‘Collective intelligence’ is not necessarily present in virtual groups

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jordan B. Barlow and Alan R. Dennis at LSE: “Do groups of smart people perform better than groups of less intelligent people?

Research published in Science magazine in 2010 reported that groups, like individuals, have a certain level of “collective intelligence,” such that some groups perform consistently well across many different types of tasks, while other groups perform consistently poorly. Collective intelligence is similar to individual intelligence, but at the group level.

Interestingly, the Science study found that collective intelligence was not related to the individual intelligence of group members; groups of people with higher intelligence did not perform better than groups with lower intelligence. Instead, the study found that high performing teams had members with higher social sensitivity – the ability to read the emotions of others using visual facial cues.

Social sensitivity is important when we sit across a table from each other. But what about online, when we exchange emails or text messages? Does social sensitivity matter when I can’t see your face?

We examined the collective intelligence in an online environment in which groups used text-based computer-mediated communication. We followed the same procedures as the original Science study, which used the approach typically used to measure individual intelligence. In individual intelligence tests, a person completes several small “tasks” or problems. An analysis of task scores typically demonstrates that task scores are correlated, meaning that if a person does well on one problem, it is likely that they did well on other problems….

The results were not what we expected. The correlations between our groups’ performance scores were either not statistically significant or significantly negative, as shown in Table 1. The average correlation between any two tasks was -0.05, indicating that performance on one task was not correlated with performance on other tasks. In other words, groups who performed well on one of the tasks were unlikely to perform well on the other tasks…

Our findings challenge the conclusion reported in Science that groups have a general collective intelligence analogous to individual intelligence. Our study shows that no collective intelligence factor emerged when groups used a popular commercial text-based online tool. That is, when using tools with limited visual cues, groups that performed well on one task were no more likely to perform well on a different task. Thus the “collective intelligence” factor related to social sensitivity that was reported in Science is not collective intelligence; it is instead a factor associated with the ability to work well using face-to-face communication, and does not transcend media….(More)”

Results of early Open Government Partnership initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Open Government Partnership: “The search for these stories ended with finding seven very different reform initiatives in different regions and covering a broad range of open government topics.

In Costa Rica, we learn about how the government is using its participation in OGP to restart a process halted for 23 years to create a consultation mechanism that will allow indigenous groups to participate in all policy making decisions that affect them, and the results of the dialogue leading to an improvement in the delivery of public services.

The Chilean story documents how a 10-year campaign to regulate influence peddling was given a boost by an explicit commitment included in the first Chilean action plan to introduce legislation to regulate lobbying – a commitment since fulfilled. The resulting Lobbying Act sheds new light on the relationship between officials and influence groups and is beginning to democratize access to authorities.

Italy’s OpenCoesione and its spin-off initiatives show how top-down open data initiatives on public spending can be combined with bottom-up, data-driven monitoring to promote accountability and public participation in the policy-making process, including promoting civic engagement amongst school students.

The Tanzanian case study tells the story of how the “How Do I?” – or “Nifanyeje?” – website is making information on basic public services available to citizens and cutting down transaction times and costs, but it also highlights the need to still reach the last mile in a country where Internet penetration remains low.

Indonesia’s initiative to create a One Map portal with official base maps for the country, part of a much larger initiative of synchronizing various maps for the country that when completed could help resolve land-related conflicts and address illegal deforestation, shows technical progress and some improvements in inter-agency cooperation.

In Macedonia, we learn how opening up data on air quality has acted as an engine for civic activism and about short and medium-term policy options being implemented and explored by the relevant authorities as a result.

Finally, the case from Israel shows how collaboration between civil society and champions within the Parliament is helping make data on the state budget accessible to citizens, journalists, and the parliamentarians themselves.

