Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “We have become a nation of digital hoarders. We save everything, even stuff that we know, deep down, we’ll never need or be able to find. We save every e-mail, every photo, every file, every text message and every video clip. If we don’t have enough space on our mobile devices, we move it to a different storage device, maybe even a hard drive or a flash drive. Or, better yet, we just move it to “the cloud.”….
If this were simply a result of the exponential growth of information — the “information overload” — that would be one thing. That’s what technology is supposed to do for us – provide new ways of creating, storing and manipulating information. Innovation, from this perspective, can be viewed as technology’s frantic quest to keep up with society’s information needs.
But digital hoarding is about something much different – it’s about hoarding data for the sake of data. When Apple creates a new “Burst Mode” on the iPhone 5s, enabling you to rapidly save a series of up to 10 photos in succession – and you save all of them – is that not an example of hoarding? When you save every e-book, every movie and every TV season that you’ve “binge-watched” on your tablet or other digital device — isn’t that another symptom of being a digital hoarder? In the analog era, you would have donated used books to charity, hosted a garage sale to get rid of old albums you never listen to, or simply dumped these items in the trash.
You may not think you are a digital hoarder. You may think that the desire to save each and every photo, e-mail or file is something relatively harmless. Storage is cheap and abundant, right? You may watch a reality TV show such as “Hoarders” and think to yourself, “That’s not me.” But maybe it is you. (Especially if you still have those old episodes of “Hoarders” on your digital device.)
Unlike hoarding in the real world — where massive stacks of papers, books, clothing and assorted junk might physically obstruct your ability to move and signal to others that you need help – there are no obvious outward signs of being a digital hoarder. And, in fact, owning the newest, super-slim 128GB tablet capable of hoarding more information than anyone else strikes many as being progressive. However, if you are constantly increasing the size of your data plan or buying new digital devices with ever more storage capacity, you just might be a digital hoarder…
In short, innovation should be about helping us transform data into information. “Search” was perhaps the first major innovation that helped us transform data into information. The “cloud” is currently the innovation that has the potential to organize our data better and more efficiently, keeping it from clogging up our digital devices. The next big innovation may be “big data,” which claims that it can make sense of all the new data we’re creating. This may be either brilliant — helping us find the proverbial needle in the digital haystack — or disastrous — encouraging us to build bigger and bigger haystacks in the hope that there’s a needle in there somewhere… (More).”
Launching “Map the Banks” campaign to map the global financial industry
OpenCorporates: “Today, we are happy to announce the launch of our latest campaign: Map the Banks – possibly first ever global sprint to scrape a single class of data from every jurisdiction in the world. For this campaign, we are focussing on how the financial industry is licenced to operate.
The financial crisis cost the world 4 trillion dollars. Before we can disrupt the industry, we need to map it. The financial crisis revealed the damage done by our lack of understanding of the influence and size of banks and financial companies. We no longer want to be in the dark. Citizens and regulators have to take control back by having open and free access to this information. We are taking up the challenge of collecting every banking and financial licence in the world so we can work towards a better banking system, that works for the good of society. We’re joined in this mission by Civio, OpenNorth & many more… (Interested in being a partner? Email us!)
Collecting this data could answer questions like:
- Which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? Even with the small amount of data already collected, we know there are at least 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US.
- Which countries have the most financial services outsourced to them?
- What companies are licenced to operate in the largest number of countries worldwide?
- Which US bank has the most consumer credit licences in Asia?
- Which organisations appear to operate like financial services companies, yet aren’t regulated as such?
- Where are credit unions being dissolved or created the fastest?
HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities
Book by Todd Presner, David Shepard, Yoh Kawano: “The prefix “hyper” refers to multiplicity and abundance. More than a physical space, a hypercity is a real city overlaid with information networks that document the past, catalyze the present, and project future possibilities. Hypercities are always under construction.
Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano put digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—through social media mapping that incorporates data visualizations, photographic documents, and Twitter streams. A collaboratively authored and designed work, HyperCities includes a “ghost map” of downtown Los Angeles, polyvocal memory maps of LA’s historic Filipinotown, avatar-based explorations of ancient Rome, and hour-by-hour mappings of the Tehran election protests of 2009.
Not a book about maps in the literal sense, HyperCities describes thick mapping: the humanist project of participating and listening that transforms mapping into an ethical undertaking. Ultimately, the digital humanities do not consist merely of computer-based methods for analyzing information. They are a means of integrating scholarship with the world of lived experience, making sense of the past in the layered spaces of the present for the sake of the open future.”
Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano put digital humanities theory into practice to chart the proliferating cultural records of places around the world. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it explains the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—through social media mapping that incorporates data visualizations, photographic documents, and Twitter streams. A collaboratively authored and designed work, HyperCities includes a “ghost map” of downtown Los Angeles, polyvocal memory maps of LA’s historic Filipinotown, avatar-based explorations of ancient Rome, and hour-by-hour mappings of the Tehran election protests of 2009.
