Jeremy Rozansky, assistant editor of National Affairs in The New Atlantis: ” In his debut book Uncontrolled, entrepreneur and policy analyst Jim Manzi argues that social scientists and policymakers should instead adopt the “experimental method.” The essential tool of this method is the randomized field trial (RFT), a technique that already informs many of our successful private enterprises. Perhaps the best known example of RFTs — one that Manzi uses to illustrate the concept — is the kind of clinical trial performed to test new medicines, wherein researchers “undertake a painstaking series of replicated controlled experiments to measure the effects of various interventions under various conditions,” as he puts it.
The central argument of Uncontrolled is that RFTs should be adopted more widely by businesses as well as government. The book is helpful and holds much wisdom — although the approach he recommends is ultimately just another streetlamp in the night, casting a pale light that tapers off after a few yards. Much still lies beyond its glow….
The econometric method now dominates the social sciences because it helps to cope with the problem of high causal density. It begins with a large data set: economic records, election results, surveys, and other similar big pools of data. Then the social scientist uses statistical techniques to model the interactions of sundry independent variables (causes) and a dependent variable (the effect). But for this method to work properly, social scientists must know all the causally important variables beforehand, because a hidden conditional could easily yield a false positive.
The experimental method, which Manzi prefers, offers a different way of coping with high causal density: sidestepping the problem of isolating exact causes. To sort out whether a given treatment or policy works, a scientist or social scientist can try it out on a random section of a population, and compare the results to a different section of the population where the treatment or policy was not implemented. So while econometric models aim to identify which particular variables are responsible for different results, RFTs have more modest aims, as they do not seek to identify every hidden conditional. By using the RFT approach, we may not know precisely why we achieved a desired effect, since we do not model all possible variables. But we can gain some ability to know that we will achieve a desired effect, at least under certain conditions.
Strictly speaking, even a randomized field trial only tells us with certainty that some exact technique worked with some specific population on some specific date in the past when conducted by some specific experimenters. We cannot know whether a given treatment or policy will work again under the same conditions at a later date, much less on a different population, much less still on the population as a whole. But scientists must always be cautious about moving from particular results to general conclusions; this is why experiments need to be replicated. And the more we do replicate them, the more information we can gain from those particular results, and the more reliably they can build toward teaching us which treatments or policies might work or (more often) which probably won’t. The result is that the RFT approach is very well suited to the business of government, since policymakers usually only need to know whether a given policy will work — whether it will produce a desired outcome.”
Data-Smart City Solutions
Press Release: “Today the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School announced the launch of Data-Smart City Solutions, a new initiative aimed at using big data and analytics to transform the way local government operates. Bringing together leading industry, academic, and government officials, the initiative will offer city leaders a national depository of cases and best practice examples where cities and private partners use analytics to solve city problems. Data-Smart City Solutions is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Data-Smart City Solutions highlights best practices, curates resources, and supports cities embarking on new data projects. The initiative’s website contains feature-length articles on how data drives innovation in different policy areas, profile pieces on municipal leaders at the forefront of implementing data analytics in their cities, and resources for interested officials to begin data projects in their own communities.
Recent articles include an assessment of Boston’s Adopt-a-Hydrant program as a potential harbinger of future city work promoting civic engagement and infrastructure maintenance, and a feature on how predictive technology is transforming police work. The site also spotlights municipal use of data such as San Francisco’s efforts to integrate data from different social service departments to better identify and serve at-risk youth. In addition to visiting the initiative’s website, Data-Smart City Solutions’ work is chronicled in their newsletter as well as on their Twitter page.”
Is Cybertopianism Really Such a Bad Thing?
Ethan Zuckerman in Slate: “As the historian and technology scholar Langdon Winner suggests, “The arrival of any new technology that has significant power and practical potential always brings with it a wave of visionary enthusiasm that anticipates the rise of a utopian social order.” Technologies that connect individuals to one another—like the airplane, the telegraph, and the radio—appear particularly powerful at helping us imagine a smaller, more connected world. Seen through this lens, the Internet’s underlying architecture—it is no more and no less than a network that connects networks—and the sheer amount written about it in the past decade guaranteed that the network would be placed at the center of visions for a world made better through connection. These visions are so abundant that they’ve even spawned a neologism: “cyberutopianism.”
The term “cyberutopian” tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naïvely overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies. Curiously, the commonly used term for an opposite stance, a belief that Internet technologies are weakening society, coarsening discourse, and hastening conflict is described with a less weighted term: “cyberskepticism.” Whether or not either of these terms adequately serves us in this debate, we should consider cyberutopianism’s appeal, and its merits….
