Addressing Inequality and the ‘Data Divide’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Castro at the US Chamber of Commerce Foundation: “In the coming years, communities across the nation will increasingly rely on data to improve quality of life for their residents, such as by improving educational outcomes, reducing healthcare costs, and increasing access to financial services. However, these opportunities require that individuals have access to high-quality data about themselves and their communities. Should certain individuals or communities not routinely have data about them collected, distributed, or used, they may suffer social and economic consequences. Just as the digital divide has held back many communities from reaping the benefits of the modern digital era, a looming “data divide” threatens to stall the benefits of data-driven innovation for a wide swathe of America. Given this risk, policymakers should make a concerted effort to combat data poverty.

Data already plays a crucial role in guiding decision making, and it will only become more important over time. In the private sector, businesses use data for everything from predicting inventory demand to responding to customer feedback to determining where to open new stores. For example, an emerging group of financial service providers use non-traditional data sources, such as an individual’s social network, to assess credit risk and make lending decisions. And health insurers and pharmacies are offering discounts to customers who use fitness trackers to monitor and share data about their health. In the public sector, data is at the heart of important efforts like improving patient safety, cutting government waste, and helping children succeed in school. For example, public health officials in states like Indiana and Maryland have turned to data science in an effort to reduce infant mortality rates.

Many of these exciting advancements are made possible by a new generation of technologies that make it easier to collect, share, and disseminate data. In particular, the Internet of Everything is creating a plethora of always-on devices that record and transmit a wealth of information about our world and the people and objects in it. Individuals are using social media to create a rich tapestry of interactions tied to particular times and places. In addition, government investments in critical data systems, such as statewide databases to track healthcare spending and student performance over time, are integral to efforts to harness data for social good….(More)”

Can Yelp Help Government Win Back the Public’s Trust?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tod Newcombe at Governing: “Look out, DMV, IRS and TSA. Yelp, the popular review website that’s best known for its rants or cheers regarding restaurants and retailers, is about to make it easier to review and rank government services.

Last month, Yelp and the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages the basic functions of the federal government, announced that government workers will soon be able to read and respond to their agencies’ Yelp reviews — and, hopefully, incorporate the feedback into service improvements.

At first glance, the news might not seem so special. There already are Yelp pages for government agencies like Departments of Motor Vehicles, which have been particularly popular. San Francisco’s DMV office, for example, has received more than 450 reviews and has a three-star rating. But federal agencies and workers haven’t been allowed to respond to the reviewers nor could they collect data from the pages because Yelp hadn’t been approved by the GSA. The agreement changes that situation, also making it possible for agencies to set up new Yelp pages….

Yelp has been posting online reviews about restaurants, bars, nail salons and other retailers since 2004. Despite its reputation as a place to vent about bad service, more than two-thirds of the 82 million reviews posted since Yelp started have been positive with most rated at either four or five stars, according to the company’s website. And when businesses boost their Yelp rating by one star, revenues have increased by as much as 9 percent, according to a 2011 study by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Luca.

Now the public sector is about to start paying more attention to those rankings. More importantly, they will find out if engaging the public in a timely fashion changes their perception of government.

While all levels of government have become active with social media, direct interaction between an agency and citizens is still the exception rather than the rule. Agencies typically use Facebook and Twitter to inform followers about services or to provide information updates, not as a feedback mechanism. That’s why having a more direct connection between the comments on a Yelp page and a government agency represents a shift in engagement….(More)”

The tools of social change: A critique of techno-centric development and activism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jan Servaes and Rolien Hoyng in New Media and Society: “Generally, the literatures on Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) and on networked resistance are evolving isolated from one another. This article aims to integrate these literatures in order to critically review differences and similarities in the techno-centric conceptions of agency and social change by political adversaries that are rooted in their socio-technical practices. We repurpose the critique of technological determinism to develop a multi-layered conception of agency that contains three interrelated dimensions: (1) “access” versus “skill” and the normative concept of inclusion; (2) fixed “system” versus “open-ended network” and savoir vivre; and (3) “institution” versus “extra-institutional network” and political efficacy. Building on our critique, we end by exploring the political possibilities at the intersections of conventional institutions or communities and emerging, extra-institutional networked formations…(More)”

