Book edited by Anna Visvizi, Miltiadis D. Lytras, and György Mudri: “Written by leading academics and practitioners in the field, Smart Villages in the EU and Beyond offers a detailed insight into issues and developments that shape the debate on smart villages, together with concepts, developments and policymaking initiatives including the EU Action for Smart Villages.This book derives from the realization that the implications of the increasing depopulation of rural areas across the EU is a pending disaster. This edited collection establishes a framework for action today, which will lead to sustainable revitalization of rural areas tomorrow.Using country-specific case studies, the chapters examine how integrated and ICT-conscious strategies and policy actions focused on wellbeing, sustainability and solidarity could provide a long-term solution in the revitalization of villages across the EU and elsewhere. Best practices pertinent to precision farming, energy diversification, tourism, entrepreneurship are discussed in detail.As an in-depth exploration of the Smart Village on a multinational scale, this book will serve as an indispensable resource for students, researchers and policy leaders in the fields of politics, strategic management and urban and rural studies….(More)”.
Re-Use Of Public Sector Open Data: Characterising The Phenomena
Paper by Josefin Lassinantti at the International Journal of Public Information Systems: “Despite the growing number of open data, re-use of this data is not reaching the expected levels and now this phenomenon seems hampered in its evolvement. Therefore, this study sets out to characterize the re-use of open data from public sector in order to increase our elaborate understanding of this practice, and does so by performing a literature review inspired by the processes for defining concepts, and contextualized within the historical evolvement of European open data policies. Apart from the identification of three main research approaches towards open data re-use and an elaborated definition of re-use, the findings led to the creation of a framework enabling us to see open data re-use as an iterative value-creating process in two different contexts, the public task context and the non-public task context. This process builds on three categories of meta-activities for reuse practice: 1) gaining access to and understanding data, 2) handling and re-purposing the data, and 3) creating broader value of data, as well as indications of value for whom. Lastly, implications of this re-use process and framework was discussed, along with implications of an identified practice-policy mismatch that risk hampering the future evolvement of open data re-use….(More)”.
Microsoft’s Open Notre Dame initiative calls for sharing of open data in restoration effort
Hamza Jawad at Neowin: “On April 15, a disastrous fire ravaged the famous Notre-Dame cathedral in France. In the wake of the episode, tech companies, such as Apple, announced that they would be donating to help in rebuilding efforts. On the other hand, some companies, like Ubisoft, took a different approach to support the restorations that followed.
A few days ago, Microsoft and Iconem announced the “Open Notre Dame” initiative to contribute towards the restoration of the ‘Lady of Paris’. The open data project is said to help gather and analyze existing documents on the monument, while simultaneously producing and sharing its 3D models. Today, the company has once again detailed the workings of this initiative, along with a call for the sharing of open data to help quicken the restoration efforts….
GitHub will host temporal models of the building, which can then be easily shared to and accessed by various other initiatives in a concerted effort to maintain accuracy as much as possible. Many companies, including Ubisoft, have already provided data that will help form the foundation for these open source models. More details regarding the project can be obtained on the original blog post….(More)”.
Data Protection and Digital Agency for Refugees
Paper by Dragana Kaurin: “For the millions of refugees fleeing conflict and persecution every year, access to information about their rights and control over their personal data are crucial for their ability to assess risk and navigate the asylum process. While asylum seekers are required to provide significant amounts of personal information on their journey to safety, they are rarely fully informed of their data rights by UN agencies or local border control and law enforcement staff tasked with obtaining and processing their personal information. Despite recent improvements in data protection mechanisms in the European Union, refugees’ informed consent for the collection and use of their personal data is rarely sought. Using examples drawn from interviews with refugees who have arrived in Europe since 2013, and an analysis of the impacts of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal on migration, this paper analyzes how the vast amount of data collected from refugees is gathered, stored and shared today, and considers the additional risks this collection process poses to an already vulnerable population navigating a perilous information-decision gap….(More)”.
