Nicole Wallace at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Planet Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up, has ambitious plans to bring down the sky-high cost of satellite imagery and significantly increase the recording frequency of such photos—all with the goal of improving life down here on earth. To make that happen, the company plans to set up a nonprofit arm, Planet.org, to provide satellite images to charities and help them learn how to use the cutting-edge technology to fulfill their missions….
Satellite imagery is expensive, and the photos aren’t updated very often. The interval between image recordings can be from several weeks to more than a year. The satellites themselves are often the size of a school bus, may take as long as a decade to build, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Planet Labs is trying to upend that model. Rather than building custom parts, the company uses cutting-edge—but readily available—electronics and sensors to build shoebox-size microsatellites. The tiny devices have been launched from the International Space State and from unmanned rockets. Modeling its approach on the software industry, Planet Labs redesigns its satellites every three months or so, incorporating new information it learns by testing them in space.
The plan is to encircle the globe with a network of microsatellites that will scan the earth’s surface every day. So far, Planet Labs has launched 71 of the devices. It expects to launch 100 to 150 more satellites to meet a goal of achieving daily imaging in the next 12 to 18 months.
The prospect of cheaper, more up-to-date satellite imagery excites nonprofit technology experts.
Because of the cost, only a handful of large charities have been able to use satellite imagery in their work, says Jim Fruchterman, chief executive of Benetech, a nonprofit technology group in Palo Alto, Calif. He points to Amnesty International’s use of remote imagery to document human-rights abuses in Darfur and Syria as an example.
Lowering the price of the technology will increase the number of nonprofits that can use the data, and more-frequent images will expand the ways groups can use the information, he says. Human-rights groups could, in some cases, use the images to confirm or refute reports they receive, almost in real time, says Mr. Fruchterman….
Some of the ways that nonprofits will probably use the satellite data won’t be that different from applications by the company’s commercial customers, says Mr. Schingler.
One case in point, he says, is agriculture. Many farmers in developed countries already use satellite imagery to help them plan when they should plant and irrigate, says Mr. Schingler. With wider access to remote imagery, he says, nonprofits could help distribute the same information to farmers in developing countries….”
Nominet Trust – celebrating 100 life-changing applications of digital technology
Charles Leadbeater in the Financial Times: “The Nominet Trust, the corporate foundation of Nominet, the organisation which looks after the UK’s system of website addresses, has been scouring the world for innovations in which people use digital technologies to tackle social challenges. The Trust wants to inspire and back UK innovators to realise the still largely untapped social potential of digital technologies, to provide new ways for people to learn, look after their health, find cleaner forms of energy and create new economic activity.
We have just announced the second year of the Nominet Trust 100, our annual celebration of such global digital social innovation. This showcases the incessant, unfolding waves of innovation rippling around the world as cheaper and more reliable digital technologies cross-fertilise and multiply. Such innovation waves build from far off before rushing forward with immense power. One prime example is 3D printing, which is about to become a practical tool rather than an esoteric toy of the rich or hip….
Citizen science
Last year’s NT100 featured Cell Slider, an app from Cancer Research UK that harnessed the power of “citizen scientists” to classify images of cells, helping researchers move more quickly towards finding a cure for cancer. Cellslider’s citizen-science approach meant that in just three months, one million images were classified by people using the app. Reverse the Odds reached that milestone in just two weeks.
Combining state-of-the-art game design, expertise in data analysis and remarkable production values, Reverse the Odds is a mobile puzzle where players are challenged to save a race of adorable minions within a magical world. The mini-puzzles are enough to engage thousands of players but in helping these colourful creatures, players are actually analysing real cancer data, which helps the scientists at Cancer Research UK to move more quickly to finding cures. The charity has terabytes of images of cells that can only be analysed by humans — computers can’t identify the patterns required.
Fighting harassment
HarassMap is an Egyptian innovation to crowd-map sexual harassment, in a country where 83 per cent of women, and 98 per cent of foreign women, have experienced sexual abuse and assault.
