Harnessing Mistrust for Civic Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ethan Zuckerman: “…One predictable consequence of mistrust in institutions is a decrease in participation. Fewer than 37% of eligible US voters participated in the 2014 Congressional election. Participation in European parliamentary and national elections across Europe is higher than the US’s dismal rates, but has steadily declined since 1979, with turnout for the 2014 European parliamentary elections dropping below 43%. It’s a mistake to blame low turnout on distracted or disinterested voters, when a better explanation exists: why vote if you don’t believe the US congress or European Parliament is capable of making meaningful change in the world?

In his 2012 book, “Twilight of the Elites”, Christopher Hayes suggests that the political tension of our time is not between left and right, but between institutionalists and insurrectionists. Institutionalists believe we can fix the world’s problems by strengthening and revitalizing the institutions we have. Insurrectionists believe we need to abandon these broken institutions we have and replace them with new, less corrupted ones, or with nothing at all. The institutionalists show up to vote in elections, but they’re being crowded out by the insurrectionists, who take to the streets to protest, or more worryingly, disengage entirely from civic life.

Conventional wisdom suggests that insurrectionists will grow up, stop protesting and start voting. But we may have reached a tipping point where the cultural zeitgeist favors insurrection. My students at MIT don’t want to work for banks, for Google or for universities – they want to build startups that disrupt banks, Google and universities.

The future of democracy depends on finding effective ways for people who mistrust institutions to make change in their communities, their nations and the world as a whole. The real danger is not that our broken institutions are toppled by a wave of digital disruption, but that a generation disengages from politics and civics as a whole.

It’s time to stop criticizing youth for their failure to vote and time to start celebrating the ways insurrectionists are actually trying to change the world. Those who mistrust institutions aren’t just ignoring them. Some are building new systems designed to make existing institutions obsolete. Others are becoming the fiercest and most engaged critics of of our institutions, while the most radical are building new systems that resist centralization and concentration of power.

Those outraged by government and corporate complicity in surveillance of the internet have the option of lobbying their governments to forbid these violations of privacy, or building and spreading tools that make it vastly harder for US and European governments to read our mail and track our online behavior. We need both better laws and better tools. But we must recognize that the programmers who build systems like Tor, PGP and Textsecure are engaged in civics as surely as anyone crafting a party’s political platform. The same goes for entrepreneurs building better electric cars, rather than fighting to legislate carbon taxes. As people lose faith in institutions, they seek change less through passing and enforcing laws, and more through building new technologies and businesses whose adoption has the same benefits as wisely crafted and enforced laws….(More)”

Weathernews thinks crowdsourcing is the future of weather

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Freedman at Mashable: “The weather forecast of the future will be crowdsourced, if one Japanese weather firm sees its vision fulfilled.

On Monday, Weathernews Inc. of Japan announced a partnership with the Chinese firm Moji to bring Weathernews’ technology to the latter company’s popular MoWeather app.

The benefit for Weathernews, in addition to more users and entry into the Chinese market, is access to more data that can then be turned into weather forecasts.

The company says that this additional user base, when added to its existing users, will make Weathernews “the largest crowdsourced weather service in the world,” with 420 million users across 175 countries.

 

…So far, though, mobile phones have not proven to be more reliable weather sensors than the network of thousands of far more expensive and specialized surface weather observation sites throughout the world, but crowdsourcing’s day in the sun may be close at hand. As Weathernews leaders were quick to point out to Mashable in an interview, the existing weather observing network on which most forecasts rely has significant drawbacks that makes crowdsourcing especially appealing outside the U.S.

For example, most surface weather stations are in wealthy nations, primarily in North America and Europe. There’s a giant forecasting blind spot over much of Africa, where many countries lack a national weather agency. However, these countries do have rapidly growing mobile phone networks that, if utilized in certain ways, could provide a way to fill in data gaps and make weather forecasts more accurate, too.

“At Weathernews, we have a core belief that more weather data is better,” said Weathernews managing director Tomohiro Ishibashi.

“So having access to the additional datasets from MoWeather’s vast user community allows us to provide more accurate and safer weather forecasting for all,” he said. “Our advanced algorithms analyze these new datasets and put them in our existing computer forecasting models.”

Weathernews is trying to use observations that most weather companies might regard as interesting but not worth the effort to tailor for computer modeling. For example, photos of clouds are a potential way to ground truth weather satellite imagery, Ishibashi told Mashable.

