New book edited by Rob Reich, Chiara Cordelli, and Lucy Bernholz: “Philanthropy is everywhere. In 2013, in the United States alone, some $330 billion was recorded in giving, from large donations by the wealthy all the way down to informal giving circles. We tend to think of philanthropy as unequivocally good, but as the contributors to this book show, philanthropy is also an exercise of power. And like all forms of power, especially in a democratic society, it deserves scrutiny. Yet it rarely has been given serious attention. This book fills that gap, bringing together expert philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, historians, and legal scholars to ask fundamental and pressing questions about philanthropy’s role in democratic societies.
The contributors balance empirical and normative approaches, exploring both the roles philanthropy has actually played in societies and the roles it should play. They ask a multitude of questions: When is philanthropy good or bad for democracy? How does, and should, philanthropic power interact with expectations of equal citizenship and democratic political voice? What makes the exercise of philanthropic power legitimate? What forms of private activity in the public interest should democracy promote, and what forms should it resist? Examining these and many other topics, the contributors offer a vital assessment of philanthropy at a time when its power to affect public outcomes has never been greater…(More)”
Bringing together the United States of data
“The U.S. Data Federation will support government-wide data standardization and data federation initiatives across both Federal agencies and local governments. This is intended to be a fundamental coordinating mechanism for a more open and interconnected digital government by profiling and supporting use-cases that demonstrate unified and coherent data architectures across disparate government agencies. These examples will highlight emerging data standards and API initiatives across all levels of government, convey the level of maturity for each effort, and facilitate greater participation by government agencies. Initiatives that may be profiled within the U.S. Data Federation include Open311, DOT’s National Transit Map, the Project Open Data metadata schema, Contact USA, and the Police Data Initiative. As part of the U.S. Data Federation, GSA will also pilot the development of reusable components needed for a successful data federation strategy including schema documentation tools, schema validation tools, and automated data aggregation and normalization capabilities. The U.S. Data Federation will provide more sophisticated and seamless opportunities on the foundation of U.S. open data initiatives by allowing the public to more easily do comparative data analysis across government bodies and create applications that work across multiple government agencies….(More)”
The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-first Century
Book by Ryan Avent: “None of us has ever lived through a genuine industrial revolution. Until now.
Digital technology is transforming every corner of the economy, fundamentally altering the way things are done, who does them, and what they earn for their efforts. In The Wealth of Humans, Economist editor Ryan Avent brings up-to-the-minute research and reporting to bear on the major economic question of our time: can the modern world manage technological changes every bit as disruptive as those that shook the socioeconomic landscape of the 19th century?
Traveling from Shenzhen, to Gothenburg, to Mumbai, to Silicon Valley, Avent investigates the meaning of work in the twenty-first century: how technology is upending time-tested business models and thrusting workers of all kinds into a world wholly unlike that of a generation ago. It’s a world in which the relationships between capital and labor and between rich and poor have been overturned.
Past revolutions required rewriting the social contract: this one is unlikely to demand anything less. Avent looks to the history of the Industrial Revolution and the work of numerous experts for lessons in reordering society. The future needn’t be bleak, but as The Wealth of Humans explains, we can’t expect to restructure the world without a wrenching rethinking of what an economy should be….(More)”
Crowdsourcing at Statistics Canada
Pilot project by Statistics Canada: “Our crowdsourcing pilot project will focus on mapping buildings across Canada.
If you live in Ottawa or Gatineau, you can be among the first to collaborate with us. If you live elsewhere, stay in touch! Your town or city could be next. We are very excited to work with communities across the country on this project.
As a project contributor, you can help create a free and open source of information on commercial, industrial, government and other buildings in Canada. We need your support to close this important data gap! Your work will improve your community’s knowledge of its buildings, and in turn inform policies and programs designed to help you.
An eye on the future
There are currently no accurate national-level statistics on buildings— and their attributes—that can be used to compare specific local areas. The information you submit will help to fill existing data gaps and provide new analytical opportunities that are important to data users.
This project will also teach us about the possibilities and limitations of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing data collection may become a way for Statistics Canada and other organizations around the world to collect much-needed information by reaching out to citizens.
What you can do
Using your knowledge of your neighbourhood, along with an online mapping tool called OpenStreetMap, you and other members of the public will be able to input the location, physical attributes and other features of buildings.
It all starts with you, on October 17, 2016
We will officially launch the crowdsourcing campaign for the pilot on October 17, 2016 and will provide further instructions and links to resources.
To subscribe to a distribution list for periodic updates on the project, send us an email at statcan.crowdsource.statcan@canada.ca. We will keep you posted!….(More)”
How Technology is Crowd-Sourcing the Fight Against Hunger
Beth Noveck at Media Planet: “There is more than enough food produced to feed everyone alive today. Yet access to nutritious food is a challenge everywhere and depends on getting every citizen involved, not just large organizations. Technology is helping to democratize and distribute the job of tackling the problem of hunger in America and around the world.
