Can technology end homelessness?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Geekwire: “At the heart of Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood exists a unique juxtaposition.
Inside a two-story brick building is the Impact Hub co-working space and business incubator, a place where entrepreneurs are busily working on ideas to improve the world we live in.
hacktoendhomelessnessBut walk outside the Impact Hub’s doors, and you’ll enter an entirely different world.
Homelessness. Drugs. Violence.
Now, those two contrasting scenes are coming together.
This weekend, more than 100 developers, designers, entrepreneurs and do-gooders will team up at the Impact Hub for the first-ever Hack to End Homelessness, a four-day event that encourages participants to envision and create ideas to alleviate the homelessness problem in Seattle.
The Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, Real Change and several other local homeless services and advocacy groups have already submitted project proposals, which range from an e-commerce site showcasing artwork of homeless youth to a social network focusing on low-end mobile phones for people who are homeless.
Seattle has certainly made an effort to fix its homelessness problem. Back in 2005, the Committee to End Homelessness established a 10-year plan to dramatically reduce the number of people without homes in the region. By the end of 2014, the goal was to “virtually end,” homelessness in King County.
But fast-forward to today and that hasn’t exactly come to fruition. There are more than 2,300 people in Seattle sleeping in the streets — up 16 percent from 2013 — and city data shows nearly 10,000 households checking into shelters or transitional housing last year. Thousands of others may not be on the streets or in shelters, yet still live without a permanent place to sleep at night.
While some efforts of the committee have helped curb homelessness, it’s clear that there is still a problem — one that has likely been affected by rising rent prices in the area.
Candace Faber, one of the event organizers, said that her team has been shocked by the growth of homelessness in the Seattle metropolitan area. They’re worried not only about how many people do not have a permanent home, but what kind of impact the problem is having on the city as a whole.
“With Seattle experiencing the highest rent hikes in the nation, we’re concerned that, without action, our city will not be able to remain the dynamic, affordable place it is now,” Faber said. “We don’t want to lose our entrepreneurial spirit or wind up with a situation like San Francisco, where you can’t afford to innovate without serious VC backing and there’s serious tension between the housing community and tech workers.”
That raises the question: How, exactly, can technology fix the homeless problem? The stories of these Seattle entrepreneurs helps to provide the answer.

FROM SHELTERS TO STARTUPS

Kyle Kesterson knows a thing or two about being homeless.
That’s because the Freak’n Genius co-founder and CEO spent his childhood living in 14 different homes and apartments, in addition to a bevy of shelters and transitional houses. The moving around and lack of permanent housing made going to school difficult, and finding acceptance anywhere was nearly impossible.
“I was always the new kid, the poor kid, and the smallest kid,” Kesterson says now. “You just become the target of getting picked on.”
By the time he was 15, Kesterson realized that school wasn’t a place that fit his learning style. So, he dropped out to help run his parents’ house-cleaning business in Seattle.
That’s when Kesterson, now a talented artist and designer, further developed his creative skills. The Yuba City, Calif. native would spend hours locked in a room perusing through deviantART.com, a new Internet community where other artists from around the world were sharing their own work and receiving feedback.
…
So now Kesterson, who plans on attending the final presentations at the Hack for Homelessness event on Sunday, is using his own experiences to teach youth about finding solutions to problems with a entrepreneurial lens. When it comes to helping at-risk youth, or those that are homeless, Kesterson says it’s about finding a thriving and supportive environment — the same one he surrounded himself with while surfing through deviantART 14 years ago.
“Externally, our environment plays a significant role in either setting people up for growth and success, or weighting people down, sucking the life out of them, and eventually leaving them at or near rock bottom,” he said.
For Kesterson, it’s entrepreneurs who can help create these environments for people, and show them that they have the ability and power to solve problems and truly make a difference.
“Entrepreneurs need to first focus on the external and internal environments of those that are homeless,” he said. “Support, help, and inspire. Become a part of their network to mentor and make connections with the challenges they are faced with the way we lean on our own mentor networks.”

