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.

The Data Revolution in Policy-Making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at the Open Institute: “There continues to be a great deal of dialogue and debate on what the data revolution from the report of the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda is all about. However, some have raised concerns that the emerging narrative around opening up data, strengthening national statistics offices or building capacity for e-government may not be revolutionary enough. In thinking through this it becomes clear that revolutions are highly contextual events. The Arab spring happened due to the unique factors of the cultural and social-economic environment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). A similar ‘spring’ may not happen in the same way in sub-Sahara Africa due to the peculiarities of the region. Attempting to replicate it is therefore an exercise in futility for those hoping for regime change.
We have just published a think piece on the role of public participation in policy making and how a data revolution could play out in that space. None of the ideas are revolutionary. They have been proposed and piloted in various countries to various extents over time. For instance, in some contexts strengthening and safe guarding the autonomy of the national statistics office may not seem revolutionary to some, in some countries it may be unprecedented (this is not part of the report). And that is okay. Nation states should be allowed, in their efforts to build capable and developmental institutions, to interpret the revolution for themselves.
In sub-Sahara Africa the availability of underlying data used to develop public policy is almost non-existent. Even when citizens are expected to participate in the formulation process and implementation of the policies, the data is still difficult to find. This neuters public participation and is a disservice to open government. Therefore making this detailed data and the accompanying rationale publicly available would be a revolutionary change in both culture and policy on access to information and potentially empower citizens to participate.
The data revolution is an opportunity to mainstream statistics into public discourse on public policy in ways that citizens can understand and engage with. I hope African countries will be willing to put an effort in translating the data revolution into an African revolution. If not, there’s a risk we shall continue singing about a revolution and never actually have one.
Download the ThinkPiece here”

Privacy and Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Teresa Scassa in Future Internet: “The public-oriented goals of the open government movement promise increased transparency and accountability of governments, enhanced citizen engagement and participation, improved service delivery, economic development and the stimulation of innovation. In part, these goals are to be achieved by making more and more government information public in reusable formats and under open licences. This paper identifies three broad privacy challenges raised by open government. The first is how to balance privacy with transparency and accountability in the context of “public” personal information. The second challenge flows from the disruption of traditional approaches to privacy based on a collapse of the distinctions between public and private sector actors. The third challenge is that of the potential for open government data—even if anonymized—to contribute to the big data environment in which citizens and their activities are increasingly monitored and profiled.”

LifeLogging: personal big data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Gurrin, Cathal and Smeaton, Alan F. and Doherty, Aiden R. at Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval: “We have recently observed a convergence of technologies to foster the emergence of lifelogging as a mainstream activity. Computer storage has become significantly cheaper, and advancements in sensing technology allows for the efficient sensing of personal activities, locations and the environment. This is best seen in the growing popularity of the quantified self movement, in which life activities are tracked using wearable sensors in the hope of better understanding human performance in a variety of tasks. This review aims to provide a comprehensive summary of lifelogging, to cover its research history, current technologies, and applications. Thus far, most of the lifelogging research has focused predominantly on visual lifelogging in order to capture life details of life activities, hence we maintain this focus in this review. However, we also reflect on the challenges lifelogging poses to an information retrieval scientist. This review is a suitable reference for those seeking a information retrieval scientist’s perspective on lifelogging and the quantified self.”

