Data Collaboratives: Sharing Public Data in Private Hands for Social Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Simone Noveck (The GovLab) in Forbes: “Sensor-rich consumer electronics such as mobile phones, wearable devices, commercial cameras and even cars are collecting zettabytes of data about the environment and about us. According to one McKinsey study, the volume of data is growing at fifty percent a year. No one needs convincing that these private storehouses of information represent a goldmine for business, but these data can do double duty as rich social assets—if they are shared wisely.

Think about a couple of recent examples: Sharing data held by businesses and corporations (i.e. public data in private hands) can help to improve policy interventions. California planners make water allocation decisions based upon expertise, data and analytical tools from public and private sources, including Intel, the Earth Research Institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the World Food Center at the University of California at Davis.

In Europe, several phone companies have made anonymized datasets available, making it possible for researchers to track calling and commuting patterns and gain better insight into social problems from unemployment to mental health. In the United States, LinkedIn is providing free data about demand for IT jobs in different markets which, when combined with open data from the Department of Labor, helps communities target efforts around training….

Despite the promise of data sharing, these kind of data collaboratives remain relatively new. There is a need toaccelerate their use by giving companies strong tax incentives for sharing data for public good. There’s a need for more study to identify models for data sharing in ways that respect personal privacy and security and enable companies to do well by doing good. My colleagues at The GovLab together with UN Global Pulse and the University of Leiden, for example, published this initial analysis of terms and conditions used when exchanging data as part of a prize-backed challenge. We also need philanthropy to start putting money into “meta research;” it’s not going to be enough to just open up databases: we need to know if the data is good.

After years of growing disenchantment with closed-door institutions, the push for greater use of data in governing can be seen as both a response and as a mirror to the Big Data revolution in business. Although more than 1,000,000 government datasets about everything from air quality to farmers markets are openly available online in downloadable formats, much of the data about environmental, biometric, epidemiological, and physical conditions rest in private hands. Governing better requires a new empiricism for developing solutions together. That will depend on access to these private, not just public data….(More)”

Why interdisciplinary research matters

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Special issue of Nature: “To solve the grand challenges facing society — energy, water, climate, food, health — scientists and social scientists must work together. But research that transcends conventional academic boundaries is harder to fund, do, review and publish — and those who attempt it struggle for recognition and advancement (see World View, page 291). This special issue examines what governments, funders, journals, universities and academics must do to make interdisciplinary work a joy rather than a curse.

A News Feature on page 308 asks where the modern trend for interdisciplinary research came from — and finds answers in the proliferation of disciplines in the twentieth century, followed by increasingly urgent calls to bridge them. An analysis of publishing data explores which fields and countries are embracing interdisciplinary research the most, and what impact such research has (page 306). Onpage 313, Rick Rylance, head of Research Councils UK and himself a researcher with one foot in literature and one in neuroscience, explains why interdisciplinarity will be the focus of a 2015–16 report from the Global Research Council. Around the world, government funding agencies want to know what it is, whether they should they invest in it, whether they are doing so effectively and, if not, what must change.

How can scientists successfully pursue research outside their comfort zone? Some answers come from Rebekah Brown, director of Monash University’s Monash Sustainability Institute in Melbourne, Australia, and her colleagues. They set out five principles for successful interdisciplinary working that they have distilled from years of encouraging researchers of many stripes to seek sustainability solutions (page 315). Similar ideas help scientists, curators and humanities scholars to work together on a collection that includes clay tablets, papyri, manuscripts and e-mail archives at the John Rylands Research Institute in Manchester, UK, reveals its director, Peter Pormann, on page 318.