FIXING THE ROOT

Lindsay Caron Epstein has always, in some shape or form, been an entrepreneur at heart.
She figured out a way to survive after moving to Arizona from New Jersey with only $100. She figured out how to land a few minimum wage jobs and eventually start a non-profit community center for at-risk youth at just 22 years old.
And now, Caron using her entrepreneurial spirit to help figure out ways to fix social challenges like homelessness.
The 36-year-old is CEO and founder of ActivateHub, a startup working alongside other socially-conscious companies in Seattle’s Fledge Accelerator. ActivateHub is a “community building social action network,” or a place where people can find local events put on by NGOs and other organizations working on a wide variety of issues.
Caron found the inspiration to start the company after organizing programs for troubled youth in Arizona and studying the homelessness problem while in school. She became fascinated with how communities were built in a way that could help people and pull them out of tough situations, but there didn’t appear to be an easy way for people to get involved.
“If you do a Google search for poverty, homelessness, climate change — any issue you care about — you’ll just find news articles and blogs,” Caron explained. “You don’t find who in your community is working on those problems and you don’t find out how you can get involved.”
Caron says her company can help those that may not have a home or have anything to do. ActivateHub, she said, might give them a reason to become engaged in something and create a sense of value in the community.
“It gives people a reason to clean up and enables them to make connections,” said Caron, who will also be attending this weekend’s event. “Some people need that inspiration and purpose to change their situation, and a lot of times that motivation isn’t there.”
Of course, ActivateHub alone isn’t going to solve the homelessness problem by itself. Caron knows this and thinks that entrepreneurs can help by focusing on more preventative measures. Sure, technology can be used to help connect homeless people to certain resources, but there’s a deeper issue at hand for Caron…”

Looking for the Needle in a Stack of Needles: Tracking Shadow Economic Activities in the Age of Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Manju Bansal in MIT Technology Review: “The undocumented guys hanging out in the home-improvement-store parking lot looking for day labor, the neighborhood kids running a lemonade stand, and Al Qaeda terrorists plotting to do harm all have one thing in common: They operate in the underground economy, a shadowy zone where businesses, both legitimate and less so, transact in the currency of opportunity, away from traditional institutions and their watchful eyes.
One might think that this alternative economy is limited to markets that are low on the Transparency International rankings (such as sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, for instance). However, a recent University of Wisconsin report estimates the value of the underground economy in the United States at about $2 trillion, about 15% of the total U.S. GDP. And a 2013 study coauthored by Friedrich Schneider, a noted authority on global shadow economies, estimated the European Union’s underground economy at more than 18% of GDP, or a whopping 2.1 trillion euros. More than two-thirds of the underground activity came from the most developed countries, including Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
Underground economic activity is a multifaceted phenomenon, with implications across the board for national security, tax collections, public-sector services, and more. It includes the activity of any business that relies primarily on old-fashioned cash for most transactions — ranging from legitimate businesses (including lemonade stands) to drug cartels and organized crime.
Though it’s often soiled, heavy to lug around, and easy to lose to theft, cash is still king simply because it is so easy to hide from the authorities. With the help of the right bank or financial institution, “dirty” money can easily be laundered and come out looking fresh and clean, or at least legitimate. Case in point is the global bank HSBC, which agreed to pay U.S. regulators $1.9 billion in fines to settle charges of money laundering on behalf of Mexican drug cartels. According to a U.S. Senate subcommittee report, that process involved transferring $7 billion in cash from the bank’s branches in Mexico to those in the United States. Just for reference, each $100 bill weighs one gram, so to transfer $7 billion, HSBC had to physically transport 70 metric tons of cash across the U.S.-Mexican border.
The Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body established in 1989, has estimated the total amount of money laundered worldwide to be around 2% to 5% of global GDP. Many of these transactions seem, at first glance, to be perfectly legitimate. Therein lies the conundrum for a banker or a government official: How do you identify, track, control, and, one hopes, prosecute money launderers, when they are hiding in plain sight and their business is couched in networked layers of perfectly defensible legitimacy?
Enter big-data tools, such as those provided by SynerScope, a Holland-based startup that is a member of the SAP Startup Focus program. This company’s solutions help unravel the complex networks hidden behind the layers of transactions and interactions.
Networks, good or bad, are near omnipresent in almost any form of organized human activity and particularly in banking and insurance. SynerScope takes data from both structured and unstructured data fields and transforms these into interactive computer visuals that display graphic patterns that humans can use to quickly make sense of information. Spotting of deviations in complex networked processes can easily be put to use in fraud detection for insurance, banking, e-commerce, and forensic accounting.
SynerScope’s approach to big-data business intelligence is centered on data-intense compute and visualization that extend the human “sense-making” capacity in much the same way that a telescope or microscope extends human vision.
To understand how SynerScope helps authorities track and halt money laundering, it’s important to understand how the networked laundering process works. It typically involves three stages.
1. In the initial, or placement, stage, launderers introduce their illegal profits into the financial system. This might be done by breaking up large amounts of cash into less-conspicuous smaller sums that are then deposited directly into a bank account, or by purchasing a series of monetary instruments (checks, money orders) that are then collected and deposited into accounts at other locations.
2. After the funds have entered the financial system, the launderer commences the second stage, called layering, which uses a series of conversions or transfers to distance the funds from their sources. The funds might be channeled through the purchase and sales of investment instruments, or the launderer might simply wire the funds through a series of accounts at various banks worldwide. 
Such use of widely scattered accounts for laundering is especially prevalent in those jurisdictions that do not cooperate in anti-money-laundering investigations. Sometimes the launderer disguises the transfers as payments for goods or services.
3. Having successfully processed the criminal profits through the first two phases, the launderer then proceeds to the third stage, integration, in which the funds re-enter the legitimate economy. The launderer might invest the funds in real estate, luxury assets, or business ventures.
Current detection tools compare individual transactions against preset profiles and rules. Sophisticated criminals quickly learn how to make their illicit transactions look normal for such systems. As a result, rules and profiles need constant and costly updating.
But SynerScope’s flexible visual analysis uses a network angle to detect money laundering. It shows the structure of the entire network with data coming in from millions of transactions, a structure that launderers cannot control. With just a few mouse clicks, SynerScope’s relation and sequence views reveal structural interrelationships and interdependencies. When those patterns are mapped on a time scale, it becomes virtually impossible to hide abnormal flows.

