Book by Rachel Botsman: “If you can’t trust those in charge, who can you trust? From government to business, banks to media, trust in institutions is at an all-time low. But this isn’t the age of distrust–far from it.
The social preferences of local citizens and spontaneous volunteerism during disaster relief operations
Paper by Samuel Roscoe et al: “Existing studies on disaster relief operations (DRO) pay limited attention to acts of spontaneous volunteerism by local citizens in the aftermath of disasters. The purpose of this paper is to explore how social preferences motivate citizens to help during post-disaster situations; above and beyond their own self-regarding interests. The paper begins by synthesizing the literature on social preferences from the field of behavioral economics and social psychology with the discourse surrounding behavioral operations management and humanitarian operations management (HOM). By doing so, we identify the motivators, enablers and barriers of local citizen response during disaster relief operations. These factors inform a theoretical framework of the social preferences motivating spontaneous volunteerism in post-disaster situations. We evidence facets of the framework using archival and unstructured data retrieved from Twitter feeds generated by local citizens during the floods that hit Chennai, India in 2015. Our model highlights the importance of individual level action during disaster relief operations and the enabling role of social media as a coordination mechanism for such efforts….(More)”.
Reputation What It Is and Why It Matters
Book by Gloria Origgi: “Reputation touches almost everything, guiding our behavior and choices in countless ways. But it is also shrouded in mystery. Why is it so powerful when the criteria by which people and things are defined as good or bad often appear to be arbitrary? Why do we care so much about how others see us that we may even do irrational and harmful things to try to influence their opinion? In this engaging book, Gloria Origgi draws on philosophy, social psychology, sociology, economics, literature, and history to offer an illuminating account of an important yet oddly neglected subject.
Origgi examines the influence of the Internet and social media, as well as the countless ranking systems that characterize modern society and contribute to the creation of formal and informal reputations in our social relations, in business, in politics, in academia, and even in wine. She highlights the importance of reputation to the effective functioning of the economy and e-commerce. Origgi also discusses the existential significance of our obsession with reputation, concluding that an awareness of the relationship between our reputation and our actions empowers us to better understand who we are and why we do what we do….(More)”.
‘Big Data’ Tells Thailand More About Jobs Than Low Unemployment
Suttinee Yuvejwattana at Bloomberg: “Thailand has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world, which doesn’t always fit the picture of an emerging-market economy that’s struggling to get growth going.
The Bank of Thailand is building its own employment index based on data from online jobs-search portals and is also creating a property indicator to give it a better sense of supply and demand in the housing market.
“We want to do evidence-based policy so big data is useful,” Jaturong Jantarangs, an assistant governor at the Bank of Thailand, said in an interview in Bangkok. “It’s not only a benefit to monetary policy but financial policy as well.”…
“Official data can’t capture the whole picture of the economy,” said Somprawin Manprasert, Bangkok-based head of research at Bank of Ayudhya Pcl. “We have a big informal sector. Many people are self-employed. This leads to a low unemployment rate.”
“The big data can show all aspects, so it can help us to solve the problems where they are,” he said…
Thailand’s military administration is also trying to harness big data to improve policy decisions, Digital Economy and Society Minister Pichet Durongkaveroj said in an interview last month. Pichet said he’s been tasked to look into digitizing, integrating and analyzing information across more than 200 government departments.
Santitarn Sathirathai, head of emerging Asia economics at Credit Suisse Group AG in Singapore, said big data analytics can be used to better target policy responses as well as allow timely evaluation of past programs. At the same time, he called on authorities to make their data more readily available to the public.
“The government should not just view big data analytics as being solely about it using richer data but also about creating a more open data environment,” he said. That’s to ensure “people can have better access to many government non-sensitive datasets and help conduct analysis that could complement the policy makers,” he said….(More)”.
Mixed Messages? The Limits of Automated Social Media Content Analysis
CDT Paper by Natasha Duarte, Emma Llanso and Anna Loup: “Governments and companies are turning to automated tools to make sense of what people post on social media, for everything ranging from hate speech detection to law enforcement investigations. Policymakers routinely call for social media companies to identify and take down hate speech, terrorist propaganda, harassment, “fake news” or disinformation, and other forms of problematic speech. Other policy proposals have focused on mining social media to inform law enforcement and immigration decisions. But these proposals wrongly assume that automated technology can accomplish on a large scale the kind of nuanced analysis that humans can accomplish on a small scale.