Each story demonstrates measurable progress and the added value of the collaboration between government and civil society that is at the very heart of OGP. The stories also show the immense importance of political will, bureaucratic buy-in, adequate resourcing, and demand-side calls for accountability in ensuring that the reforms take root and continue into the future, so that their impact can be felt by a broader range of citizens. In that sense, the last chapter for each story is still to be written. In a majority of the cases, these commitments’ inclusion in the OGP National Action Plans gave prominence and momentum to the envisioned reforms, helping them along. We hope to be able to continue to track these reforms in the years to come….(More)”.

How The Tech Community Mobilized To Help Refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Melendez at FastCompany: “Thousands of techies the world over have banded together to help refugees flooding Europe to stay connected.

The needs of the waves of migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and other points—more than a million in 2015—go beyond just shelter, safety, and sustenance.

“You can imagine, crossing to a border or coming to a place you don’t know. Information needs are massive,” says Alyoscia D’Onofrio, senior director at the governance technical unit of the International Rescue Committee, which assists refugees and displaced people around the world.

“One of the big differences between this crisis response and many that have gone before is that you’re got probably a much tech-savvier population on the move and probably much better access to handsets and networks.”

Helping to connect those newcomers to information—and each other—is a group of 15,000 digital volunteers who call themselves the Techfugees.

“We are here not to solve the biggest problems of hygiene, water, clean energy because these are sectors that need a lot of expertise,” says Joséphine Goube, the CEO of the nonprofit that quickly came together last year.

Instead, often with the aid of smartphones many migrants and asylum seekers bring with them, the continent’s tech community aids refugees and asylum seekers in getting back online to find their footing in unfamiliar places….

The IRC has received substantial funding from tech companies to support its efforts, and individual tech workers have flocked to dozens of conferences and hackathons organized by Techfugees around the world since an initial conference in London last October.

“We were actually overwhelmed by the response to our conference,” says Goube, “It just went viral.”

Affiliates of the group have since helped provide infrastructure for refugees to connect to Wi-Fi—even in places with limited electricity—and energize their phones through solar-powered charging hubs. They’ve also developed websites and apps to teach new arrivals everything from basic coding skills that could help them earn a living to how to navigate government bureaucracies in their new countries.

“Things that seem very trivial to us can actually be very complicated,” says Vincent Olislagers, a member of a team developing an interactive chatbot called HealthIntelligence, which is designed to provide refugees in Norway with information about using the country’s health care system. The tool was developed after the team met with a recent arrival to the country who had difficulty arranging hospital transportation for his pregnant wife due to language barriers and financial constraints.

“He had to call, for his wife, his caretaker at the refugee center,” Olislagers says. “The caretaker had to send an ambulance at the right location.”

The team is working with Norwegian health officials and refugee aid groups to ultimately make the chatbot available as part of a standard package of materials provided to refugees entering the country. The project was a finalist in an October hackathon organized by Techfugees in Oslo. The hackathon’s ultimate winner was a group called KomInn, which pairs families fluent in Norwegian with newcomers who come to their homes to practice the language over dinner. That group developed a digital tool to streamline finding matches, which had previously been a laborious process, says Goube….(More)”

A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “UNDP and UN Global Pulse today released a comprehensive guide on how to integrate new sources of data into development and humanitarian work.

New and emerging data sources such as mobile phone data, social media, remote sensors and satellites have the potential to improve the work of governments and development organizations across the globe.

Entitled ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept,’ this publication was developed by practitioners for practitioners. It provides step-by-step guidance for working with new sources of data to staff of UN agencies and international Non-Governmental Organizations.

The guide is a result of a collaboration of UNDP and UN Global Pulse with support from UN Volunteers. Led by UNDP innovation teams in Europe and Central Asia and Arab States, six UNDP offices in Armenia, Egypt, Kosovo[1], fYR Macedonia, Sudan and Tunisia each completed data innovation projects applicable to development challenges on the ground.

The publication builds on these successful case trials and on the expertise of data innovators from UNDP and UN Global Pulse who managed the design and development of those projects.

