How Big Data Could Undo Our Civil-Rights Laws

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Virginia Eubanks in the American Prospect: “From “reverse redlining” to selling out a pregnant teenager to her parents, the advance of technology could render obsolete our landmark civil-rights and anti-discrimination laws.
Big Data will eradicate extreme world poverty by 2028, according to Bono, front man for the band U2. But it also allows unscrupulous marketers and financial institutions to prey on the poor. Big Data, collected from the neonatal monitors of premature babies, can detect subtle warning signs of infection, allowing doctors to intervene earlier and save lives. But it can also help a big-box store identify a pregnant teenager—and carelessly inform her parents by sending coupons for baby items to her home. News-mining algorithms might have been able to predict the Arab Spring. But Big Data was certainly used to spy on American Muslims when the New York City Police Department collected license plate numbers of cars parked near mosques, and aimed surveillance cameras at Arab-American community and religious institutions.
Until recently, debate about the role of metadata and algorithms in American politics focused narrowly on consumer privacy protections and Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA). That Big Data might have disproportionate impacts on the poor, women, or racial and religious minorities was rarely raised. But, as Wade Henderson, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorOfChange, a civil rights organization that seeks to empower black Americans and their allies, point out in a commentary at TPM Cafe, while big data can change business and government for the better, “it is also supercharging the potential for discrimination.”
In his January 17 speech on signals intelligence, President Barack Obama acknowledged as much, seeking to strike a balance between defending “legitimate” intelligence gathering on American citizens and admitting that our country has a history of spying on dissidents and activists, including, famously, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If this balance seems precarious, it’s because the links between historical surveillance of social movements and today’s uses of Big Data are not lost on the new generation of activists.
“Surveillance, big data and privacy have a historical legacy,” says Amalia Deloney, policy director at the Center for Media Justice, an Oakland-based organization dedicated to strengthening the communication effectiveness of grassroots racial justice groups. “In the early 1960s, in-depth, comprehensive, orchestrated, purposeful spying was used to disrupt political movements in communities of color—the Yellow Peril, the American Indian Movement, the Brown Berets, or the Black Panthers—to create fear and chaos, and to spread bias and stereotypes.”
In the era of Big Data, the danger of reviving that legacy is real, especially as metadata collection renders legal protection of civil rights and liberties less enforceable….
Big Data and surveillance are unevenly distributed. In response, a coalition of 14 progressive organizations, including the ACLU, ColorOfChange, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, and the NOW Foundation, recently released five “Civil Rights Principles for the Era of Big Data.” In their statement, they demand:

  • An end to high-tech profiling;
  • Fairness in automated decisions;
  • The preservation of constitutional principles;
  • Individual control of personal information; and
  • Protection of people from inaccurate data.

This historic coalition aims to start a national conversation about the role of big data in social and political inequality. “We’re beginning to ask the right questions,” says O’Neill. “It’s not just about what can we do with this data. How are communities of color impacted? How are women within those communities impacted? We need to fold these concerns into the national conversation.”

The Secret Science of Retweets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “If you send a tweet to a stranger asking them to retweet it, you probably wouldn’t be surprised if they ignored you entirely. But if you sent out lots of tweets like this, perhaps a few might end up being passed on.

