media

Open & Shut

Curated on August 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Harsha Devulapalli: “Welcome to Open & Shut — a new blog dedicated to exploring the opportunities and challenges of working with open data in closed societies around the world. Although we’ll be exploring questions relevant to open data practitioners worldwide, we’re particularly interested in seeing how civil society groups and actors in the Global South are using open data to push for greater government transparency, and tackle daunting social and economic challenges facing their societies….Throughout this series we’ll be profiling and interviewing organisations working with open data worldwide, and providing do-it-yourself data tutorials that will be useful for beginners as well as data experts. …

What do we mean by the terms ‘open data’ and ‘closed societies’?

It’s important to be clear about what we’re dealing with, here. So let’s establish some key terms. When we talk about ‘open data’, we mean data that anyone can access, use and share freely. And when we say ‘closed societies’, we’re referring to states or regions in which the political and social environment is actively hostile to notions of openness and public scrutiny, and which hold principles of freedom of information in low esteem. In closed societies, data is either not published at all by the government, or else is only published in inaccessible formats, is missing data, is hard to find or else is just not digitised at all.

Iran is one such state that we would characterise as a ‘closed society’. At Small Media, we’ve had to confront the challenges of poor data practice, secrecy, and government opaqueness while undertaking work to support freedom of information and freedom of expression in the country. Based on these experiences, we’ve been working to build Iran Open Data — a civil society-led open data portal for Iran, in an effort to make Iranian government data more accessible and easier for researchers, journalists, and civil society actors to work with.

Iran Open Data — an open data portal for Iran, created by Small Media

..Open & Shut will shine a light on the exciting new ways that different groups are using data to question dominant narratives, transform public opinion, and bring about tangible change in closed societies. At the same time, it’ll demonstrate the challenges faced by open data advocates in opening up this valuable data. We intend to get the community talking about the need to build cross-border alliances in order to empower the open data movement, and to exchange knowledge and best practices despite the different needs and circumstances we all face….(More)“

Inside the Lab That’s Quantifying Happiness

Curated on August 15, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Rowan Jacobsen at Outside: “In Mississippi, people tweet about cake and cookies an awful lot; in Colorado, it’s noodles. In Mississippi, the most-tweeted activity is eating; in Colorado, it’s running, skiing, hiking, snowboarding, and biking, in that order. In other words, the two states fall on opposite ends of the behavior spectrum. If you were to assign a caloric value to every food mentioned in every tweet by the citizens of the United States and a calories-burned value to every activity, and then totaled them up, you would find that Colorado tweets the best caloric ratio in the country and Mississippi the worst.

Sure, you’d be forgiven for doubting people’s honesty on Twitter. On those rare occasions when I destroy an entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s, I most assuredly do not tweet about it. Likewise, I don’t reach for my phone every time I strap on a pair of skis.

And yet there’s this: Mississippi has the worst rate of diabetes and heart disease in the country and Colorado has the best. Mississippi has the second-highest percentage of obesity; Colorado has the lowest. Mississippi has the worst life expectancy in the country; Colorado is near the top. Perhaps we are being more honest on social media than we think. And perhaps social media has more to tell us about the state of the country than we realize.

That’s the proposition of Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, who co-direct the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, a warren of whiteboards and grad students in a handsome brick building near the shores of Lake Champlain. Dodds and Danforth are applied mathematicians, but they would make a pretty good comedy duo. When I stopped by the lab recently, both were in running clothes and cracking jokes. They have an abundance of curls between them and the wiry energy of chronic thinkers. They came to UVM in 2006 to start the Vermont Complex Systems Center, which crunches big numbers from big systems and looks for patterns. Out of that, they hatched the Computational Story Lab, which sifts through some of that public data to discern the stories we’re telling ourselves. “It took us a while to come up with the name,” Dodds told me as we shotgunned espresso and gazed into his MacBook. “We were going to be the Department of Recreational Truth.”

This year, they teamed up with their PhD student Andy Reagan to launch the Lexicocalorimeter, an online tool that uses tweets to compute the calories in and calories out for every state. It’s no mere party trick; the Story Labbers believe the Lexicocalorimeter has important advantages over slower, more traditional methods of gathering health data….(More)”.

Where’s the ‘Civic’ in CivicTech?

