Three Things Great Data Storytellers Do Differently

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jake Porway at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…At DataKind, we use data science and algorithms in the service of humanity, and we believe that communicating about our work using data for social impact is just as important as the work itself. There’s nothing worse than findings gathering dust in an unread report.

We also believe our projects should always start with a question. It’s clear from the questions above and others that the art of data storytelling needs some demystifying. But rather than answering each question individually, I’d like to pose a broader question that can help us get at some of the essentials: What do great data storytellers do differently and what can we learn from them?

1. They answer the most important question: So what?

Knowing how to compel your audience with data is more of an art than a science. Most people still have negative associations with numbers and statistics—unpleasant memories of boring math classes, intimidating technical concepts, or dry accounting. That’s a shame, because the message behind the numbers can be so enriching and enlightening.

The solution? Help your audience understand the “so what,” not the numbers. Ask: Why should someone care about your findings? How does this information impact them? My strong opinion is that most people actually don’t want to look at data. They need to trust that your methods are sound and that you’re reasoning from data, but ultimately they just want to know what it all means for them and what they should do next.

A great example of going straight to the “so what” is this beautiful, interactive visualization by Periscopic about gun deaths. It uses data sparingly but still evokes a very clear anti-gun message….

2. They inspire us to ask more questions.

The best data visualization helps people investigate a topic further, instead of drawing a conclusion for them or persuading them to believe something new.

For example, the nonprofit DC Action for Children was interested in leveraging publicly available data from government agencies and the US Census, as well as DC Action for Children’s own databases, to help policymakers, parents, and community members understand the conditions influencing child well-being in Washington, DC. We helped create a tool that could bring together data in a multitude of forms, and present it in a way that allowed people to delve into the topic themselves and uncover surprising truths, such as the fact that one out of every three kids in DC lives in a neighborhood without a grocery store….

3. They use rigorous analysis instead of just putting numbers on a page.

Data visualization isn’t an end goal; it’s a process. It’s often the final step in a long manufacturing chain, along which we poke, prod, and mold data to create that pretty graph.

Years ago, the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks) approached us—armed with data about every single tree in the city, including when it was planted and how it was pruned—and wanted to know: Does pruning trees in one year reduce the number of hazardous tree conditions in the following year? This is one of the first things our volunteer data scientists came up with:

Visualization of NYC Parks’ Department data showing tree density in New York City.

This is a visualization of tree density New York—and it was met with oohs and aahs. It was interactive! You could see where different types of trees lived! It was engaging! But another finding that came out of this work arguably had a greater impact. Brian D’Alessandro, one of our volunteer data scientists, used statistical modeling to help NYC Parks calculate a number: 22 percent. It turns out that if you prune trees in New York, there are 22 percent fewer emergencies on those blocks than on the blocks where you didn’t prune. This number is helping the city become more effective by understanding how to best allocate its resources, and now other urban forestry programs are asking New York how they can do the same thing. There was no sexy visualization, no interactivity—just a rigorous statistical model of the world that’s shaping how cities protect their citizens….(More)”

Searching for Someone: From the “Small World Experiment” to the “Red Balloon Challenge,” and beyond

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Manuel Cebrian, Iyad Rahwan, Victoriano Izquierdo, Alex Rutherford, Esteban Moro and Alex (Sandy) Pentland: “Our ability to search social networks for people and information is fundamental to our success. We use our personal connections to look for new job opportunities, to seek advice about what products to buy, to match with romantic partners, to find a good physician, to identify business partners, and so on.

Despite living in a world populated by seven billion people, we are able to navigate our contacts efficiently, only needing a handful of personal introductions before finding the answer to our question, or the person we are seeking. How does this come to be? In folk culture, the answer to this question is that we live in a “small world.” The catch-phrase was coined in 1929 by the visionary author Frigyes Karinthy in his Chain-Links essay, where these ideas are put forward for the first time.

