The People’s Platform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book Review by Tim Wu in the New York Times: “Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker who has described her work as the “steamed broccoli” in our cultural diet. Her last film, “Examined Life,” depicted philosophers walking around and talking about their ideas. She’s the kind of creative person who was supposed to benefit when the Internet revolution collapsed old media hierarchies. But two decades since that revolution began, she’s not impressed: “We are at risk of starving in the midst of plenty,” Taylor writes. “Free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs.” Instead of serving as the great equalizer, the web has created an abhorrent cultural feudalism. The creative masses connect, create and labor, while Google, Facebook and Amazon collect the cash.
Taylor’s thesis is simply stated. The pre-Internet cultural industry, populated mainly by exploitative conglomerates, was far from perfect, but at least the ancien régime felt some need to cultivate cultural institutions, and to pay for talent at all levels. Along came the web, which swept away hierarchies — as well as paychecks, leaving behind creators of all kinds only the chance to be fleetingly “Internet famous.” And anyhow, she says, the web never really threatened to overthrow the old media’s upper echelons, whether defined as superstars, like Beyoncé, big broadcast television shows or Hollywood studios. Instead, it was the cultural industry’s middle ­classes that have been wiped out and replaced by new cultural plantations ruled over by the West Coast aggregators.
It is hard to know if the title, “The People’s Platform,” is aspirational or sarcastic, since Taylor believes the classless aura of the web masks an unfair power structure. “Open systems can be starkly inegalitarian,” she says, arguing that the web is afflicted by what the feminist scholar Jo Freeman termed a “tyranny of structurelessness.” Because there is supposedly no hierarchy, elites can happily deny their own existence. (“We just run a platform.”) But the effects are real: The web has reduced professional creators to begging for scraps of attention from a spoiled public, and forced creators to be their own brand.
…
The tech industry might be tempted to dismiss Taylor’s arguments as merely a version of typewriter manufacturers’ complaints circa 1984, but that would be a mistake. “The People’s Platform” should be taken as a challenge by the new media that have long claimed to be improving on the old order. Can they prove they are capable of supporting a sustainable cultural ecosystem, in a way that goes beyond just hosting parties at the Sundance Film ­Festival?
We see some of this in the tech firms that have begun to pay for original content, as with Netflix’s investments in projects like “Orange Is the New Black.” It’s also worth pointing out that the support of culture is actually pretty cheap. Consider the nonprofit ProPublica, which employs investigative journalists, and has already won two Pulitzers, all on a budget of just over $10 million a year. That kind of money is a rounding error for much of Silicon Valley, where losing billions on bad acquisitions is routinely defended as “strategic.” If Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon truly believe they’re better than the old guard, let’s see it.”
See : THE PEOPLE’S PLATFORM. Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age By Astra Taylor, 276 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company.

Incentivizing Peer Review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Wired on “The Last Obstacle for Open Access Science: The Galapagos Islands’ Charles Darwin Foundation runs on an annual operating budget of about $3.5 million. With this money, the center conducts conservation research, enacts species-saving interventions, and provides educational resources about the fragile island ecosystems. As a science-based enterprise whose work would benefit greatly from the latest research findings on ecological management, evolution, and invasive species, there’s one glaring hole in the Foundation’s budget: the $800,000 it would cost per year for subscriptions to leading academic journals.
According to Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu, this episode is symptomatic of a larger problem. “A lot of research centers” – NGOs, academic institutions in the developing world – “are just out in the cold as far as access to top journals is concerned,” says Price. “Research is being commoditized, and it’s just another aspect of the digital divide between the haves and have-nots.”
 
Academia.edu is a key player in the movement toward open access scientific publishing, with over 11 million participants who have uploaded nearly 3 million scientific papers to the site. It’s easy to understand Price’s frustration with the current model, in which academics donate their time to review articles, pay for the right to publish articles, and pay for access to articles. According to Price, journals charge an average of $4000 per article: $1500 for production costs (reformatting, designing), $1500 to orchestrate peer review (labor costs for hiring editors, administrators), and $1000 of profit.
“If there were no legacy in the scientific publishing industry, and we were looking at the best way to disseminate and view scientific results,” proposes Price, “things would look very different. Our vision is to build a complete replacement for scientific publishing,” one that would allow budget-constrained organizations like the CDF full access to information that directly impacts their work.
But getting to a sustainable new world order requires a thorough overhaul of academic publishing industry. The alternative vision – of “open science” – has two key properties: the uninhibited sharing of research findings, and a new peer review system that incorporates the best of the scientific community’s feedback. Several groups have made progress on the former, but the latter has proven particularly difficult given the current incentive structure. The currency of scientific research is the number of papers you’ve published and their citation counts – the number of times other researchers have referred to your work in their own publications. The emphasis is on creation of new knowledge – a worthy goal, to be sure – but substantial contributions to the quality, packaging, and contextualization of that knowledge in the form of peer review goes largely unrecognized. As a result, researchers view their role as reviewers as a chore, a time-consuming task required to sustain the ecosystem of research dissemination.
“Several experiments in this space have tried to incorporate online comment systems,” explains Price, “and the result is that putting a comment box online and expecting high quality comments to flood in is just unrealistic. My preference is to come up with a system where you’re just as motivated to share your feedback on a paper as you are to share your own findings.” In order to make this lofty aim a reality, reviewers’ contributions would need to be recognized. “You need something more nuanced, and more qualitative,” says Price. “For example, maybe you gather reputation points from your community online.” Translating such metrics into tangible benefits up the food chain – hirings, tenure decisions, awards – is a broader community shift that will no doubt take time.
A more iterative peer review process could allow the community to better police faulty methods by crowdsourcing their evaluation. “90% of scientific studies are not reproducible,” claims Price; a problem that is exacerbated by the strong bias toward positive results. Journals may be unlikely to publish methodological refutations, but a flurry of well-supported comments attached to a paper online could convince the researchers to marshal more convincing evidence. Typically, this sort of feedback cycle takes years….”

Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Expertise

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of crowdsourcing was originally published in 2014.

Crowdsourcing enables leaders and citizens to work together to solve public problems in new and innovative ways. New tools and platforms enable citizens with differing levels of knowledge, expertise, experience and abilities to collaborate and solve problems together. Identifying experts, or individuals with specialized skills, knowledge or abilities with regard to a specific topic, and incentivizing their participation in crowdsourcing information, knowledge or experience to achieve a shared goal can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of problem solving.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Börner, Katy, Michael Conlon, Jon Corson-Rikert, and Ying Ding. “VIVO: A Semantic Approach to Scholarly Networking and Discovery.” Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology 2, no. 1 (October 17, 2012): 1–178. http://bit.ly/17huggT.