Curated on August 15, 2017October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Pius Enywaru: “The ideology of community participation and development is a crucial topic for any nation or community seeking to attain sustainable development. Here in Uganda, oftentimes when the opportunity for public participation either in local planning or in holding local politicians to account — the ‘don’t care’ attitude reigns….

What works?

Some of these tools include Ask Your Government Uganda, a platform built to help members of the public get the information they want about from 106 public agencies in Uganda. U-Report developed by UNICEF provides an SMS-based social monitoring tool designed to address issues affecting the youth of Uganda. Mentioned in a previous blog post, Parliament Watchbrings the proceedings of the Parliament of Uganda to the citizens. The organization leverages technology to share live updates on social media and provides in-depth analysis to create a better understanding on the business of Parliament. Other tools used include citizen scorecards, public media campaigns and public petitions. Just recently, we have had a few calls to action to get people to sign petitions, with somewhat lackluster results.

What doesn’t work?

Although the usage of these tools have dramatically grown, there is still a lack of awareness and consequently, community participation. In order to understand the interventions which the Government of Uganda believes are necessary for sustainable urban development, it is important to examine the realities pertaining to urban areas and their planning processes. There are many challenges in deploying community participation tools based on ICT such as limited funding and support for such initiatives, low literacy levels, low technical literacy, a large digital divide, low rates of seeking input from communities in developing these tools, lack of adequate government involvement and resistance/distrust of change by both government and citizens. Furthermore, in many of these initiatives, a large marketing or sensitization push is needed to let citizens know that these services exist for their benefit.

There are great minds who have brilliant ideas to try and bring literally everyone on board though civic engagement. When you have a look at their ideas, you will agree that indeed they might make a reputable service and bring about remarkable change in different communities. However, the biggest question has always been, “How do these ideas get executed and adopted by these communities that they target”? These ideas suffer a major setback of lack of inclusivity to enhance community participation. This still remains a puzzle for most folks that have these ideas….(More)”.

Community Digital Storytelling for Collective Intelligence: towards a Storytelling Cycle of Trust

Curated on August 11, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Copeland and Aldo de Moor in AI & SOCIETY: “Digital storytelling has become a popular method for curating community, organisational, and individual narratives. Since its beginnings over 20 years ago, projects have sprung up across the globe, where authentic voice is found in the narration of lived experiences. Contributing to a Collective Intelligence for the Common Good, the authors of this paper ask how shared stories can bring impetus to community groups to help identify what they seek to change, and how digital storytelling can be effectively implemented in community partnership projects to enable authentic voices to be carried to other stakeholders in society. The Community Digital Storytelling (CDST) method is introduced as a means for addressing community-of-place issues. There are five stages to this method: preparation, story telling, story digitisation, digital story sense-making, and digital story sharing. Additionally, a Storytelling Cycle of Trust framework is proposed. We identify four trust dimensions as being imperative foundations in implementing community digital media interventions for the common good: legitimacy, authenticity, synergy, and commons. This framework is concerned with increasing the impact that everyday stories can have on society; it is an engine driving prolonged storytelling. From this perspective, we consider the ability to scale up the scope and benefit of stories in civic contexts. To illustrate this framework, we use experiences from the CDST workshop in northern Britain and compare this with a social innovation project in the southern Netherlands….(More)”.

The Nudging Divide in the Digital Big Data Era

Curated on August 7, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Julia M. Puaschunder in the International Robotics & Automation Journal: “Since the end of the 1970ies a wide range of psychological, economic and sociological laboratory and field experiments proved human beings deviating from rational choices and standard neo-classical profit maximization axioms to fail to explain how human actually behave. Behavioral economists proposed to nudge and wink citizens to make better choices for them with many different applications. While the motivation behind nudging appears as a noble endeavor to foster peoples’ lives around the world in very many different applications, the nudging approach raises questions of social hierarchy and class division. The motivating force of the nudgital society may open a gate of exploitation of the populace and – based on privacy infringements – stripping them involuntarily from their own decision power in the shadow of legally-permitted libertarian paternalism and under the cloak of the noble goal of welfare-improving global governance. Nudging enables nudgers to plunder the simple uneducated citizen, who is neither aware of the nudging strategies nor able to oversee the tactics used by the nudgers.