It provides practical guidance for jump-starting a data innovation project, from the design phase through the creation of a proof-of-concept.

The guide is structured into three sections – (I) Explore the Problem & System, (II) Assemble the Team and (III) Create the Workplan. Each of the sections comprises of a series of tools for completing the steps needed to initiate and design a data innovation project, to engage the right partners and to make sure that adequate privacy and protection mechanisms are applied.

…Download ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept’ here.”

OpenStreetMap in Israel and Palestine – ‘Game changer’ or reproducer of contested cartographies?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Christian Bittner in Political Geography: “In Israel and Palestine, map-making practices were always entangled with contradictive spatial identities and imbalanced power resources. Although an Israeli narrative has largely dominated the ‘cartographic battlefield’, the latest chapter of this story has not been written yet: collaborative forms of web 2.0 cartographies have restructured power relations in mapping practices and challenged traditional monopolies on map and spatial data production. Thus, we can expect web 2.0 cartographies to be a ‘game changer’ for cartography in Palestine and Israel.

In this paper, I review this assumption with the popular example of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Following a mixed methods approach, I comparatively analyze the genesis of OSM in Israel and Palestine. Although nationalist motives do not play a significant role on either side, it turns out that the project is dominated by Israeli and international mappers, whereas Palestinians have hardly contributed to OSM. As a result, social fragmentations and imbalances between Israel and Palestine are largely reproduced through OSM data. Discussing the low involvement of Palestinians, I argue that OSM’s ground truth paradigm might be a watershed for participation. Presumably, the project’s data are less meaningful in some local contexts than in others. Moreover, the seemingly apolitical approach to map only ‘facts on the ground’ reaffirms present spatio-social order and thus the power relations behind it. Within a Palestinian narrative, however, many aspects of the factual material space might appear not as neutral physical objects but as results of suppression, in which case, any ‘accurate’ spatial representation, such as OSM, becomes objectionable….(More)”

Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times: “…Over much of the last decade, we have seen progressive social movementspowered by the web spring up across the world. There was the Green Revolution in Iran and the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa. In the United States, we saw the Occupy Wall Street movement andthe #BlackLivesMatter protests.

Social networks also played a role in electoral politics — first in the ultimately unsuccessful candidacy of Howard Dean in 2003, and then in the election of the first African-American president in 2008.

Yet now those movements look like the prelude to a wider, tech-powered crack up in the global order. In Britain this year, organizing on Facebook played a major role in the once-unthinkable push to get the country to leave the European Union. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, a firebrand mayor who was vastly outspent by opponents, managed to marshal a huge army of online supporters to help him win the presidency.

The Islamic State has used social networks to recruit jihadists from around the world to fight in Iraq and Syria, as well as to inspire terrorist attacks overseas.

And in the United States, both Bernie Sanders, a socialist who ran for president as a Democrat, and Mr. Trump, who was once reviled by most members of the party he now leads, relied on online movements to shatter the political status quo.

Why is this all happening now? Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who has studied the effects of social networks, suggested a few reasons.

One is the ubiquity of Facebook, which has reached a truly epic scale. Last month the company reported that about 1.8 billion people now log on to the service every month. Because social networks feed off the various permutations of interactions among people, they become strikingly more powerful as they grow. With about a quarter of the world’s population now on Facebook, the possibilities are staggering.

“When the technology gets boring, that’s when the crazy social effects get interesting,” Mr. Shirky said.

One of those social effects is what Mr. Shirky calls the “shifting of the Overton Window,” a term coined by the researcher Joseph P. Overton to describe the range of subjects that the mainstream media deems publicly acceptable to discuss.

From about the early 1980s until the very recent past, it was usually considered unwise for politicians to court views deemed by most of society to be out of the mainstream, things like overt calls to racial bias (there were exceptions, of course, like the Willie Horton ad). But the internet shifted that window.

