Podcast by Civilla: “One team’s mission to poke the universe. Civilla, a center for social innovation based in Detroit, was founded by a small team with big plans. This podcast is an inside peek at their journey as they work to create positive impact in the lives of one billion people. Season One follows the ups and downs as they assemble their very first $100 Million idea. Stories are captured in real time and shared out weekly. Key themes include: civic leadership, social innovation, philanthropy, human-centered design, change work, government, and courageous leadership….(More)”
Mapping Momentum
Report by Rachel Sinha and Tim Draimin:”As we hurtle towards a human community of 9.7 billion people by the year 2050, coupled with new technologies and the growing challenges of our planet’s carrying capacity, there is more and more discussion of systems and how they change or are created. The post-war era has witnessed an unprecedented growth of global, national and regional systems but systemic challenges like climate change and inequality are undermining the viability and resilience of our 20th century systems.
It’s against this backdrop that a movement is starting to gain traction. A community of practitioners trying to shift incumbent systems no longer fit for purpose and build new ones that work for our current reality.
But this field is nascent and largely unsupported. In this publication, we have created two maps designed to shine a light on the work of this group of pioneers. We offer these with the hypothesis that the field will be better able to organize itself if it can see itself more clearly. Our theory of change? A clearer picture leads to greater connectivity, connectivity leads to stronger networks, and accelerates the best initiatives we so badly need if we are to effectively shift systems….(More)”
Fine-grained dengue forecasting using telephone triage services
Nabeel Abdur Rehman et al at Science Advances: “Thousands of lives are lost every year in developing countries for failing to detect epidemics early because of the lack of real-time disease surveillance data. We present results from a large-scale deployment of a telephone triage service as a basis for dengue forecasting in Pakistan. Our system uses statistical analysis of dengue-related phone calls to accurately forecast suspected dengue cases 2 to 3 weeks ahead of time at a subcity level (correlation of up to 0.93). Our system has been operational at scale in Pakistan for the past 3 years and has received more than 300,000 phone calls. The predictions from our system are widely disseminated to public health officials and form a critical part of active government strategies for dengue containment. Our work is the first to demonstrate, with significant empirical evidence, that an accurate, location-specific disease forecasting system can be built using analysis of call volume data from a public health hotline….(More)”
#HackthePayGap
Department of Commerce: “More than 50 years ago, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law. Yet just yesterday, Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker addressed developers, data scientists, and designers who are using Department of Commerce data to build new tools and products aimed at ending the pay disparities that still disadvantage women in today’s economy.
Speaking at the White House Hack the Pay Gap Demo Day, Secretary Pritzker stressed that the issue of equal pay for equal work is not just a women’s issue, but an injustice that impacts families and threatens our nation’s economic prosperity. While the pay gap remains a stubborn and persistent problem, Secretary Pritzker pointed to open data as a powerful new tool for workers, businesses, and the public to advance equality in the workplace.
Last April the Commerce Department, Presidential Innovation Fellows, and the White House Council on Women and Girls invited data scientists and developers from across America to “Hack the Pay Gap” using MIDAAS (Making Income Data Available as a Service) – a new application programming interface (API) designed to improve public access to the U.S. Census Bureau’s income, population, and geographic data…..For example, the “What’s my Pay Gap” project asks you to answers questions about yourself and allows you to discover how your personal wage gap grows and shrinks depending on your demographic characteristics. Another project named “Aware,” provides a survey and data analytics platform for companies to use in order to make data-driven decisions about combating the pay gap in their own organizations. In addition, the Secretary listened to a presentation on the PowerShift application that provides users salary breakdown and range data on what men in a similar situation are making in addition to legal information about fair pay….To learn more about the Hack the Pay Gap challenge visit paygap.pif.gov.”
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction
New book by Arvind Narayanan, Joseph Bonneau, Edward Felten, Andrew Miller & Steven Goldfeder: “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies provides a comprehensive introduction to the revolutionary yet often misunderstood new technologies of digital currency. Whether you are a student, software developer, tech entrepreneur, or researcher in computer science, this authoritative and self-contained book tells you everything you need to know about the new global money for the Internet age.