The nudgers are thereby legally protected by democratically assigned positions they hold or by outsourcing strategies used, in which social media plays a crucial rule. Social media forces are captured as unfolding a class dividing nudgital society, in which the provider of social communication tools can reap surplus value from the information shared of social media users. The social media provider thereby becomes a capitalist-industrialist, who benefits from the information shared by social media users, or so-called consumer-workers, who share private information in their wish to interact with friends and communicate to public. The social media capitalist-industrialist reaps surplus value from the social media consumer-workers’ information sharing, which stems from nudging social media users. For one, social media space can be sold to marketers who can constantly penetrate the consumer-worker in a subliminal way with advertisements. But also nudging occurs as the big data compiled about the social media consumer-worker can be resold to marketers and technocrats to draw inferences about consumer choices, contemporary market trends or individual personality cues used for governance control, such as, for instance, border protection and tax compliance purposes.

The law of motion of the nudging societies holds an unequal concentration of power of those who have access to compiled data and who abuse their position under the cloak of hidden persuasion and in the shadow of paternalism. In the nudgital society, information, education and differing social classes determine who the nudgers and who the nudged are. Humans end in different silos or bubbles that differ in who has power and control and who is deceived and being ruled. The owners of the means of governance are able to reap a surplus value in a hidden persuasion, protected by the legal vacuum to curb libertarian paternalism, in the moral shadow of the unnoticeable guidance and under the cloak of the presumption that some know what is more rational than others. All these features lead to an unprecedented contemporary class struggle between the nudgers (those who nudge) and the nudged (those who are nudged), who are divided by the implicit means of governance in the digital scenery. In this light, governing our common welfare through deceptive means and outsourced governance on social media appears critical. In combination with the underlying assumption of the nudgers knowing better what is right, just and fair within society, the digital age and social media tools hold potential unprecedented ethical challenges….(More)”

Charities are underestimating the importance of trust. That’s a problem.

Curated on July 26, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jill Halford & Neil Sherlock at NPC: “A growing mistrust and scepticism of organisations, experts and leaders has become a defining feature of recent times, causing many to question established truths that they’ve traditionally held dear. Against a backdrop of increasing volumes of data and commentary, amplified by social media, and the rise of ‘fake news’, it has become much harder for the public to both know who the experts are and to trust them to get things right. This directly impacts many charities who are themselves experts in their field and rely on the public to listen to and respond to their advice. In an increasingly digitalised world, there’s a sense that it is harder to gain and retain trust. There are growing concerns among CEOs about the impact of social media on the level of trust in their industry.

A growing mistrust and scepticism of organisations, experts and leaders has become a defining feature of recent times.

The questioning of experts is underpinned by a pervading sense that many actors are driven by hidden or ulterior motives, perhaps making some people less willing to trust organisations and their leaders. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2017 finds that 60% of the UK public think ‘the system’ is failing. This is defined as feeling a sense of injustice, a lack of hope and confidence and a desire for change. There is an emerging view that everyone from politicians, to businesses to charities need to do more to explain what they do and how it benefits both individuals and wider society….Public polling for the Charity Commission showed that the overall level of trust and confidence in charities fell from 6.7 out of 10 in 2012 and 2014 to 5.7 in 2016. This is a trend that is also reflected in the Edelman Trust Barometer 2017. Meanwhile other studies suggest that trust is bouncing back.

…Trust is often an overlooked asset for charities. For many organisations, trust can typically only come on the agenda when things are going wrong. NPC’s State of the Sector research report Charities taking charge shows that nearly a third of charity leaders think a loss of trust in the sector would have no effect on their organisation. The research also finds a narrow association between trust and fundraising rather than taking a more holistic view to trust.

Trust is a fundamental prerequisite of effective human interaction and meaningful, constructive relationships.

But trust matters deeply to people, and so it should matter to the organisations that serve them. Trust is considered a fundamental prerequisite of effective human interaction and meaningful, constructive relationships. It is the ‘glue’ that binds society and the economy together. There is a clear need for all organisations to take a broader view of trust. While those charities that rely on fundraising may feel that they need to be more concerned with public trust than a philanthropic foundation, for example, trust impacts a charity in many ways. For example, people’s trust in an organisation can fundamentally shape their behaviour and actions towards it. This can include trusting an organisation with your data and personal information, being more willing to collaborate and engage, and listening and acting on advice and expertise.

Trust is a powerful asset for organisations in four specific ways:

trust drives performance;
trust allows organisations to be true to themselves;
trust can help win round stakeholder scepticism; and
trust can put organisations on the front foot in a crisis that will inevitably happen at some point, positioning them in a better place to recover.