Let me put it this way: Planet Earth has never been as tiny as it is now. It shrunk — relatively speaking of course — due to the quickening pulse of both physical and verbal communication. We never talked about the fact that anyone on Earth, at my or anyone’s will, can now learn in just a few minutes what I think or do, and what I want or what I would like to do. Now we live in fairyland. The only slightly disappointing thing about this land is that it is smaller than the real world has ever been. — Frigyes Karinthy, Chain-Links, 1929

Then, it was just a dystopian idea reflecting the anxiety of living in an increasingly more connected world. But there was no empirical evidence that this was actually the case, and it took almost 30 years to find any.

Six Degrees of Separation

In 1967, legendary psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a ground-breaking experiment to test this “small world” hypothesis. He started with random individuals in the U.S. midwest, and asked them to send packages to people in Boston, Massachusetts, whose address was not given. They must contribute to this “search” only by sending the package to individuals known on a first-name basis. Milgram expected that successful searches (if any!) would require hundreds of individuals along the chain from the initial sender to the final recipient.

Surprisingly, however, Milgram found that the average path length was somewhere between five point five and six individuals, which made social search look astonishingly efficient. Although the experiment raised some methodological criticisms, its findings were profound. However, what it did not answer is why social networks have such short paths in the first place. The answer was not obvious. In fact, there were reasons to suspect that short paths were just a myth: social networks are very cliquish. Your friends’ friends are likely to also be your friends, and thus most social paths are short and circular. This “cliquishness” suggests that our search through the social network can easily get “trapped” within our close social community, making social search highly inefficient.

Architectures for Social Search

Again, it took a long time — more than 40 years — before this riddle was solved. In a 1998 seminal paper in Nature, Duncan Watts & Steven Strogatzcame up with an elegant mathematical model to explain the existence of these short paths. They started from a social network that is very cliquish, i.e., most of your friends are also friends of one another. In this model, the world is “large” since the social distance among individuals is very long. However, if we take only a tiny fraction of these connections (say one out of every hundred links), and rewire them to random individuals in the network, that same world suddenly becomes “small.” These random connections allow individuals to jump to faraway communities very quickly — using them as social network highways — thus reducing average path length in a dramatic fashion.

While this theoretical insight suggests that social networks are searchable due to the existence of short paths, it does not yet say much about the “procedure” that people use to find these paths. There is no reason, a priori, that we should know how to find these short chains, especially since there are many chains, and no individuals have knowledge of the network structure beyond their immediate communities. People do not know how the friends of their friends are connected among themselves, and therefore it is not obvious that they would have a good way of navigating their social network while searching.

Soon after Watts and Strogatz came up with this model at Cornell University, a computer scientist across campus, Jon Kleinberg, set out to investigate whether such “small world” networks are searchable. In a landmark Nature article, “Navigation in a Small World,” published in 200o, he showed that social search is easy without global knowledge of the network, but only for a very specific value of the probability of long-range connectivity (i.e., the probability that we know somebody far removed from us, socially, in the social network). With the advent of a publicly available social media dataset such as LiveJournal, David Liben-Nowell and colleagues showed that real-world social networks do indeed have these particular long-range ties. It appears the social architecture of the world we inhabit is remarkably fine-tuned for searchability….

The Tragedy of the Crowdsourcers

Some recent efforts have been made to try and disincentivize sabotage. If verification is also rewarded along the recruitment tree, then the individuals who recruited the saboteurs would have a clear incentive to verify, halt, and punish the saboteurs. This theoretical solution is yet to be tested in practice, and it is conjectured that a coalition of saboteurs, where saboteurs recruit other saboteurs pretending to “vet” them, would make recursive verification futile.

If we are to believe in theory, theory does not shed a promising light on reducing sabotage in social search. We recently proposed the “Crowdsourcing Dilemma.” In it, we perform a game-theoretic analysis of the fundamental tradeoff between the potential for increased productivity of social search and the possibility of being set back by malicious behavior, including misinformation. Our results show that, in competitive scenarios, such as those with multiple social searches competing for the same information, malicious behavior is the norm, not an anomaly — a result contrary to conventional wisdom. Even worse: counterintuitively, making sabotage more costly does not deter saboteurs, but leads all the competing teams to a less desirable outcome, with more aggression, and less efficient collective search for talent.

