In Peru, trackable vultures are helping authorities find illegal garbage dumps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Peru’s black vultures are well known locally for their natural aptitude for garbage location. They don’t have to search too hard, since much of the garbage produced by the city of Lima is dumped illegally and ends up in the Pacific ocean. Now, the Ministry of the Environment has launched the Gallinazo Avisa campaign — meaning Vultures Warn — to clean up the city. It is using the vultures to its advantage, by fitting a flock of them with GoPros, which collect real-time GPS data, and enable the people to find the illegal dumps across the city.

The scheme is being run with the help of the Museum of Natural History and a local university, who had already tagged vultures to understand their seasonal movements. Each of the birds has been given a name and character, and their movements can be followed in real-time through an interactive map. Promotional videos have been created, which place the vultures in a filmic narrative as misunderstood heroes. Not only does the GPS data enable the location of garbage, the footage collected is also having a two-fold effect. First, it is educating the citizens about the repercussions of illegal dumping, and second, it is improving the reputation of the vultures by transforming them into allies of the people….(More)

vulturewarn-1-garbage-animal-bird-data-location

 

The Problem With Evidence-Based Policies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ricardo Hausmann at Project Syndicate: “Many organizations, from government agencies to philanthropic institutions and aid organizations, now require that programs and policies be “evidence-based.” It makes sense to demand that policies be based on evidence and that such evidence be as good as possible, within reasonable time and budgetary limits. But the way this approach is being implemented may be doing a lot of harm, impairing our ability to learn and improve on what we do.

The current so-called “gold standard” of what constitutes good evidence is the randomized control trial, or RCT, an idea that started in medicine two centuries ago, moved to agriculture, and became the rage in economics during the past two decades. Its popularity is based on the fact that it addresses key problems in statistical inference.

For example, rich people wear fancy clothes. Would distributing fancy clothes to poor people make them rich? This is a case where correlation (between clothes and wealth) does not imply causation.

Harvard graduates get great jobs. Is Harvard good at teaching – or just at selecting smart people who would have done well in life anyway? This is the problem of selection bias.

RCTs address these problems by randomly assigning those participating in the trial to receive either a “treatment” or a “placebo” (thereby creating a “control” group). By observing how the two groups differ after the intervention, the effectiveness of the treatment can be assessed. RCTs have been conducted on drugs, micro-loans, training programs, educational tools, and myriad other interventions….

In economics, RCTs have been all the rage, especially in the field of international development, despite critiques by the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton, Lant Pritchett, and Dani Rodrik, who have attacked the inflated claims of RCT’s proponents. One serious shortcoming is external validity. Lessons travel poorly: If an RCT finds out that giving micronutrients to children in Guatemala improves their learning, should you give micronutrients to Norwegian children?

My main problem with RCTs is that they make us think about interventions, policies, and organizations in the wrong way. As opposed to the two or three designs that get tested slowly by RCTs (like putting tablets or flipcharts in schools), most social interventions have millions of design possibilities and outcomes depend on complex combinations between them. This leads to what the complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman calls a “rugged fitness landscape.”

Getting the right combination of parameters is critical. This requires that organizations implement evolutionary strategies that are based on trying things out and learning quickly about performance through rapid feedback loops, as suggested by Matt Andrews, Lant Pritchett and Michael Woolcock at Harvard’s Center for International Development.

RCTs may be appropriate for clinical drug trials. But for a remarkably broad array of policy areas, the RCT movement has had an impact equivalent to putting auditors in charge of the R&D department. That is the wrong way to design things that work. Only by creating organizations that learn how to learn, as so-called lean manufacturing has done for industry, can we accelerate progress….(More)”

Global fact-checking up 50% in past year

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Stencel at Duke Reporters’ Lab: “The high volume of political truth-twisting is driving demand for political fact-checkers around the world, with the number of fact-checking sites up 50 percent since last year.

The Duke Reporters’ Lab annual census of international fact-checking currently counts 96 active projects in 37 countries. That’s up from 64 active fact-checkers in the 2015 count. (Map and List)

Active Fact-checkers 2016A bumper crop of new fact-checkers across the Western Hemisphere helped increase the ranks of journalists and government watchdogs who verify the accuracy of public statements and track political promises. The new sites include 14 in the United States, two in Canada as well as seven additional fact-checkers in Latin America.There also were new projects in 10 other countries, from North Africa to Central Europe to East Asia…..

