Crisis response needs to be a science, not an art

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jimmy Whitworth in the Financial Times:”…It is an imperative to offer shelter, nutrition, sanitation and medical care to those suddenly bereft of it. Without aid, humanitarian crises would cause still greater suffering. Yet admiration for the agencies that deliver relief should not blind us to the need to ensure that it is well delivered. Humanitarian responses must be founded on good evidence.
The evidence base, unfortunately, is weak. We know that storms, earthquakes and conflicts have devastating consequences for health and wellbeing, and that not responding is not an option, but we know surprisingly little about how best to go about it. Not only is evidence-based practice rare in humanitarian relief operations, it is often impossible.
Questions about how best to deliver clean water or adequate shelter, and even about which health needs should be prioritised as the most pressing, have often been barely researched. Indeed, the evidence gap is so great that the Humanitarian Practice Network has highlighted a “dire lack of credible data to help us understand just how much populations in crisis suffer, and to what extent relief operations are able to relieve that suffering”. No wonder aid responses are often characterised as messy.
Good practice often rests on past practice rather than research. The Bible of humanitarian relief is a document called the Sphere handbook, an important initiative to set minimum standards for provision of health, nutrition, sanitation and shelter. Yet analysis of the 2004 handbook has revealed that just 13 per cent of its 346 standards were supported by good evidence of relevance to health. The handbook, for example, recommended that refugee camps should prioritise measles vaccination – a worthwhile goal, but not one that should clearly be favoured over control of other infectious diseases.

Also under-researched is the question of how best to provide types of relief that everybody agrees meet essential needs. Access to clean water is a clear priority for almost all populations in crisis but little is understood about how this is most efficiently delivered. Is it best to ship bottled water to stricken areas? Are tankers of clean water more effective? Or can water purification tablets do the job? The summer floods in northern India made it clear that there is little good evidence one way or another.

Adequate shelter, too, is a human essential in all but the most benign environments but, once again, the evidence base about how best to provide it is limited. There is a school of thought that building transitional shelter from locally available materials is better in the long run than housing people under tents, tarpaulins and plastic, which if accurate would have far-reaching consequences for standard practice. But too little research has been done…
Researchers also face significant challenges to building a better evidence base. They can struggle to secure access to disaster zones when getting relief in is the priority. The timescales involved in applying for funding and ethical approval, too, make it difficult for them to move quickly enough to set up a study in the critical post-disaster period.
It is to address this that Enhancing Learning and Research for Humanitarian Assistance, with the support of the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department for International Development, recently launched an £8m research programme that investigates these issues.”

Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving – A Handbook and a Call to Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“This book was started with the intent of changing design and social entrepreneurship education. As these disciplines converge, it becomes evident that existing pedagogy doesn’t support either students or practicioners attempting to design for impact. This text is a reaction to that convergence, and will ideally be used by various students, educators, and practicioners:
One audience is professors and educators of design, who are challenged with reinventing their educational curriculum in the face of a changing world. For them, this book should act as both a starting point for curriculum development and a justification for why this development is necessary—it should answer the question “what should design and social entrepreneurship education look like?”
Another audience is made up of fresh-out-of-school designers, who are bored and uninspired by their jobs. For them, this book should answer the question “how can I redirect my design efforts to something meaningful?”
Finally, a last audience is made up of practicing designers and entrepreneurs, who are looking to achieve social impact in their work. For them, the book should answer the question “what tools and techniques can I use in my work to drive impact through design?”
The entire text of the book is available online for free as HTML, and provided for reuse and adaptation under a creative commons license. We hope you find this a useful resource in your practice, education, and in your day to day life.
Read Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving“

Crowdsourcing: Patient-Focused Drug Development Initiative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press release: “Genetic Alliance and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) announced an initiative to explore the use of a technology-enabled, crowd-sourcing approach to patient engagement as a complement to ongoing patient-focused drug development efforts under the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA V).
As part of the reauthorization of PDUFA, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) committed to gain the patient perspective on 20 disease areas in public meetings to be held between 2012 and 2017.
After issuing a Request for Proposals, Genetic Alliance chose advocacy organizations representing three disease areas that will be the focus of FDA patient-focused drug development public meetings in 2014 and 2015. The patient communities in these three disease areas will pilot a crowd-sourcing, technology-enabled approach to gathering input from a diverse set of patients on key benefit-risk questions.
“Using the Platform for Engaging Everyone Responsibly (PEER), there is an opportunity to demonstrate the power of a secure, crowd-sourced approach to provide additional insight into patients’ experience with a disease or condition,” stated Sharon Terry, President and CEO of Genetic Alliance. “The organizations we selected are expert at broad and diverse engagement from the very people that have a vested interest in patient-focused drug development. We are excited to engage these communities.”
For more information about this initiative, visit http://www.geneticalliance.org/pfdd.
 