These empirical and theoretical findings have cautionary implications for the future of social search, and crowdsourcing in general. Social search is surprisingly efficient, cheap, easy to implement, and functional across multiple applications. But there are also surprises in the amount of evildoing that the social searchers will stumble upon while recruiting. As we get deeper and deeper into the recruitment tree, we stumble upon that evil force lurking in the dark side of the network.

Evil mutates and regenerates in the crowd in new forms impossible to anticipate by the designers or participants themselves. Crowdsourcing and its enemies will always be engaged in an co-evolutionary arms race.

Talent is there to be searched and recruited. But so are evil and malice. Ultimately, crowdsourcing experts need to figure out how to recruit more of the former, while deterring more of the later. We might be living on a small world, but the cost and fragility of navigating it could harm any potential strategy to leverage the power of social networks….

Being searchable is a way of being closely connected to everyone else, which is conducive to contagion, group-think, and, most crucially, makes it hard for individuals to differentiate from each other. Evolutionarily, for better or worse, our brain makes us mimic others, and whether this copying of others ends up being part of the Wisdom of the Crowds, or the “stupidity of many,” it is highly sensitive to the scenario at hand.

Katabasis, or the myth of the hero that descends to the underworld and comes back stronger, is as old as time and pervasive across ancient cultures. Creative people seem to need to “get lost.” Grigori Perelman, Shinichi Mochizuki, and Bob Dylan all disappeared for a few years to reemerge later as more creative versions of themselves. Others like J. D. Salinger and Bobby Fisher also vanished, and never came back to the public sphere. If others cannot search and find us, we gain some slack, some room to escape from what we are known for by others. Searching for our true creative selves may rest on the difficulty of others finding us….(More)”

Fan Favorites

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Erin Reilly at Strategy + Business: “…In theory, new technological advances such as big data and machine learning, combined with more direct access to audience sentiment, behaviors, and preferences via social media and over-the-top delivery channels, give the entertainment and media industry unprecedented insight into what the audience actually wants. But as a professional in the television industry put it, “We’re drowning in data and starving for insights.” Just as my data trail didn’t trace an accurate picture of my true interest in soccer, no data set can quantify all that consumers are as humans. At USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, our research has led us to an approach that blends data collection with a deep understanding of the social and cultural context in which the data is created. This can be a powerful practice for helping researchers understand the behavior of fans — fans of sports, brands, celebrities, and shows.

A Model for Understanding Fans

Marketers and creatives often see audiences and customers as passive assemblies of listeners or spectators. But we believe it’s more useful to view them as active participants. The best analogy may be fans. Broadly characterized, fans have a continued connection with the property they are passionate about. Some are willing to declare their affinity through engagement, some have an eagerness to learn more about their passion, and some want to connect with others who share their interests. Fans are emotionally linked to the object of their passion, and experience their passion through their own subjective lenses. We all start out as audience members. But sometimes, when the combination of factors aligns in just the right way, we become engaged as fans.

For businesses, the key to building this engagement and solidifying the relationship is understanding the different types of fan motivations in different contexts, and learning how to turn the data gathered about them into actionable insights. Even if Jane Smith and her best friend are fans of the same show, the same team, or the same brand, they’re likely passionate for different reasons. For example, some viewers may watch the ABC melodrama Scandal because they’re fashionistas and can’t wait to see the newest wardrobe of star Kerry Washington; others may do so because they’re obsessed with politics and want to see how the newly introduced Donald Trump–like character will behave. And those differences mean fans will respond in varied ways to different situations and content.
Though traditional demographics may give us basic information about who fans are and where they’re located, current methods of understanding and measuring engagement are missing the answers to two essential questions: (1) Why is a fan motivated? and (2) What triggers the fan’s behavior? Our Innovation Lab research group is developing a new model called Leveraging Engagement, which can be used as a framework when designing media strategy….(More)”

Soon Your City Will Know Everything About You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Philip N. Howard at Yahoo Tech: “They call it “the Internet of Things” — the rapidly growing network of everyday objects equipped with sensors, tiny power supplies, and internet addresses. Within a few years, we will be immersed in a world of these connected devices. The best estimatessuggest that there will be about 60 billion of them by the year 2020. We’ve already seen internet-accessible sensors implanted in dolls, cars, and cows.