Civic Jazz in the New Maker Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Techonomy: “Our civic innovation movement is about 6 years old.  It began when cities started opening up data to citizens, journalists, public-sector companies, non-profits, and government agencies.  Open data is an invitation: it’s something to go to work on— both to innovate and to create a more transparent environment about what works and what doesn’t.  I remember when we first opened data in SF and began holding conferences and hackathons. In short order we saw a community emerge with remarkable capacity to contribute to, tinker with, hack, explore and improve the city.

Early on this took the form of visualizing data, like crime patterns in Oakland. This was followed by engagement: “Look, the police are skating by and not enforcing prostitution laws. Lets call them on it!”   Civic hackathons brought together journalists, software developers, hardware people, and urbanists. I recall when artists teamed with the Arup engineering firm to build noise sensors and deployed them in the Tenderloin neighborhood (with absolutely no permission from anybody). Noise was an issue. How could you understand the problem unless you measured it?

Something as wonky as an API invited people in, at which point a sense of civic possibility and wonder set in. Suddenly whole swaths of the city were working on the city.  During the SF elections four years ago Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (which I chair) led a project with candidates, bureaucrats, and hundreds of volunteers for a summer-long set of hackathons and projects. We were stunned so many people would come together and collaborate so broadly. It was a movement, fueled by a sense of agency and informed by social media. Today cities are competing on innovation. It has become a movement.

All this has been accelerated by startups, incubators, and the economy’s whole open innovation conversation.  Remarkably, we now see capital from flowing in to support urban and social ventures where we saw none just a few years ago. The accelerator Tumml in SF is a premier example, but there are similar efforts in many cities.

This initial civic innovation movement was focused on apps and data, a relatively easy place to start. With such an approach you’re not contending for real estate or creating something that might gentrify neighborhoods. Today this movement is at work on how we design the city itself.  As millennials pour in and cities are where most of us live, enormous experimentation is at play. Ours is a highly interdisciplinary age, mixing new forms of software code and various physical materials, using all sorts of new manufacturing techniques.

Brooklyn is a great example.  A few weeks ago I met with Bob Bland, CEO of Manufacture New York. This ambitious 160,000 square foot public/private partnership is reimagining the New York fashion business. In one place it co-locates contract manufacturers, emerging fashion brands and advanced fashion research. Think wearables, sensors, smart fabrics, and the application of advanced manufacturing to fashion. By bringing all these elements under one roof, the supply chain can be compressed, sped-up, and products made more innovative.

New York City’s Economic Development office envisions a local urban supply chain that can offer a scalable alternative to the giant extended global one. In fashion it makes more and more sense for brands to be located near their suppliers. Social media speeds up fashion cycles, so we’re moving beyond predictable seasons and looks specified ahead of time. Manufacturers want to place smaller orders more frequently, so they can take less inventory risk and keep current with trends.

When you put so much talent in one space, creativity flourishes. In fashion, unlike tech, there isn’t a lot of IP protection. So designers can riff off each other’s idea and incorporate influences as artists do. What might be called stealing ideas in the software business is seen in fashion as jazz and a way to create a more interesting work environment.

A few blocks away is the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a mammoth facility at the center of New York’s emerging maker economy. …In San Francisco this urban innovation movement is working on the form of the city itself. Our main boulevard, Market Street, is to be reimagined, repaved, and made greener with far fewer private vehicles over the next two years. Our planning department, in concert with art organizations here, has made citizen-led urban prototyping the centerpiece of the planning process….(More)”

Public service coding: the BBC as an open software developer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Juan Mateos-Garcia at NESTA: “On Monday, the BBC published British, Bold, Creative, a paper where it put forward a vision for its future based on openness and collaboration with its audiences and the UK’s wider creative industries.