  • This e-book “provides an introduction to VIVO…a tool for representing information about research and researchers — their scholarly works, research interests, and organizational relationships.”
  • VIVO is a response to the fact that, “Information for scholars — and about scholarly activity — has not kept pace with the increasing demands and expectations. Information remains siloed in legacy systems and behind various access controls that must be licensed or otherwise negotiated before access. Information representation is in its infancy. The raw material of scholarship — the data and information regarding previous work — is not available in common formats with common semantics.”
  • Providing access to structured information on the work and experience of a diversity of scholars enables improved expert finding — “identifying and engaging experts whose scholarly works is of value to one’s own. To find experts, one needs rich data regarding one’s own work and the work of potential related experts. The authors argue that expert finding is of increasing importance since, “[m]ulti-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary investigation is increasingly required to address complex problems. 

Bozzon, Alessandro, Marco Brambilla, Stefano Ceri, Matteo Silvestri, and Giuliano Vesci. “Choosing the Right Crowd: Expert Finding in Social Networks.” In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, 637–648. EDBT  ’13. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2013. http://bit.ly/18QbtY5.

  • This paper explores the challenge of selecting experts within the population of social networks by considering the following problem: “given an expertise need (expressed for instance as a natural language query) and a set of social network members, who are the most knowledgeable people for addressing that need?”
  • The authors come to the following conclusions:
    • “profile information is generally less effective than information about resources that they directly create, own or annotate;
    • resources which are produced by others (resources appearing on the person’s Facebook wall or produced by people that she follows on Twitter) help increasing the assessment precision;
    • Twitter appears the most effective social network for expertise matching, as it very frequently outperforms all other social networks (either combined or alone);
    • Twitter appears as well very effective for matching expertise in domains such as computer engineering, science, sport, and technology & games, but Facebook is also very effective in fields such as locations, music, sport, and movies & tv;
    • surprisingly, LinkedIn appears less effective than other social networks in all domains (including computer science) and overall.”

Brabham, Daren C. “The Myth of Amateur Crowds.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 3 (2012): 394–410. http://bit.ly/1hdnGJV.

  • Unlike most of the related literature, this paper focuses on bringing attention to the expertise already being tapped by crowdsourcing efforts rather than determining ways to identify more dormant expertise to improve the results of crowdsourcing.
  • Brabham comes to two central conclusions: “(1) crowdsourcing is discussed in the popular press as a process driven by amateurs and hobbyists, yet empirical research on crowdsourcing indicates that crowds are largely self-selected professionals and experts who opt-in to crowdsourcing arrangements; and (2) the myth of the amateur in crowdsourcing ventures works to label crowds as mere hobbyists who see crowdsourcing ventures as opportunities for creative expression, as entertainment, or as opportunities to pass the time when bored. This amateur/hobbyist label then undermines the fact that large amounts of real work and expert knowledge are exerted by crowds for relatively little reward and to serve the profit motives of companies. 

Dutton, William H. Networking Distributed Public Expertise: Strategies for Citizen Sourcing Advice to Government. One of a Series of Occasional Papers in Science and Technology Policy, Science and Technology Policy Institute, Institute for Defense Analyses, February 23, 2011. http://bit.ly/1c1bpEB.

  • In this paper, a case is made for more structured and well-managed crowdsourcing efforts within government. Specifically, the paper “explains how collaborative networking can be used to harness the distributed expertise of citizens, as distinguished from citizen consultation, which seeks to engage citizens — each on an equal footing.” Instead of looking for answers from an undefined crowd, Dutton proposes “networking the public as advisors” by seeking to “involve experts on particular public issues and problems distributed anywhere in the world.”
  • Dutton argues that expert-based crowdsourcing can be successfully for government for a number of reasons:
    • Direct communication with a diversity of independent experts
    • The convening power of government
    • Compatibility with open government and open innovation
    • Synergy with citizen consultation
    • Building on experience with paid consultants
    • Speed and urgency
    • Centrality of documents to policy and practice.
  • He also proposes a nine-step process for government to foster bottom-up collaboration networks:
    • Do not reinvent the technology
    • Focus on activities, not the tools
    • Start small, but capable of scaling up
    • Modularize
    • Be open and flexible in finding and going to communities of experts
    • Do not concentrate on one approach to all problems
    • Cultivate the bottom-up development of multiple projects
    • Experience networking and collaborating — be a networked individual
    • Capture, reward, and publicize success.

Goel, Gagan, Afshin Nikzad and Adish Singla. “Matching Workers with Tasks: Incentives in Heterogeneous Crowdsourcing Markets.” Under review by the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW). 2014. http://bit.ly/1qHBkdf

  • Combining the notions of crowdsourcing expertise and crowdsourcing tasks, this paper focuses on the challenge within platforms like Mechanical Turk related to intelligently matching tasks to workers.
  • The authors’ call for more strategic assignment of tasks in crowdsourcing markets is based on the understanding that “each worker has certain expertise and interests which define the set of tasks she can and is willing to do.”
  • Focusing on developing meaningful incentives based on varying levels of expertise, the authors sought to create a mechanism that, “i) is incentive compatible in the sense that it is truthful for agents to report their true cost, ii) picks a set of workers and assigns them to the tasks they are eligible for in order to maximize the utility of the requester, iii) makes sure total payments made to the workers doesn’t exceed the budget of the requester.

Gubanov, D., N. Korgin, D. Novikov and A. Kalkov. E-Expertise: Modern Collective Intelligence. Springer, Studies in Computational Intelligence 558, 2014. http://bit.ly/U1sxX7

  • In this book, the authors focus on “organization and mechanisms of expert decision-making support using modern information and communication technologies, as well as information analysis and collective intelligence technologies (electronic expertise or simply e-expertise).”
  • The book, which “addresses a wide range of readers interested in management, decision-making and expert activity in political, economic, social and industrial spheres, is broken into five chapters:
    • Chapter 1 (E-Expertise) discusses the role of e-expertise in decision-making processes. The procedures of e-expertise are classified, their benefits and shortcomings are identified, and the efficiency conditions are considered.
    • Chapter 2 (Expert Technologies and Principles) provides a comprehensive overview of modern expert technologies. A special emphasis is placed on the specifics of e-expertise. Moreover, the authors study the feasibility and reasonability of employing well-known methods and approaches in e-expertise.
    • Chapter 3 (E-Expertise: Organization and Technologies) describes some examples of up-to-date technologies to perform e-expertise.
    • Chapter 4 (Trust Networks and Competence Networks) deals with the problems of expert finding and grouping by information and communication technologies.
    • Chapter 5 (Active Expertise) treats the problem of expertise stability against any strategic manipulation by experts or coordinators pursuing individual goals.