This paper explains the capabilities and limitations of tools for analyzing the text of social media posts and other online content. It is intended to help policymakers understand and evaluate available tools and the potential consequences of using them to carry out government policies. This paper focuses specifically on the use of natural language processing (NLP) tools for analyzing the text of social media posts. We explain five limitations of these tools that caution against relying on them to decide who gets to speak, who gets admitted into the country, and other critical determinations. This paper concludes with recommendations for policymakers and developers, including a set of questions to guide policymakers’ evaluation of available tools….(More)”.
How Muckrakers Use Crowdsourcing: Case Studies from ProPublica to The Guardian
Global Investigative Journalism:”…Creative use of social media provides new ways for journalists not just to solicit tips, but also to tap readers’ expertise, opinions and personal experiences.
at- Seeking tips on very defined topics
- Asking readers to talk about their experiences on broad subjects
- Inviting comments after publication
Here are examples of what your colleagues are doing:
Hey, Shell Employees!
Dutch reporter Jelmer Mommers of Dutch news site De Correspondent appealed directly to Shell employees for information in a lengthy blog post, as described in this article. The resulting investigation revealed that Shell had detailed knowledge of the dangers of climate change more than a quarter century ago.
Along the way, in what Jelmer calls “the most romantic moment,” came the surprise delivery of a box full of internal documents. De Correspondent’s emphasis on communicating with subscribers is described here.
Call for Childbirth Experiences
Getting reader input in advance was key to a major U.S. story on maternal health to which thousands of people contributed. ProPublica engagement reporter Adriana Gallardo and her colleagues published a questionnaire in February of 2017 aimed at women who had experienced life-threatening complications in childbirth.
Using a variety of social media channels, Gallardo, along with ProPublica’s Nina Martin and NPR’s Renee Montagne, received several thousand responses. The personal stories fueled a series and the connections made are still being maintained for follow-up work. Read more in this this GIJN article.
Testimonials from Mexico’s Drug War
“Anyone’s Child Mexico” is a documentary about the families affected by Mexico’s drug war. To gather stories, the producers of the documentary publicized a free phone line through local partners and asked people across Mexico to call in and recount their stories.
Callers could also listen to other testimonials. With funding from the University of Bristol’s Brigstow Institute, producers Matthew Brown, Ewan Cass-Kavanagh, Mary Ryder and Jane Slater created a website to bring together audio, photos, video and text and tell harrowing stories of a country ravaged by violence….(More)”.
India Social: How Social Media Is Leading The Charge And Changing The Country
Book excerpt of Ankit Lal’s book ‘India Social’: on “How social media showed its unique power of crowdsourcing during the Chennai floods…
One ingenious resource that was circulated widely during the floods was a crowdsourced effort that mapped inundated roads in the city. Over 2,500 flooded roads were added to the city’s map via social media, which was put together by engineer and information designer, Arun Ganesh.
The Chennai floods were a superb example of the power of collective effort. Users across social media channels came together to offer shelter, food, transport, and even a place for people to charge their phones. SOS messages asking ground teams to rescue stranded family members also went back and forth, and there were many who offered their homes and offices to those who were stranded.
Perhaps the most simple yet effective tool during the floods was the website chennairains.org.
It began as a simple Google spreadsheet. Sowmya Rao was trying to help her uncle and aunt figure out whether it was safe to stay in their house in suburban Chennai or move to a friend’s place. When she found out that the area they lived in was under severe risk of flooding, she relayed the message to them. But she felt helpless about the countless others who were facing the same plight as her relatives. Acting on a suggestion by another Twitter user, she created the Google spreadsheet that went on to become the website chennairains.org.
The idea was simple: crowdsource details about those who could offer shelter, and pass it on to those who were tweeting about rising waters. A hastily put-together spreadsheet soon blossomed into a multi-faceted, volunteer-driven, highly energetic online movement to help Chennai, and ended up being used by the general public, police officers, government officials and celebrities alike….(More)”.
Democracy is dead: long live democracy!