How come? What makes somebody retweet information from a stranger? That’s the question addressed today by Kyumin Lee from Utah State University in Logan and a few pals from IBM’s Almaden research center in San Jose….by studying the characteristics of Twitter users, it is possible to identify strangers who are more likely to pass on your message than others. And in doing this, the researchers say they’ve been able to improve the retweet rate of messages sent strangers by up to 680 percent.
So how did they do it? The new technique is based on the idea that some people are more likely to tweet than others, particularly on certain topics and at certain times of the day. So the trick is to find these individuals and target them when they are likely to be most effective.
So the approach was straightforward. The idea is to study the individuals on Twitter, looking at their profiles and their past tweeting behavior, looking for clues that they might be more likely to retweet certain types of information. Having found these individuals, send your tweets to them.
That’s the theory. In practice, it’s a little more involved. Lee and co wanted to test people’s response to two types of information: local news (in San Francisco) and tweets about bird flu, a significant issue at the time of their research. They then created several Twitter accounts with a few followers, specifically to broadcast information of this kind.
Next, they selected people to receive their tweets. For the local news broadcasts, they searched for Twitter users geolocated in the Bay area, finding over 34,000 of them and choosing 1,900 at random.
They then a sent a single message to each user of the format:
“@ SFtargetuser “A man was killed and three others were wounded in a shooting … http://bit.ly/KOl2sC” Plz RT this safety news”
So the tweet included the user’s name, a short headline, a link to the story and a request to retweet.
Of these 1,900 people, 52 retweeted the message they received. That’s 2.8 percent.
For the bird flu information, Lee and co hunted for people who had already tweeted about bird flu, finding 13,000 of them and choosing 1,900 at random. Of these, 155 retweeted the message they received, a retweet rate of 8.4 percent.
But Lee and co found a way to significantly improve these retweet rates. They went back to the original lists of Twitter users and collected publicly available information about each of them, such as their personal profile, the number of followers, the people they followed, their 200 most recent tweets and whether they retweeted the message they had received
Next, the team used a machine learning algorithm to search for correlations in this data that might predict whether somebody was more likely to retweet. For example, they looked at whether people with older accounts were more likely to retweet or how the ratio of friends to followers influenced the retweet likelihood, or even how the types of negative or positive words they used in previous tweets showed any link. They also looked at the time of day that people were most active in tweeting.
The result was a machine learning algorithm capable of picking users who were most likely to retweet on a particular topic.
And the results show that it is surprisingly effective. When the team sent local information tweets to individuals identified by the algorithm, 13.3 percent retweeted it, compared to just 2.6 percent of people chosen at random.
And they got even better results when they timed the request to match the periods when people had been most active in the past. In that case, the retweet rate rose to 19.3 percent. That’s an improvement of over 600 percent.
Similarly, the rate for bird flu information rose from 8.3 percent for users chosen at random to 19.7 percent for users chosen by the algorithm.
That’s a significant result that marketers, politicians, news organizations will be eyeing with envy.
An interesting question is how they can make this technique more generally applicable. It raises the prospect of an app that allows anybody to enter a topic of interest and which then creates a list of people most likely to retweet on that topic in the next few hours.
Lee and co do not mention any plans of this kind. But if they don’t exploit it, then there will surely be others who will.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1405.3750 : Who Will Retweet This? Automatically Identifying and Engaging Strangers on Twitter to Spread Information”

The Collective Intelligence Handbook: an open experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Bernstein: “Is there really a wisdom of the crowd? How do we get at it and understand it, utilize it, empower it?
You probably have some ideas about this. I certainly do. But I represent just one perspective. What would an economist say? A biologist? A cognitive or social psychologist? An artificial intelligence or human-computer interaction researcher? A communications scholar?
For the last two years, Tom Malone (MIT Sloan) and I (Stanford CS) have worked to bring together all these perspectives into one book. We are nearing completion, and the Collective Intelligence Handbook will be published by the MIT Press later this year. I’m still relatively dumbfounded by the rockstar lineup we have managed to convince to join up.

It’s live.

Today we went live with the authors’ current drafts of the chapters. All the current preprints are here: http://cci.mit.edu/CIchapterlinks.html

And now is when you come in.

But we’re not done. We’d love for you — the crowd — to help us make this book better. We envisioned this as an open process, and we’re excited that all the chapters are now at a point where we’re ready for critique, feedback, and your contributions.
There are two ways you can help:

  • Read the current drafts and leave comments inline in the Google Docs to help us make them better.
  • Drop suggestions in the separate recommended reading list for each chapter. We (the editors) will be using that material to help us write an introduction to each chapter.