How Crowdsourced Astrophotographs on the Web Are Revolutionizing Astronomy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Astrophotography is currently undergoing a revolution thanks to the increased availability of high quality digital cameras and the software available to process the pictures after they have been taken.
Since photographs of the night sky are almost always better with long exposures that capture more light, this processing usually involves combining several images of the same part of the sky to produce one with a much longer effective exposure.
That’s all straightforward if you’ve taken the pictures yourself with the same gear under the same circumstances. But astronomers want to do better.
“The astrophotography group on Flickr alone has over 68,000 images,” say Dustin Lang at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a couple of pals. These and other images represent a vast source of untapped data for astronomers.
The problem is that it’s hard to combine images accurately when little is known about how they were taken. Astronomers take great care to use imaging equipment in which the pixels produce a signal that is proportional to the number of photons that hit.
But the same cannot be said of the digital cameras widely used by amateurs. All kinds of processes can end up influencing the final image.
So any algorithm that combines them has to cope with these variations. “We want to do this without having to infer the (possibly highly nonlinear) processing that has been applied to each individual image, each of which has been wrecked in its own loving way by its creator,” say Lang and co.
Now, these guys say they’ve cracked it. They’ve developed a system that automatically combines images from the same part of the sky to increase the effective exposure time of the resulting picture. And they say the combined images can rival those from much professional telescopes.
They’ve tested this approach by downloading images of two well-known astrophysical objects: the NGC 5907 Galaxy and the colliding pair of galaxies—Messier 51a and 51b.
For NGC 5907, they ended up with 4,000 images from Flickr, 1,000 from Bing and 100 from Google. They used an online system called astrometry.net that automatically aligns and registers images of the night sky and then combined the images using their new algorithm, which they call Enhance.
The results are impressive. They say that the combined images of NGC5907 (bottom three images) show some of the same faint features that revealed a single image taken over 11 hours of exposure using a 50 cm telescope (the top left image). All the images reveal the same kind of fine detail such as a faint stellar stream around the galaxy.
The combined image for the M51 galaxies is just as impressive, taking only 40 minutes to produce on a single processor. It reveals extended structures around both galaxies, which astronomers know to be debris from their gravitational interaction as they collide.
Lang and co say these faint features are hugely important because they allow astronomers to measure the age, mass ratios, and orbital configurations of the galaxies involved. Interestingly, many of these faint features are not visible in any of the input images taken from the Web. They emerge only once images have been combined.
One potential problem with algorithms like this is that they need to perform well as the number of images they combine increases. It’s no good if they grind to a halt as soon as a substantial amount of data becomes available.
On this score, Lang and co say astronomers can rest easy. The performance of their new Enhance algorithm scales linearly with the number of images it has to combine. That means it should perform well on large datasets.
The bottom line is that this kind of crowd-sourced astronomy has the potential to make a big impact, given that the resulting images rival those from large telescopes.
And it could also be used for historical images, say Lang and co. The Harvard Plate Archives, for example, contain half a million images dating back to the 1880s. These were all taken using different emulsions, with different exposures and developed using different processes. So the plates all have different responses to light, making them hard to compare.
That’s exactly the problem that Lang and co have solved for digital images on the Web. So it’s not hard to imagine how they could easily combine the data from the Harvard archives as well….”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1406.1528 : Towards building a Crowd-Sourced Sky Map

Towards a comparative science of cities: using mobile traffic records in New York, London and Hong Kong

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book chapter by S. Grauwin, S. Sobolevsky, S. Moritz, I. Gódor, C. Ratti, to be published in “Computational Approaches for Urban Environments” (Springer Ed.), October 2014: “This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of calls, SMS, and data transfers resolved both in time and space, we confirm the connection between temporal activity profile and land usage in three global cities: New York, London and Hong Kong. By comparing whole cities typical patterns, we provide insights on how cultural, technological and economical factors shape human dynamics. At a more local scale, we use clustering analysis to identify locations with similar patterns within a city. Our research reveals a universal structure of cities, with core financial centers all sharing similar activity patterns and commercial or residential areas with more city-specific patterns. These findings hint that as the economy becomes more global, common patterns emerge in business areas of different cities across the globe, while the impact of local conditions still remains recognizable on the level of routine people activity.”

Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Tasks and Peer Production

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.

Technological advances are creating a new paradigm by which institutions and organizations are increasingly outsourcing tasks to an open community, allocating specific needs to a flexible, willing and dispersed workforce. “Microtasking” platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are a burgeoning source of income for individuals who contribute their time, skills and knowledge on a per-task basis. In parallel, citizen science projects – task-based initiatives in which citizens of any background can help contribute to scientific research – like Galaxy Zoo are demonstrating the ability of lay and expert citizens alike to make small, useful contributions to aid large, complex undertakings. As governing institutions seek to do more with less, looking to the success of citizen science and microtasking initiatives could provide a blueprint for engaging citizens to help accomplish difficult, time-consuming objectives at little cost. Moreover, the incredible success of peer-production projects – best exemplified by Wikipedia – instills optimism regarding the public’s willingness and ability to complete relatively small tasks that feed into a greater whole and benefit the public good. You can learn more about this new wave of “collective intelligence” by following the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and their annual Collective Intelligence Conference.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, 2006. http://bit.ly/1aaU7Yb.

