media

Living in the World of Both/And

Curated on September 21, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Adene Sacks & Heather McLeod Grant in SSIR: “In 2011, New York Times data scientist Jake Porway wrote a blog post lamenting the fact that most data scientists spend their days creating apps to help users find restaurants, TV shows, or parking spots, rather than addressing complicated social issues like helping identify which teens are at risk of suicide or creating a poverty index of Africa using satellite data.

That post hit a nerve. Data scientists around the world began clamoring for opportunities to “do good with data.” Porway—at the center of this storm—began to convene these scientists and connect them to nonprofits via hackathon-style events called DataDives, designed to solve big social and environmental problems. There was so much interest, he eventually quit his day job at the Times and created the organization DataKind to steward this growing global network of data science do-gooders.

At the same time, in the same city, another movement was taking shape—#GivingTuesday, an annual global giving event fueled by social media. In just five years, #GivingTuesday has reshaped how nonprofits think about fundraising and how donors give. And yet, many don’t know that 92nd Street Y (92Y)—a 140-year-old Jewish community and cultural center in Manhattan, better known for its star-studded speaker series, summer camps, and water aerobics classes—launched it.

What do these two examples have in common? One started as a loose global network that engaged data scientists in solving problems, and then became an organization to help support the larger movement. The other started with a legacy organization, based at a single site, and catalyzed a global movement that has reshaped how we think about philanthropy. In both cases, the founding groups have incorporated the best of both organizations and networks.

Much has been written about the virtues of thinking and acting collectively to solve seemingly intractable challenges. Nonprofit leaders are being implored to put mission above brand, build networks not just programs, and prioritize collaboration over individual interests. And yet, these strategies are often in direct contradiction to the conventional wisdom of organization-building: differentiating your brand, developing unique expertise, and growing a loyal donor base.

A similar tension is emerging among network and movement leaders. These leaders spend their days steering the messy process required to connect, align, and channel the collective efforts of diverse stakeholders. It’s not always easy: Those searching to sustain movements often cite the lost momentum of the Occupy movement as a cautionary note. Increasingly, network leaders are looking at how to adapt the process, structure, and operational expertise more traditionally associated with organizations to their needs—but without co-opting or diminishing the energy and momentum of their self-organizing networks…

Welcome to the World of “Both/And”

Today’s social change leaders—be they from business, government, or nonprofits—must learn to straddle the leadership mindsets and practices of both networks and organizations, and know when to use which approach. Leaders like Porway, and Henry Timms and Asha Curran of 92Y can help show us the way.

How do these leaders work with the “both/and” mindset?

First, they understand and leverage the strengths of both organizations and networks—and anticipate their limitations. As Timms describes it, leaders need to be “bilingual” and embrace what he has called “new power.” Networks can be powerful generators of new talent or innovation around complex multi-sector challenges. It’s useful to take a network approach when innovating new ideas, mobilizing and engaging others in the work, or wanting to expand reach and scale quickly. However, networks can dissipate easily without specific “handrails,” or some structure to guide and support their work. This is where they need some help from the organizational mindset and approach.

On the flip side, organizations are good at creating centralized structures to deliver products or services, manage risk, oversee quality control, and coordinate concrete functions like communications or fundraising. However, often that efficiency and effectiveness can calcify over time, becoming a barrier to new ideas and growth opportunities. When organizational boundaries are too rigid, it is difficult to engage the outside world in ideating or mobilizing on an issue. This is when organizations need an infusion of the “network mindset.”

…(More)

Being a Scholar in the Digital Era

Curated on September 21, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

CONTENTS:

Introduction: Transformations;
Being a Scholar (Activist) Then and Now;
Opening Education, Linking It to Community;
Acting Up, Opening Knowledge;
Training Scholars for the Digital Era;
Measuring Scholarly Impact;
The Future of Being a Scholar….(More)”

Beware of the gaps in Big Data

Curated on September 21, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Edd Gent at E&T: “When the municipal authority in charge of Boston, Massachusetts, was looking for a smarter way to find which roads it needed to repair, it hit on the idea of crowdsourcing the data. The authority released a mobile app called Street Bump in 2011 that employed an elegantly simple idea: use a smartphone’s accelerometer to detect jolts as cars go over potholes and look up the location using the Global Positioning System. But the approach ran into a pothole of its own.The system reported a disproportionate number of potholes in wealthier neighbourhoods. It turned out it was oversampling the younger, more affluent citizens who were digitally clued up enough to download and use the app in the first place. The city reacted quickly, but the incident shows how easy it is to develop a system that can handle large quantities of data but which, through its own design, is still unlikely to have enough data to work as planned.

As we entrust more of our lives to big data analytics, automation problems like this could become increasingly common, with their errors difficult to spot after the fact. Systems that ‘feel like they work’ are where the trouble starts.