What future do you want? Commission invites votes on what Europe could look like in 2050 to help steer future policy and research planning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission – MEMO: “Vice-President Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital Agenda, is inviting people to join a voting and ranking process on 11 visions of what the world could look like in 20-40 years. The Commission is seeking views on living and learning, leisure and working in Europe in 2050, to steer long-term policy or research planning.
The visions have been gathered over the past year through the Futurium, an online debate platform that allows policymakers to not only consult citizens, but to collaborate and “co-create” with them, and at events throughout Europe. Thousands of thinkers – from high school students, to the Erasmus Students Network; from entrepreneurs and internet pioneers to philosophers and university professors, have engaged in a collective inquiry – a means of crowd-sourcing what our future world could look like.
Eleven over-arching themes have been drawn together from more than 200 ideas for the future. From today, everyone is invited to join the debate and offer their rating and rankings of the various ideas. The results of the feedback will help the European Commission make better decisions about how to fund projects and ideas that both shape the future and get Europe ready for that future….
The Futurium is a foresight project run by DG CONNECT, based on an open source approach. It develops visions of society, technologies, attitudes and trends in 2040-2050 and use these, for example as potential blueprints for future policy choices or EU research and innovation funding priorities.
It is an online platform developed to capture emerging trends and enable interested citizens to co-create compelling visions of the futures that matter to them.

This crowd-sourcing approach provides useful insights on:

  1. vision: where people want to go, how desirable and likely are the visions posted on the platform;
  2. policy ideas: what should ideally be done to realise the futures; the possible impacts and plausibility of policy ideas;
  3. evidence: scientific and other evidence to support the visions and policy ideas.

….
Connecting policy making to people: in an increasingly connected society, online outreach and engagement is an essential response to the growing demand for participation, helping to capture new ideas and to broaden the legitimacy of the policy making process (IP/10/1296). The Futurium is an early prototype of a more general policy-making model described in the paper “The Futurium—a Foresight Platform for Evidence-Based and Participatory Policymaking“.

The Futurium was developed to lay the groundwork for future policy proposals which could be considered by the European Parliament and the European Commission under their new mandates as of 2014. But the Futurium’s open, flexible architecture makes it easily adaptable to any policy-making context, where thinking ahead, stakeholder participation and scientific evidence are needed.”

Kansas City Measures Performance through Online Dashboard

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GovTech: “To follow through on its commitment to provide more visibility into city performance, Kansas City, Mo., launched KCStat Dashboard on Oct. 22, an online tool that displays progress on city goals and objectives.
Developed by government data company Socrata, the dashboard is the city’s way of offering residents more information about government performance with real-time data, said Julie Steenson, a performance analyst for the city. Upon full implementation, the dashboard will display various statistics, from citizen satisfaction percentages to progress on maintenance and repair tasks.
“It’s been a real evolutionary project,” Steenson said. “We never had a way for the citizens or even the elected officials to see our data at a glance.”
Kansas City’s KCStat program began in December 2011 as a data collection effort that focused on service areas that drew a significant number of public complaints: street maintenance, water line maintenance, water billing, customer service, code enforcement and animal control.
In January, the city council updated its 24 major priorities (developed with public input) into six key areas — public infrastructure, economic development, public safety, healthy communities, neighborhood livability and governance — and sought a way to make their ambitions both measurable and publicly available.
Answering this call, Socrata offered the city a platform called GovStat, a program it announced in March as a way for government leaders to integrate data to decision-making while engaging citizens at the same time.
Key features of the platform, according to Socrata’s March product announcement, include an easy-to-use interface (without the need for user licenses), and real-time dashboards that can be shared through a simple drag-and-drop system.
Mayor Sly James praised the tool for its benefits related to transparency.
“The KCStat Dashboard is the city’s way of helping residents see how we’re doing at our job of serving them,” said James in a city release. “Our residents deserve nothing less than a city government based on data-driven results, and KCStat is a great tool for benchmarking our results.”