Crowdsourcing Research Questions? Leveraging the Crowd’s Experiential Knowledge for Problem Finding
Paper by Tiare-Maria Brasseur, Susanne Beck, Henry Sauermann, Marion Poetz: “Recently, both researchers and policy makers have become increasingly interested in involving the general public (i.e., the crowd) in the discovery of new science-based knowledge. There has been a boom of citizen science/crowd science projects (e.g., Foldit or Galaxy Zoo) and global policy aspirations for greater public engagement in science (e.g., Horizon Europe). At the same time, however, there are also criticisms or doubts about this approach. Science is complex and laypeople often do not have the appropriate knowledge base for scientific judgments, so they rely on specialized experts (i.e., scientists) (Scharrer, Rupieper, Stadtler & Bromme, 2017). Given these two perspectives, there is no consensus on what the crowd can do and what only researchers should do in scientific processes yet (Franzoni & Sauermann, 2014). Previous research demonstrates that crowds can be efficiently and effectively used in late stages of the scientific research process (i.e., data collection and analysis). We are interested in finding out what crowds can actually contribute to research processes that goes beyond data collection and analysis. Specifically, this paper aims at providing first empirical insights on how to leverage not only the sheer number of crowd contributors, but also their diversity in experience for early phases of the research process (i.e., problem finding). In an online and field experiment, we develop and test suitable mechanisms for facilitating the transfer of the crowd’s experience into scientific research questions. In doing so, we address the following two research questions: 1. What factors influence crowd contributors’ ability to generate research questions? 2. How do research questions generated by crowd members differ from research questions generated by scientists in terms of quality? There are strong claims about the significant potential of people with experiential knowledge, i.e., sticky problem knowledge derived from one’s own practical experience and practices (Collins & Evans, 2002), to enhance the novelty and relevance of scientific research (e.g., Pols, 2014). Previous evidence that crowds with experiential knowledge (e.g., users in Poetz & Schreier, 2012) or ?outsiders?/nonobvious individuals (Jeppesen & Lakhani, 2010) can outperform experts under certain conditions by having novel perspectives, support the assumption that the participation of non-scientists (i.e., crowd members) in scientific problem-finding might complement scientists’ lack of experiential knowledge. Furthermore, by bringing in exactly these new perspectives, they might help overcome problems of fixation/inflexibility in cognitive-search processes among scientists (Acar & van den Ende, 2016). Thus, crowd members with (higher levels of) experiential knowledge are expected to be superior in identifying very novel and out-of-the-box research problems with high practical relevance, as compared to scientists. However, there are clear reasons to be skeptical: despite their advantage to possess important experiential knowledge, the crowd lacks the scientific knowledge we assume to be required to formulate meaningful research questions. To study exactly how the transfer of crowd members’ experiential knowledge into science can be facilitated, we conducted two experimental studies in context of traumatology (i.e., research on accidental injuries). First, we conducted a large-scale online experiment (N=704) in collaboration with an international crowdsourcing platform to test the effect of two facilitating treatments on crowd members’ ability to formulate real research questions (study 1). We used a 2 (structuring knowledge/no structuring knowledge) x 2 (science knowledge/no science knowledge) between-subject experimental design. Second, we tested the same treatments in the field (study 2), i.e., in a crowdsourcing project in collaboration with LBG Open Innovation in Science Center. We invited patients, care takers and medical professionals (e.g., surgeons, physical therapists or nurses) concerned with accidental injuries to submit research questions using a customized online platform (https://tell-us.online/) to investigate the causal relationship between our treatments and different types and levels of experiential knowledge (N=118). An international jury of experts (i.e., journal editors in the field of traumatology) then assesses the quality of submitted questions (from the online and field experiment) along several quality dimensions (i.e., clarity, novelty, scientific impact, practical impact, feasibility) in an online evaluation process. To assess the net effect of our treatments, we further include a random sample of research questions obtained from early-stage research papers (i.e., conference papers) into the expert evaluation (blind to the source) and compare them with the baseline groups of our experiments. We are currently finalizing the data collection…(More)”.
Living Labs As A Collaborative Framework For Changing Perceptions And Goals
Co-Val: “In the… ‘Report on cross-country comparison on existing innovation and living labs’, Lars Fuglsang and Anne Vorre Hansen from Roskilde University describe various applications of living labs to decision-making. The basic two examples are living labs as a collaborative framework for changing perceptions and goals and living labs as an ecosystem for policy innovation.
Living labs can involve a change in mindset and goals as expressed in one paper on public sector innovation labs (Carstensen & Bason, 2012). Carstensen and Bason (2012) report the important story of the Danish Mindlab (2002-2018) – a cross-governmental innovation lab involving public sector organisations, citizens and businesses in creating new solutions for society. They argue that innovation labs are designed to foster collaboration since labs are platforms where multiple stakeholders can engage in interaction, dialogue, and development activities. Innovation needs a different approach than everyday activities and a change in mindset and culture shift of employees towards thinking more systematically about innovation. Mindlab’s methodologies are anchored in design thinking, qualitative research and policy development, with the aim of capturing the subjective reality experienced by both citizens and businesses in the development of new solutions. Carstensen and Bason (2012) list the following key principles of Mindlab: take charge of on-going renewal, maintain top management backing, create professional empathy, insist on collaboration, do – don’t just think, recruit and develop likeable people, don’t be too big, communicate.