Harvard University professor Gary King, who is also founder of social media analytics company Crimson Hexagon, recalls a project that used social media to predict unemployment. The model was built by correlating US unemployment figures with the frequency that people used words like ‘jobs’, ‘unemployment’ and ‘classifieds’. A sudden spike convinced researchers they had predicted a big rise in joblessness, but it turned out Steve Jobs had died and their model was simply picking up posts with his name. “This was an example of really bad analytics and it’s even worse because it’s the kind of thing that feels like it should work and does work a little bit,” says King.

Big data can shed light on areas with historic information deficits, and systems that seem to automatically highlight the best course of action can be seductive for executives and officials. “In the vacuum of no decision any decision is attractive,” says Jim Adler, head of data at Toyota Research Institute in Palo Alto. “Policymakers will say, ‘there’s a decision here let’s take it’, without really looking at what led to it. Was the data trustworthy, clean?”…(More)”

Bouchra Khalili: The Mapping Journey Project

Curated on September 18, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

MOMA (NYC): “This exhibition presents, in its entirety, Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), a series of videos that details the stories of eight individuals who have been forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally and whose covert journeys have taken them throughout the Mediterranean basin. Khalili (Moroccan-French, born 1975) encountered her subjects by chance in transit hubs across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Following an initial meeting, the artist invited each person to narrate his or her journey and trace it in thick permanent marker on a geopolitical map of the region. The videos feature the subjects’ voices and their hands sketching their trajectories across the map, while their faces remain unseen.

The stories are presented on individual screens positioned throughout MoMA’s Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium. In this way, a complex network of migration is narrated by those who have experienced it, refusing the forms of representation and visibility demanded by systems of surveillance, international border control, and the news media. Shown together, the videos function as an alternative geopolitical map defined by the precarious lives of stateless people. Khalili’s work takes on the challenge of developing critical and ethical approaches to questions of citizenship, community, and political agency….(More)”

Civic political engagement and social change in the new digital age

Curated on September 18, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Koc-Michalska, K. and Vedel, T. in new media & society: “Over recent decades, research on the Internet and political participation has substantially developed, from speculative studies on possible impacts in social and economic life to detailed analyses of organizational usage. In the field of politics, focus is increasingly shifting from understanding organizational, or supply side, to the usage and dimension of citizen engagement. Citizens have various ways to engage in civic political life, with many new forms of engagement facilitated by digital technologies. The question is to what extent these forms of engagement have any impact on society and the way society is governed. More particularly, what forms of engagement have impact, what type of impact is evidenced, is that impact positive or negative, in what ways, and for whom? Phrasing the question in this way recognizes that citizen engagement can have a range of differing impacts, in multifaceted forms, and these impacts may not always be positive for broader society.

Civic political engagement is at the center of political science research, especially concentrating on voting behavior and what are described as traditional forms of political participation: demonstrating, contacting elected representatives, or joining political organizations. While these remain core to democratic society, debates are emerging surrounding new forms of participation offered by new digital wave era technologies. In particular, should we recognize actions facilitated by the participatory opportunities offered by new communication platforms (such as social networks and microblogs) as forms of political participation? The US election campaigns of 2008 and 2012, and Barack Obama’s engagement with interactive communication and empowerment of citizens through his campaigning strategy, has led to new thinking around how political communication can be performed. Obama’s campaign happened against a backdrop of activism among those Karpf (2012) describes as “Internet-mediated issue generalists”: citizens who populate forums, contribute to blogs, and initiate petitions. Data suggest that the mechanisms for facilitating political participation are evolving alongside technological innovations….(More)”

Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies

Curated on September 14, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Roberto Simanowski: “Intelligence services, government administrations, businesses, and a growing majority of the population are hooked on the idea that big data can reveal patterns and correlations in everyday life. Initiated by software engineers and carried out through algorithms, the mining of big data has sparked a silent revolution. But algorithmic analysis and data mining are not simply byproducts of media development or the logical consequences of computation. They are the radicalization of the Enlightenment’s quest for knowledge and progress. Data Love argues that the “cold civil war” of big data is taking place not among citizens or between the citizen and government but within each of us.

Roberto Simanowski elaborates on the changes data love has brought to the human condition while exploring the entanglements of those who―out of stinginess, convenience, ignorance, narcissism, or passion―contribute to the amassing of ever more data about their lives, leading to the statistical evaluation and individual profiling of their selves. Writing from a philosophical standpoint, Simanowski illustrates the social implications of technological development and retrieves the concepts, events, and cultural artifacts of past centuries to help decode the programming of our present….(More)”

Data for Policy: Data Science and Big Data in the Public Sector

Curated on September 8, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Innar Liiv at OXPOL: “How can big data and data science help policy-making? This question has recently gained increasing attention. Both the European Commission and the White House have endorsed the use of data for evidence-based policy making.

Still, a gap remains between theory and practice. In this blog post, I make a number of recommendations for systematic development paths.

RESEARCH TRENDS SHAPING DATA FOR POLICY

‘Data for policy’ as an academic field is still in its infancy. A typology of the field’s foci and research areas are summarised in the figure below.

Besides the ‘data for policy’ community, there are two important research trends shaping the field: 1) computational social science; and 2) the emergence of politicised social bots.