  • In this book, Benkler “describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing – and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves.”
  • In his discussion on Wikipedia – one of many paradigmatic examples of people collaborating without financial reward – he calls attention to the notable ongoing cooperation taking place among a diversity of individuals. He argues that, “The important point is that Wikipedia requires not only mechanical cooperation among people, but a commitment to a particular style of writing and describing concepts that is far from intuitive or natural to people. It requires self-discipline. It enforces the behavior it requires primarily through appeal to the common enterprise that the participants are engaged in…”

Brabham, Daren C. Using Crowdsourcing in Government. Collaborating Across Boundaries Series. IBM Center for The Business of Government, 2013. http://bit.ly/17gzBTA.

  • In this report, Brabham categorizes government crowdsourcing cases into a “four-part, problem-based typology, encouraging government leaders and public administrators to consider these open problem-solving techniques as a way to engage the public and tackle difficult policy and administrative tasks more effectively and efficiently using online communities.”
  • The proposed four-part typology describes the following types of crowdsourcing in government:
    • Knowledge Discovery and Management
    • Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking
    • Broadcast Search
    • Peer-Vetted Creative Production
  • In his discussion on Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking, Brabham argues that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and other microtasking platforms could be useful in a number of governance scenarios, including:
    • Governments and scholars transcribing historical document scans
    • Public health departments translating health campaign materials into foreign languages to benefit constituents who do not speak the native language
    • Governments translating tax documents, school enrollment and immunization brochures, and other important materials into minority languages
    • Helping governments predict citizens’ behavior, “such as for predicting their use of public transit or other services or for predicting behaviors that could inform public health practitioners and environmental policy makers”

Boudreau, Kevin J., Patrick Gaule, Karim Lakhani, Christoph Reidl, Anita Williams Woolley. “From Crowds to Collaborators: Initiating Effort & Catalyzing Interactions Among Online Creative Workers.” Harvard Business School Technology & Operations Mgt. Unit Working Paper No. 14-060. January 23, 2014. https://bit.ly/2QVmGUu.

  • In this working paper, the authors explore the “conditions necessary for eliciting effort from those affecting the quality of interdependent teamwork” and “consider the the role of incentives versus social processes in catalyzing collaboration.”
  • The paper’s findings are based on an experiment involving 260 individuals randomly assigned to 52 teams working toward solutions to a complex problem.
  • The authors determined the level of effort in such collaborative undertakings are sensitive to cash incentives. However, collaboration among teams was driven more by the active participation of teammates, rather than any monetary reward.

Franzoni, Chiara, and Henry Sauermann. “Crowd Science: The Organization of Scientific Research in Open Collaborative Projects.” Research Policy (August 14, 2013). http://bit.ly/HihFyj.

  • In this paper, the authors explore the concept of crowd science, which they define based on two important features: “participation in a project is open to a wide base of potential contributors, and intermediate inputs such as data or problem solving algorithms are made openly available.” The rationale for their study and conceptual framework is the “growing attention from the scientific community, but also policy makers, funding agencies and managers who seek to evaluate its potential benefits and challenges. Based on the experiences of early crowd science projects, the opportunities are considerable.”
  • Based on the study of a number of crowd science projects – including governance-related initiatives like Patients Like Me – the authors identify a number of potential benefits in the following categories:
    • Knowledge-related benefits
    • Benefits from open participation
    • Benefits from the open disclosure of intermediate inputs
    • Motivational benefits
  • The authors also identify a number of challenges:
    • Organizational challenges
    • Matching projects and people
    • Division of labor and integration of contributions
    • Project leadership
    • Motivational challenges
    • Sustaining contributor involvement
    • Supporting a broader set of motivations
    • Reconciling conflicting motivations

Kittur, Aniket, Ed H. Chi, and Bongwon Suh. “Crowdsourcing User Studies with Mechanical Turk.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 453–456. CHI ’08. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2008. http://bit.ly/1a3Op48.