We have one month. The authors’ final chapters are due to us in mid-June. So off we go!”

Here’s what’s in the book:

Chapter 1. Introduction
Thomas W. Malone (MIT) and Michael S. Bernstein (Stanford University)
What is collective intelligence, anyway?
Chapter 2. Human-Computer Interaction and Collective Intelligence
Jeffrey P. Bigham (Carnegie Mellon University), Michael S. Bernstein (Stanford University), and Eytan Adar (University of Michigan)
How computation can help gather groups of people to tackle tough problems together.
Chapter 3. Artificial Intelligence and Collective Intelligence
Daniel S. Weld (University of Washington), Mausam (IIT Delhi), Christopher H. Lin (University of Washington), and Jonathan Bragg (University of Washington)
Mixing machine intelligence with human intelligence could enable a synthesized intelligent actor that brings together the best of both worlds.
Chapter 4. Collective Behavior in Animals: An Ecological Perspective
Deborah M. Gordon (Stanford University)
How do groups of animals work together in distributed ways to solve difficult problems?
Chapter 5. The Wisdom of Crowds vs. the Madness of Mobs
Andrew W. Lo (MIT)
Economics has studied a collectively intelligent forum — the market — for a long time. But are we as smart as we think we are?
Chapter 6. Collective Intelligence in Teams and Organizations
Anita Williams Woolley (Carnegie Mellon University), Ishani Aggarwal (Georgia Tech), Thomas W. Malone (MIT)
How do the interactions between groups of people impact how intelligently that group acts?
Chapter 7. Cognition and Collective Intelligence
Mark Steyvers (University of California, Irvine), Brent Miller (University of California, Irvine)
Understanding the conditions under which people are smart individually can help us predict when they might be smart collectively.

Chapter 8. Peer Production: A Modality of Collective Intelligence
Yochai Benkler (Harvard University), Aaron Shaw (Northwestern University), Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)
What have collective efforts such as Wikipedia taught us about how large groups come together to create knowledge and creative artifacts?

#BringBackOurGirls: Can Hashtag Activism Spur Social Change?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nancy Ngo at TechChange: “In our modern times of media cycles fighting for our short attention spans, it is easy to ride the momentum of a highly visible campaign that can quickly fizzle out once another competing story emerges. Since the kidnappings of approximately 300 Nigerian girls by militant Islamist group Boko Haram last month, the international community has embraced the hashtag, “#BringBackOurGirls”, in a very vocal and visible social media campaign demanding action to rescue the Chibok girls. But one month since the mass kidnapping without the rescue of the girls, do we need to take a different approach? Will #BringBackOurGirls be just another campaign we forget about once the next celebrity scandal becomes breaking news?

#BringBackOurGirls goes global starting in Nigeria

Most of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign activity has been highly visible on Twitter, Facebook, and international media outlets. In this fascinating Twitter heat map created using the tool, CartoDB, featured in TIME Magazine, we can see a time-lapsed digital map of how the hashtag, “#BringBackOurGirls” spread globally, starting organically from within Nigeria in mid April.

The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag has been embraced widely by many public figures and has garnered wide support across the world. Michelle Obama, David Cameron, and Malala Yusafzai have posted images with the hashtag, along with celebrities such as Ellen Degeneres, Angelina Jolie, and Dwayne Johnson. To date, nearly 1 million people signed the Change.org petition. Countries including the USA, UK, China, Israel have pledged to join the rescue efforts, and other human rights campaigns have joined the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter momentum, as seen on this Hashtagify map.

Is #BringBackOurGirls repeating the mistakes of #KONY2012?