Computational social science (CSS) is an new interdisciplinary research trend in social science, which tries to transform advances in big data and data science into research methodologies for understanding, explaining and predicting underlying social phenomena.

Social science has a long tradition of using computational and agent-based modelling approaches (e.g.Schelling’s Model of Segregation), but the new challenge is to feed real-life, and sometimes even real-time information into those systems to get gain rapid insights into the validity of research hypotheses.

For example, one could use mobile phone call records to assess the acculturation processes of different communities. Such a project would involve translating different acculturation theories into computational models, researching the ethical and legal issues inherent in using mobile phone data and developing a vision for generating policy recommendations and new research hypothesis from the analysis.

Politicised social bots are also beginning to make their mark. In 2011, DARPA solicited research proposals dealing with social media in strategic communication. The term ‘political bot’ was not used, but the expected results left no doubt about the goals…

The next wave of e-government innovation will be about analytics and predictive models. Taking advantage of their potential for social impact will require a solid foundation of e-government infrastructure.

The most important questions going forward are as follows:

What are the relevant new data sources?
How can we use them?
What should we do with the information? Who cares? Which political decisions need faster information from novel sources? Do we need faster information? Does it come with unanticipated risks?

These questions barely scratch the surface, because the complex interplay between general advancements of computational social science and hovering satellite topics like political bots will have an enormous impact on research and using data for policy. But, it’s an important start….(More)”

Crowdsourced map of safe drinking water

Curated on September 7, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Just over two years ago, in April 2014, city officials in Flint, Michigan decided to save costs by switching the city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Because of the switch, residents of the town and their children were exposed to dangerous levels of lead. Much of the population suffered from the side effects of lead poisoning, including skin lesions, hair loss, depression and anxiety and in severe cases, permanent brain damage. Media attention, although focussed at first, inevitably died down. To avoid future similar disasters, Sean Montgomery, a neuroscientist and the CEO of technology company, Connected Future Labs, set up CitizenSpring.

CitizenSpring is an app which enables individuals to test their water supply using readily available water testing kits. Users hold a test strip underneath running water, hold the strip to a smartphone camera and press the button. The app then reveals the results of the test, also cataloguing the test results and storing them in the cloud in the form of a digital map. Using what Montgomery describes as “computer vision,” the app is able to detect lead levels in a given water source and confirm whether they exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s “safe” threshold. The idea is that communities can inform themselves about their own and nearby water supplies in order that they can act as guardians of their own health. “It’s an impoverished data problem,” says Montgomery. “We don’t have enough data. By sharing the results of test[s], people can, say, find out if they’re testing a faucet that hasn’t been tested before.”

CitizenSpring narrowly missed its funding target on Kickstarter. However, collective monitoring can work. We have already seen the power of communities harnessed to crowdsource pollution data in the EU and map conflict zones through user-submitted camera footage….(More)”

Civil Solutions

Curated on September 6, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Brian R. Calfano on “addressing social and political ills through the solutions journalism approach” in The Blue Review: “…To effectively work in the public interest as a member of the media covering politics in a national election year, I argue that stories evaluating and proposing solutions to our major societal problems must be an integral part of the media menu served to the public. Solutions are certainly not the only thing we need to cover in the media, but greater focus on problem solving is needed than what is provided at present.

A “solutions journalism” approach to covering political stories holds promise because it focuses attention on the evaluation of effectiveness in dealing with some of the most pressing problems we face as a society. Along the way, the solutions-based focus may even tamp down the incivility that plagues our politics.The author is a member of the Solutions Journalism Network.

So, how do we get started with a solutions journalism approach?

The Solutions Journalism Network has already done much of the legwork in setting up the scaffolding for journalists looking to sink their teeth into the consideration of “what works” in solving a social problem.

In their Solutions Journalism Toolkit (2015, pdf), the Solutions Journalism Network suggests focusing on the following questions when determining a topic to cover (pgs. 6-7):

Does the story explain the causes of social problem?
Does the story present an associated response to that problem?
Does the story get into the problem solving and how to details of implementation?
Does the story present evidence of results linked to the response?
Does the story explain limitations of the response?
Does the story convey an insight or teachable lesson?

…Most interesting about this approach is that it calls on my experience as a social science researcher. I’m tempted to go into full researcher mode and critique the all-too-frequent use of basic cross-tabulations and observational survey data as means for showing cause and effect. Generally speaking, audiences may not care about research methods, but my job is to make the story compelling enough — including the bits about methodology — to make them interested.

Importantly, I’m not alone in this effort. Sources like the website evidencebasedprograms.org feature a litany of randomized controlled trials that allow determination of direct impact from a policy intervention on issues like the “cliff effect.”

My work is made more difficult if the organizations I interview for the solutions journalism stories on the “cliff effect” are not using the randomized trial approach. At the least, I’ll have to point out to the viewer that the solutions an organization proposes are not being evaluated with the strongest possible assessment tools. This is not so much a problem, however, as an opportunity, as the organization might benefit from the critique of its own evaluation practices to find what works “better than average.”…(More)”.