All four of these should resonate with charities as they seek to deliver greater impact in line with their values and ethos….(More).

China seeks glimpse of citizens’ future with crime-predicting AI

Curated on July 24, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Yuan Yang, Yingzhi Yang and Sherry Fei Ju in the Financial Times: “China, a surveillance state where authorities have unchecked access to citizens’ histories, is seeking to look into their future with technology designed to predict and prevent crime. Companies are helping police develop artificial intelligence they say will help them identify and apprehend suspects before criminal acts are committed. “If we use our smart systems and smart facilities well, we can know beforehand . . . who might be a terrorist, who might do something bad,” Li Meng, vice-minister of science and technology, said on Friday.

Facial recognition company Cloud Walk has been trialling a system that uses data on individuals’ movements and behaviour — for instance visits to shops where weapons are sold — to assess their chances of committing a crime. Its software warns police when a citizen’s crime risk becomes dangerously high, allowing the police to intervene. “The police are using a big-data rating system to rate highly suspicious groups of people based on where they go and what they do,” a company spokesperson told the Financial Times. Risks rise if the individual “frequently visits transport hubs and goes to suspicious places like a knife store”, the spokesperson added. China’s authoritarian government has always amassed personal data to monitor and control its citizens — whether they are criminals or suspected of politically sensitive activity. But new technology, from phones and computers to fast-developing AI software, is amplifying its capabilities. These are being used to crack down on even the most minor of infractions — facial recognition cameras, for instance, are also being used to identify and shame jaywalkers, according to state media. Mr Li said crime prediction would become an important use for AI technology in the government sphere.

China’s crime-prediction technology relies on several AI techniques, including facial recognition and gait analysis, to identify people from surveillance footage. In addition, “crowd analysis” can be used to detect “suspicious” patterns of behaviour in crowds, for example to single out thieves from normal passengers at a train stations. As well as tracking people with a criminal history, Cloud Walk’s technology is being used to monitor “high-risk” places such as hardware stores…(More)”

Crowdsourcing Expertise to Increase Congressional Capacity

Curated on July 23, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Austin Seaborn at Beeck Center: “Members of Congress have close connections with their districts, and information arising from local organizations, such as professional groups, academia, industry as well as constituents with relevant expertise (like retirees, veterans or students) is highly valuable to them. Today, congressional staff capacity is at a historic low, while at the same time, constituents in districts are often well equipped to address the underlying policy questions that Congress seeks to solve….

In meetings we have had with House and Senate staffers, they repeatedly express both the difficulty managing their substantial area-specific work loads and their interest in finding ways to substantively engage constituents to find good nuggets of information to help them in their roles as policymakers. At the same time, constituents are demanding more transparency and dialogue from their elected representatives. In many cases, our project brings these two together. It allows Members to tap the expertise in their districts while at the same time creating an avenue for constituents to contribute their knowledge and area expertise to the legislative process. It’s a win for constituents and a win for Member of Congress and their staffs.

It is important to note that the United States lags behind other democracies in experimenting with more inclusive methods during the policymaking process. In the United Kingdom, for example, the UK Parliament has experimented with a variety of new digital tools to engage with constituents. These methods range from Twitter hashtags, which are now quite common given the rise in social media use by governments and elected officials, to a variety of web forums on a variety of platforms. Since June of 2015, they have also been doing digital debates, where questions from the general public are crowdsourced and later integrated into a parliamentary debate by the Member of Parliament leading the debate. Estonia, South Africa, Taiwan, France also…notable examples.

One promising new development we hope to explore more thoroughly is the U.S. Library of Congress’s recently announced legislative data App Challenge. This competition is distinct from the many hackathons that have been held on behalf of Congress in the past, in that this challenge seeks new methods not only to innovate, but also to integrate and legislate. In his announcement, the Library’s Chief Information Officer, Bernard A. Barton, Jr., stated, “An informed citizenry is better able to participate in our democracy, and this is a very real opportunity to contribute to a better understanding of the work being done in Washington. It may even provide insights for the people doing the work around the clock, both on the Hill, and in state and district offices. Your innovation and integration may ultimately benefit the way our elected officials legislate for our future.” We believe these sorts of new methods will play a crucial role in the future of engaging citizens in their democracies….(More)”.