Kony_2012_Poster_3

A great example of a past campaign where this happened was with the KONY2012 campaign, which brought some albeit short-lived urgency to addressing the child soldiers recruited by Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Michael Poffenberger, who worked on that campaign, will join us a guest expert in TC110: Social Media for Social Change online course in June 2013 and compare it the current #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Many have drawn parallels to both campaigns and warned of the false optimism that hyped social media messages can bring when context is not fully considered and understood.

According to Lauren Wolfe of Foreign Policy magazine, “Understanding what has happened to the Nigerian girls and how to rescue them means beginning to face what has happened to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of girls over years in global armed conflict.” To some critics, this hashtag trivializes the weaknesses of Nigerian democracy that have been exposed. Critics of using social media in advocacy campaigns have used the term “slacktivism” to describe the passive, minimal effort needed to participate in these movements. Others have cited such media waves being exploited for individual gain, as opposed to genuinely benefiting the girls. Florida State University Political Science professor, Will H. Moore, argues that this hashtag activism is not only hurting the larger cause of rescuing the kidnapped girls, but actually helping Boko Haram. Jumoke Balogun, Co-Founder of CompareAfrique, also highlights the limits of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag impact.

Hashtag activism, alone, is not enough

With all this social media activity and international press, what actual progress has been made in rescuing the kidnapped girls? If the objective is raising awareness of the issue, yes, the hashtag has been successful. If the objective is to rescue the girls, we still have a long way to go, even if the hashtag campaign has been part of a multi-pronged approach to galvanize resources into action.

The bottom line: social media can be a powerful tool to bring visibility and awareness to a cause, but a hashtag alone is not enough to bring about social change. There are a myriad of resources that must be coordinated to effectively implement this rescue mission, which will only become more difficult as more time passes. However, prioritizing and shining a sustained light on the problem, instead getting distracted by competing media cycles on celebrities getting into petty fights, is the first step toward a solution…”

Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rodrigo Davis: “Today I’m capping two years of studying the emergence of civic crowdfunding by submitting my master’s thesis to the MIT archives…You can read Civic Crowdfunding: Participatory Communities, Entrepreneurs and the Political Economy of Place in its entirety (173 pages) now,…
Crowdfunding is everywhere. People are using it to fund watches, comic books, even famous film directors are doing it. In what is now a $6 billion industry globally, I think the most interesting, disruptive and exciting work that’s happening is in donation-based crowdfunding. That’s worth, very roughly, $1.2 billion a year worldwide per year. Within that subset, I’ve been looking at civic projects, people who are producing shared goods for a community or broader public. These projects build on histories of community fundraising and resource pooling that long predate the Internet; what’s changed is that we’ve created a scalable, portable platform model to carry out these existing practices.
So how is civic crowdfunding doing? When I started this project very few people were using that term. No one had done any aggregated data collection and published it. So I decided to take on that task. I collected data on 1224 projects between 2010 and March 2014, which raised $10.74 million in just over three years. I focused on seven platforms: Catarse (Brazil), Citizinvestor (US), Goteo (Spain), IOBY (US), Kickstarter (US), Neighbor.ly (US) and Spacehive (UK). I didn’t collect everything. …
Here are four things I found out about civic crowdfunding.