Also, Buhr et al. (2016) show how living labs can be important for developing and implementing collective goals and creating new opportunities for citizens to influence public affairs. They describe two cases in two suburban areas (located in Sweden and Finland), where the living lab approach was used to improve the feeling of belonging in a community. In one of the two suburbs studied, a living lab approach was used to change the lightning on a pathway that seemed unsafe; and in the other case, a living lab approach was used to strengthen the social community by renovating a kiosk and organizing varied activities for the citizens. Both living labs motivated the residents to work on societal goals for sustainability and choose solutions. The study indicates that a living lab approach can be used for gaining support for change and thereby increasing the citizens’ appreciation of a local area. Further, living labs may give citizens a feeling that they are being listened to. Living labs can thus create opportunities for citizens to develop the city together with municipal policy-makers and other stakeholders and enable policy-makers to respond to the expressed needs of the citizens….(More)”
Data Science for Local Government
Report by Jonathan Bright, Bharath Ganesh, Cathrine Seidelin and Thomas Vogl: “The Data Science for Local Government project was about understanding how the growth of ‘data science’ is changing the way that local government works in the UK. We define data science as a dual shift which involves both bringing in new decision making and analytical techniques to local government work (e.g. machine learning and predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and A/B testing) and also expanding the types of data local government makes use of (for example, by repurposing administrative data, harvesting social media data, or working with mobile phone companies). The emergence of data science is facilitated by the growing availability of free, open-source tools for both collecting data and performing analysis.
Based on extensive documentary review, a nationwide survey of local authorities, and in-depth interviews with over 30 practitioners, we have sought to produce a comprehensive guide to the different types of data science being undertaken in the UK, the types of opportunities and benefits created, and also some of the challenges and difficulties being encountered.
Our aim was to provide a basis for people working in local government to start on their own data science projects, both by providing a library of dozens of ideas which have been tried elsewhere and also by providing hints and tips for overcoming key problems and challenges….(More)”
The future of work? Work of the future!
European Commission: “While historical evidence suggests that previous waves of automation have been overwhelmingly positive for the economy and society, AI is in a different league, with the potential to be much more disruptive. It builds upon other digital technologies but also brings about and amplifies major socioeconomic changes of its own.
What do recent technological developments in AI and robotisation mean for the economy, businesses and jobs? Should we be worried or excited? Which jobs will be destroyed and which new ones created? What should education systems, businesses, governments and social partners do to manage the coming transition successfully?
These are some of the questions considered by Michel Servoz, Senior Adviser on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and the Future of Labour, in this in-depth study requested by European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker….(More)”.
Missing Numbers
Introduction by Anna Powell-Smith of a new “blog on the data the government should collect, but doesn’t”: “…Over time, I started to notice a pattern. Across lots of different policy areas, it was impossible for governments to make good decisions because of a basic lack of data. There was always critical data that the state either didn’t collect at all, or collected so badly that it made change impossible.
Eventually, I decided that the power to not collect data is one of the most important and little-understood sources of power that governments have. This is why I’m writing Missing Numbers: to encourage others to ask “is this lack of data a deliberate ploy to get away with something”?
By refusing to amass knowledge in the first place, decision-makers exert power over over the rest of us. It’s time that this power was revealed, so we can have better conversations about what we need to know to run this country successfully.
A typical example
The government records and publishes data on how often each NHS hospital receives formal complaints. This is very helpful, because it means patients and the people who care for them can spot hospitals whose performance is worrying.
But the government simply doesn’t record data, even internally, on how often formal complaints are made about each Jobcentre. (That FOI response is from 2015, but I’ve confirmed it’s still true in 2019.) So it is impossible for it to know if some Jobcentres are being seriously mismanaged….(More)”.
Belgium’s democratic experiment
David van Reybrouck in Politico: “Those looking for a solution to the wave of anger and distrust sweeping Western democracies should have a look at an experiment in European democracy taking place in a small region in eastern Belgium.
Starting in September, the parliament representing the German-speaking region of Belgium will hand some of its powers to a citizens’ assembly drafted by lot. It’ll be the first time a political institution creates a permanent structure to involve citizens in political decision making.
It’s a move Belgian media has rightly hailed as “historic.” I was in parliament the night MPs from all six parties moved past ideological differences to endorse the bill. It was a courageous move, a sign to other politicians — who tend to see their voters as a threat rather than a resource — that citizens should be trusted, not feared, or “spun.”
Nowhere else in the world will everyday citizens be so consistently involved in shaping the future of their community. In times of massive, widespread distrust of party politics, German-speaking Belgians will be empowered to put the issues they care about on the agenda, to discuss potential solutions, and to monitor the follow-up of their recommendations as they pass through parliament and government. Politicians, in turn, will be able to tap independent citizens’ panels to deliberate over thorny political issues.
This experiment is happening on a small scale: Belgium’s German-speaking community, the country’s third linguistic region, is the smallest federal entity in Europe. But its powers are comparable with those of Scotland or the German province of North Rhine-Westphalia, and the lessons of its experiment with a “people’s senate” will have implications for democrats across Europe….(More)”.