When Cartography Meets Disaster Relief

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Mimi Kirk at CityLab: “Almost three weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the island is in a grim state. Fewer than 15 percent of residents have power, and much of the island has no clean drinking water. Delivery of food and other necessities, especially to remote areas, has been hampered by a variety of ills, including a lack of cellular service, washed-out roads, additional rainfall, and what analysts and Puerto Ricans say is a slow and insufficient response from the U.S. government.

Another issue slowing recovery? Maps—or lack of them. While pre-Maria maps of Puerto Rico were fairly complete, their level of detail was nowhere near that of other parts of the United States. Platforms such as Google Maps are more comprehensive on the mainland than on the island, explains Juan Saldarriaga, a research scholar at the Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University. This is because companies like Google often create maps for financial reasons, selling them to advertisers or as navigation devices, so areas that have less economic activity are given less attention.

This lack of detail impedes recovery efforts: Without basic information on the location of buildings, for instance, rescue workers don’t know how many people were living in an area before the hurricane struck—and thus how much aid is needed.

Crowdsourced mapping can help. Saldarriaga recently organized a “mapathon” at Columbia, in which volunteers examined satellite imagery of Puerto Rico and added missing buildings, roads, bridges, and other landmarks in the open-source platform OpenStreetMap. While some universities and other groups are hosting similar events, anyone with an internet connection and computer can participate.

Saldarriaga and his co-organizers collaborated with Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a nonprofit that works to create crowdsourced maps for aid and development work. Volunteers like Saldarriaga largely drive HOT’s “crisis mapping” projects, the first of which occurred in 2010 after Haiti’s earthquake…(More)”.

Updating Wikipedia should be part of all doctors’ jobs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gwinyai Masukume et al at StatNews: “When the Ebola pandemic erupted in West Africa in 2014, the English-language Wikipedia articles on Ebola were overhauled and versions were created or updated in more than 100 other languages. These pages would go on to be viewed at least 89 million times in 2014, and were the most used online sources for Ebola information in each of the four most affected countries. The work done by these authors, editors, and translators was crucial to educating the public on this devastating disease.

Medicine changes rapidly. Wikipedia, the world’s most viewed medical resource, should, too. Unfortunately, it sometimes lags behind. As we write this, pages on Ebola in African languages spoken in countries affected by the disease, such as Hausa and Fula, have either not been updated since the crisis in 2014 or are rudimentary with under 220 words.

We strongly believe that the medical community has a responsibility to keep this online encyclopedia up to date. It owes it to the people who turn to Wikipedia 4.9 billion times every year for medical information, many of whom live in low- to middle-income countries with sparse access to medical information. We follow through on this belief with action: each of us has been writing and updating Wikipedia articles on medicine and health for several years. Unfortunately, there is little incentive for busy biomedical and research professionals to spend their time editing, translating, and updating these pages….(More)”.

Can Blockchain Bring Voting Online?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Miller at Government Technology: “Hash chains are not a new concept in cryptography. They are, essentially, a long chain of data connected by values called hashes that prove the connection of each part to the next. By stringing all these pieces together and representing them in small values, then, one can represent a large amount of information without doing much. Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer for Microsoft Research and director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, gives the rough analogy of taking a picture of a person, then taking another picture of that person holding the first picture, and so on. Loss of resolution aside, each picture would contain all the images from the previous pictures.

It’s only recently that people have found a way to extend the idea to commonplace applications. That happened with the advent of bitcoin, a digital “cryptocurrency” that has attained real-world value and become a popular exchange medium for ransomware attacks. The bitcoin community operates using a specific type of hash chain called a blockchain. It works by asking a group of users to solve complex problems as a sort of proof that bitcoin transactions took place, in exchange for a reward.

“Academics who have been looking at this for years, when they saw bitcoin, they said, ‘This can’t work, this has too many problems,’” Benaloh said. “It surprised everybody that this seems to work and to hold.”

But the blockchain concept is by no means limited to money. It’s simply a public ledger, a bulletin board meant to ensure accuracy based on the fact that everyone can see it — and what’s been done to it — at all times. It could be used to keep property records, or to provide an audit trail for how a product got from factory to buyer.

Or perhaps it could be used to prove the veracity and accuracy of digital votes in an election.

It is a potential solution to the problem of cybersecurity in online elections because the foundation of blockchain is the audit trail: If anybody tampered with votes, it would be easy to see and prove.