The NGO, founded by Rebecca Chiao and three other women in 2010, uses the same technology as Ushahidi did in mapping violence in Kenya’s 2007 elections. Anyone can report and detail each instance of an attack, filed by category, from ogling and catcalling, to indecent exposure and rape, using their mobile phone to upload information to a database which then generates the map.
Victims get an instant, automated message of support including where to get legal aid, psychological counselling, learn self-defence and how to make a police report. The data generated allows the NGO to properly measure the problem of sexual harassment for the first time and help engineer a shift in how the Egyptian media reports sexual attacks. It also gives their network of 1,500 trained volunteers the ammunition to make sexual abuse socially unacceptable by challenging community norms, using hard facts.
HarassMap has a distressingly large potential market. The group has given training and technical assistance to activists from 28 other countries to run similar projects, everywhere from Palestine and Yemen to Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, India and the UK….”
The case against human rights
Eric Posner in the Guardian: “We live in an age in which most of the major human rights treaties – there are nine “core” treaties – have been ratified by the vast majority of countries. Yet it seems that the human rights agenda has fallen on hard times. In much of the Islamic world, women lack equality, religious dissenters are persecuted and political freedoms are curtailed. The Chinese model of development, which combines political repression and economic liberalism, has attracted numerous admirers in the developing world. Political authoritarianism has gained ground in Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela. Backlashes against LGBT rights have taken place in countries as diverse as Russia and Nigeria. The traditional champions of human rights – Europe and the United States – have floundered. Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels. The United States, which used torture in the years after 9/11 and continues to kill civilians with drone strikes, has lost much of its moral authority. Even age-old scourges such as slavery continue to exist. A recent report estimates that nearly 30 million people are forced against their will to work. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
At a time when human rights violations remain widespread, the discourse of human rights continues to flourish…
And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that governments continue to violate human rights with impunity. Why, for example, do more than 150 countries (out of 193 countries that belong to the UN) engage in torture? Why has the number of authoritarian countries increased in the last several years? Why do women remain a subordinate class in nearly all countries of the world? Why do children continue to work in mines and factories in so many countries?
The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning. The human rights movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades tried (and failed) to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries. But where development economists have reformed their approach, the human rights movement has yet to acknowledge its failures. It is time for a reckoning….
It is time to start over with an approach to promoting wellbeing in foreign countries that is empirical rather than ideological. Human rights advocates can learn a lot from the experiences of development economists – not only about the flaws of top-down, coercive styles of forcing people living in other countries to be free, but about how one can actually help those people if one really wants to. Wealthy countries can and should provide foreign aid to developing countries, but with the understanding that helping other countries is not the same as forcing them to adopt western institutions, modes of governance, dispute-resolution systems and rights. Helping other countries means giving them cash, technical assistance and credit where there is reason to believe that these forms of aid will raise the living standards of the poorest people. Resources currently used in fruitless efforts to compel foreign countries to comply with the byzantine, amorphous treaty regime would be better used in this way.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris, with more than a passing resemblance to the civilising efforts undertaken by western governments and missionary groups in the 19th century, which did little good for native populations while entangling European powers in the affairs of countries they did not understand. A humbler approach is long overdue.”
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Macon Money: A serious game for civic engagement
Wilson Center Commons Lab: “In 2011, residents of Macon, Georgia received over $65,000 in free local currency—with a catch.
This money was locked in bonds redeemable for an unknown value between $10 and $100. Prior to circulation, each bond was cut in half. Residents of Macon wishing to “cash” their bonds were required to first find the missing half, held by an unknown community member.
These were the rules for Macon Money, a real-world game created by Area/Code Inc. in collaboration with several community partners. Benjamin Stokes was brought on board by the Knight Foundation as an advisor and researcher for the game. Stokes describes real-world games as activities where “playing the game is congruent with making impact in the world; making progress in the game, also does something in the real world.” Macon Money was designed to foster civic engagement through a number of means.
