Mathew Ingram at GigaOm: “One of the most powerful trends in media over the past year is the crowdsourced verification of news, whether it’s the work of a blogger like Brown Moses or former NPR journalist Andy Carvin. Two other interesting efforts in this area are the “open newsroom” approach taken by Storyful — which specializes in verifying social-media reports for mainstream news entities — and a Reddit forum devoted to crowdsourcing news coverage of the civil war in Syria. Storyful journalist Joe Galvin recently looked at some of the incidents that the company has helped either debunk or... (More >)
Phone Apps Help Government, Others Counter Violence Against Women
NextGov: “Smart and mobile phones have helped authorities solve crimes from beatings that occurred during the London riots to the Boston Marathon bombing. A panel of experts gathered on Monday said the devices can also help reduce and combat rapes and other gender-based violence. Smartphone apps and text messaging services proliferated in India following a sharp rise in reported gang rapes, including the brutal 2012 rape and murder of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi, according to panelists at the Wilson Center event on gender-based violence and innovative technologies. The apps fall into four main categories, said Alex Dehgan,... (More >)
The Age of Democracy
Xavier Marquez at Abandoned Footnotes: “This is the age of democracy, ideologically speaking. As I noted in an earlier post, almost every state in the world mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” in its constitutional documents today. But the public acknowledgment of the idea of democracy is not something that began just a few years ago; in fact, it goes back much further, all the way back to the nineteenth century in a surprising number of cases. Here is a figure I’ve been wanting to make for a while that makes this point nicely (based on data graciously made... (More >)
Government Digital Service: the best startup in Europe we can't invest in
Saul Klein in the Guardian: “Everyone is rightly excited about the wall of amazing tech-enabled startups being born in Europe and Israel, disrupting massive industries including media, marketing, fashion, retail, travel, finance and transportation. However, there’s one incredibly disruptive startup based in London that is going after one of the biggest markets of all, and is so opaque it is largely unknown in the world of business – and, much to my chagrin, it’s also impossible to invest in. It’s not a private company, it wasn’t started by “conventional” tech entrepreneurs and the market (though huge) is decidedly unsexy.... (More >)
Cinq expériences de démocratie 2.0
Le Monde: “Du 23 au 27 novembre, à Strasbourg, les participants au Forum mondial pour la démocratie examineront des initiatives de démocratie participative à l’oeuvre sur tous les continents. En voici quelques exemples. ( Lire aussi l’entretien : “Internet renforce le pouvoir de la société civile”) EN FRANCE, LES ÉLECTEURS PASSENT À L’ÈRE NUMÉRIQUE Depuis trois ans, les initiatives françaises de démocratie 2.0 se multiplient, avec pour objectif de stimuler la participation citoyenne aux instances démocratiques, qu’elles soient locales ou nationales. Dans la perspective des élections municipales de mars 2014, Questionnezvoselus.org propose ainsi aux internautes d’interroger les candidats à... (More >)
The Good Judgment Project: Harnessing the Wisdom of the Crowd to Forecast World Events
The Economist: “But then comes the challenge of generating real insight into forecasting accuracy. How can one compare forecasting ability? The only reliable method is to conduct a forecasting tournament in which independent judges ask all participants to make the same forecasts in the same timeframes. And forecasts must be expressed numerically, so there can be no hiding behind vague verbiage. Words like “may” or “possible” can mean anything from probabilities as low as 0.001% to as high as 60% or 70%. But 80% always and only means 80%. In the late 1980s one of us (Philip Tetlock) launched... (More >)
Open Data Index provides first major assessment of state of open government data
Press Release from the Open Knowledge Foundation: “In the week of a major international summit on government transparency in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses. The UK and US top the 2013 Index, which is a result of community-based surveys in 70 countries. They are followed by Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Of the countries assessed, Cyprus, St Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Burkina Faso ranked lowest. There are many countries... (More >)
Information Now: Open Access and the Public Good
Podcast from SMARTech (Georgia Tech): “Every year, the international academic and research community dedicates a week in October to discuss, debate, and learn more about Open Access. Open Access in the academic sense refers to the free, immediate, and online access to the results of scholarly research, primarily academic, peer-reviewed journal articles. In the United States, the movement in support of Open Access has, in the last decade, been growing dramatically. Because of this growing interest in Open Access, a group of academic librarians from the Georgia Tech library, Wendy Hagenmaier (Digital Collections Archivist), Fred Rascoe (Scholarly Communication Librarian),... (More >)
Bright Spots of open government to be recognised at global summit
Press Release of the UK Cabinet Office: “The 7 shortlisted initiatives vying for the Bright Spots award show how governments in Open Government Partnership countries are working with citizens to sharpen governance, harness new technologies to increase public participation and improve government responsiveness. At the Open Government Partnership summit in London on 31 October 2013 and 1 November 2013, participants will be able to vote for one of the shortlisted projects. The winning project – the Bright Spot – will be announced in the summit’s final plenary session…. The shortlisted entries for the Bright Spots prize – which will... (More >)
Where in the World are Young People Using the Internet?
Georgia Tech: “According to a common myth, today’s young people are all glued to the Internet. But in fact, only 30 percent of the world’s youth population between the ages of 15 and 24 years old has been active online for at least five years. In South Korea, 99.6 percent of young people are active, the highest percentage in the world. The least? The Asian island of Timor Leste with less than 1 percent. Digital natives as a percentage of total population, 2012 (Courtesy: ITU) Those are among the many findings in a study from the Georgia Institute of... (More >)