And in fact, blockchain elections have already been run in the U.S. — just not in the big leagues. Voatz, a Massachusetts-based startup that has struck up a partnership with one of the few companies in the country that actually builds voting systems, has used a blockchain paradigm to run elections for colleges, school boards, unions and other nonprofit and quasi-governmental groups. Perhaps its most high-profile endeavor was authenticating delegate badges at the 2016 Massachusetts Democratic Convention….

Rivest and Benaloh both talk about another online voting solution with much more enthusiasm. And much in the spirit of academia, the technology’s name is pragmatic rather than sleek and buzzworthy: end-to-end verifiable Internet voting (E2E-VIV).

It’s not too far off from blockchain in spirit, but it relies on a centralized approach instead of a decentralized one. Votes are sent from remote electronic devices to the election authority, most likely the secretary of state for the state the person is voting in, and posted online in an encrypted format. The person voting can use her decryption key to check that her vote was recorded accurately.

But there are no validating peers, no chain of blocks stretching back to the first vote….(More)”.

The application of crowdsourcing approaches to cancer research: a systematic review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Young Ji Lee, Janet A. Arida, and Heidi S. Donovan at Cancer Medicine: “Crowdsourcing is “the practice of obtaining participants, services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, especially via the Internet.” (Ranard et al. J. Gen. Intern. Med. 29:187, 2014) Although crowdsourcing has been adopted in healthcare research and its potential for analyzing large datasets and obtaining rapid feedback has recently been recognized, no systematic reviews of crowdsourcing in cancer research have been conducted. Therefore, we sought to identify applications of and explore potential uses for crowdsourcing in cancer research. We conducted a systematic review of articles published between January 2005 and June 2016 on crowdsourcing in cancer research, using PubMed, CINAHL, Scopus, PsychINFO, and Embase. Data from the 12 identified articles were summarized but not combined statistically. The studies addressed a range of cancers (e.g., breast, skin, gynecologic, colorectal, prostate). Eleven studies collected data on the Internet using web-based platforms; one recruited participants in a shopping mall using paper-and-pen data collection. Four studies used Amazon Mechanical Turk for recruiting and/or data collection. Study objectives comprised categorizing biopsy images (n = 6), assessing cancer knowledge (n = 3), refining a decision support system (n = 1), standardizing survivorship care-planning (n = 1), and designing a clinical trial (n = 1). Although one study demonstrated that “the wisdom of the crowd” (NCI Budget Fact Book, 2017) could not replace trained experts, five studies suggest that distributed human intelligence could approximate or support the work of trained experts. Despite limitations, crowdsourcing has the potential to improve the quality and speed of research while reducing costs. Longitudinal studies should confirm and refine these findings….(More)”

Open mapping from the ground up: learning from Map Kibera

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Erica Hagen for Making All Voices Count: “In Nairobi in 2009, 13 young residents of the informal settlement of Kibera mapped their community using OpenStreetMap, an online mapping platform. This was the start of Map Kibera, and eight years of ongoing work to date on digital mapping, citizen media and open data. In this paper, Erica Hagen – one of the initiators of Map Kibera – reflects on the trajectory of this work. Through research interviews with Map Kibera staff, participants and clients, and users of the data and maps the project has produced, she digs into what it means for citizens to map their communities, and examines the impact of open local information on members of the community. The paper begins by situating the research and Map Kibera in selected literature on transparency, accountability and mapping. It then presents three case studies of mapping in Kibera – in the education, security and water sectors – discussing evidence about the effects not only on project participants, but also on governmental and non-governmental actors in each of the three sectors. It concludes that open, community-based data collection can lead to greater trust, which is sorely lacking in marginalised places. In large-scale data gathering, it is often unclear to those involved why the data is needed or what will be done with it. But the experience of Map Kibera shows that by starting from the ground up and sharing open data widely, it is possible to achieve strong sector-wide ramifications beyond the scope of the initial project, including increased resources and targeting by government and NGOs. While debates continue over the best way to truly engage citizens in the ‘data revolution’ and tracking the Sustainable Development Goals, the research here shows that engaging people fully in the information value chain can be the missing link between data as a measurement tool, and information having an impact on social development….(More)”.

Selected Readings on Blockchain and Identity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

By Hannah Pierce and Stefaan Verhulst

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of blockchain and identity was originally published in 2017.

The potential of blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies to create positive social change has inspired enthusiasm, broad experimentation, and some skepticism. In this edition of the Selected Readings series, we explore and curate the literature on blockchain and how it impacts identity as a means to access services and rights. (In a previous edition we considered the Potential of Blockchain for Transforming Governance).