First, the two halves of each bond were intentionally distributed in neighborhoods on opposite ends of Macon, or in neighborhoods characterized by different socio-economic status. This “game mechanic” forced residents who would not normally interact to collaborate towards a common goal. Bond holders found each other through a designated website, social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, and even serendipitous face-to-face interaction.
Bonds were redeemable for Macon Money, a currency that could only be spent at local businesses (which were reimbursed with U.S. currency). This ensured continuing engagement with the Macon community, and in some cases continuing engagement between players. Macon Money was also designed to foster community identity through the visual design of the currency itself. Macon dollars depicted symbols of communal value, such a picture of Otis Redding, a native of the town.
While the game Macon Money is over, researchers continue to analyze the how the game helped foster civic engagement within a local community. Most recently, Stokes described these impacts during a talk at American University co-sponsored by The American University Game Lab, the Series Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the AU Library, and the American University Center for Media and Social Impact. A video for the talk was recently posted here:…”
Using twitter to get ground truth on floods
Interview with Floodtags founder Jurjen Wagemaker at Global Pulse: “…Twtitter has proved to be a fantastic flood monitor tool and we encourage people to share even more of their flood experiences on Twitter. Now the difficult part is, to create the right flood filters and enrichments, so that disaster managers only need to look at a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of observations coming in.
So we enrich and analyse all flood data in real-time, and present them in an understandable format through our web service. A good example is the water depth of a flood. It turns out that a large number of people both mention the flood depth as well as the location where they monitored it. Take for instance January 29th, 2014: out of the 360.000 tweets we collected on floods, 15.000 included water depth observations (see picture). Together with the Dutch water management institute Deltares (@arnejanvl) we are working to develop a sound interpretation framework for these observations to create real-time floodmaps. For reference, to make a reliable floodmap of the January 2013 flood took a total of nine days. This was thanks to the hard work of the disaster management office and the HOT team (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team)….
We will launch the site at the upcoming Data Innovation for Policy Makers conference in Bali. And from that date onwards you can use Floodtags to get realtime flood information in Indonesia. Just go to Floodtags.com and sign-up. Especially when it rains it can become quite interesting: you can search for different neighbourhoods and see what people tweeted and how deep the water is. There is also a realtime tweet density map and you can request tweet statistics (e.g. figure 5, where we compare flood tweets with flood response tweets) – and we have got so much more to come. “
How to use the Internet to end corrupt deals between companies and governments
at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: “Every year governments worldwide spend more than $9.5 trillion on public goods and services, but finding out who won those contracts, why and whether they deliver as promised is largely invisible.
Enter the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).
Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica and Paraguay became the first countries to announce on Tuesday that they have adopted the new global standards for publishing contracts online as part of a project to shine a light on how public money is spent and to combat massive corruption in public procurement.
“The mission is to end secret deals between companies and governments,” said Gavin Hayman, the incoming executive director for Open Contracting Partnership.
The concept is simple. Under Open Contracting, the government publishes online the projects it is putting out for bid and the terms; companies submit bids online; the winning contract is published including the reasons why; and then citizens can monitor performance according to the terms of the contract.
The Open Contracting initiative, developed by the World Wide Web Foundation with the support of the World Bank and Omidyar Network, has been several years in the making and is part of a broader global movement to increase the accountability of governments by using Internet technologies to make them more transparent.
A pioneer in data transparency was the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a global coalition of governments, companies and civil society that works on improving accountability by publishing the revenues received in 35 member countries for their natural resources.
Publish What You Fund is a similar initiative for the aid industry. It delivered a common open standards in 2011 for donor countries to publish how much money they gave in development aid and details of what projects that money funded and where.
There’s also the Open Government Partnership, an international forum of 65 countries, each of which adopts an action plan laying out how it will improve the quality of government through collaboration with civil society, frequently using new technologies.
All of these initiatives have helped crack open the door of government.