The growing numbers have even spawned a new global association, the International Fact-Checking Network hosted by the Poynter Institute, a media training center in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Promises, Promises

Some of the growth has come in the form of promise-tracking. Since January 2015, fact-checkers launched six sites in five countries devoted to tracking the status of pledges candidates and party leaders made in political campaigns. In Tunisia, there are two new sites dedicated to promise-tracking — one devoted to the country’s president and the other to its prime minister.

There are another 20 active fact-checkers elsewhere that track promises,…

Nearly two-thirds of the active fact-checkers (61 of 96, or 64 percent) are directly affiliated with a new organization. However this breakdown reflects the dominant business structure in the United States, where 90 percent of fact-checkers are part of a news organization. That includes nine of 11 national projects and 28 of 30 state/local fact-checkers…The story is different outside the United States, where less than half of the active fact-checking projects (24 of 55, or 44 percent) are affiliated with news organizations.

The other fact-checkers are typically associated with non-governmental, non-profit and activist groups focused on civic engagement, government transparency and accountability. A handful are partisan, especially in conflict zones and in countries where the lines between independent media, activists and opposition parties are often blurry and where those groups are aligned against state-controlled media or other governmental and partisan entities….(More)“

A Gargantuan Challenge for The Megalopolis: Mexico City calls citizens to help map its complex public bus system

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Mexico City, the largest and oldest urban agglomeration in the American continent. The city is home to an incredible diversity of people and cultures, and its size and its diversity also poses certain challenges. In a city with such big scale (the metropolitan area measures 4,887 mi2) transportation is one of its main problems. Finding ways to improve how people move within requires imagination and cooperation from decision makers and society alike.

The scale and dynamism of Mexico City’s public transport system represents a challenge to generate quality information. Processes for the generation of mobility data are time-consuming and expensive. Given this scenario, the best alternative for the city is to include transport users in generating this information.

The megalopolis lacks an updated, open database of its more than 1,500 bus routes. To tackle this problem, Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Mexico City’s experimental office and creative think-tank, reporting to the Mayor) partnered with 12 organizations that include NGOs and  other government offices to develop Mapatón CDMX: a crowdsourcing and gamification experiment to map the city’s bus routes through civic collaboration and technology.

After one year of designing and testing a strategy, the team behind Mapatón CDMX is calling citizens to map the public transport system by participating on a city game from January 29th to February 14th 2016. The game’s goal is to map routes of licenced public transport (buses, minibuses and vans) from start to finish in order to score points, which is done through an app for Android devices that gathers GPS data from the user inside the bus.

The mappers will participate individually or in groups with friends and family for two weeks. As an incentive and once the mapping marathon is finished, those participants with higher scores will earn cash prizes and electronic devices. (A smart algorithm creates incentives to map the longest or most ignored routes, giving mappers extra points.) But what is most valuable: the data resulting will be openly available at the end of February 2016, much faster and cheaper than with traditional processes.

Mapatón CDMX is an innovative and effective way to generate updated and open information about transport routes as the game harnesses collective intelligence of the gargantuan city. Organisers consider that the open database may be used by anyone to create –for example– data driven policy, strategies for academic analysis, maps for users, applications, visualizations, among many other digital products….(More)”

Core Concepts: Computational social science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Mann at PNAS: “Cell phone tower data predicts which parts of London can expect a spike in crime (1). Google searches for polling place information on the day of an election reveal the consequences of different voter registration laws (2). Mathematical models explain how interactions among financial investors produce better yields, and even how they generate economic bubbles (3).

Figure

Using cell-phone and taxi GPS data, researchers classified people in San Francisco into “tribal networks,” clustering them according to their behavioral patterns. Student’s, tourists, and businesspeople all travel through the city in various ways, congregating and socializing in different neighborhoods. Image courtesy of Alex Pentland (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA).

Figure

Where people hail from in the Mexico City area, here indicated by different colors, feeds into a crime-prediction model devised by Alex Pentland and colleagues (6). Image courtesy of Alex Pentland (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA).

 These are just a few examples of how a suite of technologies is helping bring sociology, political science, and economics into the digital age. Such social science fields have historically relied on interviews and survey data, as well as censuses and other government databases, to answer important questions about human behavior. These tools often produce results based on individuals—showing, for example, that a wealthy, well-educated, white person is statistically more likely to vote (4)—but struggle to deal with complex situations involving the interactions of many different people.