Holst, Cathrine. “Expertise and Democracy.” ARENA Report No 1/14, Center for European Studies, University of Oslo. http://bit.ly/1nm3rh4

  • This report contains a set of 16 papers focused on the concept of “epistocracy,” meaning the “rule of knowers.” The papers inquire into the role of knowledge and expertise in modern democracies and especially in the European Union (EU). Major themes are: expert-rule and democratic legitimacy; the role of knowledge and expertise in EU governance; and the European Commission’s use of expertise.
    • Expert-rule and democratic legitimacy
      • Papers within this theme concentrate on issues such as the “implications of modern democracies’ knowledge and expertise dependence for political and democratic theory.” Topics include the accountability of experts, the legitimacy of expert arrangements within democracies, the role of evidence in policy-making, how expertise can be problematic in democratic contexts, and “ethical expertise” and its place in epistemic democracies.
    • The role of knowledge and expertise in EU governance
      • Papers within this theme concentrate on “general trends and developments in the EU with regard to the role of expertise and experts in political decision-making, the implications for the EU’s democratic legitimacy, and analytical strategies for studying expertise and democratic legitimacy in an EU context.”
    • The European Commission’s use of expertise
      • Papers within this theme concentrate on how the European Commission uses expertise and in particular the European Commission’s “expertgroup system.” Topics include the European Citizen’s Initiative, analytic-deliberative processes in EU food safety, the operation of EU environmental agencies, and the autonomy of various EU agencies.

King, Andrew and Karim R. Lakhani. “Using Open Innovation to Identify the Best Ideas.” MIT Sloan Management Review, September 11, 2013. http://bit.ly/HjVOpi.

  • In this paper, King and Lakhani examine different methods for opening innovation, where, “[i]nstead of doing everything in-house, companies can tap into the ideas cloud of external expertise to develop new products and services.”
  • The three types of open innovation discussed are: opening the idea-creation process, competitions where prizes are offered and designers bid with possible solutions; opening the idea-selection process, ‘approval contests’ in which outsiders vote to determine which entries should be pursued; and opening both idea generation and selection, an option used especially by organizations focused on quickly changing needs.

Long, Chengjiang, Gang Hua and Ashish Kapoor. “Active Visual Recognition with Expertise Estimation in Crowdsourcing.” 2013 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. December 2013. http://bit.ly/1lRWFur.

  • This paper is focused on improving the crowdsourced labeling of visual datasets from platforms like Mechanical Turk. The authors note that, “Although it is cheap to obtain large quantity of labels through crowdsourcing, it has been well known that the collected labels could be very noisy. So it is desirable to model the expertise level of the labelers to ensure the quality of the labels. The higher the expertise level a labeler is at, the lower the label noises he/she will produce.”
  • Based on the need for identifying expert labelers upfront, the authors developed an “active classifier learning system which determines which users to label which unlabeled examples” from collected visual datasets.
  • The researchers’ experiments in identifying expert visual dataset labelers led to findings demonstrating that the “active selection” of expert labelers is beneficial in cutting through the noise of crowdsourcing platforms.

Noveck, Beth Simone. “’Peer to Patent’: Collective Intelligence, Open Review, and Patent Reform.” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 20, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 123–162. http://bit.ly/HegzTT.

  • This law review article introduces the idea of crowdsourcing expertise to mitigate the challenge of patent processing. Noveck argues that, “access to information is the crux of the patent quality problem. Patent examiners currently make decisions about the grant of a patent that will shape an industry for a twenty-year period on the basis of a limited subset of available information. Examiners may neither consult the public, talk to experts, nor, in many cases, even use the Internet.”
  • Peer-to-Patent, which launched three years after this article, is based on the idea that, “The new generation of social software might not only make it easier to find friends but also to find expertise that can be applied to legal and policy decision-making. This way, we can improve upon the Constitutional promise to promote the progress of science and the useful arts in our democracy by ensuring that only worth ideas receive that ‘odious monopoly’ of which Thomas Jefferson complained.”

Ober, Josiah. “Democracy’s Wisdom: An Aristotelian Middle Way for Collective Judgment.” American Political Science Review 107, no. 01 (2013): 104–122. http://bit.ly/1cgf857.

  • In this paper, Ober argues that, “A satisfactory model of decision-making in an epistemic democracy must respect democratic values, while advancing citizens’ interests, by taking account of relevant knowledge about the world.”
  • Ober describes an approach to decision-making that aggregates expertise across multiple domains. This “Relevant Expertise Aggregation (REA) enables a body of minimally competent voters to make superior choices among multiple options, on matters of common interest.”

Sims, Max H., Jeffrey Bigham, Henry Kautz and Marc W. Halterman. “Crowdsourcing medical expertise in near real time.” Journal of Hospital Medicine 9, no. 7, July 2014. http://bit.ly/1kAKvq7.

  • In this article, the authors discuss the develoment of a mobile application called DocCHIRP, which was developed due to the fact that, “although the Internet creates unprecedented access to information, gaps in the medical literature and inefficient searches often leave healthcare providers’ questions unanswered.”
  • The DocCHIRP pilot project used a “system of point-to-multipoint push notifications designed to help providers problem solve by crowdsourcing from their peers.”
  • Healthcare providers (HCPs) sought to gain intelligence from the crowd, which included 85 registered users, on questions related to medication, complex medical decision making, standard of care, administrative, testing and referrals.
  • The authors believe that, “if future iterations of the mobile crowdsourcing applications can address…adoption barriers and support the organic growth of the crowd of HCPs,” then “the approach could have a positive and transformative effect on how providers acquire relevant knowledge and care for patients.”

Spina, Alessandro. “Scientific Expertise and Open Government in the Digital Era: Some Reflections on EFSA and Other EU Agencies.” in Foundations of EU Food Law and Policy, eds. A. Alemmano and S. Gabbi. Ashgate, 2014. http://bit.ly/1k2EwdD.

  • In this paper, Spina “presents some reflections on how the collaborative and crowdsourcing practices of Open Government could be integrated in the activities of EFSA [European Food Safety Authority] and other EU agencies,” with a particular focus on “highlighting the benefits of the Open Government paradigm for expert regulatory bodies in the EU.”
  • Spina argues that the “crowdsourcing of expertise and the reconfiguration of the information flows between European agencies and teh public could represent a concrete possibility of modernising the role of agencies with a new model that has a low financial burden and an almost immediate effect on the legal governance of agencies.”
  • He concludes that, “It is becoming evident that in order to guarantee that the best scientific expertise is provided to EU institutions and citizens, EFSA should strive to use the best organisational models to source science and expertise.”

Participant Index Seeks to Determine Why One Film Spurs Activism, While Others Falter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
in the New York Times: “You watched the wrenching documentary. You posted your outrage on Twitter. But are you good for more than a few easy keystrokes of hashtag activism?

Participant Media and some powerful partners need to know.

For the last year Participant, an activist entertainment company that delivers movies with a message, has been quietly working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to answer a question vexing those who would use media to change the world.

That is, what actually gets people moving? Do grant-supported media projects incite change, or are they simply an expensive way of preaching to the choir?…

To get the answers it wants, Participant is developing a measuring tool that it calls the Participant Index, assisted in the effort by the Annenberg school’s Media Impact Project. In rough parallel to the Nielsen television ratings, the still-evolving index compiles raw audience numbers for issue-driven narrative films, documentaries, television programs and online short videos, along with measures of conventional and social media activity, including Twitter and Facebook presence.

The two measures are then matched with the results of an online survey, about 25 minutes long, that asks as many as 350 viewers of each project an escalating set of questions about their emotional response and level of engagement.