Why Research is Key to mySociety’s Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paul Lenz – Head of Finance and International Projects, mySociety: “mySociety operates in a field that we term the Civic Power sector. This sector includes a wide range of organizations, including non-profits like Ushahidi, The Sunlight Foundation, Avaaz and other companies like Change and Nationbuilder. There are many differences between these organizations, but they do share one thing in common: in the context of the wider civil society & development world in which we are situated, they are very young indeed.  mySociety, celebrating it’s tenth birthday this year, is one of the oldest in this sector –  but we are a spring chicken compared to the likes of Oxfam, Amnesty International and Plan…
Theory of change
Our underlying philosophy – our theory of change – is that enabling (and encouraging) politically inexperienced people to take actions like reporting broken street lights or asking for government information will make people more aware of their own power to get things changed, and that will benefit both them and the communities they live in. But just because lots of people perform these actions doesn’t mean we have affected those users in any profound way.
As we have matured we have started to ask ourselves some tough questions, including:
– Does the use of our sites and services (and those of our partners) make people more powerful in the civic and democratic aspects of their lives?
– Does this power genuinely deliver tangible beneficial impacts (particularly in the face of potentially unresponsive or corrupt governments)?
– Do our tools risk increasing the power of the relatively richer, better educated and technically adept minority at the expense of the majority?
…
Theoretical challenges 
One of the challenges we face is that within our field there is not an easy or categorical connection between action and impact.  If you immunize a child against disease, then you can be certain that the child has a materially higher chance of remaining healthy.  There are of course wider discussions around whether immunization should be carried out by foreign NGOs or whether governments should work to improve their own health provisioning, but there is no doubt that the immunization itself is a good thing.
What about writing to a politician?  Is that a good thing?  We believe that it is.  We believe that it drives engagement and accountability and strengthens democracy.  But we can’t prove it, and we might be wrong. We must find out.
We have a great deal of data – page impressions, unique visitors, Freedom of Information requests raised, international re-uses of our code bases, messages sent to politicians, etc. – but no way of linking this to true impact.  In order to address this gap we will conduct methodologically rigorous, experimentally-driven research on both UK and international deployments of our technologies. We will then use the findings and the method we develop to encourage increased rigor in impact assessment by other organizations working in the Civic Power sector.
It is quite likely that some of these outcomes will be challenging for us, potentially suggesting that some of our workstreams have little or no true impact as things currently stand.  Nonetheless, we are committed to sharing the all of the results – good and ill – as they start to come through.”

Findings from the emerging field of Transparency Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tiago Peixoto: “HEC Paris has just hosted the 3rd Global Conference on Transparency Research, and they have made the list of accepted papers available. …
As one goes through the papers,  it is clear that unlike most of the open government space, when it comes to research, transparency is treated less as a matter of technology and formats and more as a matter of social and political institutions.  And that is a good thing.”
This year’s papers are listed below:

Selected Readings on Linked Data and the Semantic Web

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 linked data and the semantic web was originally published in 2013.

Linked Data and the Semantic Web movement are seeking to make our growing body of digital knowledge and information more interconnected, searchable, machine-readable and useful. First introduced by the W3C, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Christian Bizer and Tom Heath define Linked Data as “data published to the Web in such a way that it is machine-readable, its meaning is explicitly defined, it is linked to other external data sets, and can in turn be linked to from external datasets.” In other words, Linked Data and the Semantic Web seek to do for data what the Web did for documents. Additionally, the evolving capability of linking together different forms of data is fueling the potentially transformative rise of social machines – “processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration.”

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Alani, Harith, David Dupplaw, John Sheridan, Kieron O’Hara, John Darlington, Nigel Shadbolt, and Carol Tullo. “Unlocking the Potential of Public Sector Information with Semantic Web Technology,” 2007. http://bit.ly/17fMbCt.

  • This paper explores the potential of using Semantic Web technology to increase the value of public sector information already in existence.
  • The authors note that, while “[g]overnments often hold very rich data and whilst much of this information is published and available for re-use by others, it is often trapped by poor data structures, locked up in legacy data formats or in fragmented databases. One of the great benefits that Semantic Web (SW) technology offers is facilitating the large scale integration and sharing of distributed data sources.”
  • They also argue that Linked Data and the Semantic Web are growing in use and visibility in other sectors, but government has been slower to adapt: “The adoption of Semantic Web technology to allow for more efficient use of data in order to add value is becoming more common where efficiency and value-added are important parameters, for example in business and science. However, in the field of government there are other parameters to be taken into account (e.g. confidentiality), and the cost-benefit analysis is more complex.” In spite of that complexity, the authors’ work “was intended to show that SW technology could be valuable in the governmental context.”

