Sarah Jackson at Culture 24: “With only limited funds and time, professional archaeologists consistently struggle to protect and interpret the UK’s vast array of archaeological finds and resources. Yet there are huge pools of amateur groups and volunteers who are not only passionate but also skilled and knowledgeable about archaeology in the UK.
Now a new web platform called MicroPasts has been produced in a collaboration between University College London (UCL) and the British Museum to connect institutions and volunteers so that they can create, fund and work on archaeological projects together.
Work by UCL postdoctoral researchers Chiara Bonacchi and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert and British Museum post doc researcher Jennifer Wexler established much of the ground work including the design, implementation and the public engagement aspects of the of the new site.
According to one of the project leaders, Professor Andrew Bevan at UCL, MicroPasts emerged from a desire to harness the expertise (and manpower) of volunteers and to “pull together crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding in a way that hadn’t been tried before”.
Although there are many crowd-sourcing portals online, they are either specific to one project (DigVentures, for example, which conducted the world’s first crowd-funded dig in 2012) or can be used to create almost anything you can imagine (such as Kickstarter).
MicroPasts was also inspired by Crowdcrafting, which encourages citizen science projects and, like MicroPasts, offers a platform for volunteers and researchers with an interest in a particular subject to come together to create and contribute to projects….(More)”
Making emotive games from open data
Katie Collins at WIRED: “Microsoft researcher Kati London’s aim is “to try to get people to think of data in terms of personalities, relationships and emotions”, she tells the audience at the Story Festival in London. Through Project Sentient Data, she uses her background in games development to create fun but meaningful experiences that bridge online interactions and things that are happening in the real world.
One such experience invited children to play against the real-time flow of London traffic through an online game called the Code of Everand. The aim was to test the road safety knowledge of 9-11 year olds and “make alertness something that kids valued”.
The core mechanic of the game was that of a normal world populated by little people, containing spirit channels that only kids could see and go through. Within these spirit channels, everything from lorries and cars from the streets became monsters. The children had to assess what kind of dangers the monsters posed and use their tools to dispel them.
“Games are great ways to blur and observe the ways people interact with real-world data,” says London.
In one of her earlier projects back in 2005, London used her knowledge of horticulture to bring artificial intelligence to plants. “Almost every workspace I go into has a half dead plant in it, so we gave plants the ability to tell us what they need.” It was, she says, an exercise in “humanising data” that led to further projects that saw her create self aware street signs and a dynamic city map that expressed shame neighbourhood by neighbourhood depending on the open dataset of public complaints in New York.
A further project turned complaint data into cartoons on Instagram every week. London praised the open data initiative in New York, but added that for people to access it, they had to know it existed and know where to find it. The cartoons were a “lightweight” form of “civic engagement” that helped to integrate hyperlocal issues into everyday conversation.
London also gamified community engagement through a project commissioned by the Knight Foundation called Macon Money….(More)”.
Data for good
NESTA: “This report explores how capturing, sharing and analysing data in new ways can transform how charities work and how social action happens.
Key Findings
- Citizens Advice (CAB) and Data Kind partnered to develop the Civic Dashboard. A tool which mines data from CAB consultations to understand emerging social issues in the UK.
- Shooting Star Chase volunteers streamlined the referral paths of how children come to be at the hospices saving up to £90,000 for children’s hospices around the country by refining the referral system.
- In a study of open grant funding data, NCVO identified 33,000 ‘below the radar organisations’ not currently registered in registers and databases on the third sector
- In their social media analysis of tweets related to the Somerset Floods, Demos found that 39,000 tweets were related to social action
New ways of capturing, sharing and analysing data have the potential to transform how community and voluntary sector organisations work and how social action happens. However, while analysing and using data is core to how some of the world’s fastest growing businesses understand their customers and develop new products and services, civil society organisations are still some way off from making the most of this potential.
Over the last 12 months Nesta has grant funded a number of research projects that explore two dimensions of how big and open data can be used for the common good. Firstly, how it can be used by charities to develop better products and services and secondly, how it can help those interested in civil society better understand social action and civil society activity.
- Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and Datakind, a global community of data scientists interested in how data can be used for a social purpose, were grant funded to explore how a datadriven approach to mining the rich data that CAB holds on social issues in the UK could be used to develop a real–time dashboard to identify emerging social issues. The project also explored how data–driven methods could better help other charities such as St Mungo’s and Buttle UK, and how data could be shared more effectively between charities as part of this process, to create collaborative data–driven projects.
- Five organisations (The RSA, Cardiff University, The Demos Centre for Analysis of Social Media, NCVO and European Alternatives) were grant funded to explore how data–driven methods, such as open data analysis and social media analysis, can help us understand informal social action, often referred to as ‘below the radar activity’ in new ways.