Helen Margetts in OpenDemocracy: “In the course of the World Forum for Democracy 2017, and in political commentary more generally, social media are blamed for almost everything that is wrong with democracy. They are held responsible for pollution of the democratic environment through fake news, junk science, computational propaganda and aggressive micro-targeting. In turn, these phenomena have been blamed for the rise of populism, political polarization, far-right extremism and radicalisation, waves of hate against women and minorities, post-truth, the end of representative democracy, fake democracy and ultimately, the death of democracy. It feels like the tirade of relatives of the deceased at the trial of the murderer. It is extraordinary how much of this litany is taken almost as given, the most gloomy prognoses as certain visions of the future.
Yet actually we know rather little about the relationship between social media and democracy. Because ten years of the internet and social media have challenged everything we thought we knew. They have injected volatility and instability into political systems, bringing a continual cast of unpredictable events. They bring into question normative models of democracy – by which we might understand the macro-level shifts at work – seeming to make possible the highest hopes and worst fears of republicanism and pluralism.
They have transformed the ecology of interest groups and mobilizations. They have challenged élites and ruling institutions, bringing regulatory decay and policy sclerosis. They create undercurrents of political life that burst to the surface in seemingly random ways, making fools of opinion polls and pollsters. And although the platforms themselves generate new sources of real-time transactional data that might be used to understand and shape this changed environment, most of this data is proprietary and inaccessible to researchers, meaning that the revolution in big data and data science has passed by democracy research.
What do we know? The value of tiny acts
Certainly digital media are entwined with every democratic institution and the daily lives of citizens. When deciding whether to vote, to support, to campaign, to demonstrate, to complain – digital media are with us at every step, shaping our information environment and extending our social networks by creating hundreds or thousands of ‘weak ties’, particularly for users of social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram….(More)”.
Technopolitics in the Age of Big Data
Chapter by ‘Big data’ offer novel opportunities for civic engagement and foster the emergence of data activism, a form of technopolitics from the ground–up that assumes people’s active engagement with data for empowerment. Proactive data activism, in particular, sees citizens taking advantage of the possibilities offered by data for advocacy and social change. This chapter combines social movement studies and media studies to analyze the emergence of proactive data activism in the Latin American continent. Analyzing the case of InfoAmazonia—a project blending citizen participation and data analysis to generate news about the endangered Amazon region—this chapter adds to our understanding of technopolitics as a way to reinterpret reality, empower people, facilitate collective action, and challenge the establish social norms embedded in our understanding of technology and social change. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of how data can restructure social reality, and in particular civil society action….(More) (Other chapters)”.
Participatory Grant Making: Has its Time Come?
Paper by Cynthia Gibson for the Ford Foundation: “…During the past decade, all sectors of society have faced heightened demand for greater accountability and transparency. People have become more distrustful of established institutions, they are demanding more information about issues and decisions afecting them and their families and communities, and they want more voice in decision-making processes. Technological innovation also has created new possibilities — and new pressures — for organizations and institutions to become more democratic by involving the public in their work.
Philanthropy is not immune from these trends. While for decades, philanthropy was seen as endowed foundations set up by the rich, recent years have seen a surge in crowdfunding, giving circles, donor-advised funds, and a panoply of digital giving platforms that allow anyone to be a philanthropist. Alongside these, traditions of giving from within communities that existed long before philanthropy became professionalized have become more prominent.
Philanthropy and other felds also are being reshaped by the attitudes and capacities of a new generation of young people who have grown up with the Internet and embrace its culture of transparency and bottom-up action. Additionally, there is a growing awareness that many public challenges are exceedingly complex and won’t respond to one-shot solutions from experts or institutions working on their own.
These and other trends refect a backlash against the “establishment” occurring in politics, higher education, the media, and other felds in which elite interests are perceived to have drowned out the concerns of ordinary people. Americans of all stripes and political persuasions have come to believe they have little say in guiding public decisions and improving the health and well-being of their communities..
This paper assesses the embrace of participatory approaches to date by philanthropy and other felds. In assessing philanthropy’s record, the paper fnds examples of individual foundations and networks of funders that are experimenting with participatory approaches. It also, however, fnds that there is a great deal of talk about participation in the feld but comparatively little commitment to integrating these practices into foundations’ strategies and activities, and especially their cultures, over the long term…(More)”.