Berners-Lee, Tim, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. “The Semantic Web.” Scientific American 284, no. 5 (2001): 28–37. http://bit.ly/Hhp9AZ.

  • In this article, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila introduce the Semantic Web, “a new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers [and] will unleash a revolution of new possibilities.”
  • The authors argue that the evolution of linked data and the Semantic Web “lets anyone express new concepts that they invent with minimal effort. Its unifying logical language will enable these concepts to be progressively linked into a universal Web. This structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together.”

Bizer, Christian, Tom Heath, and Tim Berners-Lee. “Linked Data – The Story So Far.” International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS) 5, no. 3 (2009): 1–22. http://bit.ly/HedpPO.

  • In this paper, the authors take stock of Linked Data’s challenges, potential and successes close to a decade after its introduction. They build their argument for increasingly linked data by referring to the incredible value creation of the Web: “Despite the inarguable benefits the Web provides, until recently the same principles that enabled the Web of documents to flourish have not been applied to data.”
  • The authors expect that “Linked Data will enable a significant evolutionary step in leading the Web to its full potential” if a number of research challenges can be adequately addressed, both technical, like interaction paradigms and data fusion; and non-technical, like licensing, quality and privacy.

Ding, Li, Dominic Difranzo, Sarah Magidson, Deborah L. Mcguinness, and Jim Hendler. Data-Gov Wiki: Towards Linked Government Data, n.d. http://bit.ly/1h3ATHz.

  • In this paper, the authors “investigate the role of Semantic Web technologies in converting, enhancing and using linked government data” in the context of Data-gov Wiki, a project that attempts to integrate datasets found at Data.gov into the Linking Open Data (LOD) cloud.
  • The paper features discussion and “practical strategies” based on four key issue areas: Making Government Data Linkable, Linking Government Data, Supporting the Use of Linked Government Data and Preserving Knowledge Provenance.

Kalampokis, Evangelos, Michael Hausenblas, and Konstantinos Tarabanis. “Combining Social and Government Open Data for Participatory Decision-Making.” In Electronic Participation, edited by Efthimios Tambouris, Ann Macintosh, and Hans de Bruijn, 36–47. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6847. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/17hsj4a.

  • This paper presents a proposed data architecture for “supporting participatory decision-making based on the integration and analysis of social and government data.” The authors believe that their approach will “(i) allow decision makers to understand and predict public opinion and reaction about specific decisions; and (ii) enable citizens to inadvertently contribute in decision-making.”
  • The proposed approach, “based on the use of the linked data paradigm,” draws on subjective social data and objective government data in two phases: Data Collection and Filtering and Data Analysis. “The aim of the former phase is to narrow social data based on criteria such as the topic of the decision and the target group that is affected by the decision. The aim of the latter phase is to predict public opinion and reactions using independent variables related to both subjective social and objective government data.”

Rady, Kaiser. Publishing the Public Sector Legal Information in the Era of the Semantic Web. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2012. http://bit.ly/17fMiOp.

  • Following an EU directive calling for the release of public sector information by member states, this study examines the “uniqueness” of creating and publishing primary legal source documents on the web and highlights “the most recent technological strategy used to structure, link and publish data online (the Semantic Web).”
  • Rady argues for public sector legal information to be published as “open-linked-data in line with the new approach for the web.” He believes that if data is created and published in this form, “the data will be more independent from devices and applications and could be considered as a component of [a] big information system. That because, it will be well-structured, classified and has the ability to be used and utilized in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.”

Shadbolt, Nigel, Kieron O’Hara, Tim Berners-Lee, Nicholas Gibbins, Hugh Glaser, Wendy Hall, and m.c. schraefel. “Linked Open Government Data: Lessons from Data.gov.uk.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 27, no. 3 (May 2012): 16–24. http://bit.ly/1cgdH6R.

  • In this paper, the authors view Open Government Data (OGD) as an “opportunity and a challenge for the LDW [Linked Data Web]. The opportunity is to grow by linking with PSI [Public Sector Information] – real-world, useful information with good provenance. The challenge is to manage the sudden influx of heterogeneous data, often with minimal semantics and structure, tailored to highly specific task contexts.
  • As the linking of OGD continues, the authors argue that, “Releasing OGD is not solely a technical problem, although it presents technical challenges. OGD is not a rigid government IT specification, but it demands productive dialogue between data providers, users, and developers. We should expect a ‘perpetual beta,’ in which best practice, technical development, innovative use of data, and citizen-centric politics combine to drive data-release programs.”
  • Despite challenges, the authors believe that, “Integrating OGD onto the LDW will vastly increase the scope and richness of the LDW. A reciprocal benefit is that the LDW will provide additional resources and context to enrich OGD. Here, we see the network effect in action, with resources mutually adding value to one another.”