Not a book about maps in the literal sense, HyperCities describes thick mapping: the humanist project of participating and listening that transforms mapping into an ethical undertaking. Ultimately, the digital humanities do not consist merely of computer-based methods for analyzing information. They are a means of integrating scholarship with the world of lived experience, making sense of the past in the layered spaces of the present for the sake of the open future.”
The openness revolution
The Economist: “Business is being forced to open up in a host of reporting areas, from tax and government contracts to anti-corruption and sustainability programmes. Campaigners are cock-a-hoop, but continue to demand more. Executives are starting to ask whether the revolution is in danger of going too far.
Three forces are driving change. First, governments are demanding greater corporate accountability in the wake of the global financial crisis. No longer is ending corporate secrecy—the sharp end of which is money-laundering shell companies—an agenda pushed merely by Norway and a few others; it has become a priority for the G20. Second, investigative journalists have piled in. A recent example is the exposure by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists of sweetheart tax deals for multinationals in Luxembourg. The third factor is the growing sophistication of NGOs in this sphere, such as Transparency International (TI) and Global Witness. “Twenty years ago our work seemed an impossible dream. Now it’s coming true,” says Ben Elers of TI.
TI recently published its latest study on corporate reporting, which evaluated 124 big publicly listed companies, based on the clarity of their anti-corruption programmes, their corporate holdings and their financial reporting. Four-fifths of them scored less than five out of ten overall, but there were big regional disparities: seven of the ten most open firms were European; eight of the ten most clammed-up were Asian (see table)….“
The Global Open Data Index 2014
Open Knowledge Foundation: “The Global Open Data Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels.
The UK tops the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th .
Sierra Leone, Mali, Haiti and Guinea rank lowest of the countries assessed, but there are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society.
Overall, whilst there is meaningful improvement in the number of open datasets (from 87 to 105), the percentage of open datasets across all the surveyed countries remained low at only 11%.
Even amongst the leaders on open government data there is still room for improvement: the US and Germany, for example, do not provide a consolidated, open register of corporations. There was also a disappointing degree of openness around the details of government spending with most countries either failing to provide information at all or limiting the information available – only two countries out of 97 (the UK and Greece) got full marks here. This is noteworthy as in a period of sluggish growth and continuing austerity in many countries, giving citizens and businesses free and open access to this sort of data would seem to be an effective means of saving money and improving government efficiency.
Explore the Global Open Data Index 2014 for yourself!”
The UK tops the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th .
Sierra Leone, Mali, Haiti and Guinea rank lowest of the countries assessed, but there are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society.
Overall, whilst there is meaningful improvement in the number of open datasets (from 87 to 105), the percentage of open datasets across all the surveyed countries remained low at only 11%.
Even amongst the leaders on open government data there is still room for improvement: the US and Germany, for example, do not provide a consolidated, open register of corporations. There was also a disappointing degree of openness around the details of government spending with most countries either failing to provide information at all or limiting the information available – only two countries out of 97 (the UK and Greece) got full marks here. This is noteworthy as in a period of sluggish growth and continuing austerity in many countries, giving citizens and businesses free and open access to this sort of data would seem to be an effective means of saving money and improving government efficiency.
Explore the Global Open Data Index 2014 for yourself!”
Social innovation and the challenge of democracy in Europe
at Open Democracy: “What’s going on in Paris? This year over four thousand Parisians have been consulted on how to allocate twenty million Euros across fifteen projects that aim to improve the quality of life in the French capital.
Anne Hidalgo, who was elected as the Mayor of Paris in April 2014, has introduced a participatory budget process to give citizens an opportunity to decide on the allocation of five per cent of the capital’s investment budget. For the first time in France, a politician is giving citizens some degree of direct control over public expenditure—a sum amounting to 426 million Euros in total between 2014 and 2020.
This is an example of social innovation, but not the pseudo-revolutionary, growth-obsessed, blind-to-power variety that’s constantly hyped by management consultants and public policy think tanks. Instead, people are actively involved in planning their own shared future. They’re entrusted with the responsibility of devising ways to improve life in their communities. And the process is coherent with the purpose: everyone, not just the ‘experts,’ has an opportunity to have their say in an open and transparent online platform.
Participatory budgeting isn’t new, but this kind of public participation in processes of social innovation is a welcome and growing development across Europe. Public institutions need more participation from stakeholders and citizens to do their jobs. The political challenge of our time—the challenge of democracy in Europe—is how to channel people’s passion, expertise and resources into complex and long-term projects that improve collective life.
This challenge has motivated a group of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to join together in a project called INSITE (“Innovation, Sustainability and ICT).” INSITE is exploring the cascading dynamics of social innovation processes, and investigating how people can regain control over their results by freeing themselves from dependence on political intermediaries and experts.