Finally, on page 319, Clare Pettitt reassesses the multidisciplinary legacy of Richard Francis Burton — Victorian explorer, ethnographer, linguist and enthusiastic amateur natural scientist who got some things very wrong, but contributed vastly to knowledge of other cultures and continents. Today’s would-be interdisciplinary scientists can draw many lessons from those of the past — and can take our polymathy quiz online at nature.com/inter. (Nature special:Interdisciplinarity)

The Data Revolution for Sustainable Development

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Jeffrey D. Sachs at Project Syndicate: “There is growing recognition that the success of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will be adopted on September 25 at a special United Nations summit, will depend on the ability of governments, businesses, and civil society to harness data for decision-making…

One way to improve data collection and use for sustainable development is to create an active link between the provision of services and the collection and processing of data for decision-making. Take health-care services. Every day, in remote villages of developing countries, community health workers help patients fight diseases (such as malaria), get to clinics for checkups, receive vital immunizations, obtain diagnoses (through telemedicine), and access emergency aid for their infants and young children (such as for chronic under-nutrition). But the information from such visits is usually not collected, and even if it is put on paper, it is never used again.
We now have a much smarter way to proceed. Community health workers are increasingly supported by smart-phone applications, which they can use to log patient information at each visit. That information can go directly onto public-health dashboards, which health managers can use to spot disease outbreaks, failures in supply chains, or the need to bolster technical staff. Such systems can provide a real-time log of vital events, including births and deaths, and even use so-called verbal autopsies to help identify causes of death. And, as part of electronic medical records, the information can be used at future visits to the doctor or to remind patients of the need for follow-up visits or medical interventions….
Fortunately, the information and communications technology revolution and the spread of broadband coverage nearly everywhere can quickly make such time lags a thing of the past. As indicated in the report A World that Counts: Mobilizing the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, we must modernize the practices used by statistical offices and other public agencies, while tapping into new sources of data in a thoughtful and creative way that complements traditional approaches.
Through more effective use of smart data – collected during service delivery, economic transactions, and remote sensing – the fight against extreme poverty will be bolstered; the global energy system will be made much more efficient and less polluting; and vital services such as health and education will be made far more effective and accessible.
With this breakthrough in sight, several governments, including that of the United States, as well as businesses and other partners, have announced plans to launch a new “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data” at the UN this month. The new partnership aims to strengthen data collection and monitoring efforts by raising more funds, encouraging knowledge-sharing, addressing key barriers to access and use of data, and identifying new big-data strategies to upgrade the world’s statistical systems.
The UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network will support the new Global Partnership by creating a new Thematic Network on Data for Sustainable Development, which will bring together leading data scientists, thinkers, and academics from across multiple sectors and disciplines to form a center of data excellence….(More)”

Inside the fascinating, bizarre world of ‘Prepper Pinterest’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Caitlin Dewey in the Washington Post: “Pinterest, the aspirational candyland of women everywhere, has long been beloved by homebuyers, wedding-planners, moms, narcissists, and people who spend too much time on their hair.

Now you can add another, odder demographic to the list: “doomsday” preppers, whose rabid interest in all things DIY actually makes for a pretty comfortable cultural fit.

Prepper Pinterest has exploded in the past year, according to the site itself: The total volume of prepper pins is up 87 percent, and repins of prepping posts have nearly tripled. Leading preppers on the platform, like Angela Paskett, Damian Brindle and Glenn Levy, have racked up tens of thousands of followers.

It’s the conclusive sign, perhaps, that the much-maligned prepper movement has finally gone mainstream — or that a particularly precious branch of it has, at least. One popular infographic, currently circulating among Pinterest’s prepper ranks, depicts a “luxury bomb shelter” complete with self-filtering bathtubs and scented oxygen tanks….

It may help that mainstream culture has, in the past 10 years, become more hospitable to the prepper ethic — thanks, in large part, to a trend that Jessica Grose once dubbed “the Pinterest effect.” Young women have revitalized the $29 billion craft industry, prodded along by ideas on Etsy, Pinterest and lifestyle blogs. Concerns about the origins of our food gave us farmers’ markets, first — followed by urban farms and “Modern Farmers” and backyard chicken coops….(More)”

 

On the Farm: Startups Put Data in Farmers’ Hands

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jacob Bunge at the Wall Street Journal: “Farmers and entrepreneurs are starting to compete with agribusiness giants over the newest commodity being harvested on U.S. farms—one measured in bytes, not bushels.