This paper is not the definitive story of the opportunities in using big and open data for the common good, but it can hopefully provide insight on what can be done and lessons for others interested in exploring the opportunities in these methods….(More).”
UNDP Eyes Ukraine’s Damaged Buildings With Crowdsourcing, Mobile App
Aida Akl at VOA TECHtonics: “The crisis that plunged east Ukraine into war in November 2013 has damaged or destroyed critical infrastructure and limited access to areas caught up in fighting between Ukraine’s government forces and pro-Russian rebels. In order to assess damage, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) turned to crowdsourcing to help restore social infrastructure as part of a United Nations, European Union and World Bank Recovery and Peacebuilding Assessment for Eastern Ukraine….
Using an interactive map, ReDonbass, and a mobile app (Android and iOS), people of Donetsk and Lugansk regions can report damaged homes, hospitals, schools, kindergartens or libraries.
The easy-to-use interactive tool allows any person with a mobile phone and access to the Internet to download the most accurate data about the building in its location, photographs of the damage, and the status of the recovery phase. After that, the Ukrainian government and international donors will use the data to better plan reconstruction.
Information from the map will contribute to an ongoing Recovery and Peacebuilding Assessment for Eastern Ukraine. UNDP is part of the assessment that brings the United Nations, the European Union and the World Bank Group together to analyze the impact of the conflict and offer recommendations for short-term recovery and peacebuilding over the next two years….The map has also proven to be very useful for the experts from the Ukrainian Government and a recently launched UNDP-Government of Japan project aiming to restore critical infrastructure for social care and services. They [are] using it to identify schools, orphanages, elderly homes, and social services centers that need to be restored and rebuilt first….(More)”.
Nudge Concept App Hopes To Point Pre-Diabetics Toward A Healthier Lifestyle
Addy Dugdale at FastCompany: “A new concept app from the London office of design and innovation consultancy Smart Design aims to improve the health of a large portion of the world’s population, a segment for whom weight loss can be a matter of life and death: diabetics.
Nudge is a concept app aimed at pre-diabetics—people with a high risk of developing type 2 diabetes—to change their eating habits. Described as a “personal nutritionist disguised as a shopping assistant,” the app keeps track of a user’s weekly grocery shopping using a phone’s camera to scan products on store shelves. The app looks for purchasing patterns that can be improved, and suggests healthy alternatives—like substituting red rice for white rice, or maybe even quinoa—to nudge the individual toward making better decisions. The idea is to help pre-diabetics make small, incremental changes.
…(More)”
One State Wants To Let You Carry Your Driver’s License On Your Phone
Tarun Wadhwa at Singularity Hub: “There’s now a technology to replace almost everything in your wallet. Your cash, credit cards, and loyalty programs are all on their way to becoming obsolete. Money can now be sent via app, text, e-mail — it can even be sent via Snapchat. But you can’t leave your wallet home just yet. That’s because there is one item that remains largely unchanged: your driver’s license.
If the Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles has its way, that may no longer be the case. According to an article in the Des Moines Register, the agency is in the early stages of developing mobile software for just this purpose. The app would store a resident’s personal information, whatever is already on the physical licenses, and also include a scannable bar code. The plans are for the app to include a two-step verification process including some type of biometric or pin code. At this time, it appears that specific implementation details are still being worked out.
The governments of the United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates had both previously announced their own attempts to experiment with the concept. It’s becoming increasingly common to see mobile versions of other documents. Over 30 states now allow motorists to show electronic proof of insurance. It only follows that the driver’s license would be next. But the considerations around that document are different — it is perhaps the most regulated and important document that a person carries….(More)”
The Tricky Task of Rating Neighborhoods on 'Livability'
Tanvi Misra at CityLab: “Jokubas Neciunas was looking to buy an apartment almost two years back in Vilnius, Lithuania. He consulted real estate platforms and government data to help him decide the best option for him. In the process, he realized that there was a lot of information out there, but no one was really using it very well.
Fast-forward two years, and Neciunas and his colleagues have created PlaceILive.com—a start-up trying to leverage open data from cities and information from social media to create a holistic, accessible tool that measures the “livability” of any apartment or house in a city.
“Smart cities are the ones that have smart citizens,” says PlaceILive co-founder Sarunas Legeckas.
The team recognizes that foraging for relevant information in the trenches of open data might not be for everyone. So they tried to “spice it up” by creating a visually appealing, user-friendly portal for people looking for a new home to buy or rent. The creators hope PlaceILive becomes a one-stop platform where people find ratings on every quality-of-life metric important to them before their housing hunt begins.