In this blog post, we focus on an area where the BBC is already using an open and collaborative model for innovation: software development.

The value of software

Although less visible to the public than its TV, radio and online content programming, the BBC’s software development activities may create value and drive innovation beyond the BBC, providing an example of how the corporation can put its “technology and digital capabilities at the service of the wider industry.”

Software is an important form of innovation investment that helps the BBC deliver new products and services, and become more efficient. One might expect that much of the software developed by the BBC would also be of value to other media and digital organisations. Such beneficial “spillovers” are encouraged by the BBC’s use of open source licensing, which enables other organisations to download its software for free, change it as they see fit, and share the results.

Current debates about the future of the BBC – including the questions about its role in influencing the future technology landscape in the Government’s Charter Review Consultation – need to be informed by robust evidence about how it develops software, and the impact that this has.

In this blog post, we use data from the world’s biggest collaborative software development platform, GitHub, to study the BBC as an open software developer.

GitHub gives organisations and individuals hosting space to store their projects (referred to as “repos”), and tools to coordinate development. This includes the option to “fork” (copy) other users’ software, change it and redistribute the improvements. Our key questions are:

  • How active is the BBC on GitHub?
  • How has its presence on GitHub changed over time?
  • What is the level of adoption (forking) of BBC projects on GitHub?
  • What types of open source projects is the BBC developing?
  • Where in the UK and in the rest of the world are the people interested in BBC projects based?

But before tackling these questions, it is important to address a question often raised in relation to open source software:

Why might an organisation like the BBC want to share its valuable code on a platform like GitHub?

There are several possible reasons:

  • Quality: Opening up a software project attracts help from other developers, making it better
  • Adoption: Releasing software openly can help turn it into a widely adopted standard
  • Signalling: It signals the organisation as an interesting place to work and partner with
  • Public value: Some organisations release their code openly with the explicit goal of creating public value

The webpage introducing TAL (Television Application Layer), a BBC project on GitHub, is a case in point: “Sharing TAL should make building applications on TV easier for others, helping to drive the uptake of this nascent technology. The BBC has a history of doing this and we are always looking at new ways to reach our audience.”…(More)“

The impact of Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GovLab/Omidyar Network: “…share insights gained from our current collaboration with Omidyar Network on a series of open data case studies. These case studies – 19, in total – are designed to provide a detailed examination of the various ways open data is being used around the world, across geographies and sectors, and to draw some over-arching lessons. The case studies are built from extensive research, including in-depth interviews with key participants in the various open data projects under study….

Ways in which open data impacts lives

Broadly, we have identified four main ways in which open data is transforming economic, social, cultural and political life, and hence improving people’s lives.

  • First, open data is improving government, primarily by helping tackle corruption, improving transparency, and enhancing public services and resource allocation.
  • Open data is also empowering citizens to take control of their lives and demand change; this dimension of impact is mediated by more informed decision making and new forms of social mobilization, both facilitated by new ways of communicating and accessing information.
  • Open data is also creating new opportunities for citizens and groups, by stimulating innovation and promoting economic growth and development.
  • Finally, open data is playing an increasingly important role insolving big public problems, primarily by allowing citizens and policymakers to engage in new forms of data-driven assessment and data-driven engagement.

 

Enabling Conditions

While these are the four main ways in which open data is driving change, we have seen wide variability in the amount and nature of impact across our case studies. Put simply, some projects are more successful than others; or some projects might be more successful in a particular dimension of impact, and less successful in others.

As part of our research, we have therefore tried to identify some enabling conditions that maximize the positive impact of open data projects. These four stand out:

  • Open data projects are most successful when they are built not from the efforts of single organizations or government agencies, but when they emerge from partnerships across sectors (and even borders). The role of intermediaries (e.g., the media and civil society groups) and “data collaboratives” are particularly important.
  • Several of the projects we have seen have emerged on the back of what we might think of as an open data public infrastructure– i.e., the technical backend and organizational processes necessary to enable the regular release of potentially impactful data to the public.
  • Clear open data policies, including well-defined performance metrics, are also essential; policymakers and political leaders have an important role in creating an enabling (yet flexible) legal environment that includes mechanisms for project assessments and accountability, as well as providing the type high-level political buy-in that can empower practitioners to work with open data.
  • We have also seen that the most successful open data projects tend to be those that target a well-defined problem or issue. In other words, projects with maximum impact often meet a genuine citizen need.