  1. Civic crowdfunding is small-scale but relatively successful, and it has big ambitions.Currently the average civic crowdfunding project is small in scale: $6,357 is the median amount raised. But these civic projects seem to be doing pretty well. Projects tagged ‘civic’ on Kickstarter, for instance, succeed 81% of the time. If Civic were a separate category, it would be Kickstarter’s most successful category. Meanwhile, most platform owners and some incumbent institutions see civic crowdfunding as a new mechanism for public-private partnerships capable of realizing large-scale projects. In a small minority of cases, such as the three edge-case projects I explored in Chapter 3 of my thesis, civic crowdfunding has begun to fulfill some of those ambitions. For the center of gravity to shift further in the direction of these potential outcomes, though, existing institutions, including government, large non-profits and the for-profit sector, will need to engage more comprehensively with the process.
  2. Civic crowdfunding started as a hobby for green space projects by local non-profits, but larger organizations are getting involved. Almost a third of campaigners are using civic crowdfunding platforms for park and garden-related projects (29%). Event-based projects, and education and training are also popular. Sports and mobility projects are pretty uncommon. The frequency of garden and park projects is partly because these projects are not capital intensive, and they’re uncontroversial. That’s also changing. Organizations from governments to corporations and large foundations, are exploring ways to support crowdfunding for a much wider range of community-facing activities. Their modes of engagement include publicizing campaigns, match-funding campaigns on an ad-hoc basis, running their own campaigns and even building new platforms from the ground up.
  3. Civic crowdfunding is concentrated in cities (especially those where platforms are based). The genre is too new to have spread very effectively, it seems. Five states account for 80% of the projects, and this is partly a function of where the platforms are located. New York, California are our top two, followed by Illinois and Oregon. We know there’s a strong trend towards big cities. It’s hard work for communities to use crowdfunding to get projects off the ground, especially when it’s an unfamiliar process. The platforms have played a critical role in building participants’ understanding of crowdfunding and supporting them through the process.
  4. Civic crowdfunding has the same highly unequal distributional tendencies as other crowd markets. When we look at the size distribution of projects, the first thing we notice is something close to a Pareto distribution, or Long Tail. Most projects are small-scale, but a small number of high-value projects have taken a large share of the total revenue raised by civic crowdfunding. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. On Kickstarter most successful projects are between 5 and 10k, and 47% of civic projects I studied are in the same bracket. The problem is that we tend to remember the outliers, such as Veronica Mars and Spike Lee – because they show what’s possible. But they are still the outliers.

Now, here are two things we don’t know.

  1. Will civic crowdfunding deter public investment or encourage it?
  2. Will civic crowdfunding widen wealth gaps?”

The merits of participatory budgeting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Hollie Russon Gilman at Aljazeera America: “For many Americans, government just isn’t working. In 2013, government dysfunction surpassed the economy as the top identified U.S. problem. A recent survey found that nearly 6 out of 10 Americans rate the health of our democracy as weak — and unlikely to get better anytime soon. But in small corners throughout the United States, democratic innovations are creating new opportunities for citizens to be a part of governance. Collectively known as open government or civic innovation, these projects are engaging policymakers, citizens and civil society and proving the skeptics wrong.
One particularly promising innovation in participatory budgeting, or PB — a process to directly empower citizens to make spending decisions on a defined public budget. PB was first attempted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989. Its success led to the World Bank calling PB a “best practice” in democratic innovation. Since then, PB has expanded to over 1,500 cities worldwide, including several in the U.S. Starting in 2009 in Chicago’s 49th Ward with a budget of just $1 million, PB in the United States has expanded to a $27 million-a-year experiment. Municipal leaders from Vallejo, California, to New York City have turned over a portion of their discretionary funds to neighborhood residents. Boston recently launched the first youth-driven PB. Nearly half of New York’s City Council members are slated to participate this fall, after newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio made it a cornerstone of his campaign. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel created a new manager of participatory budgeting who will help coordinate Council districts that want to participate. The White House recently included federally supported participatory budgeting as part of its international Open Government Partnership commitments.

Wants and needs

In PB, citizens are empowered to identify community needs, work with elected officials to craft budget proposals and vote upon where to spend public funds. The decisions are binding. And that’s important: Making democracy work is not just about making better citizens or changing policies. It is also about creating structures that create the conditions that make the effective exercise of democratic citizenship possible, and PB is uniquely structured to do that.

