Northern America

Tech and Innovation to Re-engage Civic Life

Curated on November 26, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Sometimes even the best-intentioned policymakers overlook the power of people. And even the best-intentioned discussions on social impact and leveraging big data for the social sector can obscure the power of every-day people in their communities.

But time and time again, I’ve seen the transformative power of civic engagement when initiatives are structured well. For example, the other year I witnessed a high school student walk into a school auditorium one evening during Boston’s first-ever youth-driven participatory budgeting project. Participatory budgeting gives residents a structured opportunity to work together to identify neighborhood priorities, work in tandem with government officials to draft viable projects, and prioritize projects to fund. Elected officials in turn pledge to implement these projects and are held accountable to their constituents. Initially intrigued by an experiment in democracy (and maybe the free pizza), this student remained engaged over several months, because she met new members of her community; got to interact with elected officials; and felt like she was working on a concrete objective that could have a tangible, positive impact on her neighborhood.

For many of the young participants, ages 12-25, being part of a participatory budgeting initiative is the first time they are involved in civic life. Many were excited that the City of Boston, in collaboration with the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project, empowered young people with the opportunity to allocate $1 million in public funds. Through participating, young people gain invaluable civic skills, and sometimes even a passion that can fuel other engagements in civic and communal life.

This is just one example of a broader civic and social innovation trend. Across the globe, people are working together with their communities to solve seemingly intractable problems, but as diverse as those efforts are, there are also commonalities. Well-structured civic engagement creates the space and provides the tools for people to exert agency over policies. When citizens have concrete objectives, access to necessary technology (whether it’s postcards, trucks, or open data portals), and an eye toward outcomes, social change happens.

Using Technology to Distribute Expertise

Technology is allowing citizens around the world to participate in solving local, national, and global problems. When it comes to large, public bureaucracies, expertise is largely top-down and concentrated. Leveraging technology creates opportunities for people to work together in new ways to solve public problems. One way is through civic crowdfunding platforms like Citizinvestor.com, which cities can use to develop public sector projects for citizen support; several cities in Rhode Island, Oregon, and Philadelphia have successfully pooled citizen resources to fund new public works. Another way is through citizen science. Old Weather, a crowdsourcing project from the National Archives and Zooniverse, enrolls people to transcribe old British ship logs to identify climate change patterns. Platforms like these allow anyone to devote a small amount of time or resources toward a broader public good. And because they have a degree of transparency, people can see the progress and impact of their efforts. ….(More)”

Big Data and Big Cities: The Promises and Limitations of Improved Measures of Urban Life

Curated on November 25, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Edward L. Glaeser et al: “New, “big” data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for the study of cities when it allows measurement of the previously opaque, or when it can be coupled with exogenous shocks to people or place. We describe a number of new urban data sources and illustrate how they can be used to improve the study and function of cities. We first show how Google Street View images can be used to predict income in New York City, suggesting that similar image data can be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the developing world. We then discuss how survey techniques can be improved to better measure willingness to pay for urban amenities. Finally, we explain how Internet data is being used to improve the quality of city services….(More)”

Using prizes to spur innovation and government savings

Curated on November 25, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by R-Street: “In myriad sectors of the U.S. economy, from military technology to medical care, the federal government serves as the single-largest spender. As such, many of the innovations, inventions and discoveries that could propel economic growth in the future also would have a direct and measurable impact on federal spending.

To offer an incentive to research and development that yields significant taxpayer savings, we propose an “innovation savings program” that would serve as an alternative to the traditional patent system. The program would reward teams or individuals who develop discoveries or technologies that produce federal budget savings. In effect, a portion of those savings would be set aside for the discoverers. To be eligible for these rewards, the researchers and inventors would not receive patents on their discoveries or processes.

This perpetual, self-funded federal prize system would be based, in part, on the successful False Claims Act and Medicare Recovery Audit programs. Payouts would be administered by an independent or executive agency, verified by the Government Accountability Office and overseen by Congress to ensure fair and effective implementation.

New technologies developed through this process would be available immediately for generic commercialization, free of royalty fees. This could encourage innovation in sectors where patents and traditional research spending have lagged, while also bringing those innovations to market more quickly and affordably. Prize systems of this type have been in operation in the United States for more than 150 years, in the form of the False Claims Act, and date back to “qui tam” actions from the 13th century, thus predating the patent system by several hundred years. (Download PDF)

Citizens Police Data Project (Chicago)

Curated on November 25, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“The Citizens Police Data Project houses police disciplinary information obtained from the City of Chicago.

The information and stories we have collected here are intended as a resource for public oversight. Our aim is to create a new model of accountability between officers and citizens.

This is an evolving platform. We are constantly adding data, and we welcome questions, feedback, and collaboration.

28,567 allegations of misconduct were filed against Chicago Police Department officers between March 2011 and September 2015.

Less than 2% of those complaints resulted in any discipline.