Currently, the biggest users of these sensor arrays are in cities, where city governments use them to collect large amounts of policy-relevant data. In Los Angeles, the crowdsourced traffic and navigation app Waze collects data that helps residents navigate the city’s choked highway networks. In Chicago, an ambitious program makes public data available to startups eager to build apps for residents. The city’s 49th ward has been experimenting with participatory budgeting and online votingto take the pulse of the community on policy issues. Chicago has also been developing the “Array of Things,” a network of sensors that track, among other things, the urban conditions that affect bronchitis.

Edmonton uses the cloud to track the condition of playground equipment. And a growing number of countries have purpose-built smart cities, like South Korea’s high tech utopia city of Songdo, where pervasive sensor networks and ubiquitous computing generate immense amounts of civic data for public services.

The drive for smart cities isn’t restricted to the developed world. Rio de Janeiro coordinates the information flows of 30 different city agencies. In Beijing and Da Nang (Vietnam), mobile phone data is actively tracked in the name of real-time traffic management. Urban sensor networks, in other words, are also developing in countries with few legal protections governing the usage of data.

These services are promising and useful. But you don’t have to look far to see why the Internet of Things has serious privacy implications. Public data is used for “predictive policing” in at least 75 cities across the U.S., including New York City, where critics maintain that using social media or traffic data to help officers evaluate probable cause is a form of digital stop-and-frisk. In Los Angeles, the security firm Palantir scoops up publicly generated data on car movements, merges it with license plate information collected by the city’s traffic cameras, and sells analytics back to the city so that police officers can decide whether or not to search a car. In Chicago, concern is growing about discriminatory profiling because so much information is collected and managed by the police department — an agency with a poor reputation for handling data in consistent and sensitive ways. In 2015, video surveillance of the police shooting Laquan McDonald outside a Burger King was erased by a police employee who ironically did not know his activities were being digitally recorded by cameras inside the restaurant.

Since most national governments have bungled privacy policy, cities — which have a reputation for being better with administrative innovations — will need to fill this gap. A few countries, such as Canada and the U.K., have independent “privacy commissioners” who are responsible for advocating for the public when bureaucracies must decide how to use or give out data. It is pretty clear that cities need such advocates too.

What would Urban Privacy Commissioners do? They would teach the public — and other government staff — about how policy algorithms work. They would evaluate the political context in which city agencies make big data investments. They would help a city negotiate contracts that protect residents’ privacy while providing effective analysis to policy makers and ensuring that open data is consistently serving the public good….(more)”.

Is civic technology the killer app for democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at TechCrunch: “Smartphone apps have improved convenience for public transportation in many urban centers. In Washington, DC, riders can download apps to help them figure out where to go, when to show up and how long to wait for a bus or train. However, the problem with public transport in DC is not the lack of modern, helpful and timely information. The problem is that the Metro subway system is onfire. 

Critical infrastructure refers to the vital systems that connect us. Like the water catastrophe in Flint, Michigan and our crumbling roads, bridges and airports, the Metro system in DC is experiencing a systems failure. The Metro’s problems arise from typical public challenges like  poor management and deferred maintenance.

Upgrades of physical infrastructure are not easy and nimble like a software patch or an agile design process. They are slow, expensive and subject to deliberation and scrutiny. In other words, they are the fundamental substance of democratic decision-making: big decisions with long-term implications that require thoughtful strategy, significant investment, political leadership and public buy-in.

A killer app is an application you love so much you buy into a whole new way of doing things. Email and social media are good examples of killer apps. The killer app for Metro would have to get political leaders to look beyond their narrow, short-term interests and be willing to invest in modern public transportation for our national capital region.

The same is true for fixing our critical infrastructure throughout the nation. The killer apps for the systems on which we rely daily won’t be technical, they will be human. It will be Americans working together to a build a technology-enabled resilient democracy —one that is inclusive, responsive and successful in the Information Age.

In 2007, the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi river. During his presidential bid, Senator John McCain used this event as an example of the failure of our leaders to make trade-offs for common national purpose. Case in point, an extravagantly expensive congressionally funded Alaskan “bridge to nowhere” that served just a handful of people on an island. But how many apps to nowhere are we building?.