Chicago has been a particularly insightful petri dish to study PB in the U.S., mainly because the city is an unlikely candidate for democratic innovations. For decades its Democratic machine retained a strong and continuous hold over city government. The Daley family held the mayoralty for a combined 12 terms. While discretionary funds (known as “menu money”) are allocated equally — but not equitably, given different needs — to all 50 wards, the process of spending this money is at the discretion of locally elected aldermen. From 1972 to 2009, 30 Chicago aldermen were indicted and convicted of federal crimes ranging from income tax evasion to extortion, embezzlement and conspiracy. Clearly, Chicago has not always been a model of good governance.
Against this backdrop, PB has continued to expand in Chicago. This year three districts participated. The Fifth Ward, home to the University of Chicago, decided not to continue the process again this year. Instead, this year the ward had four groups of residents each allocate $250,000. The alderwoman noted that this enabled the transparency and engagement aspect of PB with fewer process resources — they had only 100 people come out to vote.
Different versions of PB are aimed to lower the current barriers to civic engagement. I have seen PB bring out people who have never before engaged in politics. Many longtime civic participants often cite PB as the single most meaningful civic engagement of their lives — far above, say, jury duty. Suddenly, citizens are empowered with real decision-making authority and leave with new relationships with their peers, community and elected officials.
However, PB is not a stand-alone endeavor. It must be part of a larger effort to improve governance. This must include greater transparency in public decision making and empowering citizens to hold their elected officials more accountable. The process provides an enormous education that can be translated into civic activity beyond PB. Ideally after engaging in PB, a citizen will be better equipped to volunteer in the community, vote or push for policy reform. What other infrastructure, both online and off, is needed to support citizens who want to further engage in more collaborative governance?  …”

New crowdsourcing site like ‘Yelp’ for philanthropy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Vanessa Small in the Washington Post: “Billionaire investor Warren Buffett once said that there is no market test for philanthropy. Foundations with billions in assets often hand out giant grants to charity without critique. One watchdog group wants to change that.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has created a new Web site that posts public feedback about a foundation’s giving. Think Yelp for the philanthropy sector.
Along with public critiques, the new Web site, Philamplify.org, uploads a comprehensive assessment of a foundation conducted by researchers at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
The assessment includes a review of the foundation’s goals, strategies, partnerships with grantees, transparency, diversity in its board and how any investments support the mission.
The site also posts recommendations on what would make the foundation more effective in the community. The public can agree or disagree with each recommendation and then provide feedback about the grantmaker’s performance.
People who post to the site can remain anonymous.
NCRP officials hope the site will stir debate about the giving practices of foundations.
“Foundation leaders rarely get honest feedback because no one wants to get on the wrong side of a foundation,” said Lisa Ranghelli, a director at NCRP. “There’s so much we need to do as a society that we just want these philanthropic resources to be used as powerfully as possible and for everyone to feel like they have a voice in how philanthropy operates.”
With nonprofit rating sites such as Guidestar and Charity Navigator, Philamplify is just one more move to create more transparency in the nonprofit sector. But the site might be one of the first to force transparency and public commentary exclusively about the organizations that give grants.
Foundation leaders are open to the site, but say that some grantmakers already use various evaluation methods to improve their strategies.
Groups such as Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the Center for Effective Philanthropy provide best practices for foundation giving.
The Council on Foundations, an Arlington-based membership organization of foundation groups, offers a list of tools and ideas for foundations to make their giving more effective.
“We will be paying close attention to Philamplify and new developments related to it as the project unfolds,” said Peter Panepento, senior vice president of community and knowledge at the Council on Foundations.
Currently there are three foundations up for review on the Web site: the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, which focuses on improving the Greater Philadelphia community; the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation in Atlanta, which gives grants in science and education; and the Lumina Foundation for Education in Indianapolis, which focuses on access to higher learning….”
Officials say Philamplify will focus on the top 100 largest foundations to start. Large foundations would include groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the foundations of companies such as Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline.
Although there are concerns about the site’s ability to keep comments objective, grantees hope it will start a dialogue that has been absent in philanthropy.