Did it affect you emotionally? Did you share information about it? Did you boycott a product or company? Did it change your life?

“If this existed, we would not be doing it,” said James G. Berk, chief executive of Participant. “We desperately need more and more information, to figure out if what we were doing is actually working.”

The answers result in a score that combines separate emotional and behavioral measures. On a scale of 100, for instance, “The Square,” a documentary about Egyptian political upheaval that was included in Participant’s first echelon of 35 indexed titles this year, scored extremely high for emotional involvement, with a 97, but lower in terms of provoking action, with an 87, for a combined average of 92.

By contrast, “Farmed and Dangerous,” a comic web series about industrial agriculture, hit 99 on the action scale, as respondents said, for instance, that they had bought or shunned a product, and 94 for emotion, for an average of 97. That marked it as having potentially higher impact than “The Square” among those who saw it….”

Urban Analytics (Updated and Expanded)

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore the literature on Urban Analytics. To suggest additional readings on this or any other topic, please email biblio@thegovlab.org.

Data and its uses for Governance

Urban Analytics places better information in the hands of citizens as well as government officials to empower people to make more informed choices. Today, we are able to gather real-time information about traffic, pollution, noise, and environmental and safety conditions by culling data from a range of tools: from the low-cost sensors in mobile phones to more robust monitoring tools installed in our environment. With data collected and combined from the built, natural and human environments, we can develop more robust predictive models and use those models to make policy smarter.

With the computing power to transmit and store the data from these sensors, and the tools to translate raw data into meaningful visualizations, we can identify problems as they happen, design new strategies for city management, and target the application of scarce resources where they are most needed.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Amini, L., E. Bouillet, F. Calabrese, L. Gasparini, and O. Verscheure. “Challenges and Results in City-scale Sensing.” In IEEE Sensors, 59–61, 2011. http://bit.ly/1doodZm.

  • This paper examines “how city requirements map to research challenges in machine learning, optimization, control, visualization, and semantic analysis.”
  • The authors raises several research challenges including how to extract accurate information when the data is noisy and sparse; how to represent findings from digital pervasive technologies; and how people interact with one another and their environment.

Batty, M., K. W. Axhausen, F. Giannotti, A. Pozdnoukhov, A. Bazzani, M. Wachowicz, G. Ouzounis, and Y. Portugali. “Smart Cities of the Future.” The European Physical Journal Special Topics 214, no. 1 (November 1, 2012): 481–518. http://bit.ly/HefbjZ.

  • This paper explores the goals and research challenges involved in the development of smart cities that merge ICT with traditional infrastructures through digital technologies.
  • The authors put forth several research objectives, including: 1) to explore the notion of the city as a laboratory for innovation; 2) to develop technologies that ensure equity, fairness and realize a better quality of city life; and 3) to develop technologies that ensure informed participation and create shared knowledge for democratic city governance.
  • The paper also examines several contemporary smart city initiatives, expected paradigm shifts in the field, benefits, risks and impacts.

Budde, Paul. “Smart Cities of Tomorrow.” In Cities for Smart Environmental and Energy Futures, edited by Stamatina Th Rassia and Panos M. Pardalos, 9–20. Energy Systems. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2014. http://bit.ly/17MqPZW.

  • This paper examines the components and strategies involved in the creation of smart cities featuring “cohesive and open telecommunication and software architecture.”
  • In their study of smart cities, the authors examine smart and renewable energy; next-generation networks; smart buildings; smart transport; and smart government.
  • They conclude that for the development of smart cities, information and communication technology (ICT) is needed to build more horizontal collaborative structures, useful data must be analyzed in real time and people and/or machines must be able to make instant decisions related to social and urban life.

Cardone, G., L. Foschini, P. Bellavista, A. Corradi, C. Borcea, M. Talasila, and R. Curtmola. “Fostering Participaction in Smart Cities: a Geo-social Crowdsensing Platform.” IEEE Communications
Magazine 51, no. 6 (2013): 112–119. http://bit.ly/17iJ0vZ.

  • This article examines “how and to what extent the power of collective although imprecise intelligence can be employed in smart cities.”
  • To tackle problems of managing the crowdsensing process, this article proposes a “crowdsensing platform with three main original technical aspects: an innovative geo-social model to profile users along different variables, such as time, location, social interaction, service usage, and human activities; a matching algorithm to autonomously choose people to involve in participActions and to quantify the performance of their sensing; and a new Android-based platform to collect sensing data from smart phones, automatically or with user help, and to deliver sensing/actuation tasks to users.”

Chen, Chien-Chu. “The Trend towards ‘Smart Cities.’” International Journal of Automation and Smart Technology. June 1, 2014. http://bit.ly/1jOOaAg.

  • In this study, Chen explores the ambitions, prevalence and outcomes of a variety of smart cities, organized into five categories:
    • Transportation-focused smart cities
    • Energy-focused smart cities
    • Building-focused smart cities
    • Water-resources-focused smart cities
    • Governance-focused smart cities
  • The study finds that the “Asia Pacific region accounts for the largest share of all smart city development plans worldwide, with 51% of the global total. Smart city development plans in the Asia Pacific region tend to be energy-focused smart city initiatives, aimed at easing the pressure on energy resources that will be caused by continuing rapid urbanization in the future.”
  • North America, on the other hand is generally more geared toward energy-focused smart city development plans. “In North America, there has been a major drive to introduce smart meters and smart electric power grids, integrating the electric power sector with information and communications technology (ICT) and replacing obsolete electric power infrastructure, so as to make cities’ electric power systems more reliable (which in turn can help to boost private-sector investment, stimulate the growth of the ‘green energy’ industry, and create more job opportunities).”
  • Looking to Taiwan as an example, Chen argues that, “Cities in different parts of the world face different problems and challenges when it comes to urban development, making it necessary to utilize technology applications from different fields to solve the unique problems that each individual city has to overcome; the emphasis here is on the development of customized solutions for smart city development.”

Domingo, A., B. Bellalta, M. Palacin, M. Oliver and E. Almirall. “Public Open Sensor Data: Revolutionizing Smart Cities.” Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE 32, No. 4. Winter 2013. http://bit.ly/1iH6ekU.

  • In this article, the authors explore the “enormous amount of information collected by sensor devices” that allows for “the automation of several real-time services to improve city management by using intelligent traffic-light patterns during rush hour, reducing water consumption in parks, or efficiently routing garbage collection trucks throughout the city.”
  • They argue that, “To achieve the goal of sharing and open data to the public, some technical expertise on the part of citizens will be required. A real environment – or platform – will be needed to achieve this goal.” They go on to introduce a variety of “technical challenges and considerations involved in building an Open Sensor Data platform,” including:
    • Scalability
    • Reliability
    • Low latency
    • Standardized formats
    • Standardized connectivity
  • The authors conclude that, despite incredible advancements in urban analytics and open sensing in recent years, “Today, we can only imagine the revolution in Open Data as an introduction to a real-time world mashup with temperature, humidity, CO2 emission, transport, tourism attractions, events, water and gas consumption, politics decisions, emergencies, etc., and all of this interacting with us to help improve the future decisions we make in our public and private lives.”