In DC, commuters who can afford alternatives will leave Metro. They’ll walk, drive, ordera car service or locate a bikeshare. The people who suffer from the public service risk and imbalance of the current Metro system are those who have no choice.

So here’s the challenge: Modern technology needs to create an inclusive society. Our current technical approach too often means that we’re prioritizing progress or profit for the few over the many. This pattern defeats the purpose of both the technology revolution and American democracy. Government and infrastructure are supposed to serve everyone, but technology thus far has made it so that public failures affect some Americans more than others. …

For democracy to succeed in the Information Age, we’ll need some new rules of engagement with technology. The White House recently released its third report on data and its implications for society. The 2016 report pays special attention to the ethics of machine automation and algorithms. The authors stress the importance of ethical analytics and propose the principle of “equal opportunity by design.” It’s an excellent point of departure as we recalibrate old systems and build new bridges to a more resilient, inclusive and prosperous nation….(more)”

Twiplomacy Study 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Summary: “Social media has become diplomacy’s significant other. It has gone from being an afterthought to being the very first thought of world leaders and governments across the globe, as audiences flock to their newsfeeds for the latest news. This recent worldwide embrace of online channels has brought with it a wave of openness and transparency that has never been experienced before. Social media provides a platform for unconditional communication, and has become a communicator’s most powerful tool. Twitter in particular, has even become a diplomatic ‘barometer, a tool used to analyze and forecast international relations.

There is a vast array of social networks for government communicators to choose from. While some governments and foreign ministries still ponder the pros and cons of any social media engagement, others have gone beyond Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to reach their target audiences, even embracing emerging platforms such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and Telegram where communications are under the radar and almost impossible to track.

Burson-Marsteller’s 2016 Twiplomacy study has been expanded to include other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, as well as more niche digital diplomacy platforms such as Snapchat, LinkedIn, Google+,Periscope and Vine.

There is a growing digital divide between governments that are active on social media with dedicated teams and those that see digital engagement as an afterthought and so devote few resources to it. There is still a small number of government leaders who refuse to embrace the new digital world and, for these few, their community managers struggle to bring their organizations into the digital century.

Over the past year, the most popular world leaders on social media have continued to increase their audiences, while new leaders have emerged in the Twittersphere. Argentina’s Mauricio Macri, Canada’s Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama have all made a significant impact on Twitter and Facebook over the past year.

Obama’s social media communication has become even more personal through his @POTUS Twitter account and Facebook page, and the first “president of the social media age” will leave the White House in January 2017 with an incredible 137 million fans, followers and subscribers. Beyond merely Twitter and Facebook, world leaders such as the Argentinian President have also become active on new channels like Snapchat to reach a younger audience and potential future voters. Similarly, a number of governments, mainly in Latin America, have started to use Periscope, a cost-effective medium to live-stream their press conferences.

We have witnessed occasional public interactions between leaders, namely the friendly fighting talk between the Obamas, the Queen of England and Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Foreign ministries continue to expand their diplomatic and digital networks by following each other and creating coalitions on specific topics, in particular the fight against ISIS….

A number of world leaders, including the President of Colombia and Australia’s Julie Bishop, also use emojis to brighten up their tweets, creating what can be described as a new diplomatic sign language. The Foreign Ministry in Finland has even produced its own set of 49 emoticons depicting summer and winter in the Nordic country.

We asked a number of digital leaders of some of the best connected foreign ministries and governments to share their thoughts on their preferred social media channel and examples of their best campaigns on our blog. You will learn:

Here is our list of the #Twiplomacy Top Twenty Twitterati in 2016….(More)”

Improving patient care by bridging the divide between doctors and data scientists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation: “While wonderful new medical discoveries and innovations are in the news every day, doctors struggle daily with using information and techniques available right now while carefully adopting new concepts and treatments. As a practicing doctor, I deal with uncertainties and unanswered clinical questions all the time….At the moment, a report from the National Academy of Medicine tells us, most doctors base most of their everyday decisions on guidelines from (sometimes biased) expert opinions or small clinical trials. It would be better if they were from multicenter, large, randomized controlled studies, with tightly controlled conditions ensuring the results are as reliable as possible. However, those are expensive and difficult to perform, and even then often exclude a number of important patient groups on the basis of age, disease and sociological factors.