SynerScope’s relation and sequence views reveal structural and temporal transaction patterns which make it virtually impossible to hide abnormal money flows.”

Minecraft: All of Denmark virtually recreated

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

BBC: “The whole of Denmark has been recreated, to scale, within the virtual world of Minecraft. The whole country has been faithfully reproduced in the hugely popular title’s building-block style by the Danish government. Danish residents are urged to “freely move around in Denmark” and “find your own residential area, to build and tear down”.
Around 50 million copies of Minecraft have been sold worldwide.Known as a “sandbox” game, the title allows players to exist in a virtual world, using building blocks to create everything from basic structures to entire worlds. Minecraft was launched in 2011 by independent Swedish developer Markus “Notch” Persson.
The Danish government said the maps were created to be used as an educational tool – suggesting “virtual field trips” to hard-to-reach parts of the country.
Flat roofs
There are no specific goals to achieve other than continued survival. Recreating real-world locations is of particular interest for many players. Last year an intern working with the UK’s Ordnance Survey team built geographically accurate landscapes covering 86,000 sq miles (224,000 sq km) of Britain.The Danish project is more ambitious however, with buildings and towns reproduced in more detail. The only difference, the team behind it said, was that all roofs were flat.
It has also banned the use of one of the game’s typical tools – dynamite. The full map download of Denmark will be available until 23 October.”

Twenty-one European Cities Advance in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge Competition to Create Innovative Solutions to Urban Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Bloomberg Philanthropies today revealed the 21 European cities that have emerged as final contenders in its 2013-2014 Mayors Challenge, a competition to inspire cities to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life, and that ultimately can spread to other cities. One grand prize winner will receive €5 million for the most creative and transferable idea. Four additional cities will be awarded €1 million, and all will be announced in the fall. The finalists’ proposed solutions address some of Europe’s most critical issue areas: youth unemployment, aging populations, civic engagement, economic development, environment and energy concerns, public health and safety, and making government more efficient…
James Anderson, the head of government innovation for Bloomberg Philanthropies, said: “While the ideas are very diverse, we identified key themes. The ideas tended toward networked, distributed solutions as opposed to costly centralized ones. There was a lot of interest in citizen engagement as both a means and end. Technology that concretely and positively affects the lives of individual citizens – from the blind person in Warsaw to the unemployed youth in Amsterdam to the homeowner in Schaerbeek — also played a significant role.”
Bloomberg Philanthropies staff and an independent selection committee of 12 members from across Europe closely considered each application over multiple rounds of review, culminating in feedback and selection earlier this month, resulting in 21 cities’ ideas moving forward for further development. The submissions will be judged on four critieria: vision, potential for impact, implementation plan, and potential to spread to other cities. The finalists and their ideas are:

  1. AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Youth Unemployment: Tackling widespread youth unemployment by equipping young people with 21st century skills and connecting them with jobs and apprenticeships across Europe through an online game
  2. ATHENS, Greece – Civic Engagement: Empowering citizens with a new online platform to address the large number of small-scale urban challenges accelerated by the Greek economic crisis
  3. BARCELONA, Spain – Aging: Improving quality of life and limiting social isolation by establishing a network of public and private support – including family, friends, social workers, and volunteers – for each elderly citizen
  4. BOLOGNA, Italy – Youth Unemployment: Building an urban scale model of informal education labs and civic engagement to prevent youth unemployment by teaching children aged 6-16 entrepreneurship and 21st century skills
  5. BRISTOL, United Kingdom – Health/Anti-obesity: Tackling obesity and unemployment by creating a new economic system that increases access to locally grown, healthy foods
  6. BRNO, Czech Republic – Public Safety/Civic Engagement: Engaging citizens in keeping their own communities safe to build social cohesion and reduce crime
  7. CARDIFF, United Kingdom – Economic Development: Increasing productivity little by little in residents’ personal and professional lives, so that a series of small improvements add up to a much more productive city
  8. FLORENCE, Italy – Economic Development: Combatting unemployment with a new economic development model that combines technology and social innovation, targeting the city’s historic artisan and maker community
  9. GDAŃSK, Poland – Civic Engagement: Re-instilling faith in local democracy by mandating that city government formally debate local issues put forward by citizens
  10. KIRKLEES, United Kingdom – Social Capital: Pooling the city and community’s idle assets – from vehicles to unused spaces to citizens’ untapped time and expertise – to help the area make the most of what it has and do more with less
  11. KRAKOW, Poland – Transportation: Implementing smart, personalized transportation incentives and a seamless and unified public transit payment system to convince residents to opt for greener modes of transportation
  12. LISBON, Portugal – Energy: Transforming wasted kinetic energy generated by the city’s commuting traffic into electricity, reducing the carbon footprint and increasing environmental sustainability
  13. LONDON, United Kingdom – Public Health: Empowering citizens to monitor and improve their own health through a coordinated, multi-stakeholder platform and new technologies that dramatically improve quality of life and reduce health care costs
  14. MADRID, Spain – Energy: Diversifying its renewable energy options by finding and funding the best ways to harvest underground power, such as wasted heat generated by the city’s below-ground infrastructure
  15. SCHAERBEEK, Belgium – Energy: Using proven flyover and 3D geothermal mapping technology to provide each homeowner and tenant with a personalized energy audit and incentives to invest in energy-saving strategies
  16. SOFIA, Bulgaria – Civic Engagement: Transforming public spaces by deploying mobile art units to work side-by-side with local residents, re-envisioning and rejuvenating underused spaces and increasing civic engagement
  17. STARA ZAGORA, Bulgaria – Economic Development: Reversing the brain-drain of the city’s best and brightest by helping young entrepreneurs turn promising ideas into local high-tech businesses
  18. STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Environment: Combatting climate change by engaging citizens to produce biochar, an organic material that increases tree growth, sequesters carbon, and purifies storm runoff
  19. THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Civic Engagement: Enabling citizens to allocate a portion of their own tax money to support the local projects they most believe in
  20. WARSAW, Poland – Transportation/Accessibility: Enabling the blind and visually impaired to navigate the city as easily as their sighted peers by providing high-tech auditory alerts which will save them travel time and increase their independence
  21. YORK, United Kingdom – Government Systems: Revolutionizing the way citizens, businesses, and others can propose new ideas to solve top city problems, providing a more intelligent way to acquire or develop the best solutions, thus enabling greater civic participation and saving the city both time and money

Further detail and related elements for this year’s Mayors Challenge can be found via: http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/”