 

A growing field called “computational social science” is now using digital tools to analyze the rich and interactive lives we lead. The discipline uses powerful computer simulations of networks, data collected from cell phones and online social networks, and online experiments involving hundreds of thousands of individuals to answer questions that were previously impossible to investigate. Humans are fundamentally social creatures and these new tools and huge datasets are giving social scientists insights into exactly how connections among people create societal trends or heretofore undetected patterns, related to everything from crime to economic fortunes to political persuasions. Although the field provides powerful ways to study the world, it’s an ongoing challenge to ensure that researchers collect and store the requisite information safely, and that they and others use that information ethically….(More)”

2015 Philip Meyer Award winners for data-driven investigation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

From IRE: “First Place: “Failure Factories” | Tampa Bay Times
Cara Fitzpatrick, Michael LaForgia, Lisa Gartner, Nathaniel Lash and Connie Humburg

The team used statistical analysis and linear regression of data from dozens of records requests to document how steady resegregation of Pinellas County schools left black children to fail at increasingly higher rates than anywhere else in Florida. The series focused on failures of school district officials to give the schools the support necessary for success. The judges praised the reporters for dogged work on a project that took 18 months to report and write, and noted that the results underscored what decades of sociological research has shown happens in racially segregated schools.

Second Place: “The Changing Face of America” | USA Today
Paul Overberg, Sarah Frostenson, Marisol Bello, Greg Toppo, and Jodi Upton 

The project was built around measurements across time of the racial and ethnic diversity of each of America’s more than 3,100 counties, going back to 1960 and projected ahead to 2060. The reporters used the results to reveal that high levels of diversity, once found only in a few Southern states and along the border with Mexico, had bloomed out into large areas of the upper Midwest and the Appalachians, for instance. Those results informed the assignments of reporters to find the local stories that illustrated those changes, with the results running in more than 100 Gannett papers and broadcast stations.

Third Place: “The Echo Chamber” | Thomson Reuters
Joan Biskupic, Janet Roberts and John Shiffman

The Reuters team analyzed the characteristics of more than 14,400 U.S. Supreme Court records from nine years worth of petitions seeking review by the Court. The analysis showed that 43% of cases eventually heard by the court came from a tiny pool of a few dozen lawyers who represent less than 1% of the more than 17,000 lawyers seeking such review. Further reporting showed that these elite lawyers, mostly representing large corporations, had strong personal connections with the justices, with about half of them having served as clerks to the justices….(More)”

Passive Philanthropy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PSFK: “What if you could cure cancer in your sleep? What if throwing out food meant feeding more people? What if helping coffee farmers in developing nations was as easy as a retweet? Today, businesses pay big money in order to reach the same audience as some viral tweets, and the same strategy is being applied to the reach and impact of social good campaigns. Nonprofits have also begun to leverage creative opportunities to spread awareness and raise funds to harness socially-aware citizens and rethink how social good is spread and executed. Take, for instance, an app that tracks exercise and donates to the charity of choice based on distance….

The DreamLab is a free app that turns smartphones into a research tool for cancer researchers in the Garvan Institute in Australia when their users are sleeping. Developed in conjunction with Vodaphone, the app uses the processing power of idle phones as an alternative to supercomputers which can be difficult to access. After downloading the app, participants simply open it and charge their phone. Once the phone reaches 95 percent charge, it gets to work, acting as a networked processor alongside other users with the app. Each phone solves a small piece of a larger puzzle and sends it back to Garvan.

If 1,000 people are using the app, cancer puzzles can be solved 30x faster.

As DreamLab researchers work toward finding a cure for cancer, Feeding Forward is working toward ending hunger. In America, hunger is not a problem of supply, but rather of distribution. Feeding Forward aims to solves this by connecting restaurants, grocery stores, caterers, or other businesses that are forced to throw away perishable food products with those in need.

Businesses simply need post their excess food on the platform and a driver will come pick it up to deliver to a food bank in need. Donors receive profiles of the people they helped and can also write off the donation as a charitable contribution for tax purposes. Since their launch in 2013, Feeding Forward has achieved a pick up rate of 99 percent, distributing 780,000 pounds of food saving business $3.9 million.

DreamLab and Feeding Forward are putting activities people are already going to do to use, while One Big Tweet harnesses the power of people’s social media accounts as a fundraising strategy. Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation are getting people to donate their Twitter followings for charity, asking people to sign up to post an automated tweet from a corporate sponsor who purchased the privilege at an auction for social good. The more people who donate their accounts, the higher the value of the tweet at auction. After four months, over 700 people with a collective reach of 3.2 mil followers, signed up to help make the One Big Tweet worth $49,000. While the charity is still in search of a buyer, Cafédirect promises the tweet that will be sent out through participants’ accounts will only happen once and be “safe enough for your Gran to read.” All money from the sale will go directly to continuing the work they do with coffee and tea farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America…(MoreMore)

Democracy Reinvented: Participatory Budgeting and Civic Innovation in America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Hollie Russon Gilman: “Democracy Reinvented is the first comprehensive academic treatment of participatory budgeting in the United States, situating it within a broader trend of civic technology and innovation. This global phenomenon, which has been called “revolutionary civics in action” by the New York Times, started in Brazil in 1989 but came to America only in 2009.  Participatory budgeting empowers citizens to identify community needs, work with elected officials to craft budget proposals, and vote on how to spend public funds.