If we reject the notion that technology makes certain changes inevitable, but accept that the aspirations of the “cyberutopians” are worthy ones, we are left with a challenge: How do we rewire the tools we’ve built to maximize our impact on an interconnected world? Accepting the shortcomings of the systems we’ve built as inevitable and unchangeable is lazy. As Benjamin Disraeli observed in Vivian Grey, “Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.” And, as Rheingold suggests, believing that people can use technology to build a world that’s more just, fair, and inclusive isn’t merely defensible. It’s practically a moral imperative.
Excerpted from Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman.”
Socialstructing
“A new kind of society in which amplified individuals—individuals empowered with technologies and the collective intelligence of others in their social network—can take on many functions that previously only large organizations could perform, often more efficiently, at lower cost or no cost at all, and with much greater ease.”
Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future (IFTF), released a book entitled The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World. According to the IFTF website, the book “offers an inspiring portrayal of how new technologies are giving individuals so much power to connect and share resources that networks of individuals—not big organizations—will solve a host of problems by reinventing business, education, medicine, banking, government, and scientific research.” In her review in the New York Journal of Books, Geri Spieler argues that, when focusing on the book’s central premise, Gorbis “breaks through to the reader as to what is important here: the future of a citizen-created world.”
In many ways, the book joins the growing literature on swarms, wikinomics, commons-based and peer-to-peer production methods enabled by advances made in technology:
“Empowered by computing and communication technologies that have been steadily building village-like networks on a global scale, we are infusing more and more of our economic transactions with social connectedness….The new technologies are inherently social and personal. They help us create communities around interests, identities, and common personal challenges. They allow us to gain direct access to a worldwide community of others. And they take anonymity out of our economic transactions.”
Marina Gorbis subsequently describes the impact of these technologies on how we operate as “socialstructing”:
“We are moving away from the dominance of the depersonalized world of institutional production and creating a new economy around social connections and social rewards—a process I call socialstructing. … Not only is this new social economy bringing with it an unprecedented level of familiarity and connectedness to both our global and our local economic exchanges, but it is also changing every domain of our lives, from finance to education and health. It is rapidly ushering in a vast array of new opportunities for us to pursue our passions, create new types of businesses and charitable organizations, redefine the nature of work, and address a wide range of problems that the prevailing formal economy has neglected, if not caused.
Socialstructing is in fact enabling not only a new kind of global economy but a new kind of society, in which amplified individuals—individuals empowered with technologies and the collective intelligence of others in their social network—can take on many functions that previously only large organizations could perform, often more efficiently, at lower cost or no cost at all, and with much greater ease.”
Following a brief intro describing the social and technical drivers behind socialstructing the book describes its manifestation in finance, education, governance, science, and health. In the chapter “governance beyond government” the author advocates the creation of a revised “agora” modeled on the ancient Greek concept of participatory democracy. Of particular interest, the chapter describes and explains the legitimacy deficit of present-day political institutions and governmental structures:
“Political institutions are shaped by the social realities of their time and reflect the prevailing technological infrastructure, levels of knowledge, and citizen values. In ancient Athens, a small democratic state, it was possible to gather most citizens in an assembly or on a hill to practice a direct form of democracy, but in a country with millions of people this is nearly impossible. The US Constitution and governance structure emerged in the eighteenth century and were products of a Newtonian view of the universe….But while this framework of government and society as machines worked reasonably well for several centuries, it is increasingly out of sync with today’s reality and level of knowledge.”
Building upon the deliberative polling process developed by Professor James Fishkin, director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, the author proposes and develops four key elements behind the so-called socialstructed governance:
- Rich and open data for making informed decisions (referencing the open data movement within the US and elsewhere);
- Sophisticated decision-support tools and use of algorithms for exploring alternatives and uncovering complex interdependencies (reflecting on the big data potential for decision making);
- Engagement platforms for wide citizen involvement and deliberation (comparing various “architectures of participation” such as the State Department’s Opinion Space); and
- Microparticipation of regular citizens in government decisions and the delivery of public services (pointing to the San Ramon Valley’s CPR app and other tools for networked collaboration developed by, for instance, Citizen Logistics).
The chapter provides for an interesting introduction to the kind of new governance arrangements made feasible by increased computing power and the use of collaborative platforms. As with most literature on the subject, little attention, however, is paid to evidence on whether these new platforms contribute to more legitimate and effective outcomes–a necessary next step to move away from “faith-based” discussions to more evidence-based interventions.
Is Civic Hacking The Future Of Democracy And Job Creation?
Anthony Wing Kosner in Forbes: “The hacker method is code first, ask permission later. This is great for getting things done quickly, but it sidesteps the gnarly issues of how citizen contributions actually get deployed within government agencies. There are all kinds of projects that can just get done and deployed using resources in the public domain, but civic hacking aims to get more directly involved in government.