“For us the picture of the sky… has a lot of information,” he said. (The company’s website refers to such observations as “eye-servation.”)…

Compared to Weathernews’ ambitions, AccuWeather’s recent decision to incorporate crowdsourced data into its iOS app seems more traditional, like a TV weather forecaster adding a few new “weather watchers” to their station’s network during local television’s heyday in the 1980s and 90s.

Now, we’re all weather watchers….(More)”

Datafication and empowerment: How the open data movement re-articulates notions of democracy, participation, and journalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stefan Baack at Big Data and Society: “This article shows how activists in the open data movement re-articulate notions of democracy, participation, and journalism by applying practices and values from open source culture to the creation and use of data. Focusing on the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and drawing from a combination of interviews and content analysis, it argues that this process leads activists to develop new rationalities around datafication that can support the agency of datafied publics. Three modulations of open source are identified: First, by regarding data as a prerequisite for generating knowledge, activists transform the sharing of source code to include the sharing of raw data. Sharing raw data should break the interpretative monopoly of governments and would allow people to make their own interpretation of data about public issues. Second, activists connect this idea to an open and flexible form of representative democracy by applying the open source model of participation to political participation. Third, activists acknowledge that intermediaries are necessary to make raw data accessible to the public. This leads them to an interest in transforming journalism to become an intermediary in this sense. At the same time, they try to act as intermediaries themselves and develop civic technologies to put their ideas into practice. The article concludes with suggesting that the practices and ideas of open data activists are relevant because they illustrate the connection between datafication and open source culture and help to understand how datafication might support the agency of publics and actors outside big government and big business….(More)“

We are data: the future of machine intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times: “…But what if the rise of Artificial Intuition instead blossoms under the aegis of theology or political ideology? With politics we can see an interesting scenario developing in Europe, where Google is by far the dominant search engine. What is interesting there is that people are perfectly free to use Yahoo or Bing yet they choose to stick with Google and then they get worried about Google having too much power — which is an unusual relationship dynamic, like an old married couple. Maybe Google could be carved up into baby Googles? But no. How do you break apart a search engine? AT&T was broken into seven more or less regional entities in 1982 but you can’t really do that with a search engine. Germany gets gaming? France gets porn? Holland gets commerce? It’s not a pie that can be sliced.

The time to fix this data search inequity isn’t right now, either. The time to fix this problem was 20 years ago, and the only country that got it right was China, which now has its own search engine and social networking systems. But were the British or Spanish governments — or any other government — to say, “OK, we’re making our own proprietary national search engine”, that would somehow be far scarier than having a private company running things. (If you want paranoia, let your government control what you can and can’t access — which is what you basically have in China. Irony!)

The tendency in theocracies would almost invariably be one of intense censorship, extreme limitations of access, as well as machine intelligence endlessly scouring its system in search of apostasy and dissent. The Americans, on the other hand, are desperately trying to implement a two-tiered system to monetise information in the same way they’ve monetised medicine, agriculture, food and criminality. One almost gets misty-eyed looking at North Koreans who, if nothing else, have yet to have their neurons reconfigured, thus turning them into a nation of click junkies. But even if they did have an internet, it would have only one site to visit, and its name would be gloriousleader.nk.

. . .

To summarise. Everyone, basically, wants access to and control over what you will become, both as a physical and metadata entity. We are also on our way to a world of concrete walls surrounding any number of niche beliefs. On our journey, we get to watch machine intelligence become profoundly more intelligent while, as a society, we get to watch one labour category after another be systematically burped out of the labour pool. (Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.)…(More)”

Scientists Are Hoarding Data And It’s Ruining Medical Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Goldacre at Buzzfeed: “We like to imagine that science is a world of clean answers, with priestly personnel in white coats, emitting perfect outputs, from glass and metal buildings full of blinking lights.

The reality is a mess. A collection of papers published on Wednesday — on one of the most commonly used medical treatments in the world — show just how bad things have become. But they also give hope.

The papers are about deworming pills that kill parasites in the gut, at extremely low cost. In developing countries, battles over the usefulness of these drugs have become so contentious that some people call them “The Worm Wars.”…

This “deworm everybody” approach has been driven by a single, hugely influential trial published in 2004 by two economists, Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer. This trial, done in Kenya, found that deworming whole schools improved children’s health, school performance, and school attendance. What’s more, these benefits apparently extended to children in schools several miles away, even when those children didn’t get any deworming tablets (presumably, people assumed, by interrupting worm transmission from one child to the next).