“White ethno nationalism was kept at bay because of pluralistic ignorance,”Mr. Shirky said. “Every person who was sitting in their basement yelling at the TV about immigrants or was willing to say white Christians were more American than other kinds of Americans — they didn’t know how many others shared their views.”

Thanks to the internet, now each person with once-maligned views can see that he’s not alone. And when these people find one another, they can do things — create memes, publications and entire online worlds that bolster their worldview, and then break into the mainstream. The groups also become ready targets for political figures like Mr. Trump, who recognize their energy and enthusiasm and tap into it for real-world victories.

Mr. Shirky notes that the Overton Window isn’t just shifting on the right. We see it happening on the left, too. Mr. Sanders campaigned on an anti-Wall Street platform that would have been unthinkable for a Democrat just a decade ago….(More)”

The Journal of Interrupted Studies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“…The Journal of Interrupted Studies is an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the work of academics whose work has been interrupted by forced migration. Publishing both complete and incomplete articles the Journal is currently accepting submissions in the sciences and humanities….

By embracing a multidisciplinary approach the journal offers a platform for all academic endeavours thwarted by forced migration. Especially with regards to the ongoing crises in Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea. We invite any and all students and academics who were interrupted in their studies and are now considered refugees to submit work.

Engaging in this process, we hope to create a conversation in which all participants can shape the discourse, on terms of dignity and mutual respect. We believe academia allows us to to to initiate such a dialogue and in the process create something of value for all parties.

Refugees status according to the European Union’s directive 2013/32/EU and 2013/33/EU is by no means a requirement for submitting to the Journal. We also wish to attract exiled academics who cannot return to their countries and universities without putting their lives at risk.

We believe that when academic voices are silenced by adversity it is not only the intellectual community that suffers…(More)

Wikipedia’s not as biased as you might think

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ananya Bhattacharya in Quartz: “The internet is as open as people make it. Often, people limit their Facebook and Twitter circles to likeminded people and only follow certain subreddits, blogs, and news sites, creating an echo chamber of sorts. In a sea of biased content, Wikipedia is one of the few online outlets that strives for neutrality. After 15 years in operation, it’s starting to see results

Researchers at Harvard Business School evaluated almost 4,000 articles in Wikipedia’s online database against the same entries in Encyclopedia Brittanica to compare their biases. They focused on English-language articles about US politics, especially controversial topics, that appeared in both outlets in 2012.

“That is just not a recipe for coming to a conclusion,” Shane Greenstein, one of the study’s authors, said in an interview. “We were surprised that Wikipedia had not failed, had not fallen apart in the last several years.”

Greenstein and his co-author Feng Zhu categorized each article as “blue” or “red.” Drawing from research in political science, they identified terms that are idiosyncratic to each party. For instance, political scientists have identified that Democrats were more likely to use phrases such as “war in Iraq,” “civil rights,” and “trade deficit,” while Republicans used phrases such as “economic growth,” “illegal immigration,” and “border security.”…

“In comparison to expert-based knowledge, collective intelligence does not aggravate the bias of online content when articles are substantially revised,” the authors wrote in the paper. “This is consistent with a best-case scenario in which contributors with different ideologies appear to engage in fruitful online conversations with each other, in contrast to findings from offline settings.”

More surprisingly, the authors found that the 2.8 million registered volunteer editors who were reviewing the articles also became less biased over time. “You can ask questions like ‘do editors with red tendencies tend to go to red articles or blue articles?’” Greenstein said. “You find a prevalence of opposites attract, and that was striking.” The researchers even identified the political stance for a number of anonymous editors based on their IP locations, and the trend held steadfast….(More)”

There isn’t always an app for that: How tech can better assist refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alex Glennie and Meghan Benton at Nesta: “Refugees are natural innovators. Often armed with little more than a smartphone, they must be adaptable and inventive if they are to navigate unpredictable, dangerous environments and successfully establish themselves in a new country.