Finland opens new portal launched to support transparency and interaction

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Epractice:” The Ministry of Justice (of Finland) has launched a new portal, demokratia.fi, which gathers together information from various democracy-related sites and news in the field of political decision-making. The site thereby makes it easier for citizens to find the best channels for participation and influence, and increases government transparency and interaction.
Demokratia.fi summarises the eDemocracy web services maintained by the Ministry of Justice, namely otakantaa.fi, kansalaisaloite.fi and kuntalaisaloite.fi. Later in spring 2014, a fourth site will be added, lausuntopalvelu.fi, which is intended to streamline the consultation procedures and make it transparent and open to the public. The service will digitise the current consultation process.
The administration is acting in accordance with the principles of the Finnish action plan for open government, to strengthen citizens’ rights to information and participation in the development of common solutions and services. Matters that are under preparation should be reported at an early stage of preparations so that citizens have genuine opportunities to influence the process.
Demokrati.fi also contains links to other public authorities’ websites with information on current matters that are being planned or prepared. In addition, it highlights the latest news from, for example, the parliament and the government.”

The Data Mining Techniques That Reveal Our Planet's Cultural Links and Boundaries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “The habits and behaviors that define a culture are complex and fascinating. But measuring them is a difficult task. What’s more, understanding the way cultures change from one part of the world to another is a task laden with challenges.
The gold standard in this area of science is known as the World Values Survey, a global network of social scientists studying values and their impact on social and political life. Between 1981 and 2008, this survey conducted over 250,000 interviews in 87 societies. That’s a significant amount of data and the work has continued since then. This work is hugely valuable but it is also challenging, time-consuming and expensive.
Today, Thiago Silva at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil and a few buddies reveal another way to collect data that could revolutionize the study of global culture. These guys study cultural differences around the world using data generated by check-ins on the location-based social network, Foursquare.
That allows these researchers to gather huge amounts of data, cheaply and easily in a short period of time. “Our one-week dataset has a population of users of the same order of magnitude of the number of interviews performed in [the World Values Survey] in almost three decades,” they say.
Food and drink are fundamental aspects of society and so the behaviors and habits associated with them are important indicators. The basic question that Silva and co attempt to answer is: what are your eating and drinking habits? And how do these differ from a typical individual in another part of the world such as Japan, Malaysia, or Brazil?
Foursquare is ideally set up to explore this question. Users “check in” by indicating when they have reached a particular location that might be related to eating and drinking but also to other activities such as entertainment, sport and so on.
Silva and co are only interested in the food and drink preferences of individuals and, in particular, on the way these preferences change according to time of day and geographical location.
So their basic approach is to compare a large number individual preferences from different parts of the world and see how closely they match or how they differ.
Because Foursquare does not share its data, Silva and co downloaded almost five million tweets containing Foursquare check-ins, URLs pointing to the Foursquare website containing information about each venue. They discarded check-ins that were unrelated to food or drink.
That left them with some 280,000 check-ins related to drink from 160,000 individuals; over 400,000 check-ins related to fast food from 230,000 people; and some 400,000 check-ins relating to ordinary restaurant food or what Silva and co call slow food.
They then divide each of these classes into subcategories. For example, the drink class has 21 subcategories such as brewery, karaoke bar, pub, and so on. The slow food class has 53 subcategories such as Chinese restaurant, Steakhouse, Greek restaurant, and so on.
Each check-in gives the time and geographical location which allows the team to compare behaviors from all over the world. They compare, for example, eating and drinking times in different countries both during the week and at the weekend. They compare the choices of restaurants, fast food habits and drinking habits by continent and country. The even compare eating and drinking habits in New York, London, and Tokyo.
The results are a fascinating insight into humanity’s differing habits. Many places have similar behaviors, Malaysia and Singapore or Argentina and Chile, for example, which is just as expected given the similarities between these places.
But other resemblances are more unexpected. A comparison of drinking habits show greater similarity between Brazil and France, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, than they do between France and England, separated only by the English Channel…
They point out only two major differences. The first is that no Islamic cluster appears in the Foursquare data. Countries such as Turkey are similar to Russia, while Indonesia seems related to Malaysia and Singapore.
The second is that the U.S. and Mexico make up their own individual cluster in the Foursquare data whereas the World Values Survey has them in the “English-speaking” and “Latin American” clusters accordingly.
That’s exciting data mining work that has the potential to revolutionize the way sociologists and anthropologists study human culture around the world. Expect to hear more about it
Ref: http://arxiv.org/abs/1404.1009: You Are What You Eat (and Drink): Identifying Cultural Boundaries By Analyzing Food & Drink Habits In Foursquare”.