The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post: “What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world’s most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them?
According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. The bank is one of those high-minded organizations — Washington is full of them — that release hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports a year on policy issues big and small. Many of these reports are long and highly technical, and just about all of them get released to the world as a PDF report posted to the organization’s Web site.
The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. Since most World Bank reports have a stated objective of informing public debate or government policy, this seems like a pretty lousy track record.
pdfs
Now, granted, the bank isn’t Buzzfeed. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect thousands of downloads for reports with titles like “Detecting Urban Expansion and Land Tenure Security Assessment: The Case of Bahir Dar and Debre Markos Peri-Urban Areas of Ethiopia.” Moreover, downloads aren’t the be-all and end-all of information dissemination; many of these reports probably get some distribution by e-mail, or are printed and handed out at conferences. Still, it’s fair to assume that many big-idea reports with lofty goals to elevate the public discourse never get read by anyone other than the report writer and maybe an editor or two. Maybe the author’s spouse. Or mom.
I’m not picking on the World Bank here. In fact, they’re to be commended, strongly, for not only taking a serious look at the question but making their findings public for the rest of us to learn from. And don’t think for a second that this is just a World Bank problem. PDF reports are basically the bread and butter of Washington’s huge think tank industry, for instance. Every single one of these groups should be taking a serious look at their own PDF analytics the way the bank has.
Government agencies are also addicted to the PDF. As The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reported this week, federal agencies spend thousands of dollars and employee-hours each year producing Congressionally-mandated reports that nobody reads. And let’s not even get started on the situation in academia, where the country’s best and brightest compete for the honor of seeing their life’s work locked away behind some publisher’s paywall.”
Not every policy report is going to be a game-changer, of course. But the sheer numbers dictate that there are probably a lot of really, really good ideas out there that never see the light of day. This seems like an inefficient way for the policy community to do business, but what’s the alternative?
One final irony to ponder: You know that World Bank report, about how nobody reads its PDFs? It’s only available as a PDF. Given the attention it’s receiving, it may also be one of their most-downloaded reports ever.

Continued Progress and Plans for Open Government Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steve VanRoekel, and Todd Park at the White House:  “One year ago today, President Obama signed an executive order that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. This historic step is helping to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs while appropriately safeguarding sensitive information and rigorously protecting privacy.
Freely available data from the U.S. government is an important national resource, serving as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and economic growth. Making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government. This initiative is a key component of the President’s Management Agenda and our efforts to ensure the government is acting as an engine to expand economic growth and opportunity for all Americans. The Administration is committed to driving further progress in this area, including by designating Open Data as one of our key Cross-Agency Priority Goals.
Over the past few years, the Administration has launched a number of Open Data Initiatives aimed at scaling up open data efforts across the Health, Energy, Climate, Education, Finance, Public Safety, and Global Development sectors. The White House has also launched Project Open Data, designed to share best practices, examples, and software code to assist federal agencies with opening data. These efforts have helped unlock troves of valuable data—that taxpayers have already paid for—and are making these resources more open and accessible to innovators and the public.
Other countries are also opening up their data. In June 2013, President Obama and other G7 leaders endorsed the Open Data Charter, in which the United States committed to publish a roadmap for our nation’s approach to releasing and improving government data for the public.
Building upon the Administration’s Open Data progress, and in fulfillment of the Open Data Charter, today we are excited to release the U.S. Open Data Action Plan. The plan includes a number of exciting enhancements and new data releases planned in 2014 and 2015, including:

  • Small Business Data: The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) database of small business suppliers will be enhanced so that software developers can create tools to help manufacturers more easily find qualified U.S. suppliers, ultimately reducing the transaction costs to source products and manufacture domestically.
  • Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection: The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s entire digitized collection will be opened to software developers to make educational apps and tools. Today, even museum curators do not have easily accessible information about their art collections. This information will soon be available to everyone.
  • FDA Adverse Drug Event Data: Each year, healthcare professionals and consumers submit millions of individual reports on drug safety to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These anonymous reports are a critical tool to support drug safety surveillance. Today, this data is only available through limited quarterly reports. But the Administration will soon be making these reports available in their entirety so that software developers can build tools to help pull potentially dangerous drugs off shelves faster than ever before.