A decade later, in 2013, these two economists did something that very few researchers have ever done. They handed over their entire dataset to independent researchers on the other side of the world, so that their analyses could be checked in public. What happened next has every right to kick through a revolution in science and medicine….

This kind of statistical replication is almost vanishingly rare. A recent study set out to find all well-documented cases in which the raw data from a randomized trial had been reanalysed. It found just 37, out of many thousands. What’s more, only five were conducted by entirely independent researchers, people not involved in the original trial.

These reanalyses were more than mere academic fun and games. The ultimate outcomes of the trials changed, with terrifying frequency: One-third of them were so different that the take-home message of the trial shifted.

This matters. Medical trials aren’t conducted out of an abstract philosophical interest, for the intellectual benefit of some rarefied class in ivory towers. Researchers do trials as a service, to find out what works, because they intend to act on the results. It matters that trials get an answer that is not just accurate, but also reliable.

So here we have an odd situation. Independent reanalysis can improve the results of clinical trials, and help us not go down blind alleys, or give the wrong treatment to the wrong people. It’s pretty cheap, compared to the phenomenal administrative cost of conducting a trial. And it spots problems at an alarmingly high rate.

And yet, this kind of independent check is almost never done. Why not? Partly, it’s resources. But more than that, when people do request raw data, all too often the original researchers duck, dive, or simply ignore requests….

Two years ago I published a book on problems in medicine. Front and center in this howl was “publication bias,” the problem of clinical trial results being routinely and legally withheld from doctors, researchers, and patients. The best available evidence — from dozens of studieschasing results for completed trials — shows that around half of all clinical trials fail to report their results. The same is true of industry trials, and academic trials. What’s more, trials with positive results are about twice as likely to post results, so we see a biased half of the literature.

This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. When half the evidence is withheld, doctors and patients cannot make informed decisions about which treatment is best. When I wrote about this, various people from the pharmaceutical industry cropped up to claim that the problem was all in the past. So I befriended some campaigners, we assembled a group of senior academics, and started the AllTrials.net campaign with one clear message: “All trials must be registered, with their full methods and results reported.”

Dozens of academic studies had been published on the issue, and that alone clearly wasn’t enough. So we started collecting signatures, and we now have more than 85,000 supporters. At the same time we sought out institutional support. Eighty patient groups signed up in the first month, with hundreds more since then. Some of the biggest research funders, and even government bodies, have now signed up.

This week we’re announcing support from a group of 85 pension funds and asset managers, representing more than 3.5 trillion euros in funds, who will be asking the pharma companies they invest in to make plans to ensure that all trials — past, present, and future — report their results properly. Next week, after two years of activity in Europe, we launch our campaign in the U.S….(More)”

From Governmental Open Data Toward Governmental Open Innovation (GOI)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Daniele Archibugi et al in The Handbook of Global Science, Technology, and Innovation: “Today, governments release governmental data that were previously hidden to the public. This democratization of governmental open data (OD) aims to increase transparency but also fuels innovation. Indeed, the release of governmental OD is a global trend, which has evolved into governmental open innovation (GOI). In GOI, governmental actors purposively manage the knowledge flows that span organizational boundaries and reveal innovation-related knowledge to the public with the aim to spur innovation for a higher economic and social welfare at regional, national, or global scale. GOI subsumes different revealing strategies, namely governmental OD, problem, and solution revealing. This chapter introduces the concept of GOI that has evolved from global OD efforts. It present a historical analysis of the emergence of GOI in four different continents, namely, Europe (UK and Denmark), North America (United States and Mexico), Australia, and China to highlight the emergence of GOI at a global scale….(More)”

Local Governments Need Financial Transparency Tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cities of the Future: “Comprehensive financial transparency — allowing anyone to look up the allocation of budgets, expenses by department, and even the ledger of each individual expense as it happens — can help local governments restore residents’ confidence, help manage the budget efficiently and make more informed decisions for new projects and money allocation.

A few weeks ago, we had municipal elections in Spain. Many local governments changed hands and the new administrations had to review the current budgets, see where money was being spent and, on occasion, discovered expenses they were not expecting.

As costs rise and cities find it more difficult to provide the same services without raising taxes, citizens among others are demanding full disclosure of income and expenses.