  • In this paper, the authors examine “[m]icro-task markets, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, [which] offer a potential paradigm for engaging a large number of users for low time and monetary costs. [They] investigate the utility of a micro-task market for collecting user measurements, and discuss design considerations for developing remote micro user evaluation tasks.”
  • The authors conclude that in addition to providing a means for crowdsourcing small, clearly defined, often non-skill-intensive tasks, “Micro-task markets such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are promising platforms for conducting a variety of user study tasks, ranging from surveys to rapid prototyping to quantitative measures. Hundreds of users can be recruited for highly interactive tasks for marginal costs within a timeframe of days or even minutes. However, special care must be taken in the design of the task, especially for user measurements that are subjective or qualitative.”

Kittur, Aniket, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Michael S. Bernstein, Elizabeth M. Gerber, Aaron Shaw, John Zimmerman, Matthew Lease, and John J. Horton. “The Future of Crowd Work.” In 16th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2013), 2012. http://bit.ly/1c1GJD3.

  • In this paper, the authors discuss paid crowd work, which “offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale.” However, they caution that, “it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework.”
  • The authors argue that seven key challenges must be met to ensure that crowd work processes evolve and reach their full potential:
    • Designing workflows
    • Assigning tasks
    • Supporting hierarchical structure
    • Enabling real-time crowd work
    • Supporting synchronous collaboration
    • Controlling quality

Madison, Michael J. “Commons at the Intersection of Peer Production, Citizen Science, and Big Data: Galaxy Zoo.” In Convening Cultural Commons, 2013. http://bit.ly/1ih9Xzm.

  • This paper explores a “case of commons governance grounded in research in modern astronomy. The case, Galaxy Zoo, is a leading example of at least three different contemporary phenomena. In the first place, Galaxy Zoo is a global citizen science project, in which volunteer non-scientists have been recruited to participate in large-scale data analysis on the Internet. In the second place, Galaxy Zoo is a highly successful example of peer production, some times known as crowdsourcing…In the third place, is a highly visible example of data-intensive science, sometimes referred to as e-science or Big Data science, by which scientific researchers develop methods to grapple with the massive volumes of digital data now available to them via modern sensing and imaging technologies.”
  • Madison concludes that the success of Galaxy Zoo has not been the result of the “character of its information resources (scientific data) and rules regarding their usage,” but rather, the fact that the “community was guided from the outset by a vision of a specific organizational solution to a specific research problem in astronomy, initiated and governed, over time, by professional astronomers in collaboration with their expanding universe of volunteers.”

Malone, Thomas W., Robert Laubacher and Chrysanthos Dellarocas. “Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence.” MIT Sloan Research Paper. February 3, 2009. https://bit.ly/2SPjxTP.

  • In this article, the authors describe and map the phenomenon of collective intelligence – also referred to as “radical decentralization, crowd-sourcing, wisdom of crowds, peer production, and wikinomics – which they broadly define as “groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.”
  • The article is derived from the authors’ work at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, where they gathered nearly 250 examples of Web-enabled collective intelligence. To map the building blocks or “genes” of collective intelligence, the authors used two pairs of related questions:
    • Who is performing the task? Why are they doing it?
    • What is being accomplished? How is it being done?
  • The authors concede that much work remains to be done “to identify all the different genes for collective intelligence, the conditions under which these genes are useful, and the constraints governing how they can be combined,” but they believe that their framework provides a useful start and gives managers and other institutional decisionmakers looking to take advantage of collective intelligence activities the ability to “systematically consider many possible combinations of answers to questions about Who, Why, What, and How.”

Mulgan, Geoff. “True Collective Intelligence? A Sketch of a Possible New Field.” Philosophy & Technology 27, no. 1. March 2014. http://bit.ly/1p3YSdd.

  • In this paper, Mulgan explores the concept of a collective intelligence, a “much talked about but…very underdeveloped” field.
  • With a particular focus on health knowledge, Mulgan “sets out some of the potential theoretical building blocks, suggests an experimental and research agenda, shows how it could be analysed within an organisation or business sector and points to possible intellectual barriers to progress.”
  • He concludes that the “central message that comes from observing real intelligence is that intelligence has to be for something,” and that “turning this simple insight – the stuff of so many science fiction stories – into new theories, new technologies and new applications looks set to be one of the most exciting prospects of the next few years and may help give shape to a new discipline that helps us to be collectively intelligent about our own collective intelligence.”