Real-time research
One of the hardest problems is the difficulty of gaining real-time insight into food prices and shortages. Enter technology. We no longer have to rely on professional inspectors slowly collecting information face-to-face. The UN World Food Programme, which provides food assistance to 80 million people each year, together with Nielsen is conducting mobile phone surveys in 15 countries (with plans to expand to 30), asking people by voice and text about what they are eating. Formerly blank maps are now filled in with information provided quickly and directly by the most affected people, making it easy to prioritize the allocation of resources.
Technology helps the information flow in both directions, enabling those in need to reach out, but also to become more effective at helping themselves. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture, in collaboration with Reuters Market Light, provides information services in nine Indian languages to 1.4 million registered farmers in 50,000 villages across 17 Indian states via text and voice messages.
“In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure…”
Data to the people
New open data laws and policies that encourage more transparent publication of public information complement data collection and dissemination technologies such as phones and tablets. About 70 countries and hundreds of regions and cities have adopted open data policies, which guarantee that the information these public institutions collect be available for free use by the public. As a result, there are millions of open datasets now online on websites such as the Humanitarian Data Exchange, which hosts 4,000 datasets such as country-by-country stats on food prices and undernourishment around the world.
Companies are compiling and sharing data to combat food insecurity, too. Anyone can dig into the data on the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition platform, a data collaborative where 300 private and public partners are sharing information.
Importantly, this vast quantity of open data is available to anyone, not only to governments. As a result, large and small entrepreneurs are able to create new apps and programs to combat food insecurity, such as Plantwise, which uses government data to offer a knowledge bank and run “plant clinics” that help farmers lose less of what they grow to pests. Google uses open government data to show people the location of farmers markets near their homes.
Students, too, can learn to play a role. For the second summer in a row, the Governance Lab at New York University, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), mounted a two-week open data summer camp for 40 middle and high school students. The next generation of problem solvers is learning new data science skills by working on food safety and other projects using USDA open data.
Enhancing connection
Ultimately, technology enables greater communication and collaboration among the public, social service organizations, restaurants, farmers and other food producers who must work together to avoid food crises. The European Food Safety Authority in Italy has begun exploring how to use internet-based collaboration (often called citizen science or crowdsourcing) to get more people involved in food and feed risk assessment.
In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure, according to the Rockefeller Foundation. Copia, a San Francisco based smartphone app facilitates donations and deliveries of those with excess food in six cities in the Bay Area. Zero Percent in Chicago similarly attacks the distribution problem by connecting restaurants to charities to donate their excess food. Full Harvest is a tech platform that facilitates the selling of surplus produce that otherwise would not have a market.
Mobilizing the world
Prize-backed challenges create the incentives for more people to collaborate online and get involved in the fight against hunger….(More)”
Beware of the gaps in Big Data
Edd Gent at E&T: “When the municipal authority in charge of Boston, Massachusetts, was looking for a smarter way to find which roads it needed to repair, it hit on the idea of crowdsourcing the data. The authority released a mobile app called Street Bump in 2011 that employed an elegantly simple idea: use a smartphone’s accelerometer to detect jolts as cars go over potholes and look up the location using the Global Positioning System. But the approach ran into a pothole of its own.The system reported a disproportionate number of potholes in wealthier neighbourhoods. It turned out it was oversampling the younger, more affluent citizens who were digitally clued up enough to download and use the app in the first place. The city reacted quickly, but the incident shows how easy it is to develop a system that can handle large quantities of data but which, through its own design, is still unlikely to have enough data to work as planned.
As we entrust more of our lives to big data analytics, automation problems like this could become increasingly common, with their errors difficult to spot after the fact. Systems that ‘feel like they work’ are where the trouble starts.
Harvard University professor Gary King, who is also founder of social media analytics company Crimson Hexagon, recalls a project that used social media to predict unemployment. The model was built by correlating US unemployment figures with the frequency that people used words like ‘jobs’, ‘unemployment’ and ‘classifieds’. A sudden spike convinced researchers they had predicted a big rise in joblessness, but it turned out Steve Jobs had died and their model was simply picking up posts with his name. “This was an example of really bad analytics and it’s even worse because it’s the kind of thing that feels like it should work and does work a little bit,” says King.
Big data can shed light on areas with historic information deficits, and systems that seem to automatically highlight the best course of action can be seductive for executives and officials. “In the vacuum of no decision any decision is attractive,” says Jim Adler, head of data at Toyota Research Institute in Palo Alto. “Policymakers will say, ‘there’s a decision here let’s take it’, without really looking at what led to it. Was the data trustworthy, clean?”…(More)”
Data and Analytics Innovation
GAO report from the Data and Analytics Innovation Forum Convened by the Comptroller General of the United States: “….discussions considered the implications of new data-related technologies and developments that are revolutionizing the basic three-step innovation process in the figure below. As massive amounts of varied data become available in many fields, data generation (step 1 in the process) is transformed. Continuing technological advances are bringing more powerful analytics and changing analysis possibilities (step 2 in the process). And approaches to new decision making include intelligent machines that may, for example, guide human decision makers. Additionally, data may be automatically generated on actions taken in response to data analytic results, creating an evaluative feedback loop.