Big data: are we making a big mistake?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Harford in the Financial Times: “Cheerleaders for big data have made four exciting claims, each one reflected in the success of Google Flu Trends: that data analysis produces uncannily accurate results; that every single data point can be captured, making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete; that it is passé to fret about what causes what, because statistical correlation tells us what we need to know; and that scientific or statistical models aren’t needed because, to quote “The End of Theory”, a provocative essay published in Wired in 2008, “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”. Unfortunately, these four articles of faith are at best optimistic oversimplifications. At worst, according to David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge university, they can be “complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense.”…
But big data do not solve the problem that has obsessed statisticians and scientists for centuries: the problem of insight, of inferring what is going on, and figuring out how we might intervene to change a system for the better.
“We have a new resource here,” says Professor David Hand of Imperial College London. “But nobody wants ‘data’. What they want are the answers.”
To use big data to produce such answers will require large strides in statistical methods.
“It’s the wild west right now,” says Patrick Wolfe of UCL. “People who are clever and driven will twist and turn and use every tool to get sense out of these data sets, and that’s cool. But we’re flying a little bit blind at the moment.”
Statisticians are scrambling to develop new methods to seize the opportunity of big data. Such new methods are essential but they will work by building on the old statistical lessons, not by ignoring them.
Recall big data’s four articles of faith. Uncanny accuracy is easy to overrate if we simply ignore false positives, as with Target’s pregnancy predictor. The claim that causation has been “knocked off its pedestal” is fine if we are making predictions in a stable environment but not if the world is changing (as with Flu Trends) or if we ourselves hope to change it. The promise that “N = All”, and therefore that sampling bias does not matter, is simply not true in most cases that count. As for the idea that “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves” – that seems hopelessly naive in data sets where spurious patterns vastly outnumber genuine discoveries.
“Big data” has arrived, but big insights have not. The challenge now is to solve new problems and gain new answers – without making the same old statistical mistakes on a grander scale than ever.”

Randomized control trials (RCTs): interesting, but a marginal tool for governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ODI Researcher Philipp Krause at BeyondBudgets: “Randomized control trials (RCTs) have had a great decade. The stunning line-up of speakers who celebrated J-PAL’s tenth anniversary in Boston last December gives some indication of just how great. They are the shiny new tool of development policy, and a lot of them are pretty cool. Browsing through J-PAL’s library of projects, it’s easy to see how so many of them end up in top-notch academic journals.
So far, so good. But the ambition of RCTs is not just to provide a gold-standard measurement of impact. They aim to actually have an impact on the real world themselves. The scenario goes something like this: researchers investigate the effect of an intervention and use the findings to either get out of that mess quickly (if the intervention doesn’t work) or scale it up quickly (if it does). In the pursuit of this impact-seeker’s Nirvana, it’s easy to conflate a couple of things, notably that an RCT is not the only way to evaluate impact; and evaluating impact is not the only way to use evidence for policy. Unfortunately, it is now surprisingly common to hear RCTs conflated with evidence-use, and evidence-use equated with the key ingredient for better public services in developing countries. The reality of evidence use is different.
Today’s rich countries didn’t get rich by using evidence systematically. This is a point that we recently discussed at a big World Bank – ODI conference on the (coincidental?) tenth anniversary of the WDR 2004. Lant Pritchett made it best when describing Randomistas as engaging in faith-based activity: nobody could accuse the likes of Germany, Switzerland, Sweden or the US of achieving human development by systematically scaling up what works.
What these countries do have in spades is people noisily demanding stuff, and governments giving it to them. In fact, some of the greatest innovations in providing health, unemployment benefits and pensions to poor people (and taking them to scale) happened because citizens seemed to want them, and giving them stuff seemed like a good way to shut them up. Ask Otto Bismarck. It’s not too much of a stretch to call this the history of public spending in a nutshell….
The bottom line is governments s that care about impact have plenty of cheaper, timelier and more appropriate tools and options available to them than RCTs. That doesn’t mean RCTs shouldn’t be done, of course. And the evaluation of aid is a different matter altogether, where donors are free to be as inefficient about evidence-basing as they wish without burdening poor countries.
But for governments the choice of how to go about using systematic evidence is theirs to make. And it’s a tough capability to pick up. Many governments choose not to do it, and there’s no evidence that they suffer for it. It would be wrong for donors to suggest to low-income countries that RCTs are in any way critical for their public service capability. Better call them what they are: interesting, but marginal.”