Sauermann, Henry and Chiara Franzoni. “Participation Dynamics in Crowd-Based Knowledge Production: The Scope and Sustainability of Interest-Based Motivation.” SSRN Working Papers Series. November 28, 2013. http://bit.ly/1o6YB7f.

  • In this paper, Sauremann and Franzoni explore the issue of interest-based motivation in crowd-based knowledge production – in particular the use of the crowd science platform Zooniverse – by drawing on “research in psychology to discuss important static and dynamic features of interest and deriv[ing] a number of research questions.”
  • The authors find that interest-based motivation is often tied to a “particular object (e.g., task, project, topic)” not based on a “general trait of the person or a general characteristic of the object.” As such, they find that “most members of the installed base of users on the platform do not sign up for multiple projects, and most of those who try out a project do not return.”
  • They conclude that “interest can be a powerful motivator of individuals’ contributions to crowd-based knowledge production…However, both the scope and sustainability of this interest appear to be rather limited for the large majority of contributors…At the same time, some individuals show a strong and more enduring interest to participate both within and across projects, and these contributors are ultimately responsible for much of what crowd science projects are able to accomplish.”

Schmitt-Sands, Catherine E. and Richard J. Smith. “Prospects for Online Crowdsourcing of Social Science Research Tasks: A Case Study Using Amazon Mechanical Turk.” SSRN Working Papers Series. January 9, 2014. http://bit.ly/1ugaYja.

  • In this paper, the authors describe an experiment involving the nascent use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a social science research tool. “While researchers have used crowdsourcing to find research subjects or classify texts, [they] used Mechanical Turk to conduct a policy scan of local government websites.”
  • Schmitt-Sands and Smith found that “crowdsourcing worked well for conducting an online policy program and scan.” The microtasked workers were helpful in screening out local governments that either did not have websites or did not have the types of policies and services for which the researchers were looking. However, “if the task is complicated such that it requires ongoing supervision, then crowdsourcing is not the best solution.”

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. https://bit.ly/2QysNif.

  • In this book, Shirky explores our current era in which, “For the first time in history, the tools for cooperating on a global scale are not solely in the hands of governments or institutions. The spread of the Internet and mobile phones are changing how people come together and get things done.”
  • Discussing Wikipedia’s “spontaneous division of labor,” Shirky argues that the process is like, “the process is more like creating a coral reef, the sum of millions of individual actions, than creating a car. And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.”

Silvertown, Jonathan. “A New Dawn for Citizen Science.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24, no. 9 (September 2009): 467–471. http://bit.ly/1iha6CR.

  • This article discusses the move from “Science for the people,” a slogan adopted by activists in the 1970s to “’Science by the people,’ which is “a more inclusive aim, and is becoming a distinctly 21st century phenomenon.”
  • Silvertown identifies three factors that are responsible for the explosion of activity in citizen science, each of which could be similarly related to the crowdsourcing of skills by governing institutions:
    • “First is the existence of easily available technical tools for disseminating information about products and gathering data from the public.
    • A second factor driving the growth of citizen science is the increasing realisation among professional scientists that the public represent a free source of labour, skills, computational power and even finance.
    • Third, citizen science is likely to benefit from the condition that research funders such as the National Science Foundation in the USA and the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK now impose upon every grantholder to undertake project-related science outreach. This is outreach as a form of public accountability.”

Szkuta, Katarzyna, Roberto Pizzicannella, David Osimo. “Collaborative approaches to public sector innovation: A scoping study.” Telecommunications Policy. 2014. http://bit.ly/1oBg9GY.