Tools such as OpenGov platform are helping cities accomplish that goal…Earlier this year the city of Beaufort (pop. 13,000), South Carolina’s second oldest city known for its historic charm and moss-laden oak trees, decided to implement OpenGov. It rolled out the platform to the public last February, becoming the first city in the State to provide the public with in-depth, comprehensive financial data (spanning five budget years).

The reception by the city council and residents was extremely positive. Residents can now look up where their tax money goes down to itemized expenses. They can also see up-to-date charts of every part of the budget, how it is being spent, and what remains to be used. City council members can monitor the administration’s performance and ask informed questions at town meetings about the budget use, right down to the smallest expenses….

Many cities are now implementing open data tools to share information on different aspects of city services, such as transit information, energy use, water management, etc. But those tools are difficult to use and do not provide comprehensive financial information about the use of public money. …(More)”

The digital revolution liberating Latin American people

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Luis Alberto Moreno in the Financial Times: “Imagine a place where citizens can deal with the state entirely online, where all health records are electronic and the wait for emergency care is just seven minutes. Singapore? Switzerland? Try Colima, Mexico.

Pessimists fear the digital revolution will only widen social and economic disparities in the developing world — particularly in Latin America, the world’s most unequal region. But Colima, though small and relatively prosperous, shows how some of the region’s governments are harnessing these tools to modernise services, improve quality of life and share the benefits of technology more equitably.

In the past 10 years, this state of about 600,000 people has transformed the way government works, going completely digital. Its citizens can carry out 62 procedures online, from applying for permits to filing crime reports. No internet at home? Colima offers hundreds of free WiFi hotspots.

Colombia and Peru are taking broadband to remote corners of their rugged territories. Bogotá has subsidised the ex­pansion of its fibre optic network, which now links virtually every town in the country. Peru is expanding a programme that aims to bring WiFi to schools, hospitals and other public buildings in each of its 25 regions. The Colombian plan, Vive Digital, fosters internet adoption among all its citizens. Taxes on computers, tablets and smartphones have been scrapped. Low-income families have been given vouchers to sign up for broadband. In five years, the percentage of households connected to the internet jumped from 16 per cent to 50 per cent. Among small businesses it soared from 7 per cent to 61 per cent .

Inexpensive devices and ubiquitous WiFi, however, do not guarantee widespread usage. Diego Molano Vega, an architect of Vive Digital, found that many programs designed for customers in developed countries were ill suited to most Colombians. “There are no poor people in Silicon Valley,” he says. Latin American governments should use their purchasing power to push for development of digital services easily adopted by their citizens and businesses. Chile is a leader: it has digitised hundreds of trámites — bureaucratic procedures involving endless forms and queues. In a 4,300km-longcountry of mountains, deserts and forests, this enables access to all sorts of services through the internet. Entrepreneurs can now register businesses online for free in a single day.

In Chile, entrepreneurs can now register new businesses online for free in a single day…

Technology can be harnessed to boost equity in education. Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state launched a free online service to prepare high school students for a tough national exam in which a good grade is a prerequisite for admission to federal universities. On average the results of the students who used the service were 31 per cent higher than those of their peers, prompting 10 other states to adopt the system.

Digital tools can also help raise competitiveness in business. Uruguay’s livestock information system keeps track of the country’s cattle. The publicly financed electronic registry ensures every beast can be traced, making it easier to monitor outbreaks of diseases….(More)”

 

The data or the hunch

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ian Leslie at Intelligent Life: “THE GIFT FOR talent-spotting is mysterious, highly prized and celebrated. We love to hear stories about the baseball coach who can spot the raw ability of an erratic young pitcher, the boss who sees potential in the guy in the post room, the director who picks a soloist out of the chorus line. Talent shows are a staple of the TV schedules. We like to believe that certain people—sometimes ourselves—can just sense when a person has something special. But there is another method of spotting talent which doesn’t rely on hunches. In place of intuition, it offers data and analysis. Rather than relying on the gut, it invites us to use our heads. It tends not to make for such romantic stories, but it is effective—which is why, despite our affection, the hunch is everywhere in retreat.

Strike one against the hunch was the publication of “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis (2003), which has attained the status of a management manual for many in sport and beyond. Lewis reported on a cash-strapped major-league baseball team, the Oakland A’s, who enjoyed unlikely success against bigger and better-funded competitors. Their secret sauce was data. Their general manager, Billy Beane, had realised that when it came to evaluating players, the gut instincts of experienced baseball scouts were unreliable, and he employed statisticians to identify talent overlooked by the big clubs…..