Artists Show How Anyone Can Fight the Man with Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MotherBoard: “The UK’s Open Data Institute usually looks, as you’d probably expect, like an office full of people staring at screens. But visit at the moment and you might see a potato gun among the desks or a bunch of drone photos on the wall—all in the name of encouraging public discussion around and engagement with open data.
The ODI was set up by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and interdisciplinary researcher Nigel Shadbolt in London to push for an open data culture, and from Monday it will be hosting the second Data as Culture exhibition, which presents a more artistic take on questions surrounding the practicalities of open data. In doing so, it shows quite how the general public can (and probably really should) use data to inform their own lives and to engage with political issues.
All of the exhibits are based on freely available data, which is made lot more animated and accessible than numbers in a spreadsheet. “I made the decision straight away to move away from anything screen-based,” curator Shiri Shalmy told me as she gave me a tour, winding through office workers tapping away on keyboards. “Everything had to be physical.”…
James Bridle’s work on drone warfare touches a similar theme, though in this case the data are not hidden: his images of military UAVs come from Google Maps. “They’re there for anybody to look at, they’re kind of secret but available,” said Shalmy, who added that with the data out there, we can’t pretend we don’t know what’s going on. “They can do things in secret as long as we pretend it’s a secret.”
We’ve looked at Bridle’s work before, from his Dronestagram photos to his chalk outlines of drones, and he’s been commissioned to do something new for the Data as Culture show: Shalmy has asked him to compare the open data on military drones against that of London’s financial centre. He’ll present what he digs up in summer.

From the series ‘Watching the Watchers.’ Image: James Bridle/ODI

Using this kind of government data—from local council expenses to military movements—shows quite how much information is available and how it can be used to hold politicians to account. In essence, anyone can do surveillance to some level. While activists including Berners-Lee push for more data to be made accessible, it’s only useful if we actually bother to engage with it, and work like Bridle’s pose the uneasy suggestion that sometimes it’s more comfortable to remain ignorant.
And in addition to reading data, we can collect it. Rather than delving into government files, a knitted banner by artist Sam Meech uses publicly generated data to make a political point. The banner bears the phrase “8 hour labour,” a reference to the eight-hour workday movement that sprang up in Britain’s Industrial Revolution. The idea was that people would have eight hours work, eight hours rest, and eight hours recreation.

A detail from Sam Meechan’s Punchcard Economy. Image: Sam Meechan/ODI

But the black-and-white pattern in the banner is made up of much less regular working hours: those logged by self-employed creatives, who can take part by entering their own timesheet data via virtual punchcards. Shalmy pointed out her own schedule in a week when she was setting up the exhibition: a 70-hour block woven into the knit. It’s an example of how individuals can use data to make a political point—the work is reminiscent of trade union banners and seems particularly relevant at a time when controversial zero hours contracts are on the rise.
Also garnering data from the public, artist collective Thickear are asking people to fill in data forms on their arrival, which they’ll file on an old-fashioned spike. I took one of the forms, only to be confronted with nonsensical bureaucratic-type boxes. “The data itself is not informative in any way,” said Shalmy. It’s more about the idea of who we trust to give our data to. How often do we accept privacy policies without even giving ourselves the chance to even blink at the small print?…”