Forum participants:
• saw the newly revolutionized and still-evolving process of data and analytics innovation (DAI) as generating far-reaching new economic opportunities, including a new Industrial Revolution based on combining data-transmitting cyber systems and physical systems, resulting in cyber-physical systems—which have alternatively been termed the Industrial Internet, also the Internet of Things;
• warned of an ongoing and potentially widening mismatch between the kinds of jobs that are or will be available and the skill levels of the U.S. labor force;
• identified beneficial DAI impacts that could help efforts to reach key societal goals—through defining DAI pathways to greater efficiency and effectiveness—in areas such as
• saw the newly revolutionized and still-evolving process of data and analytics innovation (DAI) as generating far-reaching new economic opportunities, including a new Industrial Revolution based on combining data-transmitting cyber systems and physical systems, resulting in cyber-physical systems—which have alternatively been termed the Industrial Internet, also the Internet of Things;
• warned of an ongoing and potentially widening mismatch between the kinds of jobs that are or will be available and the skill levels of the U.S. labor force; • identified beneficial DAI impacts that could help efforts to reach key societal goals—through defining DAI pathways to greater efficiency and effectiveness—in areas such as
• identified beneficial DAI impacts that could help efforts to reach key societal goals—through defining DAI pathways to greater efficiency and effectiveness—in areas such as health care, transportation, financial markets, and “smart cities,” among others; and
• outlined areas of data-privacy concern, including for example, possible threats to personal autonomy, which could occur as data on individual persons are collected and used without their knowledge or against their will.
The overall goal of the forum’s discussions and of this report is to help lay the groundwork for future efforts to maximize DAI benefits and minimize potential drawbacks. As such, the forum was not directed toward identifying a specific set of policies relevant to DAI. However, participants suggested that efforts to help realize the promise of DAI opportunities would be directed toward improving data access, assessing the validity of new data and models, creating a welcoming DAI ecosystem, and more generally, raising awareness of DAI’s potential among both policymakers and the general public. Participants also noted a likely need for higher U.S. educational achievement and a measured approach to privacy issues that recognizes both their import and their complexity….(More)”
The government technology pitch
Luke Fretwell at TechCrunch: “Crisis has a history of dictating government technology disruption. We’ve seen this with the anticipation of Soviet Union aerospace and military dominance that sparked the emergence of DARPA, as well as with the response to 9/11 and subsequent establishment of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
And, of course, there’s the ongoing, seemingly invisible crisis around security that’s expediting an infusion of public sector funding, particularly in the wake of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management breach that exposed the personal records of millions of federal employees and government contractors.
The Healthcare.gov launch debacle is the most recent and referenced example of crisis spawning government technology progress. The federal government woke to the issues surrounding outdated digital practices — from procurement to technical — and quickly launched two startups of its own: 18F and the U.S. Digital Service (USDS).
The failings of Healthcare.gov and subsequent creation of 18F and USDS has inspired others — such as the state of California, large cities and local governments — to fund a surge in attention to digital — from web to data to security — to address outdated technologies powering the technological infrastructure that runs our governments.
But innovators don’t wait for crises.
They imagine a different path, whether it’s a new approach to solving an old problem or a moonshot that leapfrogs business as usual. They observe the world, realize potential and fund and build engines of change — and forward-thinking, optimistic entrepreneurs and investors are starting to do this with government technology….(More)”
How Citizen Attachment to Neighborhoods Helps to Improve Municipal Services and Public Spaces
Paper by Daniel O’Brien, Dietmar Offenhuber, Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Melissa Sands, and Eric Gordon: “What motivates people to contact their local governments with reports about street light outages, potholes, graffiti, and other deteriorations in public spaces? Current efforts to improve government interactions with constituents operate on the premise that citizens who make such reports are motivated by broad civic values. In contrast, our recent research demonstrates that such citizens are primarily motivated by territoriality – that is, attachments to the spaces where they live. Our research focuses on Boston’s “311 system,” which provides telephone hotlines and web channels through which constituents can request non-emergency government services.
Although our study focuses on 311 users in Boston, it holds broader implications for more than 400 U.S. municipalities that administer similar systems. And our results encourage a closer look at the drivers of citizen participation in many “coproduction programs” – programs that involve people in the design and implementation of government services. Currently, 311 is just one example of government efforts to use technology to involve constituents in joint efforts.
Territorial Ties and Civic Engagement
The concept of territoriality originated in studies of animal behavior – such as bears marking trees in the forest or lions and hyenas fighting over a kill. Human beings also need to manage the ownership of objects and spaces, but social psychologists have demonstrated that human territoriality, whether at home, the workplace, or a neighborhood, entails more than the defense of objects or spaces against others. It includes maintenance and caretaking, and even extends to items shared with others….(More)”
The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science
New book by Cass R. Sunstein: “In recent years, ‘Nudge Units’ or ‘Behavioral Insights Teams’ have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book, Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge (2008), breaks new ground with a deep yet highly readable investigation into the ethical issues surrounding nudges, choice architecture, and mandates, addressing such issues as welfare, autonomy, self-government, dignity, manipulation, and the constraints and responsibilities of an ethical state. Complementing the ethical discussion, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science contains a wealth of new data on people’s attitudes towards a broad range of nudges, choice architecture, and mandates…(More)”