Introduction

In 2008, an unknown source calling itself Satoshi Nakamoto released a paper named Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System which introduced Blockchain. Blockchain is a novel technology that uses a distributed ledger to record transactions and ensure compliance. Blockchain and other Distributed Ledger technologies (DLTs) rely on an ability to act as a vast, transparent, and secure public database.

Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have disruptive potential beyond innovation in products, services, revenue streams and operating systems within industry. By providing transparency and accountability in new and distributed ways, DLTs have the potential to positively empower underserved populations in myriad ways, including providing a means for establishing a trusted digital identity.

Consider the potential of DLTs for 2.4 billion people worldwide, about 1.5 billion of whom are over the age of 14, who are unable to prove identity to the satisfaction of authorities and other organizations – often excluding them from property ownership, free movement, and social protection as a result. At the same time, transition to a DLT led system of ID management involves various risks, that if not understood and mitigated properly, could harm potential beneficiaries.

Annotated Selected Reading List

Governance

Cuomo, Jerry, Richard Nash, Veena Pureswaran, Alan Thurlow, Dave Zaharchuk. “Building trust in government: Exploring the potential of blockchains.” IBM Institute for Business Value. January 2017.

This paper from the IBM Institute for Business Value culls findings from surveys conducted with over 200 government leaders in 16 countries regarding their experiences and expectations for blockchain technology. The report also identifies “Trailblazers”, or governments that expect to have blockchain technology in place by the end of the year, and details the views and approaches that these early adopters are taking to ensure the success of blockchain in governance. These Trailblazers also believe that there will be high yields from utilizing blockchain in identity management and that citizen services, such as voting, tax collection and land registration, will become increasingly dependent upon decentralized and secure identity management systems. Additionally, some of the Trailblazers are exploring blockchain application in borderless services, like cross-province or state tax collection, because the technology removes the need for intermediaries like notaries or lawyers to verify identities and the authenticity of transactions.

Mattila, Juri. “The Blockchain Phenomenon: The Disruptive Potential of Distributed Consensus Architectures.” Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy. May 2016.

This working paper gives a clear introduction to blockchain terminology, architecture, challenges, applications (including use cases), and implications for digital trust, disintermediation, democratizing the supply chain, an automated economy, and the reconfiguration of regulatory capacity. As far as identification management is concerned, Mattila argues that blockchain can remove the need to go through a trusted third party (such as a bank) to verify identity online. This could strengthen the security of personal data, as the move from a centralized intermediary to a decentralized network lowers the risk of a mass data security breach. In addition, using blockchain technology for identity verification allows for a more standardized documentation of identity which can be used across platforms and services. In light of these potential capabilities, Mattila addresses the disruptive power of blockchain technology on intermediary businesses and regulating bodies.

Identity Management Applications

Allen, Christopher.  “The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity.” Coindesk. April 27, 2016.

In this Coindesk article, author Christopher Allen lays out the history of digital identities, then explains a concept of a “self-sovereign” identity, where trust is enabled without compromising individual privacy. His ten principles for self-sovereign identity (Existence, Control, Access, Transparency, Persistence, Portability, Interoperability, Consent, Minimization, and Protection) lend themselves to blockchain technology for administration. Although there are actors making moves toward the establishment of self-sovereign identity, there are a few challenges that face the widespread implementation of these tenets, including legal risks, confidentiality issues, immature technology, and a reluctance to change established processes.

Jacobovitz, Ori. “Blockchain for Identity Management.” Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University. December 11, 2016.

This technical report discusses advantages of blockchain technology in managing and authenticating identities online, such as the ability for individuals to create and manage their own online identities, which offers greater control over access to personal data. Using blockchain for identity verification can also afford the potential of “digital watermarks” that could be assigned to each of an individual’s transactions, as well as negating the creation of unique usernames and passwords online. After arguing that this decentralized model will allow individuals to manage data on their own terms, Jacobvitz provides a list of companies, projects, and movements that are using blockchain for identity management.

Mainelli, Michael. “Blockchain Will Help Us Prove Our Identities in a Digital World.” Harvard Business Review. March 16, 2017.

In this Harvard Business Review article, author Michael Mainelli highlights a solution to identity problems for rich and poor alike–mutual distributed ledgers (MDLs), or blockchain technology. These multi-organizational data bases with unalterable ledgers and a “super audit trail” have three parties that deal with digital document exchanges: subjects are individuals or assets, certifiers are are organizations that verify identity, and inquisitors are entities that conducts know-your-customer (KYC) checks on the subject. This system will allow for a low-cost, secure, and global method of proving identity. After outlining some of the other benefits that this technology may have in creating secure and easily auditable digital documents, such as greater tolerance that comes from viewing widely public ledgers, Mainelli questions if these capabilities will turn out to be a boon or a burden to bureaucracy and societal behavior.