  • In this article, the authors explore cases where government collaboratively delivers online public services, with a focus on success factors and “incentives for services providers, citizens as users and public administration.”
  • The authors focus on six types of collaborative governance projects:
    • Services initiated by government built on government data;
    • Services initiated by government and making use of citizens’ data;
    • Services initiated by civil society built on open government data;
    • Collaborative e-government services; and
    • Services run by civil society and based on citizen data.
  • The cases explored “are all designed in the way that effectively harnesses the citizens’ potential. Services susceptible to collaboration are those that require computing efforts, i.e. many non-complicated tasks (e.g. citizen science projects – Zooniverse) or citizens’ free time in general (e.g. time banks). Those services also profit from unique citizens’ skills and their propensity to share their competencies.”

Open Government Will Reshape Latin America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alejandro Guerrero at Medium: “When people think on the place for innovations, they typically think on innovation being spurred by large firms and small startups based in the US. And particularly in that narrow stretch of land and water called Silicon Valley.
However, the flux of innovation taking place in the intersection between technology and government is phenomenal and emerging everywhere. From the marble hallways of parliaments everywhere —including Latin America’s legislative houses— to office hubs of tech-savvy non-profits full of enthusiastic social changers —also including Latin American startups— a driving force is starting to challenge our conception of how government and citizens can and should interact. And few people are discussing or analyzing these developments.
Open Government in Latin America
The potential for Open Government to improve government’s decision-making and performance is huge. And it is particularly immense in middle income countries such as the ones in Latin America, where the combination of growing incomes, more sophisticated citizens’ demands, and broken public services is generating a large bottom-up pressure and requesting more creative solutions from governments to meet the enormous social needs, while cutting down corruption and improving governance.
It is unsurprising that citizens from all over Latin America are increasingly taking the streets and demanding better public services and more transparent institutions.
While these protests are necessarily short-lived and unarticulated —a product of growing frustration with government— they are a symptom with deeper causes that won’t go easily away, and these protests will most likely come back with increasing frequency and the unresolved frustration may eventually transmute in political platforms with more radical ideas to challenge the status quo.
Behind the scene, governments across the region still face enormous weaknesses in public management, ill-prepared and underpaid public officials carry on with their duties as the platonic idea of a demotivated workforce, and the opportunities for corruption, waste, and nepotism are plenty. The growing segment of more affluent citizens simply opt out from government and resort to private alternatives, thus exacerbating inequalities in the already most unequal region in the world. The crumbling middle classes and the poor can just resort to voicing their complaints. And they are increasingly doing so.
And here is where open government initiatives might play a transformative role, disrupting the way governments make decisions and work while empowering citizens in the process.
The preconditions for OpenGov are almost here
In Latin America, connectivity rates are growing fast (reaching 61% in 2013 for the Americas as a whole), close to 90% of the population owns a cellphone, and access to higher levels of education keeps growing (as an example, the latest PISA report indicates that Mexico went from 58% in 2003 to 70% high-schoolers in 2012). The social conditions for a stronger role of citizens in government are increasingly there.
Moreover, most Latin American countries passed transparency laws during the 2000s, creating the enabling environment for open government initiatives to flourish. It is thus unsurprising that the next generation of young government bureaucrats, on average more internet-savvy and better educated than its predecessors, is taking over and embracing innovations in government. And they are finding echo (and suppliers of ideas and apps!) among local startups and civil society groups, while also being courted by large tech corporations (think of Google or Microsoft) behind succulent government contracts associated with this form of “doing good”.
This is an emerging galaxy of social innovators, technologically-savvy bureaucrats, and engaged citizens providing a large crowd-sourcing community and an opportunity to test different approaches. And the underlying tectonic shifts are pushing governments towards that direction. For a sampler, check out the latest developments for Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Chile, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and (why not?) my own country, which I will include in the review often for the surprisingly limited progress of open government in this OECD member, which shares similar institutions and challenges with Latin America.