Harrison, C., B. Eckman, R. Hamilton, P. Hartswick, J. Kalagnanam, J. Paraszczak, and P. Williams. “Foundations for Smarter Cities.” IBM Journal of Research and Development 54, no. 4 (2010): 1–16. http://bit.ly/1iha6CR.

  • This paper describes the information technology (IT) foundation and principles for Smarter Cities.
  • The authors introduce three foundational concepts of smarter cities: instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.
  • They also describe some of the major needs of contemporary cities, and concludes that Creating the Smarter City implies capturing and accelerating flows of information both vertically and horizontally.

Hernández-Muñoz, José M., Jesús Bernat Vercher, Luis Muñoz, José A. Galache, Mirko Presser, Luis A. Hernández Gómez, and Jan Pettersson. “Smart Cities at the Forefront of the Future Internet.” In The Future Internet, edited by John Domingue, Alex Galis, Anastasius Gavras, Theodore Zahariadis, Dave Lambert, Frances Cleary, Petros Daras, et al., 447–462. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6656. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/HhNbMX.

  • This paper explores how the “Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS), can become building blocks to progress towards a unified urban-scale ICT platform transforming a Smart City into an open innovation platform.”
  • The authors examine the SmartSantander project to argue that, “the different stakeholders involved in the smart city business is so big that many non-technical constraints must be considered (users, public administrations, vendors, etc.).”
  • The authors also discuss the need for infrastructures at the, for instance, European level for realistic large-scale experimentally-driven research.

Hoon-Lee, Jung, Marguerite Gong Hancock, Mei-Chih Hu. “Towards an effective framework for building smart cities: Lessons from Seoul and San Francisco.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Ocotober 3, 2013. http://bit.ly/1rzID5v.

  • In this study, the authors aim to “shed light on the process of building an effective smart city by integrating various practical perspectives with a consideration of smart city characteristics taken from the literature.”
  • They propose a conceptual framework based on case studies from Seoul and San Francisco built around the following dimensions:
    • Urban openness
    • Service innovation
    • Partnerships formation
    • Urban proactiveness
    • Smart city infrastructure integration
    • Smart city governance
  • The authors conclude with a summary of research findings featuring “8 stylized facts”:
    • Movement towards more interactive services engaging citizens;
    • Open data movement facilitates open innovation;
    • Diversifying service development: exploit or explore?
    • How to accelerate adoption: top-down public driven vs. bottom-up market driven partnerships;
    • Advanced intelligent technology supports new value-added smart city services;
    • Smart city services combined with robust incentive systems empower engagement;
    • Multiple device & network accessibility can create network effects for smart city services;
    • Centralized leadership implementing a comprehensive strategy boosts smart initiatives.

Kamel Boulos, Maged N. and Najeeb M. Al-Shorbaji. “On the Internet of Things, smart cities and the WHO Healthy Cities.” International Journal of Health Geographics 13, No. 10. 2014. http://bit.ly/Tkt9GA.

  • In this article, the authors give a “brief overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) for cities, offering examples of IoT-powered 21st century smart cities, including the experience of the Spanish city of Barcelona in implementing its own IoT-driven services to improve the quality of life of its people through measures that promote an eco-friendly, sustainable environment.”
  • The authors argue that one of the central needs for harnessing the power of the IoT and urban analytics is for cities to “involve and engage its stakeholders from a very early stage (city officials at all levels, as well as citizens), and to secure their support by raising awareness and educating them about smart city technologies, the associated benefits, and the likely challenges that will need to be overcome (such as privacy issues).”
  • They conclude that, “The Internet of Things is rapidly gaining a central place as key enabler of the smarter cities of today and the future. Such cities also stand better chances of becoming healthier cities.”

Keller, Sallie Ann, Steven E. Koonin, and Stephanie Shipp. “Big Data and City Living – What Can It Do for Us?” Significance 9, no. 4 (2012): 4–7. http://bit.ly/166W3NP.

  • This article provides a short introduction to Big Data, its importance, and the ways in which it is transforming cities. After an overview of the social benefits of big data in an urban context, the article examines its challenges, such as privacy concerns and institutional barriers.
  • The authors recommend that new approaches to making data available for research are needed that do not violate the privacy of entities included in the datasets. They believe that balancing privacy and accessibility issues will require new government regulations and incentives.

Kitchin, Rob. “The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, July 3, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aamZj2.

  • This paper focuses on “how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’ which enable real-time analysis of city life, new modes of technocratic urban governance, and a re-imagining of cities.”
  • The authors provide “a number of projects that seek to produce a real-time analysis of the city and provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism.”

Mostashari, A., F. Arnold, M. Maurer, and J. Wade. “Citizens as Sensors: The Cognitive City Paradigm.” In 2011 8th International Conference Expo on Emerging Technologies for a Smarter World (CEWIT), 1–5, 2011. http://bit.ly/1fYe9an.

  • This paper argues that. “implementing sensor networks are a necessary but not sufficient approach to improving urban living.”
  • The authors introduce the concept of the “Cognitive City” – a city that can not only operate more efficiently due to networked architecture, but can also learn to improve its service conditions, by planning, deciding and acting on perceived conditions.
  • Based on this conceptualization of a smart city as a cognitive city, the authors propose “an architectural process approach that allows city decision-makers and service providers to integrate cognition into urban processes.”

Oliver, M., M. Palacin, A. Domingo, and V. Valls. “Sensor Information Fueling Open Data.” In Computer Software and Applications Conference Workshops (COMPSACW), 2012 IEEE 36th Annual, 116–121, 2012. http://bit.ly/HjV4jS.

  • This paper introduces the concept of sensor networks as a key component in the smart cities framework, and shows how real-time data provided by different city network sensors enrich Open Data portals and require a new architecture to deal with massive amounts of continuously flowing information.
  • The authors’ main conclusion is that by providing a framework to build new applications and services using public static and dynamic data that promote innovation, a real-time open sensor network data platform can have several positive effects for citizens.

Perera, Charith, Arkady Zaslavsky, Peter Christen and Dimitrios Georgakopoulos. “Sensing as a service model for smart cities supported by Internet of Things.” Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 25, Issue 1. January 2014. http://bit.ly/1qJLDP9.

  • This paper looks into the “enormous pressure towards efficient city management” that has “triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in information and communication technologies to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues.”
  • The authors explore the parallel advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), which “envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities.”
  • The paper proposes the sensing as a service model “as a solution based on IoT infrastructure.” The sensing as a service model consists of four conceptual layers: “(i) sensors and sensor owners; (ii) sensor publishers (SPs); (iii) extended service providers (ESPs); and (iv) sensor data consumers. They go on to describe how this model would work in the areas of waste management, smart agriculture and environmental management.

Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good: Frameworks for Engagement. Edited by Julia Lane, Victoria Stodden, Stefan Bender, and Helen Nissenbaum; Cambridge University Press, 2014. http://bit.ly/UoGRca.