What’s important about Open Contracting is the sheer scale of impact it could have. Public procurement accounts for about 15 percent of global GDP and according to Anne Jellema, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation which seeks to expand free access to the web worldwide and backed the OCDS project, corruption adds an estimated $2.3 trillion to the cost of those contracts every year.
A study by the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank, looked at four countries already publishing their contracts online — the United Kingdom, Georgia, Colombia and Slovakia. It found open contracting increased visibility and encouraged more companies to submit bids, the quality and price competitiveness improved and citizen monitoring meant better service delivery….”
Cities Find Rewards in Cheap Technologies
Nanette Byrnes at MIT Technology Review: “Cities around the globe, whether rich or poor, are in the midst of a technology experiment. Urban planners are pulling data from inexpensive sensors mounted on traffic lights and park benches, and from mobile apps on citizens’ smartphones, to analyze how their cities really operate. They hope the data will reveal how to run their cities better and improve urban life. City leaders and technology experts say that managing the growing challenges of cities well and affordably will be close to impossible without smart technology.
Fifty-four percent of humanity lives in urban centers, and almost all of the world’s projected population growth over the next three decades will take place in cities, including many very poor cities. Because of their density and often strained infrastructure, cities have an outsize impact on the environment, consuming two-thirds of the globe’s energy and contributing 70 percent of its greenhouse-gas emissions. Urban water systems are leaky. Pollution levels are often extreme.
But cities also contribute most of the world’s economic production. Thirty percent of the world’s economy and most of its innovation are concentrated in just 100 cities. Can technology help manage rapid population expansion while also nurturing cities’ all-important role as an economic driver? That’s the big question at the heart of this Business Report.
Selling answers to that question has become a big business. IBM, Cisco, Hitachi, Siemens, and others have taken aim at this market, publicizing successful examples of cities that have used their technology to tackle the challenges of parking, traffic, transportation, weather, energy use, water management, and policing. Cities already spend a billion dollars a year on these systems, and that’s expected to grow to $12 billion a year or more in the next 10 years.
To justify this kind of outlay, urban technologists will have to move past the test projects that dominate discussions today. Instead, they’ll have to solve some of the profound and growing problems of urban living. Cities leaning in that direction are using various technologies to ease parking, measure traffic, and save water (see “Sensing Santander”), reduce rates of violent crime (see “Data-Toting Cops”), and prepare for ever more severe weather patterns.
There are lessons to be learned, too, from cities whose grandiose technological ideas have fallen short, like the eco-city initiative of Tianjin, China (see “China’s Future City”), which has few residents despite great technology and deep government support.
The streets are similarly largely empty in the experimental high-tech cities of Songdo, South Korea; Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; and Paredes, Portugal, which are being designed to have minimal impact on the environment and offer high-tech conveniences such as solar-powered air-conditioning and pneumatic waste disposal systems instead of garbage trucks. Meanwhile, established cities are taking a much more incremental, less ambitious, and perhaps more workable approach, often benefiting from relatively inexpensive and flexible digital technologies….”
Off the map
The Economist: “Rich countries are deluged with data; developing ones are suffering from drought…
AFRICA is the continent of missing data. Fewer than half of births are recorded; some countries have not taken a census in several decades. On maps only big cities and main streets are identified; the rest looks as empty as the Sahara. Lack of data afflicts other developing regions, too. The self-built slums that ring many Latin American cities are poorly mapped, and even estimates of their population are vague. Afghanistan is still using census figures from 1979—and that count was cut short after census-takers were killed by mujahideen.
As rich countries collect and analyse data from as many objects and activities as possible—including thermostats, fitness trackers and location-based services such as Foursquare—a data divide has opened up. The lack of reliable data in poor countries thwarts both development and disaster-relief. When Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), a charity, moved into Liberia to combat Ebola earlier this year, maps of the capital, Monrovia, fell far short of what was needed to provide aid or track the disease’s spread. Major roads were marked, but not minor ones or individual buildings.
