This is an opportunity for a select number of gifted researchers to join interdisciplinary teams to work on the pressing and meaningful problems facing Boston communities.
Unlike hackathons, meant to generate quick ideas and prototypes in a short period of time, DataSwap is about forging and supporting long-term collaborations between researchers, communities and data guardians. Groups sharing common interests and complementary skills will collaborate around specific problems. Each problem will be proposed by the owners of one of the datasets who present. On day one at The Boston Globe, you’ll learn more about that dataset and others to help you in your research. You’ll be given a community facilitator to help you craft useful research that is relevant outside the bounds of academia. Then, it’s up to you! Over the next several months, you and your team are challenged to craft a presentation around the problem you were given. At the conclusion of the time frame, we’ll reconvene to share our findings with one another and choose a winner.”
This isn’t your mother’s hackathon.
There’s no conference room full over over-caffeinated and under-deodorized engineers, no 72 hour time limit, and no room for shoddy prototypes. This is an opportunity for a select number of gifted researchers to join interdisciplinary teams to work on the pressing and meaningful problems facing Boston communities.
Unlike hackathons, meant to generate quick ideas and prototypes in a short period of time, DataSwap is about forging and supporting long-term collaborations between researchers, communities and data guardians. Groups sharing common interests and complementary skills will collaborate around specific problems. Each problem will be proposed by the owners of one of the datasets who present. On day one at The Boston Globe, you’ll learn more about that dataset and others to help you in your research. You’ll be given a community facilitator to help you craft useful research that is relevant outside the bounds of academia. Then, it’s up to you! Over the next several months, you and your team are challenged to craft a presentation around the problem you were given. At the conclusion of the time frame, we’ll reconvene to share our findings with one another and choose a winner.”
Embracing Expertise
Biella Coleman in Concurring Opinions: “I often describe hacker politics as Weapons of the Geek, in contrast to Weapons of the Weak—the term anthropologist James Scott uses to capture the unique, clandestine nature of peasant politics. While Weapons of the Weak is a modality of politics among disenfranchised, economically marginalized populations who engage in small-scale illicit acts —such as foot dragging and minor acts of sabotage—that don’t appear on their surface to be political, Weapons of the Geek is a modality of politics exercised by a class of privileged actors who often lie at the center of economic life. Among geeks and hackers, political activities are rooted in concrete experiences of their craft—administering a server or editing videos—and portion of these hackers channel these skills toward political life. To put another way hackers don’t necessarily have class-consciousness, though some certainly do, but they all tend to have craft consciousness. But they have already shown they are willing to engage in prolific and distinct types of political acts from policy making to party politics, from writing free software to engaging in some of the most pronounced and personally risky acts of civil disobedience of the last decade as we saw with Snowden. Just because they are hackers does not mean they are only acting out their politics through technology even if their technological experiences usually inform their politics.
It concerns and bothers me that most technologists are male and white but I am not concerned, in fact I am quite thrilled, these experts are taking political charge. I tend to agree with Michael Shudson’s reading of Walter Lippman that when it comes to democracy we need more experts not less: “The intellectual challenge is not to invent democracy without experts, but to seek a way to harness experts to a legitimately democratic function.”
Imagine if as many doctors and professors mobilized their moral authority and expertise as hackers have done, to rise up and intervene in the problems plaguing their vocational domains. Professors would be visibly denouncing the dismal and outrageous labor conditions of adjuncts whose pay is a pittance. Doctors would be involved in the fight for more affordable health care in the United States. Mobilizing expertise does not mean other stakeholders can’t and should not have a voice but there are many practical and moral reasons why we should embrace a politics of expertise, especially if configured to allow more generally contributions.
More than any other group of experts, hackers have shown how productive an expert based politics can be. And many domains of hacker and geek politics such as the Pirate Parties and Anonymous are interesting precisely for how they marry an open participatory element along with a more technical, expert-based one. Expertise can co-exist with participation if configured as such.
My sense is that hacker (re: technically informed) based politics will grow more important in years to come. Just last week I went to visit one hacker-activist, Jeremy Hammond who is in jail for his politically motivated acts of direct action. I asked him what he thought of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s blanket surveillance of American citizens. Along with saying he was encouraged for someone dared to expose this wrongdoing (as many of us are), he captured the enormous power held by hackers and technologists when he followed with this statement: “there are all these nerds who don’t agree with what is politically happening and they have power.”
Hammond and others are exercising their technical power and I generally think this is a net gain for democracy. But it is why we must diligently work toward establishing more widespread digital and technical literacy. The low numbers of female technologists and other minorities in and out of hacker-dom are appalling and disturbing (and why I am involved with initiatives like those of NCWIT to rectify this problem). There are certainly barriers internal to the hacker world but the problems are so entrenched and so systematic unless those are solved, the numbers of women in voluntary and political domains will continue to be low.
So it is not that expertise is the problem. It is the barriers that prevent a large class of individuals from ever becoming experts that concerns me the most”.
It concerns and bothers me that most technologists are male and white but I am not concerned, in fact I am quite thrilled, these experts are taking political charge. I tend to agree with Michael Shudson’s reading of Walter Lippman that when it comes to democracy we need more experts not less: “The intellectual challenge is not to invent democracy without experts, but to seek a way to harness experts to a legitimately democratic function.”