Part of the problem is that health records are traditionally kept on paper, making them hard to analyze en masse. As a result, most of what medical professionals might have learned from experiences was lost – or at least was inaccessible to another doctor meeting with a similar patient.

A digital system would collect and store as much clinical data as possible from as many patients as possible. It could then use information from the past – such as blood pressure, blood sugar levels, heart rate and other measurements of patients’ body functions – to guide future doctors to the best diagnosis and treatment of similar patients.

Industrial giants such as Google, IBM, SAP and Hewlett-Packard have also recognized the potential for this kind of approach, and are now working on how to leverage population data for the precise medical care of individuals.

Collaborating on data and medicine

At the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we have begun to collect large amounts of detailed patient data in the Medical Information Mart in Intensive Care (MIMIC). It is a database containing information from 60,000 patient admissions to the intensive care units of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Boston teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The data in MIMIC has been meticulously scoured so individual patients cannot be recognized, and is freely shared online with the research community.

But the database itself is not enough. We bring together front-line clinicians (such as nurses, pharmacists and doctors) to identify questions they want to investigate, and data scientists to conduct the appropriate analyses of the MIMIC records. This gives caregivers and patients the best individualized treatment options in the absence of a randomized controlled trial.

Bringing data analysis to the world

At the same time we are working to bring these data-enabled systems to assist with medical decisions to countries with limited health care resources, where research is considered an expensive luxury. Often these countries have few or no medical records – even on paper – to analyze. We can help them collect health data digitally, creating the potential to significantly improve medical care for their populations.

This task is the focus of Sana, a collection of technical, medical and community experts from across the globe that is also based in our group at MIT. Sana has designed a digital health information system specifically for use by health providers and patients in rural and underserved areas.

At its core is an open-source system that uses cellphones – common even in poor and rural nations – to collect, transmit and store all sorts of medical data. It can handle not only basic patient data such as height and weight, but also photos and X-rays, ultrasound videos, and electrical signals from a patient’s brain (EEG) and heart (ECG).

Partnering with universities and health organizations, Sana organizes training sessions (which we call “bootcamps”) and collaborative workshops (called “hackathons”) to connect nurses, doctors and community health workers at the front lines of care with technology experts in or near their communities. In 2015, we held bootcamps and hackathons in Colombia, Uganda, Greece and Mexico. The bootcamps teach students in technical fields like computer science and engineering how to design and develop health apps that can run on cellphones. Immediately following the bootcamp, the medical providers join the group and the hackathon begins…At the end of the day, though, the purpose is not the apps….(More)

An App to Save Syria’s Lost Generation? What Technology Can and Can’t Do

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Latonero in Foreign Affairs: ” In January this year, when the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe had hit its peak—more than a million had crossed into Europe over the course of 2015—the U.S. State Department and Google hosted a forum of over 100 technology experts. The goal was to “bridge the education gap for Syrian refugee children.” Speaking to the group assembled at Stanford University, Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a $1.7 million prize “to develop a smartphone app that can help Syrian children learn how to read and improve their wellbeing.” The competition, known as EduApp4Syria, is being run by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) and is supported by the Australian government and the French mobile company Orange.

Less than a month later, a group called Techfugees brought together over 100 technologists for a daylong brainstorm in New York City focused exclusively on education solutions. “We are facing the largest refugee crisis since World War II,” said U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power to open the conference. “It is a twenty-first-century crisis and we need a twenty-first-century solution.” Among the more promising, according to Power, were apps that enable “refugees to access critical services,” new “web platforms connecting refugees with one another,” and “education programs that teach refugees how to code.”

For example, the nonprofit PeaceGeeks created the Services Advisor app for the UN Refugee Agency, which maps the location of shelters, food distribution centers, and financial services in Jordan….(More)”

Open data + increased disclosure = better public-private partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Bloomgarden and Georg Neumann at Fomin Blog: “The benefits of open and participatory public procurement are increasingly being recognized by international bodies such as the Group of 20 major economies, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and multilateral development banks. Value for money, more competition, and better goods and services for citizens all result from increased disclosure of contract data. Greater openness is also an effective tool to fight fraud and corruption.