Democracy Reinvented places participatory budgeting within the larger discussion of the health of U.S. democracy and focuses on the enabling political and institutional conditions.  Author and former White House policy adviser Hollie Russon Gilman presents theoretical insights, in-depth case studies, and interviews to offer a compelling alternative to the current citizen disaffection and mistrust of government. She offers policy recommendations on how to tap online tools and other technological and civic innovations to promote more inclusive governance.

While most literature tends to focus on institutional changes without solutions, this book suggests practical ways to empower citizens to become change agents. Democracy Reinvented also includes a discussion on the challenges and opportunities that come with using digital tools to re-engage citizens in governance….(More)”

What Citizens Can Teach Civil Servants About Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 and  in Governing: “An open government is one that is transparent, participatory and collaborative. But moving from traditional government operating behind closed doors to more open institutions, where civil servants work together with citizens to create policies and solve problems, demands new skills and sensibilities.

As more and more American public-sector leaders embrace the concept of openness as a positive force for governmental effectiveness, they would do well to look toward Brazil’s largest city, where an unusual experiment was just launched: an effort to use a variation on crowdsourcing to retrain Sao Paulo’s 150,000 civil servants. It’s described as the world’s largest open-government training program.

The program, known as Agents of Open Government – part of a wider city initiative called “Sao Paulo Aberta” (Open Sao Paulo) — aims to teach through peer-to-peer learning, where government employees learn from citizens. Twenty-four citizen-led courses that began last month are aimed not only at government employees and elected community representatives but also at social activists and the general population.

Sao Paolo is betting on the radical notion that learning can happen outside of formal civil-service training colleges. This initiative reflects a growing global trend toward recognizing that institutions can become smarter — more effective and efficient — by making use of the skills and experience of those outside of government.

Officials hope to have 25,000 participants over the course of the coming year. To encourage public employees’ participation, city workers who attend the courses gain credits in the municipal evaluation system that allow them to get pay raises….(More)”

To reduce economic inequality, do we need better democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Leighninger at Public Agenda: “When people have a say in the decisions that affect their lives, they will be better off economically as well as politically.

This idea has intrigued community development experts, foundation executives, public officials and academic researchers for many years. It has also animated some of the work people and governments are undertaking to address inequality, both in the United States and (especially) in the Global South.

But can a participatory democracy lead to greater economic opportunity? We are just beginning to amass evidence that this idea is true, understand how and why it works, and figure out how to make it happen better and faster.

Over the last two decades we have witnessed a quiet revolution in how governments and other institutions engage the public. Public officials, technologists, engagement practitioners, community organizers and other leaders have developed hundreds of projects, processes, tools and apps that boost engagement.

While they differ in many ways, these strategies and resources have one common thread: they treat citizens like adults rather than the clients (or children) of the state. They give people chances to connect, learn, deliberate, make recommendations, vote on budget or policy decisions, take action to solve public problems or all of the above. The principles behind these practices embody and enable greater political equality.

This wave of experimentation has produced inspiring outcomes in cities all over the world, but it has been particularly productive in Brazil and other parts of the Global South, where engagement has been built into the way that many cities operate. In these places, it is increasingly clear that when people have a legitimate voice in the institutions that govern their communities, and when they have support through various kinds of social and political networks, their economic fortunes improve.

The best-documented cases come from cities in Brazil, where Participatory Budgeting and other forms of engagement have been built into a much more robust “civic infrastructure” than we have in most American cities. In other words, people in these places have a wider variety of ways to participate on a broader range of issues and decisions. Their chances for engagement include online opportunities as well as face-to-face meetings. Many are social events as much as political ones: people participate because they get to see their neighbors and feel like they are part of a community, in addition to being able to weigh in on a public decision.

In these cities, the gap between rich and poor has narrowed, much more so than in similar cities without vibrant local democracies. In addition, governments are more likely to complete planned projects; public finances are better managed and less prone to corruption; people exhibit increased trust in public institutions and are more likely to pay their taxes; public expenditures are more likely to benefit low-income people; public health outcomes, such as the rate of infant mortality, have improved; and poverty has been reduced.

The connection between democratic innovation and greater economic equity raises many questions ripe for research:….(More)”