Charities Try New Ways to Test Ideas Quickly and Polish Them Later

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Gose in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “A year ago, a division of TechSoup Global began working on an app to allow donors to buy a hotel room for victims of domestic violence when no other shelter is available. Now that app is a finalist in a competition run by a foundation that combats human trafficking—and a win could mean a grant worth several hundred thousand dollars. The app’s evolution—adding a focus on sex slaves to the initial emphasis on domestic violence—was hardly accidental.
Caravan Studios, the TechSoup division that created the app, has embraced a new management approach popular in Silicon Valley known as “lean start-up.”
The principles, which are increasingly popular among nonprofits, emphasize experimentation over long-term planning and urge groups to get products and services out to clients as early as possible so the organizations can learn from feedback and make changes.
When the app, known as SafeNight, was still early in the design phase, Caravan posted details about the project on its website, including applications for grants that Caravan had not yet received. In lean-start-up lingo, Caravan put out a “minimal viable product” and hoped for feedback that would lead to a better app.
Caravan soon heard from antitrafficking organizations, which were interested in the same kind of service. Caravan eventually teamed up with the Polaris Project and the State of New Jersey, which were working on a similar app, to jointly create an app for the final round of the antitrafficking contest. Humanity United, the foundation sponsoring the contest, plans to award $1.8-million to as many as three winners later this month.
Marnie Webb, CEO of Caravan, which is building an array of apps designed to curb social problems, says lean-start-up principles help Caravan work faster and meet real needs.
“The central idea is that any product that we develop will get better if it lives as much of its life as possible outside of our office,” Ms. Webb says. “If we had kept SafeNight inside and polished it and polished it, it would have been super hard to bring on a partner because we would have invested too much.”….
Nonprofits developing new tech tools are among the biggest users of lean-start-up ideas.
Upwell, an ocean-conservation organization founded in 2011, scans the web for lively ocean-related discussions and then pushes to turn them into full-fledged movements through social-media campaigns.
Lean principles urge groups to steer clear of “vanity metrics,” such as site visits, that may sound impressive but don’t reveal much. Upwell tracks only one number—“social mentions”—the much smaller group of people who actually say something about an issue online.
After identifying a hot topic, Upwell tries to assemble a social-media strategy within 24 hours—what it calls a “minimum viable campaign.”
“We do the least amount of work to get something out the door that will get results and information,” says Rachel Dearborn, Upwell’s campaign director.
Campaigns that don’t catch on are quickly scrapped. But campaigns that do catch on get more time, energy, and money from Upwell.
After Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, a prominent writer on ocean issues and others began pushing the idea that revitalizing the oyster beds near New York City could help protect the shore from future storm surges. Upwell’s “I (Oyster) New York” campaign featured a catchy logo and led to an even bigger spike in attention.

‘Build-Measure-Learn’

Some organizations that could hardly be called start-ups are also using lean principles. GuideStar, the 20-year-old aggregator of financial information about charities, is using the lean approach to develop tools more quickly that meet the needs of its users.
The lean process promotes short “build-measure-learn” cycles, in which a group frequently updates a product or service based on what it hears from its customers.
GuideStar and the Nonprofit Finance Fund have developed a tool called Financial Scan that allows charities to see how they compare with similar groups on various financial measures, such as their mix of earned revenue and grant funds.
When it analyzed who was using the tool, GuideStar found heavy interest from both foundations and accounting firms, says Evan Paul, GuideStar’s senior director of products and marketing.
In the future, he says, GuideStar may create three versions of Financial Scan to meet the distinct interests of charities, foundations, and accountants.
“We want to get more specific about how people are using our data to make decisions so that we can help make those decisions better and faster,” Mr. Paul says….

Lean Start-Up: a Glossary of Terms for a Hot New Management Approach

Build-Measure-Learn

Instead of spending considerable time developing a product or service for a big rollout, organizations should consider using a continuous feedback loop: “build” a program or service, even if it is not fully fleshed out; “measure” how clients are affected; and “learn” by improving the program or going in a new direction. Repeat the cycle.

Minimum Viable Product

An early version of a product or service that may be lacking some features. This approach allows an organization to obtain feedback from clients and quickly determine the usefulness of a product or service and how to improve it.

Get Out of the Building

To determine whether a product or service is needed, talk to clients and share your ideas with them before investing heavily.

A/B Testing

Create two versions of a product or service, show them to different groups, and see which performs best.

Failing Fast

By quickly realizing that a product or service isn’t viable, organizations save time and money and gain valuable information for their next effort.

Pivot

Making a significant change in strategy when the early testing of a minimum viable product shows that the product or service isn’t working or isn’t needed.

Vanity Metrics

Measures that seem to provide a favorable picture but don’t accurately capture the impact of a product. An example might be a tally of website page views. A more meaningful measure—or an “actionable metric,” in the lean lexicon—might be the number of active users of an online service.
Sources: The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries; The Ultimate Dictionary of Lean for Social Good, a publication by Lean Impact”