Srik Gopal at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…the California Endowment (TCE) .. and ..The Grand Rapids Community Foundation (GRCF) …are just two funders who are actively “shifting the lens” in terms of how they are looking at evaluation in the light of complexity. They are building on the recognition that a traditional approach to evaluation—assessing specific effects of a defined program according to a set of pre-determined outcomes, often in a way that connects those outcomes back to the initiative—is increasingly falling short. There is a clear message emerging that evaluation needs to accommodate complexity, not “assume it away.”... (More >)
Crowdsourcing America’s cybersecurity is an idea so crazy it might just work
Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “One idea that’s starting to bubble up from Silicon Valley is the concept of crowdsourcing cybersecurity. As Silicon Valley venture capitalist Robert R. Ackerman, Jr. has pointed out, due to “the interconnectedness of our society in cyberspace,” cyber networks are best viewed as an asset that we all have a shared responsibility to protect. Push on that concept hard enough and you can see how many of the core ideas from Silicon Valley – crowdsourcing, open source software, social networking, and the creative commons – can all be applied to cybersecurity. Silicon Valley... (More >)
Action-Packed Signs Could Mean Fewer Pedestrian Accidents
Marielle Mondon at Next City: “Action-packed road signs could mean less unfortunate action for pedestrians. More than a year after New York and San Francisco implemented Vision Zero campaigns to increase pedestrian safety, new research shows that warning signs depicting greater movement — think running stick figures, not walking ones — cause fewer pedestrian accidents. “A sign that evokes more perceived movement increases the observer’s perception of risk, which in turn brings about earlier attention and earlier stopping,” said Ryan Elder, co-author of the new Journal of Consumer Research report. “If you want to grab attention, you need signs... (More >)
Measuring government impact in a social media world
Arthur Mickoleit & Ryan Androsoff at OECD Insights: “There is hardly a government around the world that has not yet felt the impact of social media on how it communicates and engages with citizens. And while the most prominent early adopters in the public sector have tended to be politicians (think of US President Barack Obama’s impressive use of social media during his 2008 campaign), government offices are also increasingly jumping on the bandwagon. Yes, we are talking about those – mostly bricks-and-mortar – institutions that often toil away from the public gaze, managing the public administration in our... (More >)
Platform lets patients contribute to their own medical records
Springwise: “Those with complex medical conditions often rely heavily on their own ability to communicate their symptoms in short — and sometimes stressful — healthcare visits. We have recently seen Ginger.io, a smartphone app which uses big data to improve communication between patients and clinicians in between visits, and now OurNotes is a Commonwealth grant funded program that will enable patients to contribute to their own electronic medical records. The scheme, currently being researched at Beth Isreal Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston and four other sites in the US, is part of a countrywide initiative called OpenNotes, which has... (More >)
City Governments Are Using Yelp to Tell You Where Not to Eat
Michael Luca and Luther Lowe at HBR Blog: “…in recent years consumer-feedback platforms like TripAdvisor, Foursquare, and Chowhound have transformed the restaurant industry (as well as the hospitality industry), becoming important guides for consumers. Yelp has amassed about 67 million reviews in the last decade. So it’s logical to think that these platforms could transform hygiene awareness too — after all, people who contribute to review sites focus on some of the same things inspectors look for. It turns out that one way user reviews can transform hygiene awareness is by helping health departments better utilize their resources. The... (More >)
Dataset Inventorying Tool
Waldo Jaquith at US Open Data: “Today we’re releasing Let Me Get That Data For You (LMGTDFY), a free, open source tool that quickly and automatically creates a machine-readable inventory of all the data files found on a given website. When government agencies create an open data repository, they need to start by inventorying the data that the agency is already publishing on their website. This is a laborious process. It means searching their own site with a query like this: site:example.gov filetype:csv OR filetype:xls OR filetype:json Then they have to read through all of the results, download all... (More >)
The Tricky Task of Rating Neighborhoods on 'Livability'
Tanvi Misra at CityLab: “Jokubas Neciunas was looking to buy an apartment almost two years back in Vilnius, Lithuania. He consulted real estate platforms and government data to help him decide the best option for him. In the process, he realized that there was a lot of information out there, but no one was really using it very well. Fast-forward two years, and Neciunas and his colleagues have created PlaceILive.com—a start-up trying to leverage open data from cities and information from social media to create a holistic, accessible tool that measures the “livability” of any apartment or house in... (More >)
How I used data-driven journalism to reveal racial disparities in U.S. nursing homes
Jeff Kelly Lowenstein at StoryBench: “In 2009, while at The Chicago Reporter, I took a deep look at racial disparities in the quality of care in nursing homes in Chicago, Illinois and nationally. For a project that the Center for Public Integrity published in November 2014, I brought together Medicaid cost reports, self-reported staffing figures, testimonies from advocates and lawyers, and personal stories from nursing home residents and their families to address a simple question: how much care is a loved one actually receiving at a nursing home? The conclusion? Nursing homes serving minorities offer a lot less care... (More >)
The Epidemic of Facelessness
Stephen Marche in the New York Times: “….Every month brings fresh figuration to the sprawling, shifting Hieronymus Bosch canvas of faceless 21st-century contempt. Faceless contempt is not merely topical. It is increasingly the defining trait of topicality itself. Every day online provides its measure of empty outrage. When the police come to the doors of the young men and women who send notes telling strangers that they want to rape them, they and their parents are almost always shocked, genuinely surprised that anyone would take what they said seriously, that anyone would take anything said online seriously. There is... (More >)