Startups including Farmobile LLC, Granular Inc. and Grower Information Services Cooperative are developing computer systems that will enable farmers to capture data streaming from their tractors and combines, store it in digital silos and market it to agriculture companies or futures traders. Such platforms could allow farmers to reap larger profits from a technology revolution sweeping the U.S. Farm Belt and give them more control over the information generated on their fields.

The efforts in some cases would challenge a wave of data-analysis tools from big agricultural companies such as Monsanto Co., DuPontCo., Deere & Co. and Cargill Inc. Those systems harness modern planters, combines and other machinery outfitted with sensors to track planting, spraying and harvesting, then crunch that data to provide farm-management guidance that these firms say can help farmers curb costs and grow larger crops. The companies say farmers own their data, and it won’t be sold to third parties.

Some farmers and entrepreneurs say crop producers can get the most from their data by compiling and analyzing it themselves—for instance, to determine the best time to apply fertilizer to their soil and how much. Then, farmers could profit further by selling data to seed, pesticide and equipment makers seeking a glimpse into how and when farmers use machinery and crop supplies.

The new ventures come as farmers weigh the potential benefits of sharing their data with large agricultural firms against privacy concerns and fears that agribusinesses could leverage farm-level information to charge higher rates for seeds, pesticides and other supplies.

“We need to get farmers involved in this because it’s their information,” said Dewey Hukill, board president of Grower Information Services Cooperative, or GISC, a farmer-owned cooperative that is building a platform to collect its members’ data. The cooperative has signed up about 1,500 members across 37 states….

Companies developing markets for farm data say it’s not their intention to displace big seed and machinery suppliers but to give farmers a platform that would enable them to manage their own information. Storing and selling their own data wouldn’t necessarily bar a farmer from sharing information with a seed company to get a planting recommendation, they say….(More)”

 

The Art of Managing Complex Collaborations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Knight, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, and Barbara Mittleman at MIT Sloan Management Review: “It’s not easy for stakeholders with widely varying interests to collaborate effectively in a consortium. The experience of the Biomarkers Consortium offers five lessons on how to successfully navigate the challenges that arise….

Society’s biggest challenges are also its most complex. From shared economic growth to personalized medicine to global climate change, few of our most pressing problems are likely to have simple solutions. Perhaps the only way to make progress on these and other challenges is by bringing together the important stakeholders on a given issue to pursue common interests and resolve points of conflict.

However, it is not easy to assemble such groups or to keep them together. Many initiatives have stumbled and disbanded. The Biomarkers Consortium might have been one of them, but this consortium beat the odds, in large part due to the founding parties’ determination to make it work. Nine years after it was founded, this public-private partnership, which is managed by the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health and based in Bethesda, Maryland, is still working to advance the availability of biomarkers (biological indicators for disease states) as tools for drug development, including applications at the frontiers of personalized medicine.

The Biomarkers Consortium’s mandate — to bring together, in the group’s words, “the expertise and resources of various partners to rapidly identify, develop, and qualify potential high-impact biomarkers particularly to enable improvements in drug development, clinical care, and regulatory decision-making” — may look simple. However, the reality has been quite complex. The negotiations that led to the consortium’s formation in 2006 were complicated, and the subsequent balancing of common and competing interests remains challenging….

Many in the biomedical sector had seen the need to tackle drug discovery costs for a long time, with multiple companies concurrently spending millions, sometimes billions, of dollars only to hit common dead ends in the drug development process. In 2004 and 2005, then National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni convened key people from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the NIH, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America to create a multistakeholder forum.