How do Bitcoin and its block chain actually work? How secure are your bitcoins? How anonymous are their users? Can cryptocurrencies be regulated? These are some of the many questions this book answers. It begins by tracing the history and development of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, and then gives the conceptual and practical foundations you need to engineer secure software that interacts with the Bitcoin network as well as to integrate ideas from Bitcoin into your own projects. Topics include decentralization, mining, the politics of Bitcoin, altcoins and the cryptocurrency ecosystem, the future of Bitcoin, and more.
- An essential introduction to the new technologies of digital currency
- Covers the history and mechanics of Bitcoin and the block chain, security, decentralization, anonymity, politics and regulation, altcoins, and much more
- Features an accompanying website that includes instructional videos for each chapter, homework problems, programming assignments, and lecture slides…(More)”.
See also: Coursera course
The Future of Economics Uses the Science of Real-Life Social Networks
Paul Ormerod at Evonomics: “….The recognition of the fundamental importance of networks for outcomes in the modern social and economic worlds does not mean that governments are powerless. Instead it calls for smarter government rather than no government. It almost certainly means fewer state bureaucrats, working in an outdated intellectual framework, searching for the elusive silver bullet which is guaranteed to solve a problem.
The silver bullet of this approach is that there are no silver bullets. Instead, we need to rely much more on the processes of experimentation and discovery. A key influence on behaviour in many social and economic contexts is the prevailing social norm in the relevant network, which emerges from the interactions of the individuals who comprise the network. But there are no levers, no magic buttons to press, which will guarantee that social norms can be altered in ways which the policymaker desires. We can only discover what works by experiment.
This does not mean that we are operating in the dark, that the success or otherwise of a policy is merely a matter of chance. The more knowledge we have of how people are connected on the relevant network, of who might influence whom and when, the more chance a policy has of succeeding. Much of this knowledge is held at decentralised levels in tacit form, a form which is hard or even impossible to codify. But it is crucial to how most social and economic systems work in practice.
Our current political institutions are to a large extent based on the vision of society and the economy operating like machines, populated by economically rational agents. This view of the world leads to centralised bureaucracies and centralised decision-making. We live in a society where decisions are made through several layers of bureaucracy, in both the public and private sectors. On the whole, this leads to decisions that are insensitive to local (micro) conditions, and which are insensitive to society as it changes.
A lack of both resilience and robustness is a characteristic feature of such approaches to social and economic management. Structures, rules, regulations, incentives are put in place in the belief that a desired outcome can be achieved, that a potential crisis can be predicted and forestalled by such policies. As the recent financial crisis illustrates only too well, this view of the world is ill-suited to creating systems which are resilient when unexpected shocks occur, and which exhibit robustness in their ability to recover from the shock. The focus of policy needs to shift away from prediction and control. We can never predict the unpredictable. Instead, we need systems which exhibit resilience and robustness together with the ability to adapt and respond well to unpredictable future events….(More) Adapted from Complex New World: Translating new economic thinking into public policy, published by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).
MapSwipe
Pete Masters at MissingMaps: “Downloading MapSwipe means that in a matter of minutes you can contribute to the work being done around the world by MSF, the Red Cross and others, and all from the comfort of your own phone!
In a humanitarian crisis, the location of the most vulnerable people is fundamental information for delivering food, shelter, medical care and other services where they are most needed. And, although it may be hard to believe, millions people around the world are not represented on any accessible map.
Part of the Missing Maps project, MapSwipe enables anyone with a smartphone to contribute to the mapping of these vulnerable communities.Download the app, choose a mission, read the instructions and get started! One tap identifies features, a second tap indicates possible features (if you’re not sure) and a third flags cloudy or bad quality imagery areas. If there is nothing to identify, just swipe to the next image! You can download imagery for offline MapSwiping on an underground train or plane, so say goodbye to your wasted commuter hours on Candy Crush or Angry Birds!