Vitale, Michael, Anni Rowland-Campbell, Valentina Cardo, and Peter Thompson. “The Implications of Government as a ‘Social Machine’ for Making and Implementing Market-based Policy.” Intersticia, September 2013. http://bit.ly/HhMzqD.

  • This report from the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) explores the concept of government as a social machine. The authors draw on the definition of a social machine proposed by Sir Nigel Shadbolt et al. – a system where “human and computational intelligence coalesce in order to achieve a given purpose” – to describe a “new approach to the relationship between citizens and government, facilitated by technological systems which are increasingly becoming intuitive, intelligent and ‘social.'”
  • The authors argue that beyond providing more and varied data to government, the evolving concept of government as a social machine as the potential to alter power dynamics, address the growing lack of trust in public institutions and facilitate greater public involvement in policy-making.

Seizing the data opportunity: UK data capability strategy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New UK Policy Paper by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills: “In the information economy, the ability to handle and analyse data is essential for the UK’s competitive advantage and business transformation. The volume, velocity and variety of data being created and analysed globally is rising every day, and using data intelligently has the potential to transform public sector organisations, drive research and development, and enable market-changing products and services. The social and economic potential is significant, and the UK is well placed to compete in the global market for data analytics. Through this strategy, the government aims to place the UK at the forefront of this process by building our capability to exploit data for the benefit of citizens, business, and academia. This is our action plan for making the UK a data success story.

Working in partnership with business and academia, the government has developed a shared vision for the UK’s data capability, with the aim of making the UK a worldleader in extracting insight and value from data for the benefit of citizens and consumers, business and academia, the public and the private sectors. The Information Economy Council and the E-infrastructure Leadership Council will oversee delivery of the actions in this strategy, and continue to develop additional
plans to support this vision.
Data capability: This strategy focuses on three overarching aspects to data capability. The first is human capital – a skilled workforce, and data-confident citizens. The second covers the tools and infrastructure which are available to store and analyse data. The third is data itself as an enabler – data capability is underpinned by the ability of consumers, businesses and academia to access and share data appropriately…”

 

Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special Report on Big Data by Volta – A newsletter on Science, Technology and Society in Europe:  “Locating crime spots, or the next outbreak of a contagious disease, Big Data promises benefits for society as well as business. But more means messier. Do policy-makers know how to use this scale of data-driven decision-making in an effective way for their citizens and ensure their privacy?90% of the world’s data have been created in the last two years. Every minute, more than 100 million new emails are created, 72 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube and Google processes more than 2 million searches. Nowadays, almost everyone walks around with a small computer in their pocket, uses the internet on a daily basis and shares photos and information with their friends, family and networks. The digital exhaust we leave behind every day contributes to an enormous amount of data produced, and at the same time leaves electronic traces that contain a great deal of personal information….
Until recently, traditional technology and analysis techniques have not been able to handle this quantity and type of data. But recent technological developments have enabled us to collect, store and process data in new ways. There seems to be no limitations, either to the volume of data or technology for storing and analyzing them. Big Data can map a driver’s sitting position to identify a car thief, it can use Google searches to predict outbreaks of the H1N1 flu virus, it can data-mine Twitter to predict the price of rice or use mobile phone top-ups to describe unemployment in Asia.
The word ‘data’ means ‘given’ in Latin. It commonly refers to a description of something that can be recorded and analyzed. While there is no clear definition of the concept of ‘Big Data’, it usually refers to the processing of huge amounts and new types of data that have not been possible with traditional tools.

‘The new development is not necessarily that there are so much more data. It’s rather that data is available to us in a new way.’

The notion of Big Data is kind of misleading, argues Robindra Prabhu, a project manager at the Norwegian Board of Technology. “The new development is not necessarily that there are so much more data. It’s rather that data is available to us in a new way. The digitalization of society gives us access to both ‘traditional’, structured data – like the content of a database or register – and unstructured data, for example the content in a text, pictures and videos. Information designed to be read by humans is now also readable by machines. And this development makes a whole new world of  data gathering and analysis available. Big Data is exciting not just because of the amount and variety of data out there, but that we can process data about so much more than before.”