However, because public-private partnerships (PPPs) are planned during a long timeframe and involve a large number of groups, therefore, implementing greater levels of openness in disclosure is complicated. This complexity can be a challenge to good design. Finding a structured and transparent approach to managing PPP contract data is fundamental for a project to be accepted and used by its local community….

In open contracting, all data is disclosed during the public procurement process—from the planning stage, to the bidding and awarding of the contract, to the monitoring of the implementation. A global open source data standard is used to publish that data, which is already being implemented in countries as diverse as Canada, Paraguay, and the Ukraine. Using open data throughout the contracting process provides opportunities to innovate in managing bids, fixing problems, and integrating feedback as needed. Open contracting contributes to the overall social and environmental sustainability of infrastructure investments.

In the case of Mexico’s airport, the project publishes details of awarded contracts, including visualizing the flow of funds and detailing the full amounts of awarded contracts and renewable agreements. Standardized, timely, and open data that follow global standards such as the Open Contracting Data Standard will make this information useful for analysis of value for money, cost-benefit, sustainability, and monitoring performance. Crucially, open contracting will shift the focus from the inputs into a PPP, to the outputs: the goods and services being delivered.

Benefits of open data for PPPs

We think that better and open data will lead to better PPPs. Here’s how:

1. Using user feedback to fix problems

The Brazilian state of Minas Gerais has been a leader in transparent PPP contracts with full proactive disclosure of the contract terms, as well as of other relevant project information—a practice that puts a government under more scrutiny but makes for better projects in the long run.

According to Marcos Siqueira, former head of the PPP Unit in Minas Gerais, “An adequate transparency policy can provide enough information to users so they can become contract watchdogs themselves.”

For example, a public-private contract was signed in 2014 to build a $300 million waste treatment plant for 2.5 million people in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. As the team members conducted appraisals, they disclosed them on the Internet. In addition, the team held around 20 public meetings and identified all the stakeholders in the project. One notable result of the sharing and discussion of this information was the relocation of the facility to a less-populated area. When the project went to the bidding phase, it was much closer to the expectations of its various stakeholders.

2. Making better decisions on contracts and performance

Chile has been a leader in developing PPPs (which it refers to as concessions) for several decades, in a range of sectors: urban and inter-urban roads, seaports, airports, hospitals, and prisons. The country tops the list for the best enabling environment for PPPs in Latin America and the Caribbean, as measured by Infrascope, an index produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Multilateral Investment Fund of the IDB Group.

Chile’s distinction is that it discloses information on performance of PPPs that are underway. The government’s Concessions Unit regularly publishes summaries of the projects during their different phases, including construction and operation. The reports are non-technical, yet include all the necessary information to understand the scope of the project…(More)”

Teenage scientists enlisted to fight Zika

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ShareAmerica: “A mosquito’s a mosquito, right? Not when it comes to Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases.

Only two of the estimated 3,000 species of mosquitoes are capable of carrying the Zika virus in the United States, but estimates of their precise range remain hazy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists could start getting better information about these pesky, but important, insects with the help of plastic cups, brown paper towels and teenage biology students.

As part of the Invasive Mosquito Project from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, secondary-school students nationwide are learning about mosquito populations and helping fill the knowledge gaps.

Simple experiment, complex problem

The experiment works like this: First, students line the cups with paper, then fill two-thirds of the cups with water. Students place the plastic cups outside, and after a week, the paper is dotted with what looks like specks of dirt. These dirt particles are actually mosquito eggs, which the students can identify and classify.

Students then upload their findings to a national crowdsourced database. Crowdsourcing uses the collective intelligence of online communities to “distribute” problem solving across a massive network.

Entomologist Lee Cohnstaedt of the U.S. Department of Agriculture coordinates the program, and he’s already thinking about expansion. He said he hopes to have one-fifth of U.S. schools participate in the mosquito species census. He also plans to adapt lesson plans for middle schools, Scouting troops and gardening clubs.

Already, crowdsourcing has “collected better data than we could have working alone,” he told the Associated Press….

In addition to mosquito tracking, crowdsourcing has been used to develop innovative responses to a number of complex challenges, from climate change to archaeologyto protein modeling….(More)”