Take Mojahed Akil, a young Syrian computer science student whose involvement in street protests in Aleppo brought him to the attention – and torture chambers – of the regime. With the support of his family, Mojahed was able to move across the border to the relative safety of Gaziantep, a city in southwest Turkey. Yet once he was there, he found it very difficult to communicate with those around him (most of whom only spoke Turkish but not Arabic or English) and to access essential information about laws, regulations and local services.

To overcome these challenges, Mojahed used his software training to develop a free smartphone app and website for Syrians living in Turkey. The Gherbetna platform offers both information (for example, about job listings) and connections (through letting users ask for help from the app’s community of contributors). Since its launch in 2014, it is estimated that Gherbetna has been downloaded by more than 50,000 people.

Huge efforts, but mixed results

Over the last 18 months, an explosion of creativity and innovation from tech entrepreneurs has tried to make life better for refugees. A host of new tools and resources now exists to support refugees along every stage of their journey. Our new report for the Migration Policy Institute’s Transatlantic Council on Migration explores some of these tools trying to help refugees integrate, and examines how policymakers can support the best new initiatives.

Our report finds that the speed of this ‘digital humanitarianism’ has been a double-edged sword, with a huge amount of duplication in the sector and some tools failing to get off the ground. ‘Failing fast’ might be a badge of honour in Silicon Valley, but what are the risks if vulnerable refugees rely on an app that disappears from one day to the next?

For example, consider Migreat, a ‘skyscanner for migration’, which pivoted at the height of the refugee crisis to become an asylum information app. Its selling point was that it was obsessively updated by legal experts, so users could trust the information — and rely less on smugglers or word of mouth. At its peak, Migreat had two million users a month, but according to an interview with Josephine Goube (one of the cofounders of the initiative) funding challenges meant the platform had to fold. Its digital presence still exists, but is no longer being updated, a ghost of February 2016.

Perhaps an even greater challenge is that few of these apps were designed with refugees, so many do not meet their needs. Creating an app to help refugees navigate local services is a bit like putting a sticking plaster on a deep wound: it doesn’t solve the problem that most services, and especially digital services, are not attuned to refugee needs. Having multilingual, up-to-date and easy-to-navigate government websites might be more helpful.

A new ‘digital humanitarianism’…(More)”

USGS expands sensor network to track monster hurricane

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Rockwell at FCW: “The internet of things is tracking Hurricane Matthew. As the monster storm draws a bead on the south Atlantic coast after wreaking havoc in the Caribbean, its impact will be measured by a sensor network deployed by the U.S. Geological Survey.

USGS hurricane response crews are busy installing two kinds of sensors in areas across four states where the agency expects the storm to hit hardest. The information the sensors collect will help with disaster recovery efforts and critical weather forecasts for the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

As is the case with most things these days, the storm will be tracked online.

The information collected will be distributed live on the USGS Flood Viewer to help federal and state officials gauge the extent and the storm’s damage as it passes through each area.

FEMA, which tasked USGS with the sensor distribution, is also talking with other federal and state officials further up the Atlantic coastline about whether the equipment is needed there. Recent forecasts call for Matthew to take a sharp easterly turn and head out to sea as it reaches the North Carolina coast.

USGS crews are in installing storm-surge sensors at key sites along the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida in anticipation of the storm, said Brian McCallum, associate director for data at the USGS South Atlantic Water Science Center.

In all, USGS is deploying more than 300 additional weather and condition sensors, he told FCW in an interview on Oct. 5.

The devices come in two varieties. The first are 280 storm surge sensors, set out in protective steel tubes lashed to piers, bridges and other solid structures in the storm’s projected path. The low-cost devices will provide the highest density of storm data, such as depth and duration of the storm surge, McCallum said. The devices won’t communicate their information in real time, however; McCallum said USGS crews will come in behind the storm to upload the sensor data to the Internet.

The second set of sensors, however, could be thought of as the storm’s “live tweets.” USGS is installing 25 rapid-deployment gauges to augment its existing collection of sensors and fill in gaps along the coast….(More)”