 

Challenges

Impact is also determined by the obstacles and challenges that a project confronts. Some regions and some projects face a greater number of hurdles. These also vary, but we have found four challenges that appear most often in our case studies:

  • Projects in countries or regions with low capacity or “readiness”(indicated, for instance by low Internet penetration rates or hostile political environments) typically fare less well.
  • Projects that are unresponsive to feedback and user needs are less likely to succeed than those that are flexible and able to adapt to what their users want.
  • Open data often exists in tension with risks such as privacy and security; often, the impact of a project is limited or harmed when it fails to take into account and mitigate these risks.
  • Although open data projects are often “hackable” and cheap to get off the ground, the most successful do require investments – of time and money – after their launch; inadequate resource allocation is one of the most common reasons for a project to fail.

These lists of impacts, enabling factors and challenges are, of course, preliminary. We continue to refine our research and will include a final set of findings along with our final report….(More)

Open Budget Data: Mapping the Landscape

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jonathan Gray at Open Knowledge: “We’re pleased to announce a new report, “Open Budget Data: Mapping the Landscape” undertaken as a collaboration between Open Knowledge, the Global Initiative for Financial Transparency and the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam.

Download the PDF.

The report offers an unprecedented empirical mapping and analysis of the emerging issue of open budget data, which has appeared as ideals from the open data movement have begun to gain traction amongst advocates and practitioners of financial transparency.

In the report we chart the definitions, best practices, actors, issues and initiatives associated with the emerging issue of open budget data in different forms of digital media.

In doing so, our objective is to enable practitioners – in particular civil society organisations, intergovernmental organisations, governments, multilaterals and funders – to navigate this developing field and to identify trends, gaps and opportunities for supporting it.

How public money is collected and distributed is one of the most pressing political questions of our time, influencing the health, well-being and prospects of billions of people. Decisions about fiscal policy affect everyone-determining everything from the resourcing of essential public services, to the capacity of public institutions to take action on global challenges such as poverty, inequality or climate change.

Digital technologies have the potential to transform the way that information about public money is organised, circulated and utilised in society, which in turn could shape the character of public debate, democratic engagement, governmental accountability and public participation in decision-making about public funds. Data could play a vital role in tackling the democratic deficit in fiscal policy and in supporting better outcomes for citizens….(More)”

Memex Human Trafficking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“MEMEX is a DARPA program that explores how next generation search and extraction systems can help with real-world use cases. The initial application is the fight against human trafficking. In this application, the input is a portion of the public and dark web in which human traffickers are likely to (surreptitiously) post supply and demand information about illegal labor, sex workers, and more. DeepDive processes such documents to extract evidential data, such as names, addresses, phone numbers, job types, job requirements, information about rates of service, etc. Some of these data items are difficult for trained human annotators to accurately extract and have never been previously available, but DeepDive-based systems have high accuracy (Precision and Recall in the 90s, which may exceed non-experts). Together with provenance information, such structured, evidential data are then passed on to both other collaborators on the MEMEX program as well as law enforcement for analysis and consumption in operational applications. MEMEX has been featured extensively in the media and is supporting actual investigations. For example, every human trafficking investigation pursued by the Human Trafficking Response Unity in New York City involves MEMEX. DeepDive is the main extracted data provider for MEMEX. See also, 60 minutes, Scientific American, Wall St. Journal, BBC, and Wired. It is supporting actual investigations and perhaps new usecases in the war on terror.

Here is a detailed description of DeepDive’s role in MEMEX.”