These days, when a football club is interested in a player, it considers the average distance he runs in a game, the number of passes and tackles or blocks he makes, his shots on goal, the ratio of goals to shots, and many other details nobody thought to measure a generation ago. Sport is far from the only industry in which talent-spotting is becoming a matter of measurement. Prithwijit Mukerji, a postgraduate at the University of Westminster in London, recently published a paper on the way the music industry is being transformed by “the Moneyball approach”. By harvesting data from Facebook and Twitter and music services like Spotify and Shazam, executives can track what we are listening to in far more detail than ever before, and use it as a guide to what we will listen to next….

This is the day of the analyst. In education, academics are working their way towards a reliable method of evaluating teachers, by running data on test scores of pupils, controlled for factors such as prior achievement and raw ability. The methodology is imperfect, but research suggests that it’s not as bad as just watching someone teach. A 2011 study led by Michael Strong at the University of California identified a group of teachers who had raised student achievement and a group who had not. They showed videos of the teachers’ lessons to observers and asked them to guess which were in which group. The judges tended to agree on who was effective and ineffective, but, 60% of the time, they were wrong. They would have been better off flipping a coin. This applies even to experts: the Gates Foundation funded a vast study of lesson observations, and found that the judgments of trained inspectors were highly inconsistent.

THE LAST STRONGHOLD of the hunch is the interview. Most employers and some universities use interviews when deciding whom to hire or admit. In a conventional, unstructured interview, the candidate spends half an hour or so in a conversation directed at the whim of the interviewer. If you’re the one deciding, this is a reassuring practice: you feel as if you get a richer impression of the person than from the bare facts on their résumé, and that this enables you to make a better decision. The first theory may be true; the second is not.

Decades of scientific evidence suggest that the interview is close to useless as a tool for predicting how someone will do a job. Study after study has found that organisations make better decisions when they go by objective data, like the candidate’s qualifications, track record and performance in tests. “The assumption is, ‘if I meet them, I’ll know’,” says Jason Dana, of Yale School of Management, one of many scholars who have looked into the interview’s effectiveness. “People are wildly over-confident in their ability to do this, from a short meeting.” When employers adopt a holistic approach, combining the data with hunches formed in interviews, they make worse decisions than they do going on facts alone….” (More)

Democratising the Data Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jonathan Gray at Open Knowledge: “What will the “data revolution” do? What will it be about? What will it count? What kinds of risks and harms might it bring? Whom and what will it serve? And who will get to decide?

Today we are launching a new discussion paper on “Democratising the Data Revolution”, which is intended to advance thinking and action around civil society engagement with the data revolution. It looks beyond the disclosure of existing information, towards more ambitious and substantive forms of democratic engagement with data infrastructures.1

It concludes with a series of questions about what practical steps institutions and civil society organisations might take to change what is measured and how, and how these measurements are put to work.

You can download the full PDF report here, or continue to read on in this blog post.

What Counts?

How might civil society actors shape the data revolution? In particular, how might they go beyond the question of what data is disclosed towards looking at what is measured in the first place? To kickstart discussion around this topic, we will look at three kinds of intervention: changing existing forms of measurement, advocating new forms of measurement and undertaking new forms of measurement.

Changing Existing Forms of Measurement

Rather than just focusing on the transparency, disclosure and openness of public information, civil society groups can argue for changing what is measured with existing data infrastructures. One example of this is recent campaigning around company ownership in the UK. Advocacy groups wanted to unpick networks of corporate ownership and control in order to support their campaigning and investigations around tax avoidance, tax evasion and illicit financial flows.

While the UK company register recorded information about “nominal ownership”, it did not include information about so-called “beneficial ownership”, or who ultimately benefits from the ownership and control of companies. Campaigners undertook an extensive programme of activities to advocate for changes and extensions to existing data infrastructures – including via legislation, software systems, and administrative protocols.2

Advocating New Forms of Measurement

As well as changing or recalibrating existing forms of measurement, campaigners and civil society organisations can make the case for the measurement of things which were not previously measured. For example, over the past several decades social and political campaigning has resulted in new indicators about many different issues – such as gender inequality, health, work, disability, pollution or education.3 In such cases activists aimed to establish a given indicator as important and relevant for public institutions, decision makers, and broader publics – in order to, for example, inform policy development or resource allocation.

Undertaking New Forms of Measurement

Historically, many civil society organisations and advocacy groups have collected their own data to make the case for action on issues that they work on – from human rights abuses to endangered species….(More)”