Personal Data Security Applications

Banafa, Ahmed. “How to Secure the Internet of Things (IoT) with Blockchain.” Datafloq. August 15, 2016.

This article details the data security risks that are coming up as the Internet of Things continues to expand, and how using blockchain technology can protect the personal data and identity information that is exchanged between devices. Banafa argues that, as the creation and collection of data is central to the functions of Internet of Things devices, there is an increasing need to better secure data that largely confidential and often personally identifiable. Decentralizing IoT networks, then securing their communications with blockchain can allow to remain scalable, private, and reliable. Enabling blockchain’s peer-to-peer, trustless communication may also enable smart devices to initiate personal data exchanges like financial transactions, as centralized authorities or intermediaries will not be necessary.

Shrier, David, Weige Wu and Alex Pentland. “Blockchain & Infrastructure (Identity, Data Security).” Massachusetts Institute of Technology. May 17, 2016.

This paper, the third of a four-part series on potential blockchain applications, covers the potential of blockchains to change the status quo of identity authentication systems, privacy protection, transaction monitoring, ownership rights, and data security. The paper also posits that, as personal data becomes more and more valuable, that we should move towards a “New Deal on Data” which provides individuals data protection–through blockchain technology– and the option to contribute their data to aggregates that work towards the common good. In order to achieve this New Deal on Data, robust regulatory standards and financial incentives must be provided to entice individuals to share their data to benefit society.

Information Seeding and Knowledge Production in Online Communities: Evidence from OpenStreetMap

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Abhishek Nagaraj: “The wild success of a few online community-produced knowledge goods, notably Wikipedia, has obscured the fact that most attempts at forming online communities fail. A large body of work analyses motivations behind user contributions to successful, online communities but less is known, however, about early-stage interventions that might make online communities more or less successful.

This study evaluates information seeding, a popular practice to bootstrap online communities by enabling contributors to build on externally-sourced information rather that starting from scratch. I analyze the effects of information seeding on follow-on contributions using data from more than 350 million contributions made by over 577,000 contributors to OpenStreetMap, a Wikipedia-style digital map-making community that was seeded with data from the US Census. To estimate the effects of information seeding, I rely on a natural experiment in which an oversight caused about 60% of quasi-randomly chosen US counties to be seeded with a complete Census map, while the rest were seeded with less complete versions. While access to knowledge generally encourages follow-on knowledge production, I find that a higher level of information seeding significantly lowered follow-on knowledge production and contributor activity on OpenStreetMap and was also associated with lower levels of long-term quality. I argue that information seeding can crowd out contributors’ ability to develop ownership over baseline knowledge and disincentivize follow-on contributions in some circumstances. Empirical evidence supports this explanation as the mechanism through which a higher level of information seeding can stifle rather than spur knowledge production in online communities….(More)”.

BBC Four to investigate how flu pandemic spreads by launching BBC Pandemic app

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

BBC Press Release: “In a first of its kind nationwide citizen science experiment, Dr Hannah Fry is asking volunteers to download the BBC Pandemic App onto their smartphones. The free app will anonymously collect vital data on how far users travel over a 24 hour period. Users will be asked for information about the number of people they have come into contact with during this time. This data will be used to simulate the spread of a highly infectious disease to see what might happen when – not if – a real pandemic hits the UK.

By partnering with researchers at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the BBC Pandemic app will identify the human networks and behaviours that spread infectious disease. The data collated from the app will help improve public health planning and outbreak control.

The results of the experiment will be revealed in a 90 minute landmark documentary, BBC Pandemic which will air in spring 2018 on BBC Four with Dr Hannah Fry and Dr Javid Abdelmoneim. The pair will chart the creation of the first ever life-saving pandemic, provide new insight into the latest pandemic science and use the data collected by the BBC Pandemic app to chart how an outbreak would spread across the UK.

In the last 100 years there have been four major flu pandemics including the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918 that killed up to 100 million people world wide. The Government National Risk Register estimates that infectious diseases are an even greater risk since 2015 and pandemic flu is the key concern as 50% of the population could be affected.

“Nobody knows when the next epidemic will hit, how far it will spread, or how many people will be affected. And yet, because of the power of mathematics, we can still be prepared for whatever lies ahead. What’s really important is that every single download will help improve our models so please please do take part – it will make a difference.” explains Dr Fry.