Imagine if as many doctors and professors mobilized their moral authority and expertise as hackers have done, to rise up and intervene in the problems plaguing their vocational domains. Professors would be visibly denouncing the dismal and outrageous labor conditions of adjuncts whose pay is a pittance. Doctors would be involved in the fight for more affordable health care in the United States. Mobilizing expertise does not mean other stakeholders can’t and should not have a voice but there are many practical and moral reasons why we should embrace a politics of expertise, especially if configured to allow more generally contributions.
More than any other group of experts, hackers have shown how productive an expert based politics can be. And many domains of hacker and geek politics such as the Pirate Parties and Anonymous are interesting precisely for how they marry an open participatory element along with a more technical, expert-based one. Expertise can co-exist with participation if configured as such.
My sense is that hacker (re: technically informed) based politics will grow more important in years to come. Just last week I went to visit one hacker-activist, Jeremy Hammond who is in jail for his politically motivated acts of direct action. I asked him what he thought of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s blanket surveillance of American citizens. Along with saying he was encouraged for someone dared to expose this wrongdoing (as many of us are), he captured the enormous power held by hackers and technologists when he followed with this statement: “there are all these nerds who don’t agree with what is politically happening and they have power.”
Hammond and others are exercising their technical power and I generally think this is a net gain for democracy. But it is why we must diligently work toward establishing more widespread digital and technical literacy. The low numbers of female technologists and other minorities in and out of hacker-dom are appalling and disturbing (and why I am involved with initiatives like those of NCWIT to rectify this problem). There are certainly barriers internal to the hacker world but the problems are so entrenched and so systematic unless those are solved, the numbers of women in voluntary and political domains will continue to be low.
So it is not that expertise is the problem. It is the barriers that prevent a large class of individuals from ever becoming experts that concerns me the most”.
Chicago Works For You
“Chicago Works For You is a citywide dashboard with ward-by-ward views of service delivery in Chicago. …The homepage is a citywide map with a daily summary of all service requests submitted, by service type and ward.Dark lines under and up-arrows next to a request type means there were more requests of that type on that date than average. The longer the line, the higher above average. Highest above average is highlighted on the map as default. Click any service request type to see the raw numbers and averages. The legend in the lake shows you the number ranges for each type in each ward. Click any service type to see those numbers for any day….
This data comes directly from the City of Chicago’s Open311 API. Chicago’s Open311 API can be used to both view 311 request data as well as enter new requests directly into the system. In 2012, the City of Chicago became a Code for America partner city. A team of four technologists worked to build an Open311 system for Chicago that would help residents track what was happening with their service requests. Through a grant from Smart Chicago the team built Chicago Service Tracker which shows each step the city takes to resolve a 311 request. This also enabled all the 311 data to be accessible on the city’s data portal….
The Smart Chicago Collaborative is a civic organization devoted to using technology to make lives better in Chicago. We were formed to address the challenge of the lack of broadband Internet access for all Chicagoans. More broadly, we work to apply the transformative power of technology to solve problems for the people of Chicago.
We are a startup that was founded in part by our municipal government and nurtured by some of its most venerable institutions. Our founding partners are the City of Chicago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust. As a funding collaborative, we help bring together municipal, philanthropic, and corporate investments in civic innovation.
We have a host of current projects and partnerships, and we are actively seeking to connect ideas and resources in all areas of philanthropy in Chicago.”
From Crowd-Sourcing Potholes to Community Policing
New paper by Manik Suri (GovLab): “The tragic Boston Marathon bombing and hair-raising manhunt that ensued was a sobering event. It also served as a reminder that emerging “civic technologies” – platforms and applications that enable citizens to connect and collaborate with each other and with government – are more important today than ever before. As commentators have noted, local police and federal agents utilized a range of technological platforms to tap the “wisdom of the crowd,” relying on thousands of private citizens to develop a “hive mind” that identified two suspects within a record period of time.
In the immediate wake of the devastating attack on April 15th, investigators had few leads. But within twenty-four hours, senior FBI officials, determined to seek “assistance from the public,” called on everyone with information to submit all media, tips, and leads related to the Boston Marathon attack. This unusual request for help yielded thousands of images and videos from local Bostonians, tourists, and private companies through technological channels ranging from telephone calls and emails to Flickr posts and Twitter messages. In mere hours, investigators were able to “crowd-source” a tremendous amount of data – including thousands of images from personal cameras, amateur videos from smart phones, and cell-tower information from private carriers. Combing through data from this massive network of “eyes and ears,” law enforcement officials were quickly able to generate images of two lead suspects – enabling a “modern manhunt” to commence immediately.
Technological innovations have transformed our commercial, political, and social realities. These advances include new approaches to how we generate knowledge, access information, and interact with one another, as well as new pathways for building social movements and catalyzing political change. While a significant body of academic research has focused on the role of technology in transforming electoral politics and social movements, less attention has been paid to how technological innovation can improve the process of governance itself.
A growing number of platforms and applications lie at this intersection of technology and governance, in what might be termed the “civic technology” sector. Broadly speaking, this sector involves the application of new information and communication technologies – ranging from robust social media platforms to state-of-the-art big data analysis systems – to address public policy problems. Civic technologies encompass enterprises that “bring web technologies directly to government, build services on top of government data for citizens, and change the way citizens ask, get, or need services from government.” These technologies have the potential to transform governance by promoting greater transparency in policy-making, increasing government efficiency, and enhancing citizens’ participation in public sector decision-making.“