Of those cases in which discipline is imposed, the vast majority result in a reprimand or a suspension of less than one week….(More)”

Analyzing 1.1 Billion NYC Taxi and Uber Trips

Curated on November 20, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Todd W. Schneider: “The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission has released a staggeringly detailed historical dataset covering over 1.1 billion individual taxi trips in the city from January 2009 through June 2015. Taken as a whole, the detailed trip-level data is more than just a vast list of taxi pickup and drop off coordinates: it’s a story of New York. How bad is the rush hour traffic from Midtown to JFK? Where does the Bridge and Tunnel crowd hang out on Saturday nights? What time do investment bankers get to work? How has Uber changed the landscape for taxis? And could Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson have made it from 72nd and Broadway to Wall Street in less than 30 minutes? The dataset addresses all of these questions and many more.

I mapped the coordinates of every trip to local census tracts and neighborhoods, then set about in an attempt to extract stories and meaning from the data. This post covers a lot, but for those who want to pursue more analysis on their own: everything in this post—the data, software, and code—is freely available. Full instructions to download and analyze the data for yourself are available on GitHub.

RethinkCityHall.org

Curated on November 18, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release (Boston): “Mayor Martin J. Walsh today announced the launch of RethinkCityHall.org, a website designed to encourage civic participation in the City Hall campus plan study, a one-year comprehensive planning process that will serve as a roadmap for the operation and design improvements to City Hall and the plaza.

This announcement is one of three interrelated efforts that the City is pursuing to reinvigorate and bring new life to both City Hall and City Hall Plaza. As part of the Campus Plan Request for Qualifications (RFQ) that was released on June 8, 2015, the City has selected Utile, a local architecture and planning firm, to partner with the city to lead the campus plan study. Utile is teamed with Grimshaw Architects and Reed Hilderbrand for the design phases of the effort.

“I am excited to have Utile on board as we work to identify ways to activate our civic spaces,” said Mayor Walsh. “As we progress in the planning process, it is important to take inventory of all of our assets to be able to identify opportunities for improvement. This study will help us develop a thoughtful and forward-thinking plan to reimagine City Hall and the plaza as thriving, healthy and innovative civic spaces.”

“We are energized by Mayor Walsh’s challenge and are excited to work with the various constituencies to develop an innovative plan,” said Tim Love, a principal at Utile. “Thinking about the functional, programmatic and experiential aspects of both the building and plaza provides the opportunity to fundamentally rethink City Hall.”

Both the City and Utile are committed to an open and interactive process that engages members of the public, community groups, professional organizations, and as part of that effort the website will include information about stakeholder meetings and public forums. Additionally, the website will be updated on an ongoing basis with the research, analysis, concepts and design scenarios generated by the consultant team….(More)”

Batea: a Wikipedia hack for medical students

Curated on November 18, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Sullivan at HealthCareIT: “Medical students use Wikipedia in great numbers, but what if it were a more trusted source of information?

That’s the idea behind Batea, a piece of software that essentially collects data from clinical reference URLs medical students visit, then aggregates that information to share with WikiProject Medicine, such that relevant medical editors can glean insights about how best to enhance Wikipedia’s medical content.

Batea takes its name from the Spanish name for gold pan, according to Fred Trotter, a data journalist at DocGraph.

“It’s a data mining project,” Trotter explained, “so we wanted a short term that positively referenced mining.”

DocGraph built Batea with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and, prior to releasing it on Tuesday, operated beta testing pilots of the browser extension at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Texas, Houston.

UCSF, for instance, has what Trotter described as “a unique program where medical students edit Wikipedia for credit. They helped us tremendously in testing the alpha versions of the software.”

Wikipedia houses some 25,000 medical articles that receive more than 200 million views each month, according to the DocGraph announcement, while 8,000 pharmacology articles are read more than 40 million times a month.

DocGraph is encouraging medical students around the country to download the Batea extension – and anonymously donate their clinical-related browsing history. Should Batea gain critical mass, the potential exists for it to substantively enhance Wikipedia….(More)”

Tackling quality concerns around (volunteered) big data

Curated on November 18, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

University of Twente: “… Improvements in online information communication and mobile location-aware technologies have led to a dramatic increase in the amount of volunteered geographic information (VGI) in recent years. The collection of volunteered data on geographic phenomena has a rich history worldwide. For example, the Christmas Bird Count has studied the impacts of climate change on spatial distribution and population trends of selected bird species in North America since 1900. Nowadays, several citizen observatories collect information about our environment. This information is complementary or, in some cases, essential to tackle a wide range of geographic problems.

Despite the wide applicability and acceptability of VGI in science, many studies argue that the quality of the observations remains a concern. Data collected by volunteers does not often follow scientific principles of sampling design, and levels of expertise vary among volunteers. This makes it hard for scientists to integrate VGI in their research.

Low quality, inconsistent, observations can bias analysis and modelling results because they are not representative for the variable studied, or because they decrease the ratio of signal to noise. Hence, the identification of inconsistent observations clearly benefits VGI-based applications and provide more robust datasets to the scientific community.