  • This book focuses on the legal, practical, and statistical approaches for maximizing the use of massive datasets while minimizing information risk.
  • “Big data” is more than a straightforward change in technology.  It poses deep challenges to our traditions of notice and consent as tools for managing privacy.  Because our new tools of data science can make it all but impossible to guarantee anonymity in the future, the authors question whether it possible to truly give informed consent, when we cannot, by definition, know what the risks are from revealing personal data either for individuals or for society as a whole.
  • Based on their experience building large data collections, authors discuss some of the best practical ways to provide access while protecting confidentiality.  What have we learned about effective engineered controls?  About effective access policies?  About designing data systems that reinforce – rather than counter – access policies?  They also explore the business, legal, and technical standards necessary for a new deal on data.
  • Since the data generating process or the data collection process is not necessarily well understood for big data streams, authors discuss what statistics can tell us about how to make greatest scientific use of this data. They also explore the shortcomings of current disclosure limitation approaches and whether we can quantify the extent of privacy loss.

Schaffers, Hans, Nicos Komninos, Marc Pallot, Brigitte Trousse, Michael Nilsson, and Alvaro Oliveira. “Smart Cities and the Future Internet: Towards Cooperation Frameworks for Open Innovation.” In The Future Internet, edited by John Domingue, Alex Galis, Anastasius Gavras, Theodore Zahariadis, Dave Lambert, Frances Cleary, Petros Daras, et al., 431–446. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6656. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/16ytKoT.

  • This paper “explores ‘smart cities’ as environments of open and user-driven innovation for experimenting and validating Future Internet-enabled services.”
  • The authors examine several smart city projects to illustrate the central role of users in defining smart services and the importance of participation. They argue that, “Two different layers of collaboration can be distinguished. The first layer is collaboration within the innovation process. The second layer concerns collaboration at the territorial level, driven by urban and regional development policies aiming at strengthening the urban innovation systems through creating effective conditions for sustainable innovation.”

Suciu, G., A. Vulpe, S. Halunga, O. Fratu, G. Todoran, and V. Suciu. “Smart Cities Built on Resilient Cloud Computing and Secure Internet of Things.” In 2013 19th International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), 513–518, 2013. http://bit.ly/16wfNgv.

  • This paper proposes “a new platform for using cloud computing capacities for provision and support of ubiquitous connectivity and real-time applications and services for smart cities’ needs.”
  • The authors present a “framework for data procured from highly distributed, heterogeneous, decentralized, real and virtual devices (sensors, actuators, smart devices) that can be automatically managed, analyzed and controlled by distributed cloud-based services.”

Townsend, Anthony. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

  • In this book, Townsend illustrates how “cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.”
  • He also considers “the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings” of the many stakeholders involved in the development of smart cities, and poses a new civics to guide these efforts.
  • He argues that smart cities are not made smart by various, soon-to-be-obsolete technologies built into its infrastructure, but how citizens use these ever-changing technologies to be “human-centered, inclusive and resilient.”

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Did we miss anything? Please submit reading recommendations to biblio@thegovlab.org or in the comments below.

Crowdsourcing and social search

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at Techcrunch: “When we think of the sharing economy, what often comes to mind are sites like Airbnb, Lyft, or Feastly — the platforms that allow us to meet people for a specific reason, whether that’s a place to stay, a ride, or a meal.
But what about sharing something much simpler than that, like answers to our questions about the world around us? Sharing knowledge with strangers can offer us insight into a place we are curious about or trying to navigate, and in a more personal, efficient way than using traditional web searches.
“Sharing an answer or response to question, that is true sharing. There’s no financial or monetary exchange based on that. It’s the true meaning of [the word],” said Maxime Leroy, co-founder and CEO of a new app called Enquire.
Enquire is a new question-and-answer app, but it is unlike others in the space. You don’t have to log in via Facebook or Twitter, use SMS messaging like on Quest, or upload an image like you do on Jelly. None of these apps have taken off yet, which could be good or bad for Enquire just entering the space.
With Enquire, simply log in with a username and password and it will unlock the neighborhood you are in (the app only works in San Francisco, New York, and Paris right now). There are lists of answers to other questions, or you can post your own. If 200 people in a city sign up, the app will become available to them, which is an effort to make sure there is a strong community to gather answers from.
Leroy, who recently made a documentary about the sharing economy, realized there was “one tool missing for local communities” in the space, and decided to create this app.
“We want to build a more local-based network, and empower and increase trust without having people share all their identity,” he said.
Different social channels look at search in different ways, but the trend is definitely moving to more social searching or location-based searching, according to according to Altimeter social media analyst Rebecca Lieb. Arguably, she said, Yelp, Groupon, and even Google Maps are vertical search engines. If you want to find a nearby restaurant, pharmacy, or deal, you look to these platforms.
However, she credits Aardvark as one of the first in the space, which was a social search engine founded in 2007 that used instant messaging and email to get answers from your existing contacts. Google bought the company in 2010. It shows the idea of crowdsourcing answers isn’t new, but the engines have become “appified,” she said.
“Now it’s geo-local specific,” she said. “We’re asking a lot more of those geo-local questions because of location-based immediacy [that we want].”
Think Seamless, with which you find the food nearby that most satisfies your appetite. Even Tinder and Grindr are social search engines, Lieb said. You want to meet up with the people that are closest to you, geographically….
His challenge is to offer rewards to incite people to sign up for the app. Eventually, Leroy would like to strengthen the networks and scale Enquire to cities and neighborhoods all over the world. Once that’s in place, people can start creating their own neighborhoods — around a school or workplace, where they hang out regularly — instead of using the existing constraints.
“I may be an expert in one area, and a newbie in another. I want to emphasize the activity and content from users to give them credit to other users and build that trust,” he said.
Usually, our first instinct is to open Yelp to find the best sushi restaurant or Google to search the closest concert venue, and it will probably stay that way for some time. But the idea that the opinions and insights of other human beings, even of strangers, is becoming much more valuable because of the internet is not far-fetched.
Admit it: haven’t you had a fleeting thought of starting a Kickstarter campaign for an idea? Looked for a cheaper place to stay on Airbnb than that hotel you normally book in New York? Or considered financing someone’s business idea across the world using Kiva? If so, then you’ve engaged in social search.
Suddenly, crowdsourcing answers for the things that pique your interest on your morning walk may not seem so strange after all.”