INSITE started with the idea that societies’ love affair with innovation may be misplaced – at least with respect to the way that social innovation is currently conceived and organized. The lion’s share of attention goes to products that make a profit—not processes that enhance the collective good or transform systems, structures and values.
The hype around the “Innovation Society” also obscures the fact that innovation processes bring about cascades of changes that are unpredictable, and may produce toxic side-effects. Just think about the growth of new kinds of financial instruments which exploded in the sub-prime mortgage disaster, triggering the financial and economic crises that have dragged on since 2008. Market-driven cascades of innovation have also contributed to global warming and obesity epidemics in the industrialized world. Not everything that’s innovative is valuable or effective.
As presently constituted, neither governments nor markets are able to control these cascades of innovation. They lack the means and the intelligence to detect unintended consequences and encourage innovation processes to move in positive directions. So how can this ‘boat’ be steered through the ‘storm’ before it crashes on the ‘rocks?’
Since 2008, researchers from INSITE and elsewhere have been trying to address this question by refocusing innovation theory on social questions, power relations and democratic concerns. For INSITE, the “social” in “social innovation” isn’t simply a marker for a target group in society or the social intentions of innovators and entrepreneurs. It stands for something much deeper: giving power back to society to direct innovation processes towards greater prosperity for all. In this conception, social innovation challenges the foundations of the “Innovation Society’s” narrow ideology. It provides an alternative through which engaged citizens can mobilize to construct a socially sustainable future. …more.“
How to Fingerprint a City
at BigThink: “Thanks to Big Data, a new “Science of Cities” is emerging. Urban processes that until now could only be perceived subjectively can finally be quantified. Point in case: two French scientists have developed a mathematical formula to ‘fingerprint’ cities.
Take a good, close look at your fingertips. The pattern of grooves and ridges on your skin there [1] is yours alone. Equally unique is the warp and weft of urban road networks. No two cities’ street grids are exactly alike. Some are famously distinct. The forensic urbanist in all of us can probably recognise a blind map of New York, London and a few other global metropolises.
Rémi Louf and Marc Barthelemy examined the street patterns of 131 cities around the world. Not to learn them by heart and impress their fellow scientists at the Institut de Physique Théorique near Paris – although that would be a neat parlor trick. They wanted to see if it would be possible to classify them into distinct types. The title of their paper, A Typology of Street Patterns, is a bit of a giveaway: the answer is Yes.
Before we get to the How, let’s hear them explain the Why:
“[Street and road] networks can be thought as a simplified schematic view of cities, which captures a large part of their structure and organization and contain a large amount of information about underlying and universal mechanisms at play in their formation and evolution. Extracting common patterns between cities is a way towards the identification of these underlying mechanisms. At stake is the question of the processes behind the so-called ‘organic’ patterns – which grow in response to local constraints – and whether they are preferable to the planned patterns which are designed under large scale constraints”.
There have been attempts before to classify urban networks, but the results have always been colored by the subjectivity of what Louf and Barthelemy call the ‘Space Syntax Community’. That’s all changed now: Big Data – in this case, the mass digitization of street maps – makes it possible to extract common patterns from street grids in an objective manner, as dispassionately as the study of tree leaves according to their venation. …
Read their entire paper here.“
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….”
Bringing the data revolution to education, and education to the data revolution
Pauline Rose at Post2015.org: “Calls for a data revolution are putting the spotlight on the importance of more and better data as a means to hold policymakers to account for post-2015 goals. In many ways, education has been at the forefront of approaches to measuring progress over the past 15 years. The influence of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR) and the efforts of the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) in improving the availability of education data provide important lessons for tracking progress post-2015. This experience should play an important contribution to informing the practical next steps for the data revolution.
Building on this experience, a roundtable held at the Overseas Development Institute on 17 November brought together over 40 technical experts, who debated approaches to measuring progress towards post-2015 education targets, with a focus on learning and equity. The meeting coincided with the launch of consultation on post-2015 education indicators by the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to the EFA Steering Committee. As noted in the opening remarks on the data revolution by Neil Jackson, Chief Statistician at DFID, in many ways the education sector is leading the way in thinking about how to monitor post-2015 progress in concrete ways.
One of the problems that the GMR and UIS faced in tracking progress over the past 15 years was that indicators were not set at the time of deciding on education for all goals in 2000, hence the importance of the current consultation process. Another was that data have not been available a sufficiently disaggregated form to track progress on the most disadvantaged subgroups within each country, that is those most likely to be left behind. The GMR’s World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), drawing on internationally-comparable household survey data, has been one step forward in presenting data in an accessible format to show that the poorest children living in rural areas, and often girls, are still far from completing primary school in many countries, and that many are also not learning the basics in reading and mathematics even if they have spent time in school….”
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. “