 

Dissecting the Spirit of Gezi: Influence vs. Selection in the Occupy Gezi Movement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New study by Ceren Budak and Duncan J. Watts in Sociological Science: “Do social movements actively shape the opinions and attitudes of participants by bringing together diverse groups that subsequently influence one another? Ethnographic studies of the 2013 Gezi uprising seem to answer “yes,” pointing to solidarity among groups that were traditionally indifferent, or even hostile, to one another. We argue that two mechanisms with differing implications may generate this observed outcome: “influence” (change in attitude caused by interacting with other participants); and “selection” (individuals who participated in the movement were generally more supportive of other groups beforehand).

We tease out the relative importance of these mechanisms by constructing a panel of over 30,000 Twitter users and analyzing their support for the main Turkish opposition parties before, during, and after the movement. We find that although individuals changed in significant ways, becoming in general more supportive of the other opposition parties, those who participated in the movement were also significantly more supportive of the other parties all along. These findings suggest that both mechanisms were important, but that selection dominated. In addition to our substantive findings, our paper also makes a methodological contribution that we believe could be useful to studies of social movements and mass opinion change more generally. In contrast with traditional panel studies, which must be designed and implemented prior to the event of interest, our method relies on ex post panel construction, and hence can be used to study unanticipated or otherwise inaccessible events. We conclude that despite the well known limitations of social media, their “always on” nature and their widespread availability offer an important source of public opinion data….(More)”

How Africa can benefit from the data revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Guardian: “….The modern information infrastructure is about movement of data. From data we derive information and knowledge, and that knowledge can be propagated rapidly across the country and throughout the world. Facebook and Google have both made massive investments in machine learning, the mainstay technology for converting data into knowledge. But the potential for these technologies in Africa is much larger: instead of simply advertising products to people, we can imagine modern distributed health systems, distributed markets, knowledge systems for disease intervention. The modern infrastructure should be data driven and deployed across the mobile network. A single good idea can then be rapidly implemented and distributed via the mobile phone app ecosystems.

The information infrastructure does not require large scale thinking and investment to deliver. In fact, it requires just the reverse. It requires agility and innovation. Larger companies cannot react quickly enough to exploit technological advances. Small companies with a good idea can grow quickly. From IBM to Microsoft, Google and now Facebook. All these companies now agree on one thing: data is where the value lies. Modern internet companies are data-driven from the ground up. Could the same thing happen in Africa’s economies? Can entire countries reformulate their infrastructures to be data-driven from the ground up?

Maybe, or maybe not, but it isn’t necessary to have a grand plan to give it a go. It is already natural to use data and communication to solve real world problems. In Silicon Valley these are the challenges of getting a taxi or reserving a restaurant. In Africa they are often more fundamental. John Quinn has been in Kampala, Uganda at Makerere University for eight years now targeting these challenges. In June this year, John and other researchers from across the region came together for Africa’s first workshop on data science at Dedan Kimathi University of Technology. The objective was to spread knowledge of technologies, ideas and solutions. For the modern information infrastructure to be successful software solutions need to be locally generated. African apps to solve African problems. With this in mind the workshop began with a three day summer school on data science which was then followed by two days of talks on challenges in African data science.

The ideas and solutions presented were cutting edge. The Umati project uses social media to understand the use of ethnic hate speech in Kenya (Sidney Ochieng, iHub, Nairobi). The use of social media for monitoring the evolution and effects of Ebola in west Africa (Nuri Pashwani, IBM Research Africa). The Kudusystem for market making in Ugandan farm produce distribution via SMS messages (Kenneth Bwire, Makerere University, Kampala). Telecommunications data for inferring the source and spread of a typhoid outbreak in Kampala (UN Pulse Lab, Kampala). The Punya system for prototyping and deployment of mobile phone apps to deal with emerging crises or market opportunities (Julius Adebayor, MIT) and large scale systems for collating and sharing data resources Open Data Kenya and UN OCHA Human Data Exchange….(More)”