Can social media make every civil servant an innovator?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steve Kelman at FCW: “Innovation, particularly in government, can be very hard. Lots of signoffs, lots of naysayers. For many, it’s probably not worth the hassle.
Yet all sorts of examples are surfacing about ways civil servants, non-profits, startups and researchers have thought to use social media — or data mining of government information — to get information that can either help citizens directly or help agencies serve citizens. I want to call attention to examples that I’ve seen just in the past few weeks — partly to recognize the creative people who have come up with these ideas, but partly to make a point about the relationship between these ideas and the general issue of innovation in government. I think that these social media and data-driven experiments are often a much simpler way for civil servants to innovate than many of the changes we typically think of under the heading “innovation in government.” They open the possibility to make innovation in government an activity for the civil service masses.
One example that was reported in The New York Times was about a pilot project at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to do rapid keyword searches with phrases such as “vomit” and “diarrhea” associated with 294,000 Yelp restaurant reviews in New York City. The city is using a software program developed at Columbia University. They have now expended the monitoring to occur daily, to get quick information on possible problems at specific restaurants or with specific kinds of food.
A second example, reported in BloombergBusinessWeek, involved — perhaps not surprisingly, given the publication — an Israeli startup called Treato that is applying a similar idea to ferretting out adverse drug reactions before they come in through FDA studies and other systems. The founders are cooperating with researchers at Harvard Medical School and FDA officials, among others. Their software looks through Twitter and Facebook, along with a large number of patient forum sites, to cull out from all the reports of illnesses the incidents that may well reflect an unusual presence of adverse drug reactions.
These examples are fascinating in themselves. But one thing that caught my eye about both is that each seems high on the creativity dimension and low on the need-to-overcome-bureaucracy dimension. Both ideas reflect new and improved ways to do what these organizations do anyway, which is gather information to help inform regulatory and health decisions by government. Neither requires any upheaval in an agency’s existing culture, or steps on somebody’s turf in any serious way. Introducing the changes doesn’t require major changes in an agency’s internal procedures. Compared to many innovations in government, these are easy ones to make happen. (They do all need some funds, however.)
What I hope is that the information woven into social media will unlock a new era of innovation inside government. The limits of innovation are much less determined by difficult-to-change bureaucratic processes and can be much more responsive to an individual civil servant’s creativity…”

Humanitarians in the sky

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Patrick Meier in the Guardian: “Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capture images faster, cheaper, and at a far higher resolution than satellite imagery. And as John DeRiggi speculates in “Drones for Development?” these attributes will likely lead to a host of applications in development work. In the humanitarian field that future is already upon us — so we need to take a rights-based approach to advance the discussion, improve coordination of UAV flights, and to promote regulation that will ensure safety while supporting innovation.
It was the unprecedentedly widespread use of civilian UAVs following typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines that opened my eyes to UAV use in post-disaster settings. I was in Manila to support the United Nations’ digital humanitarian efforts and came across new UAV projects every other day.
One team was flying rotary-wing UAVs to search for survivors among vast fields of debris that were otherwise inaccessible. Another flew fixed-wing UAVs around Tacloban to assess damage and produce high-quality digital maps. Months later, UAVs are still being used to support recovery and preparedness efforts. One group is working with local mayors to identify which communities are being overlooked in the reconstruction.
Humanitarian UAVs are hardly new. As far back as 2007, the World Food Program teamed up with the University of Torino to build humanitarian UAVs. But today UAVs are much cheaper, safer, and easier to fly. This means more people own personal UAVs. The distinguishing feature between these small UAVs and traditional remote control airplanes or helicopters is that they are intelligent. Most can be programmed to fly and land autonomously at designated locations. Newer UAVs also have on-board, flight-stabilization features that automatically adapt to changing winds, automated collision avoidance systems, and standard fail-safe mechanisms.
While I was surprised by the surge in UAV projects in the Philippines, I was troubled that none of these teams were aware of each other and that most were apparently not sharing their imagery with local communities. What happens when even more UAV teams show up following future disasters? Will they be accompanied by droves of drone journalists and “disaster tourists” equipped with personal UAVs? Will we see thousands of aerial disaster pictures and videos uploaded to social media rather than in the hands of local communities? What are the privacy implications? And what about empowering local communities to deploy their own UAVs?
There were many questions but few answers. So I launched the humanitarian UAV network (UAViators) to bridge the worlds of humanitarian professionals and UAV experts to address these questions. Our first priority was to draft a code of conduct for the use of UAVs in humanitarian settings to hold ourselves accountable while educating new UAV pilots before serious mistakes are made…”

Lessons in Mass Collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Walker, Ryan Siegel, Todd Khozein, Nick Skytland, Ali Llewellyn, Thea Aldrich, and Michael Brennan in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “significant advances in technology in the last two decades have opened possibilities to engage the masses in ways impossible to imagine centuries ago. Beyond coordination, today’s technological capability permits organizations to leverage and focus public interest, talent, and energy through mass collaborative engagement to better understand and solve today’s challenges. And given the rising public awareness of a variety of social, economic, and environmental problems, organizations have seized the opportunity to leverage and lead mass collaborations in the form of hackathons.
Hackathons emerged in the mid-2000s as a popular approach to leverage the expertise of large numbers of individuals to address social issues, often through the creation of online technological solutions. Having led hundreds of mass collaboration initiatives for organizations around the world in diverse cultural contexts, we at SecondMuse offer the following lessons as a starting point for others interested in engaging the masses, as well as challenges others’ may face.

What Mass Collaboration Looks Like

An early example of a mass collaborative endeavor was Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), which formed in 2009. RHoK was initially developed in collaboration with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA, the World Bank, and later, HP as a volunteer mobilization effort; it aimed to build technology that would enable communities to respond better to crises such as natural disasters. In 2012, nearly 1,000 participants attended 30 events around the world to address 176 well-defined problems.
In 2013, NASA and SecondMuse led the International Space Apps Challenge, which engaged six US federal agencies, 400 partner institutions, and 9,000 global citizens through a variety of local and global team configurations; it aimed to address 58 different challenges to improve life on Earth and in space. In Athens, Greece, for example, in direct response to the challenge of creating a space-deployable greenhouse, a team developed a modular spinach greenhouse designed to survive the harsh Martian climate. Two months later, 11,000 citizens across 95 events participated in the National Day of Civic Hacking in 83 different US cities, ultimately contributing about 150,000 person-hours and addressing 31 federal and several state and local challenges over a single weekend. One result was Keep Austin Fed from Austin, Texas, which leveraged local data to coordinate food donations for those in need.
Strong interest on the part of institutions and an enthusiastic international community has paved the way for follow-up events in 2014.

Benefits of Mass Collaboration

The benefits of this approach to problem-solving are many, including:

  • Incentivizing the use of government data. As institutions push to make data available to the public, mass collaboration can increase the usefulness of that data by creating products from it, as well as inform and streamline future data collection processes.
  • Increasing transparency. Engaging citizens in the process of addressing public concerns educates them about the work that institutions do and advances efforts to meet public expectations of transparency.
  • Increasing outcome ownership. When people engage in a collaborative process of problem solving, they naturally have a greater stake in the outcome. Put simply, the more people who participate in the process, the greater the sense of community ownership. Also, when spearheading new policies or initiatives, the support of a knowledgeable community can be important to long-term success.
  • Increasing awareness. Engaging the populace in addressing challenges of public concern increases awareness of issues and helps develop an active citizenry. As a result, improved public perception and license to operate bolster governmental and non-governmental efforts to address challenges.
  • Saving money. By providing data and structures to the public, and allowing them to build and iterate on plans and prototypes, mass collaboration gives agencies a chance to harness the power of open innovation with minimal time and funds.
  • Harnessing cognitive surplus. The advent of online tools allowing for distributed collaboration enables citizens to use their free time incrementally toward collective endeavors that benefit local communities and the nation.