Screenshots from MapSwipe
Developed by Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors Without Borders (MSF), MapSwipe serves a direct purpose for NGOs. For example, when MSF responds to major disease outbreaks with mass vaccination campaigns, hundreds of teams have to cover enormous areas (as in the measles outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo last year). Now, with MapSwipe, we can give vaccination campaign coordinators a super-fast snapshot of where the population clusters are, helping them to send their teams to the locations where they are most needed to achieve maximum vaccination coverage.
The Missing Maps project is a collaborative project in which a large and committed community of NGOs, academic institutes, companies and most of all individual mappers map vulnerable areas in OpenStreetMap. By using MapSwipe to identify where communities are located, you also give these mappers the ability to use their talents to map the towns and villages in these areas without having to search through miles of jungle and bush to find them, saving time and helping to put valuable data into the hands of field teams even faster….(More)”
Understanding Institutions: The Science and Philosophy of Living Together
New book by Francesco Guala: “Understanding Institutions proposes a new unified theory of social institutions that combines the best insights of philosophers and social scientists who have written on this topic. Francesco Guala presents a theory that combines the features of three influential views of institutions: as equilibria of strategic games, as regulative rules, and as constitutive rules.
Guala explains key institutions like money, private property, and marriage, and develops a much-needed unification of equilibrium- and rules-based approaches. Although he uses game theory concepts, the theory is presented in a simple, clear style that is accessible to a wide audience of scholars working in different fields. Outlining and discussing various implications of the unified theory, Guala addresses venerable issues such as reflexivity, realism, Verstehen, and fallibilism in the social sciences. He also critically analyses the theory of “looping effects” and “interactive kinds” defended by Ian Hacking, and asks whether it is possible to draw a demarcation between social and natural science using the criteria of causal and ontological dependence. Focusing on current debates about the definition of marriage, Guala shows how these abstract philosophical issues have important practical and political consequences.
Moving beyond specific cases to general models and principles, Understanding Institutions offers new perspectives on what institutions are, how they work, and what they can do for us….(More)”
Building a Civic Tech Sector to Last: Design Principles to Generate a Civic Tech Movement
Stefaan G. Verhulst at Positive Returns (Medium): “Over the last few years we have seen growing recognition of the potential of “civic tech,” or the use of technology that “empowers citizens to make government more accessible, efficient and effective (definition provided in “Engines of Change”)”. One commentator recently described “civic tech as the next big thing.” At the same time, we are yet to witness a true tech-enabled transformation of how government works and how citizens engage with institutions and with each other to solve societal problems. In many ways, civic tech still operates under the radar screen and often lacks broad acceptance. So how do we accelerate and expand the civic tech sector? How can we build a civic tech field that can last and stand the test of time?
The “Engines of Change” report written for Omidyar Network by Purpose seeks to provide an answer to these questions in the context of the United States….
Given the new insights gained from the report, how to move forward? How to translate its findings into a strategy that seeks to improve people’s lives and addresses societal problems by leveraging technology? What emerges from reading the report, and reflecting on how fields and movements have been built in other areas (e.g., the digital learning movement by theMacArthur Foundation or the Hewlett Foundation’s efforts to build a conflict resolution field), are a set of design principles that, when applied consistently, may generate a true lasting civic tech movement. These principles include:
- Define a common problem that matters enough to work on collectively and identify a unique opportunity to solve it. Most successful movements seek to solve hard problems. So what is the problem that civic tech seeks to address? …
- Encourage experimentation. As it stands, there is no shortage of experimentation with new platforms and tools in the civic tech space.What is missing, however, is the type of assessment that uncovers whether or not such efforts are actually working, and why or why not. Rather than viewing experimentation as simply “trying new things,” the field could embrace “fast-cycle action research” to understand both more quickly, and more precisely, when an innovation works, for whom, and under what conditions.
- Establish an evidence base and a common set of metrics. While there is good reason to believe that breakthrough solutions may come from using technology, there are still too little studies measuring exactly how impactful civic tech is. Without a deeper understanding of whether, when, why and to what extent an intervention has made an impact, the civic tech movement will lack credibility. To accelerate the rate of experimentation and create more agile institutions capable of piloting civic tech solutions, we need research that will enable the sector to move away from “faith-based” initiatives toward “evidence-based” ones. The TicTec conference, the Opening Governance Research Network and the recently launched Open Governance Research Exchange are some initiatives that seek to address this shortcoming. Yet more analysis and translation of current findings into clear baselines of impact against common metrics is needed to make the sector more reliable.