Dr Abdelmoneim says: “We shouldn’t underestimate the flu virus. It could easily be the cause of a major pandemic that could sweep around the world in a matter of weeks. I’m really excited about the BBC Pandemic app. If it can help predict the spread of a disease and be used to work out ways to slow that spread, it will be much easier for society and our healthcare system to manage”.

Cassian Harrison, Editor BBC Four says: “This is a bold and tremendously exciting project; bringing genuine insight and discovery, and taking BBC Four’s Experimental brief absolutely literally!”…(More)”

Ethical Guidelines for Applying Predictive Tools Within Human Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MetroLab Network: “Predictive analytical tools are already being put to work within human service agencies to help make vital decisions about when and how to intervene in the lives of families and communities. The sector may not be entirely comfortable with this trend, but it should not be surprised. Predictive models are in wide use within the justice and education sectors and, more to the point, they work: risk assessment is fundamental to what social services do, and these tools can help agencies respond more quickly to prevent harm, to create more personalized interventions, and allocate scarce public resources to where they can do the most good.

There is also a strong case that predictive risk models (PRM) can reduce bias in decision-making. Designing a predictive model forces more explicit conversations about how agencies think about different risk factors and how they propose to guard against disadvantaging certain demographic or socioeconomic groups. And the standard that agencies are trying to improve upon is not perfect equity—it is the status quo, which is neither transparent nor uniformly fair. Risk scores do not eliminate the possibility of personal or institutional prejudice but they can make it more apparent by providing a common reference point.

That the use of predictive analytics in social services can reduce bias is not to say that it will. Careless or unskilled development of these predictive tools could worsen disparities among clients receiving social services. Child and civil rights advocates rightly worry about the potential for “net widening”—drawing more people in for unnecessary scrutiny by the government. They worry that rather than improving services for vulnerable clients, these models will replicate the biases in existing public data sources and expose them to greater trauma. Bad models scale just as quickly as good ones, and even the best of them can be misused.

The stakes here are real: for children and families that interact with these social systems and for the reputation of the agencies that turn to these tools. What, then, should a public leader know about risk modeling, and what lessons does it offer about how to think about data science, data stewardship, and the public interest?…(More)”.

Polish activists turn to digital democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zosia Wasik in the Financial Times: “Opponents of the Polish government have mounted a series of protests on issues ranging from reform of the judiciary to an attempt to ban abortion. In February, they staged yet another, less public but intensely emotive, battle — to save the country’s trees.

At the beginning of the year, a new law allowed property owners to cut trees on their land without official permission. As a result, hundreds of trees disappeared from the centres of Polish cities as more valuable treeless plots were sold off to developers. In parallel, the government authorised extensive logging of the ancient forest in Bialowieza, a Unesco world heritage site.

“People reacted very emotionally to these practices,” says Wojciech Sanko, a co-ordinator at Code for Poland, a programme run by ePanstwo (eState), the country’s biggest non-governmental organisation in this field.

The group aims to deploy new technology tools designed to explain local and national policies, and to make it easier for citizens to take part in public life. As no one controlled the tree-cutting, for example, Mr Sanko thought technology could at least help to monitor it. First, he wanted to set up a simple digital map of trees cut in Warsaw. But as the controversial liberalisation of tree-cutting was reversed, the NGO together with local activists decided to work on another project — to map trees still standing, along with data about species and their absorption of carbon dioxide associated with climate change.

The group has also started to create an app for activists in Bialowieza forest: an open-source map that will gather all documentation from civic patrols monitoring the site, and will indicate the exact places of logging.

A trend towards recruiting technology for civic projects has been slowly gathering pace in a country that is hard to describe as socially-engaged: only 59 per cent of Poles say they have done volunteer work for the community, according to a 2016 survey by the Centre of Public Opinion Research.

Election turnout barely surpasses 50 per cent. Yet since the election of the rightwing Law and Justice government in 2015, which has introduced rapid and controversial reforms across all domains of public life, citizens have started to take a closer look at politicians and their actions.

In addition to the tree map, Code for Poland has developed a website that aggregates public data, such as tax spending or air pollution.

Mr Sanko underlines, however, that Code for Poland is much more about local communities than national politics. Many of the group’s projects are small scale, ranging from a mobile app for an animal shelter in Gdansk and a tool that shows people where they can take their garbage.

Piotr Micula, board member of Miasto Jest Nasze (The City is Ours), an urban movement in Warsaw, says that increasing access to data is fuelling the development of civic tech. “Even as a small organisation, we try to use big data and visualise it,” he says….(More)”.