Every member knew from the outset that their fellow stakeholders represented many divergent and sometimes opposing interests: large pharmaceutical companies, smaller entrepreneurial biotechnology companies, FDA regulators, NIH science and policy experts, university researchers and nonprofit patient advocacy organizations….(More)”

A New Kind of Media Using Government Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Newburger at the Department of Commerce: “MSNBC has published a data-heavy story collection that takes advantage of the internet’s power to communicate not only faster, but in different and meaningful ways.  “The Geography of Poverty” combines narrative, data graphics, and photo-essay content through an interface so seamless as to be almost invisible.

So far they have released three of what will eventually be five parts, but already they have tapped datasets from BLS, Census, the Department of Agriculture, and EPA.  They combined these federal sources with private data: factory data from Randy Peterson and Chemplants.com; displacement information from news sources; Mary Sternberg’s “Along the River Road”; and Steve Lerner’s Diamond and Kate Orff’s research in “Petrochemical America.”

These layers of data feed visualizations which provide a deeper understanding of the highly personal stories the photos tell; the text weaves the elements into a cohesive whole.  Today’s web tools make this kind of reporting not only possible, but fairly simple to assemble.

The result is a new kind of media that mixes the personal and the societal, the social and the environmental, fitting small scale stories of individuals and local communities into the broader context of our whole nation….(More)”

The Trouble With Disclosure: It Doesn’t Work

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Jesse Eisinger at ProPublica: “Louis Brandeis was wrong. The lawyer and Supreme Court justice famously declared that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we have unquestioningly embraced that advice ever since.

 Over the last century, disclosure and transparency have become our regulatory crutch, the answer to every vexing problem. We require corporations and government to release reams of information on food, medicine, household products, consumer financial tools, campaign finance and crime statistics. We have a booming “report card” industry for a range of services, including hospitals, public schools and restaurants.

All this sunlight is blinding. As new scholarship is demonstrating, the value of all this information is unproved. Paradoxically, disclosure can be useless — and sometimes actually harmful or counterproductive.

“We are doing disclosure as a regulatory move all over the board,” says Adam J. Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown, “The funny thing is, we are doing this despite very little evidence of its efficacy.”

Let’s start with something everyone knows about — the “terms of service” agreements for the likes of iTunes. Like everybody else, I click the “I agree” box, feeling a flash of resentment. I’m certain that in Paragraph 184 is a clause signing away my firstborn to a life of indentured servitude to Timothy D. Cook as his chief caviar spoon keeper.

Our legal theoreticians have determined these opaque monstrosities work because someone, somewhere reads the fine print in these contracts and keeps corporations honest. It turns out what we laymen intuit is true: No one reads them, according to research by a New York University law professor, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler.

In real life, there is no critical mass of readers policing the agreements. And if there were an eagle-eyed crew of legal experts combing through these agreements, what recourse would they have? Most people don’t even know that the Supreme Court has gutted their rights to sue in court, and they instead have to go into arbitration, which usually favors corporations.

The disclosure bonanza is easy to explain. Nobody is against it. It’s politically expedient. Companies prefer such rules, especially in lieu of actual regulations that would curtail bad products or behavior. The opacity lobby — the remora fish class of lawyers, lobbyists and consultants in New York and Washington — knows that disclosure requirements are no bar to dodgy practices. You just have to explain what you’re doing in sufficiently incomprehensible language, a task that earns those lawyers a hefty fee.

Of course, some disclosure works. Professor Levitin cites two examples. The first is an olfactory disclosure. Methane doesn’t have any scent, but a foul smell is added to alert people to a gas leak. The second is ATM. fees. A study in Australia showed that once fees were disclosed, people avoided the high-fee machines and took out more when they had to go to them.