In their paper the researchers describe a novel automated workflow to identify inconsistencies in VGI. “Leveraging a digital control mechanism means we can give value to the millions of observations collected by volunteers” and “it allows a new kind of science where citizens can directly contribute to the analysis of global challenges like climate change” say Hamed Mehdipoor and Dr. Raul Zurita-Milla, who work at the Geo-Information Processing department of ITC….

While some inconsistent observations may reflect real, unusual events, the researchers demonstrated that these observations also bias the trends (advancement rates), in this case of the date of lilac flowering onset. This shows that identifying inconsistent observations is a pre-requisite for studying and interpreting the impact of climate change on the timing of life cycle events….(More)”

The War on Campus Sexual Assault Goes Digital

Curated on November 17, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Natasha Singer in the New York Times: “As the problem of sexual assault on college campuses has become a hot-button issue for school administrators and federal education regulators, one question keeps coming up: Why don’t more students report attacks?

According to a recent study of 27 schools, about one-quarter of female undergraduates and students who identified as queer or transgender said they had experienced nonconsensual sex or touching since entering college, but most of the students said they did not report it to school officials or support services.

Some felt the incidents weren’t serious enough. Others said they did not think anyone would believe them or they feared negative social consequences. Some felt it would be too emotionally difficult.

Now, in an effort to give students additional options — and to provide schools with more concrete data — a nonprofit software start-up in San Francisco called Sexual Health Innovations has developed an online reporting system for campus sexual violence.

Students at participating colleges can use its site, called Callisto, to record details of an assault anonymously. The site saves and time-stamps those records. That allows students to decide later whether they want to formally file reports with their schools — identifying themselves by their school-issued email addresses — or download their information and take it directly to the police. The site also offers a matching system in which a user can elect to file a report with the school electronically only if someone else names the same assailant.

Callisto’s hypothesis is that some college students — who already socialize, study and shop online — will be more likely initially to document a sexual assault on a third-party site than to report it to school officials on the phone or in person.

“If you have to walk into a building to report, you can only go at certain times of day and you’re not certain who you have to talk to, how many people you have to talk to, what they will ask,” Jessica Ladd, the nonprofit’s founder and chief executive, said in a recent interview in New York. “Whereas online, you can fill out a form at any time of day or night from anywhere and push a button.”

Callisto is part of a wave of apps and sites that tackle different facets of the sexual assault problem on campus. Some colleges and universities have introduced third-party mobile apps that enable students to see maps of local crime hot spots, report suspicious activity, request a ride from campus security services or allow their friends to track their movements virtually as they walk home. Many schools now ask students to participate in online or in-person training programs that present different situations involving sexual assault, relationship violence and issues of consent…..(More)”

The promise and perils of predictive policing based on big data

Curated on November 16, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

H. V. Jagadish in the Conversation: “Police departments, like everyone else, would like to be more effective while spending less. Given the tremendous attention to big data in recent years, and the value it has provided in fields ranging from astronomy to medicine, it should be no surprise that police departments are using data analysis to inform deployment of scarce resources. Enter the era of what is called “predictive policing.”

Some form of predictive policing is likely now in force in a city near you.Memphis was an early adopter. Cities from Minneapolis to Miami have embraced predictive policing. Time magazine named predictive policing (with particular reference to the city of Santa Cruz) one of the 50 best inventions of 2011. New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton recently said that predictive policing is “the wave of the future.”

The term “predictive policing” suggests that the police can anticipate a crime and be there to stop it before it happens and/or apprehend the culprits right away. As the Los Angeles Times points out, it depends on “sophisticated computer analysis of information about previous crimes, to predict where and when crimes will occur.”

At a very basic level, it’s easy for anyone to read a crime map and identify neighborhoods with higher crime rates. It’s also easy to recognize that burglars tend to target businesses at night, when they are unoccupied, and to target homes during the day, when residents are away at work. The challenge is to take a combination of dozens of such factors to determine where crimes are more likely to happen and who is more likely to commit them. Predictive policing algorithms are getting increasingly good at such analysis. Indeed, such was the premise of the movie Minority Report, in which the police can arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crime.

Predicting a crime with certainty is something that science fiction can have a field day with. But as a data scientist, I can assure you that in reality we can come nowhere close to certainty, even with advanced technology. To begin with, predictions can be only as good as the input data, and quite often these input data have errors.

But even with perfect, error-free input data and unbiased processing, ultimately what the algorithms are determining are correlations. Even if we have perfect knowledge of your troubled childhood, your socializing with gang members, your lack of steady employment, your wacko posts on social media and your recent gun purchases, all that the best algorithm can do is to say it is likely, but not certain, that you will commit a violent crime. After all, to believe such predictions as guaranteed is to deny free will….

What data can do is give us probabilities, rather than certainty. Good data coupled with good analysis can give us very good estimates of probability. If you sum probabilities over many instances, you can usually get a robust estimate of the total.

For example, data analysis can provide a probability that a particular house will be broken into on a particular day based on historical records for similar houses in that neighborhood on similar days. An insurance company may add this up over all days in a year to decide how much to charge for insuring that house….(More)”