Challenges of Mass Collaboration

Although the benefits can be significant, agencies planning to lead mass collaborations should be aware of several challenges:

  • Investing time and effort. A mass collaboration is most effective when it is not a one-time event. The up-front investment in building a collaboration of supporting partner organizations, creating a robust framework for action, developing the necessary tools and defining the challenges, and investing in implementation and scaling of the most promising results all require substantial time to secure long-term commitment and strong relationships.
  • Forging an institution-community relationship. Throughout the course of most engagements, the power dynamic between the organization providing the frameworks and challenges and the groupings of individuals responding to the call to action can shift dramatically as the community incorporates the endeavor into their collective identity. Everyone involved should embrace this as they lay the foundation for self-sustaining mass collaboration communities. Once participants develop a firmly entrenched collective identity and sense of ownership, the convening organization can fully tap into its collective genius, as they can work together based on trust and shared vision. Without community ownership, organizers need to allot more time, energy, and resources to keep their initiative moving forward, and to battle against volunteer fatigue, diminished productivity, and substandard output.
  • Focusing follow-up. Turning a massive infusion of creative ideas, concepts, and prototypes into concrete solutions requires a process of focused follow-up. Identifying and nurturing the most promising seeds to fruition requires time, discrete skills, insight, and—depending on the solutions you scale—support from a variety of external organizations.
  • Understanding ROI. Any resource-intensive endeavor where only a few of numerous resulting products ever see the light of day demands deep consideration of what constitutes a reasonable return on investment. For mass collaborations, this means having an initial understanding of the potential tangible and intangible outcomes, and making a frank assessment of whether those outcomes meet the needs of the collaborators.

Technological developments in the last century have enabled relationships between individuals and institutions to blossom into a rich and complex tapestry…”

HHS releases new data and tools to increase transparency on hospital utilization and other trends

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pressrelease: “With more than 2,000 entrepreneurs, investors, data scientists, researchers, policy experts, government employees and more in attendance, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is releasing new data and launching new initiatives at the annual Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C.
Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is releasing its first annual update to the Medicare hospital charge data, or information comparing the average amount a hospital bills for services that may be provided in connection with a similar inpatient stay or outpatient visit. CMS is also releasing a suite of other data products and tools aimed to increase transparency about Medicare payments. The data trove on CMS’s website now includes inpatient and outpatient hospital charge data for 2012, and new interactive dashboards for the CMS Chronic Conditions Data Warehouse and geographic variation data. Also today, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will launch a new open data initiative. And before the end of the conference, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will announce the winners of two data challenges.
“The release of these data sets furthers the administration’s efforts to increase transparency and support data-driven decision making which is essential for health care transformation,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
“These public data resources provide a better understanding of Medicare utilization, the burden of chronic conditions among beneficiaries and the implications for our health care system and how this varies by where beneficiaries are located,” said Bryan Sivak, HHS chief technology officer. “This information can be used to improve care coordination and health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries nationwide, and we are looking forward to seeing what the community will do with these releases. Additionally, the openFDA initiative being launched today will for the first time enable a new generation of consumer facing and research applications to embed relevant and timely data in machine-readable, API-based formats.”
2012 Inpatient and Outpatient Hospital Charge Data
The data posted today on the CMS website provide the first annual update of the hospital inpatient and outpatient data released by the agency last spring. The data include information comparing the average charges for services that may be provided in connection with the 100 most common Medicare inpatient stays at over 3,000 hospitals in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Hospitals determine what they will charge for items and services provided to patients and these “charges” are the amount the hospital generally bills for those items or services.
With two years of data now available, researchers can begin to look at trends in hospital charges. For example, average charges for medical back problems increased nine percent from $23,000 to $25,000, but the total number of discharges decreased by nearly 7,000 from 2011 to 2012.
In April, ONC launched a challenge – the Code-a-Palooza challenge – calling on developers to create tools that will help patients use the Medicare data to make health care choices. Fifty-six innovators submitted proposals and 10 finalists are presenting their applications during Datapalooza. The winning products will be announced before the end of the conference.
Chronic Conditions Warehouse and Dashboard
CMS recently released new and updated information on chronic conditions among Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries, including:

  • Geographic data summarized to national, state, county, and hospital referral regions levels for the years 2008-2012;
  • Data for examining disparities among specific Medicare populations, such as beneficiaries with disabilities, dual-eligible beneficiaries, and race/ethnic groups;
  • Data on prevalence, utilization of select Medicare services, and Medicare spending;
  • Interactive dashboards that provide customizable information about Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions at state, county, and hospital referral regions levels for 2012; and
  • Chartbooks and maps.

These public data resources support the HHS Initiative on Multiple Chronic Conditions by providing researchers and policymakers a better understanding of the burden of chronic conditions among beneficiaries and the implications for our health care system.
Geographic Variation Dashboard
The Geographic Variation Dashboards present Medicare fee-for-service per-capita spending at the state and county levels in interactive formats. CMS calculated the spending figures in these dashboards using standardized dollars that remove the effects of the geographic adjustments that Medicare makes for many of its payment rates. The dashboards include total standardized per capita spending, as well as standardized per capita spending by type of service. Users can select the indicator and year they want to display. Users can also compare data for a given state or county to the national average. All of the information presented in the dashboards is also available for download from the Geographic Variation Public Use File.
Research Cohort Estimate Tool
CMS also released a new tool that will help researchers and other stakeholders estimate the number of Medicare beneficiaries with certain demographic profiles or health conditions. This tool can assist a variety of stakeholders interested in specific figures on Medicare enrollment. Researchers can also use this tool to estimate the size of their proposed research cohort and the cost of requesting CMS data to support their study.
Digital Privacy Notice Challenge
ONC, with the HHS Office of Civil Rights, will be awarding the winner of the Digital Privacy Notice Challenge during the conference. The winning products will help consumers get notices of privacy practices from their health care providers or health plans directly in their personal health records or from their providers’ patient portals.
OpenFDA
The FDA’s new initiative, openFDA, is designed to facilitate easier access to large, important public health datasets collected by the agency. OpenFDA will make FDA’s publicly available data accessible in a structured, computer readable format that will make it possible for technology specialists, such as mobile application creators, web developers, data visualization artists and researchers to quickly search, query, or pull massive amounts of information on an as needed basis. The initiative is the result of extensive research to identify FDA’s publicly available datasets that are often in demand, but traditionally difficult to use. Based on this research, openFDA is beginning with a pilot program involving millions of reports of drug adverse events and medication errors submitted to the FDA from 2004 to 2013. The pilot will later be expanded to include the FDA’s databases on product recalls and product labeling.
For more information about CMS data products, please visit http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems.html.
For more information about today’s FDA announcement visit: http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/UCM399335 or http://open.fda.gov/“