But to Omri Ben-Shahar, co-author of a recent book, ” More Than You Wanted To Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure,” these are cherry-picked examples in a world awash in useless disclosures. Of course, information is valuable. But disclosure as a regulatory mechanism doesn’t work nearly well enough, he argues….(More)

We are data: the future of machine intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times: “…But what if the rise of Artificial Intuition instead blossoms under the aegis of theology or political ideology? With politics we can see an interesting scenario developing in Europe, where Google is by far the dominant search engine. What is interesting there is that people are perfectly free to use Yahoo or Bing yet they choose to stick with Google and then they get worried about Google having too much power — which is an unusual relationship dynamic, like an old married couple. Maybe Google could be carved up into baby Googles? But no. How do you break apart a search engine? AT&T was broken into seven more or less regional entities in 1982 but you can’t really do that with a search engine. Germany gets gaming? France gets porn? Holland gets commerce? It’s not a pie that can be sliced.

The time to fix this data search inequity isn’t right now, either. The time to fix this problem was 20 years ago, and the only country that got it right was China, which now has its own search engine and social networking systems. But were the British or Spanish governments — or any other government — to say, “OK, we’re making our own proprietary national search engine”, that would somehow be far scarier than having a private company running things. (If you want paranoia, let your government control what you can and can’t access — which is what you basically have in China. Irony!)

The tendency in theocracies would almost invariably be one of intense censorship, extreme limitations of access, as well as machine intelligence endlessly scouring its system in search of apostasy and dissent. The Americans, on the other hand, are desperately trying to implement a two-tiered system to monetise information in the same way they’ve monetised medicine, agriculture, food and criminality. One almost gets misty-eyed looking at North Koreans who, if nothing else, have yet to have their neurons reconfigured, thus turning them into a nation of click junkies. But even if they did have an internet, it would have only one site to visit, and its name would be gloriousleader.nk.

. . .

To summarise. Everyone, basically, wants access to and control over what you will become, both as a physical and metadata entity. We are also on our way to a world of concrete walls surrounding any number of niche beliefs. On our journey, we get to watch machine intelligence become profoundly more intelligent while, as a society, we get to watch one labour category after another be systematically burped out of the labour pool. (Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.)…(More)”

Setting High and Compatible Standards

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Laura Bacon at Omidyar Network:  “…Standards enable interoperability, replicability, and efficiency. Airplane travel would be chaotic at best and deadly at worst if flights and air traffic control did not use common codes for call signs, flight numbers, location, date, and time. Trains that cross national borders need tracks built to a standard gauge as evidenced by Spain’s experience in making its trains interoperable with the rest of the continent’s.

Standards matter in data collection and publication as well.  This is especially true for those datasets that matter most to people’s lives, such as health, education, agriculture, and water. Disparate standards for basic category definitions like geography and organizations mean that data sources cannot be easily or cost-effectively analyzed for cross-comparison and decision making.

Compatible data standards that enable data being ‘joined up,’ would enable more efficacious logging and use of immunization records, controlling the spread of infectious disease, helping educators prioritize spending based on the greatest needs, and identifying the beneficial owners of companies to help ensure transparent and legal business transactions.

Data: More Valuable When Joined Up

Lots of efforts, time, and money are poured into the generation and publication of open data. And where open data is important in itself, the biggest return on investment is potentially from the inter-linkages among datasets. However, it is very difficult to yield this return because of the now-missing standards and building blocks (e.g., geodata, organizational identifiers, project identifiers) that would enable joining up of data.

Omidyar Network currently supports open data standards for contracting, extractives, budgets, and others. If “joining up” work is not considered and executed at early stages, these standards 1) could evolve in silos and 2) may not reach their full capacity.

Interoperability will not happen automatically; specific investments and efforts must be made to develop the public good infrastructure for the joining up of key datasets….The two organizations leading this project have an impressive track record working in this area. Development Initiatives is a global organization working to empower people to make more effective use of information. In 2013, it commissioned Open Knowledge Foundation to publish a cross-initiative scoping study, Joined-Up Data: Building Blocks for Common Standards, which recommended focus areas, shared learning, and the adoption of joined-up data and common standards for all publishers. Partnering with Development Initiatives is Publish What You Fund,…(More)”