Poor data afflict even the highest-profile international development effort: the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The targets, which include ending extreme poverty, cutting infant mortality and getting all children into primary school, were set by UN members in 2000, to be achieved by 2015. But, according to a report by an independent UN advisory group published on November 6th, as the deadline approaches, the figures used to track progress are shaky. The availability of data on 55 core indicators for 157 countries has never exceeded 70%, it found (see chart)….
Some of the data gaps are now starting to be filled from non-government sources. A volunteer effort called Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) improves maps with information from locals and hosts “mapathons” to identify objects shown in satellite images. Spurred by pleas from those fighting Ebola, the group has intensified its efforts in Monrovia since August; most of the city’s roads and many buildings have now been filled in (see maps). Identifying individual buildings is essential, since in dense slums without formal roads they are the landmarks by which outbreaks can be tracked and assistance targeted.
On November 7th a group of charities including MSF, Red Cross and HOT unveiled MissingMaps.org, a joint initiative to produce free, detailed maps of cities across the developing world—before humanitarian crises erupt, not during them. The co-ordinated effort is needed, says Ivan Gayton of MSF: aid workers will not use a map with too little detail, and are unlikely, without a reason, to put work into improving a map they do not use. The hope is that the backing of large charities means the locals they work with will help.
In Kenya and Namibia mobile-phone operators have made call-data records available to researchers, who have used them to combat malaria. By comparing users’ movements with data on outbreaks, epidemiologists are better able to predict where the disease might spread. mTrac, a Ugandan programme that replaces paper reports from health workers with texts sent from their mobile phones, has made data on medical cases and supplies more complete and timely. The share of facilities that have run out of malaria treatments has fallen from 80% to 15% since it was introduced.
Private-sector data are also being used to spot trends before official sources become aware of them. Premise, a startup in Silicon Valley that compiles economics data in emerging markets, has found that as the number of cases of Ebola rose in Liberia, the price of staple foods soared: a health crisis risked becoming a hunger crisis. In recent weeks, as the number of new cases fell, prices did, too. The authorities already knew that travel restrictions and closed borders would push up food prices; they now have a way to measure and track price shifts as they happen….”
Stories of Innovative Democracy at Local Level
Special Issue of Field Actions Science Reports published in partnership with CIVICUS, coordinated by Dorothée Guénéheux, Clara Bosco, Agnès Chamayou and Henri Rouillé d’Orfeuil: “This special issue presents many and varied field actions, such as the promotion of the rights of young people, the resolution of the conflicts of agropastoral activities, or the process of participatory decisionmaking on community budgetary allocations, among many others. It addresses projects developed all over the world, on five continents, and covering both the northern and southern hemispheres. The legitimate initial queries and doubts that assailed those who started this publication as regards its feasibility, have been swept away by the enthusiasm and the large number of papers that have been sent in….”
Logged On: Smart Government Solutions from South Asia
Book by Zubair K. Bhatti, Jody Zall Kusek and Tony Verheijen: “Logged On looks at mobile and smart phone technology through the lens of good government management. How will developing governments deliver goods and services that citizens care about? How will government in these countries leapfrog over traditional public management reforms to help reach out to and collaborate directly with the citizen? This book provides example after example where this has happened and how mobile technology has helped provide solutions to old problems. Our astounding revelation that mobile technology is helping to fight corruption in Pakistan, improve health delivery in Bangladesh, provide access to government by the ordinary citizen in India, and help monitor elections in Afghanistan. If this Is possible in some place in poor South Asian countries considered the most poor in the world, then how can these examples be spread to further in these counties or in other countries? Logged on Government provides a look back on conventional solutions that have mostly not worked and why mobile solutions are taking hold. The book offers a model called Smart Proactive Government based on a Feedback model being used in Punjab, Pakistan. The book also offers five solutions that are present in every successful mobile and smart phone example that the authors reviewed. (Book PDF (20.18 MB) | View Chapters).”