A Road Full of Promise…and Obstacles

Most of the progress in Latin America is quite recent, and the real impact is still often more limited once you abandon the halls of the Digital Government directorates and secretarías or look if you look beyond the typical government data portal. The resistance to change is as human as laughing, but it is particularly intense among the public sector side of human beings. Politics also typically plays a enormous role in resisting transparency open government, and in a context of weak institutions and pervasive corruption, the temptation to politically block or water down open data/open government projects is just too high. Selective release of data (if any) is too frequent, government agencies often act as silos by not sharing information with other government departments, and irrational fears by policy-makers combined with adoption barriers (well explained here) all contribute to deter the progress of the open government promise in Latin America…”

OSTP’s Own Open Government Plan

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nick Sinai and Corinna Zarek: “The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) today released its 2014 Open Government Plan. The OSTP plan highlights three flagship efforts as well as the team’s ongoing work to embed the open government principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration into its activities.
OSTP advises the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The work of the office includes policy efforts encompassing science, environment, energy, national security, technology, and innovation. This plan builds off of the 2010 and 2012 Open Government Plans, updating progress on past initiatives and adding new subject areas based on 2014 guidance.
Agencies began releasing biennial Open Government Plans in 2010, with direction from the 2009 Open Government Directive. These plans serve as a roadmap for agency openness efforts, explaining existing practices and announcing new endeavors to be completed over the coming two years. Agencies build these plans in consultation with civil society stakeholders and the general public. Open government is a vital component of the President’s Management Agenda and our overall effort to ensure the government is expanding economic growth and opportunity for all Americans.
OSTP’s 2014 flagship efforts include:

  • Access to Scientific Collections: OSTP is leading agencies in developing policies that will improve the management of and access to scientific collections that agencies own or support. Scientific collections are assemblies of physical objects that are valuable for research and education—including drilling cores from the ocean floor and glaciers, seeds, space rocks, cells, mineral samples, fossils, and more. Agency policies will help make scientific collections and information about scientific collections more transparent and accessible in the coming years.
  • We the Geeks: We the Geeks Google+ Hangouts feature informal conversations with experts to highlight the future of science, technology, and innovation in the United States. Participants can join the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #WeTheGeeks and asking questions of the presenters throughout the hangout.
  • “All Hands on Deck” on STEM Education: OSTP is helping lead President Obama’s commitment to an “all-hands-on-deck approach” to providing students with skills they need to excel in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). In support of this goal, OSTP is bringing together government, industry, non-profits, philanthropy, and others to expand STEM education engagement and awareness through events like the annual White House Science Fair and the upcoming White House Maker Faire.

OSTP looks forward to implementing the 2014 Open Government Plan over the coming two years to continue building on its strong tradition of transparency, participation, and collaboration—with and for the American people.”

Harnessing the Power of Data, Technology, and Innovation for a Clean Energy Economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House: “Today, the White House, the Energy Department, and the General Services Administration are teaming up to host an Energy Datapalooza, highlighting important new steps in the public and private sectors to leverage data and innovation in ways that promote a clean energy economy in America.
Advances in technology are making it easier for consumers and businesses across the nation to better understand how they are using and saving energy. Empowering citizens with information about their energy usage can help them make smart choices that cut energy waste, cut down energy bills, and preserve our environment.
The federal government has an important role to play in unleashing energy-related data and catalyzing innovation to support these savings. That is why the Obama Administration has taken unprecedented steps to make open government data more available to citizens, companies, and innovators — including by launching both an Energy Data Initiative and a Climate Data Initiative.
In addition, in 2011, the Administration launched the Green Button Initiative to provide families and businesses with easy and secure access to their own energy-usage information. And today, the Obama Administration is announcing a number of new steps to continue this momentum, including: a successful federal pilot applying the Green Button to help building managers achieve greater efficiencies; and new or expanded data resources and tools in the areas of geothermal, solar, hydropower, bio energy, and buildings.
Private-sector entrepreneurs and innovators are important partners in this effort. They are continually finding new ways to use groundbreaking software and technologies to analyze data about energy usage, building efficiency, renewable energy sources, and more, and providing those data to consumers in ways that help them achieve energy savings and help advance America’s clean energy goals.
At today’s Energy Datapalooza, companies, utilities, and innovators who are leading the charge in this important domain are announcing new commitments to make energy data available to their customers, provide consumers and first-responders with information about power outages, publish data about open building energy performance, and more. These innovators — and dozens more students, researchers, and technologists — will demonstrate exciting tools, apps, and services at a live Innovation Showcase, highlighting just some of the cutting-edge advances already underway in the energy-data space….
FACT SHEET: Harnessing the Power of Data for a Clean, Secure, and Reliable Energy Future ”