For organizations on the receiving end of civic code, there are many questions as well. How do you test and implement the code? How will the code get maintained? What happens if there are unintended consequences of how public data is used? Jawitz hismelf is working on the idea of “civic startups,” as a way of both creating jobs around these efforts and in developing the specific infrastructure required to harvest civic efforts and turn them into working programs—and in some cases, new businesses….
I think that we are only beginning to explore the ways to merge the creative anarchy of hacker culture with the careful regulation of civic concerns. In a sense, this is the dialectic between entropy and inertia that play itself out in technologies of all kinds. But the fact that it is difficult is an indication that there is real work here to engage with, real problems to solve. Hack on!”
“Statisticians are the modern explorers”
An interview with Professor David J. Hand in Statistics Views: “The point to remember is that statisticians are there when the discoveries are made because the statisticians are, almost by defintion, the ones analysing the data and seeing the patterns. Often they are patterns no one else has seen before. Statisticians are the modern day version of the 19th century explorer….The computer has totally revolutionised the subject. It’s arguable that statistics is now more of a computational discipline than a mathematical one. You cannot do modern statistics without a computer. The computer has enabled us not merely to work more quickly but also to do things we would never have thought of before. Bootstrap methods are an example….The discipline is so important. Modern societies are built on the infrastructure of statistics. We need statisticians to cope with the data for medical research, government policies, engineering and there have not been enough. Society would benefit tremendously from statisticians and there is a danger that there aren’t going to be enough.”
Could CrowdOptic Be Used For Disaster Response?
Patrick Meier: “Crowds—rather than sole individuals—are increasingly bearing witness to disasters large and small. Instagram users, for example, snapped 800,000 #Sandy pictures during the hurricane last year. One way to make sense of this vast volume and velocity of multimedia content—Big Data—during disasters is with PhotoSynth, as blogged here. Another perhaps more sophisticated approach would be to use CrowdOptic, which automatically zeros in on the specific location that eyewitnesses are looking at when using their smartphones to take pictures or recording videos….How does it work? CrowdOptic simply triangulates line-of-sight intersections using sensory metadata from pictures and videos taken using a smartphone. The basic approach is depicted in the figure below. The areas of intersection is called a focal cluster. CrowdOptic automatically identifies the location of these clusters….Clearly, all this could have important applications for disaster response and information forensics.”
Great groups: What 15 things do breakthrough genius teams share?
Barking Up The Wrong Tree: “Warren Bennis and Patricia Biederman studied a number of breakthrough great groups to see what made them so successful. They compiled the results into their book, Organizing Genius.
They looked at the Disney’s Animation division, the Manhattan Project (developed the nuclear bomb), Xerox PARC (designed the modern computer interface), the 1992 Clinton campaign (pulled off an enormous victory), Lockheed’s Skunk Works (created the U2 spy plane and the Stealth Bomber), and others.
Highlights from Organizing Genius summarized by Erik Barker can be found here.”
Time we all learned how to program the world we want
Editorial of NewScientist: “OUR world is written in code. These days, almost anything electrical or mechanical requires many thousands of lines of code to work. Consider a modern car: you could argue that from the driver’s perspective, it’s now a computer that gives you control over an engine, drivetrain and wheels. And with cars beginning to drive themselves, the code will soon be in even more control.
But who controls the code? Those who write the programs behind the machines have become hugely lionised. Silicon Valley courts software developers with huge salaries and copious stock options, throwing in perks ranging from gourmet food to free haircuts. The rest of us can only look on, excluded by esoteric arguments about the merits of rival programming techniques and languages. Like the clerics who once controlled written language, programmers have a vested interest in keeping the status quo…”
Nominate a White House Champion of Change for Transformative Civic Engagement
Lisa Ellman and Nick Sinai @ The White House Blog: “But we know that much of the best open government work happens in America’s towns and cities. Every day, local leaders across America’s communities are stepping up in big ways to advance open government goals from the ground up.
This July, the White House will host a “Champions of Change” event to celebrate these local change-agents, whose exemplary leadership is helping to strengthen our democracy and increase participation in our government.
The event will convene extraordinary individuals who are taking innovative approaches to engage citizens and communities in the practice of open government and civic participation. These leaders will be invited to the White House to celebrate their accomplishments and showcase the steps they have taken to foster a more open, transparent, and participatory government.
Today, we’re asking you to help us identify these standout local leaders by nominating a Champion of Change for Transformative Civic Engagement by noon on Friday, June 21st. A Champion’s work may involve:
- Piloting a participatory and democracy-building initiative, such as one that engages citizens in governance beyond elections;
- Engaging traditionally disengaged communities in local governance;
- Using new technologies to enhance transparency, participation, and collaboration in government.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Nominate a Transformative Civic Leader as a Champion of Change (under theme of service, choose “Transformative Civic Engagement Leaders”).