We look forward to implementing the U.S. Open Data Action Plan, and to continuing to work with our partner countries in the G7 to take the open data movement global”.

United States federal government use of crowdsourcing grows six-fold since 2011

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at E Pluribus Unum: “Citizensourcing and open innovation can work in the public sector, just as crowdsourcing can in the private sector. Around the world, the use of prizes to spur innovation has been booming for years. The United States of America has been significantly scaling up its use of prizes and challenges to solving grand national challenges since January 2011, when, President Obama signed an updated version of the America COMPETES Act into law.
According to the third congressionally mandated report released by the Obama administration today (PDF/Text), the number of prizes and challenges conducted under the America COMPETES Act has increased by 50% since 2012, 85% since 2012, and nearly six-fold overall since 2011. 25 different federal agencies offered prizes under COMPETES in fiscal year 2013, with 87 prize competitions in total. The size of the prize purses has also grown as well, with 11 challenges over $100,000 in 2013. Nearly half of the prizes conducted in FY 2013 were focused on software, including applications, data visualization tools, and predictive algorithms. Challenge.gov, the award-winning online platform for crowdsourcing national challenges, now has tens of thousands of users who have participated in more than 300 public-sector prize competitions. Beyond the growth in prize numbers and amounts, Obama administration highlighted 4 trends in public-sector prize competitions:

  • New models for public engagement and community building during competitions
  • Growth software and information technology challenges, with nearly 50% of the total prizes in this category
  • More emphasis on sustainability and “creating a post-competition path to success”
  • Increased focus on identifying novel approaches to solving problems

The growth of open innovation in and by the public sector was directly enabled by Congress and the White House, working together for the common good. Congress reauthorized COMPETES in 2010 with an amendment to Section 105 of the act that added a Section 24 on “Prize Competitions,” providing all agencies with the authority to conduct prizes and challenges that only NASA and DARPA has previously enjoyed, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which has been guiding its implementation and providing guidance on the use of challenges and prizes to promote open government.
“This progress is due to important steps that the Obama Administration has taken to make prizes a standard tool in every agency’s toolbox,” wrote Cristin Dorgelo, assistant director for grand challenges in OSTP, in a WhiteHouse.gov blog post on engaging citizen solvers with prizes:

In his September 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, President Obama called on all Federal agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges. Those efforts have expanded since the signing of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, which provided all agencies with expanded authority to pursue ambitious prizes with robust incentives.
To support these ongoing efforts, OSTP and the General Services Administration have trained over 1,200 agency staff through workshops, online resources, and an active community of practice. And NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (COECI) provides a full suite of prize implementation services, allowing agencies to experiment with these new methods before standing up their own capabilities.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy famously once said that “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” This rings true, in and outside of government. The idea of governments using prizes like this to inspire technological innovation, however, is not reliant on Web services and social media, born from the fertile mind of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. As the introduction to the third White House prize report  notes:

“One of the most famous scientific achievements in nautical history was spurred by a grand challenge issued in the 18th Century. The issue of safe, long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail was of such great importance that the British government offered a cash award of £20,000 pounds to anyone who could invent a way of precisely determining a ship’s longitude. The Longitude Prize, enacted by the British Parliament in 1714, would be worth some £30 million pounds today, but even by that measure the value of the marine chronometer invented by British clockmaker John Harrison might be a deal.”

Centuries later, the Internet, World Wide Web, mobile devices and social media offer the best platforms in history for this kind of approach to solving grand challenges and catalyzing civic innovation, helping public officials and businesses find new ways to solve old problem. When a new idea, technology or methodology that challenges and improves upon existing processes and systems, it can improve the lives of citizens or the function of the society that they live within….”