In its beta form, the site features five cities—New York, Chicago, San Francisco, London and Berlin. Once you click on the New York portal, for instance, you can search for the place you want to know about by borough, zip code, or address. I pulled up Brooklyn….The index is calculated using a variety of public information sources (from transit agencies, police departments, and the Census, for instance) as well as other available data (from the likes of Google, Socrata, and Foursquare)….(More)”
Small Pieces Loosely Joined: How smarter use of technology and data can deliver real reform of local government
Policy Exchange (UK): “Local authorities could save up to £10billion by 2020 through smarter and more collaborative use of technology and data.
Small Pieces Loosely Joined highlights how every year councils lose more than £1 billion by failing to identify where fraud has taken place. The paper also sheds light on how a lack of data sharing and collaboration between many local authorities, as well as the use of bespoke IT systems, keeps the cost of providing public services unsustainably high.
The report sets out three ways in which local authorities could not only save billions of pounds, but also provide better, more coordinated public services:
- Using data to predict and prevent fraud. Each year councils lose in excess of £1.3 billion through Council Tax fraud, benefit fraud and housing tenancy fraud (such as illegal subletting). By collecting and analysing data from numerous different sources, it is possible to predict where future violations are most likely to occur and direct investigative teams to respond to them first.
- Sharing data between neighbouring councils. Sharing data would reveal where it might be beneficial for two or more neighbouring LAs to merge one or more services. For example, if one council spends £5m each year on combating a particular issue, such as investigating food safety violations, fly-tipping or pest control, it may be more cost-effective to hire the services of a neighbouring council that has a far greater incidence of that same issue.
- Phasing out costly bespoke IT systems. Rather than each LA independently designing or commissioning its own apps and online services (such as paying for council tax or reporting noisy neighbours), an ‘app store’ should be created where individuals, businesses or other organisations can bid to provide them. The services created could then be used by dozens – or even hundreds – of LAs, creating economies of scale that bring down prices for all.
Since 2008, councils have shouldered the largest spending cuts of any part of the public sector – despite providing 80% of local public services – and face a funding shortfall of £12.4 billion by 2020. Some are doing admirably well under this extreme financial pressure, developing innovative schemes using data to ensure that they scale back spending but continue to provide vital public services. For example, Leeds, Yorkshire and Humber are developing a shared platform for digital services needed by all three councils. Similarly, a collaboration of public sector organisations in and around Hampshire and the Isle of Wight is developing ways of sharing data and helping neighbouring councils to share content and data through the Hampshire Hub.
FULL Report“
Data Mining Reveals a Global Link Between Corruption and Wealth
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Social scientists have never understood why some countries are more corrupt than others. But the first study that links corruption with wealth could help change that…One question that social scientists and economists have long puzzled over is how corruption arises in different cultures and why it is more prevalent in some countries than others. But it has always been difficult to find correlations between corruption and other measures of economic or social activity.
Michal Paulus and Ladislav Kristoufek at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, have for the first time found a correlation between the perception of corruption in different countries and their economic development.
The data they use comes from Transparency International, a nonprofit campaigning organisation based in Berlin, Germany, and which defines corruption as the misuse of public power for private benefit. Each year, this organization publishes a global list of countries ranked according to their perceived levels of corruption. The list is compiled using at least three sources of information but does not directly measure corruption, because of the difficulties in gathering such data.
Instead, it gathers information from a wide range of sources such as the African Development Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit. But it also places significant weight on the opinions of experts who are asked to assess corruption levels.
The result is the Corruption Perceptions Index ranking countries between 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). In 2014, Denmark occupied of the top spot as the world’s least corrupt nation while Somalia and North Korea prop up the table in an unenviable tie for the most corrupt countries on the planet.
Paulus and Kristoufek use this data to search for find clusters of countries that share similar properties using a new generation of cluster-searching algorithms. And they say that the 134 countries they study fall neatly into four groups which are clearly correlated with the wealth of the nations within them….Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1502.00104 Worldwide Clustering Of The Corruption Perception”
2015 Edelman Trust Barometer
“The 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer shows a global decline in trust over the last year, and the number of countries with trusted institutions has fallen to an all-time low among the informed public.
Among the general population, the trust deficit is even more pronounced, with nearly two-thirds of countries falling into the distruster category.
In the last year, trust has declined for three of the four institutions measured. NGOs continue to be the most trusted institution, but trust in NGOs declined from 66 to 63 percent. Sixty percent of countries now distrust media. Trust in government increased slightly, driven by big gains in India, Russia and Indonesia but government is still distrusted in 19 of the 27 markets surveyed. And trust in business is below 50 percent in half of those markets.
In the last year, trust has declined for three of the four institutions measured. NGOs continue to be the most trusted institution, but trust in NGOs declined from 66 to 63 percent. Sixty percent of countries now distrust media. Trust in government increased slightly, driven by big gains in India, Russia and Indonesia but government is still distrusted in 19 of the 27 markets surveyed. And trust in business is below 50 percent in half of those markets.