- Develop a Network Infrastructure…
- Identify the signal…
As every engineer knows, building engines requires a set of basic design principles. Similarly, transforming the civic tech sector into a sustainable engine of change may require the implementation of the principles outlined above. Let’s build a civic tech sector to last….(More)”
How technology disrupted the truth
Katharine Viner in The Guardian: “Social media has swallowed the news – threatening the funding of public-interest reporting and ushering in an era when everyone has their own facts. But the consequences go far beyond journalism…
When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and “facts” that are not. The leave campaign was well aware of this – and took full advantage, safe in the knowledge that the Advertising Standards Authority has no power to police political claims. A few days after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side knew all along that facts would not win the day. “It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”
It was little surprise that some people were shocked after the result to discover that Brexit might have serious consequences and few of the promised benefits. When “facts don’t work” and voters don’t trust the media, everyone believes in their own “truth” – and the results, as we have just seen, can be devastating.
How did we end up here? And how do we fix it?
Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.
Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour, kindness and cruelty; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.
What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.
Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). A dubious story about Cameron and a pig appears in a tabloid one morning, and by noon, it has flown around the world on social media and turned up in trusted news sources everywhere. This may seem like a small matter, but its consequences are enormous.
In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true. “The Truth”, as Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie wrote in Stick It Up Your Punter!, their history of the Sun newspaper, is a “bald statement which every newspaper prints at its peril”. There are usually several conflicting truths on any given subject, but in the era of the printing press, words on a page nailed things down, whether they turned out to be true or not. The information felt like the truth, at least until the next day brought another update or a correction, and we all shared a common set of facts.
This settled “truth” was usually handed down from above: an established truth, often fixed in place by an establishment. This arrangement was not without flaws: too much of the press often exhibited a bias towards the status quo and a deference to authority, and it was prohibitively difficult for ordinary people to challenge the power of the press. Now, people distrust much of what is presented as fact – particularly if the facts in question are uncomfortable, or out of sync with their own views – and while some of that distrust is misplaced, some of it is not.
In the digital age, it is easier than ever to publish false information, which is quickly shared and taken to be true – as we often see in emergency situations, when news is breaking in real time. To pick one example among many, during the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, rumours quickly spread on social media that the Louvre and Pompidou Centre had been hit, and that François Hollande had suffered a stroke. Trusted news organisations are needed to debunk such tall tales.
Sometimes rumours like these spread out of panic, sometimes out of malice, and sometimes deliberate manipulation, in which a corporation or regime pays people to convey their message. Whatever the motive, falsehoods and facts now spread the same way, through what academics call an “information cascade”. As the legal scholar and online-harassment expert Danielle Citron describes it, “people forward on what others think, even if the information is false, misleading or incomplete, because they think they have learned something valuable.” This cycle repeats itself, and before you know it, the cascade has unstoppable momentum. You share a friend’s post on Facebook, perhaps to show kinship or agreement or that you’re “in the know”, and thus you increase the visibility of their pot to others.
Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook’s news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want – which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. When Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Upworthy, coined the term “filter bubble” in 2011, he was talking about how the personalised web – and in particular Google’s personalised search function, which means that no two people’s Google searches are the same – means that we are less likely to be exposed to information that challenges us or broadens our worldview, and less likely to encounter facts that disprove false information that others have shared.
Pariser’s plea, at the time, was that those running social media platforms should ensure that “their algorithms prioritise countervailing views and news that’s important, not just the stuff that’s most popular or most self-validating”. But in less than five years, thanks to the incredible power of a few social platforms, the filter bubble that Pariser described has become much more extreme.
On the day after the EU referendum, in a Facebook post, the British internet activist and mySociety founder, Tom Steinberg, provided a vivid illustration of the power of the filter bubble – and the serious civic consequences for a world where information flows largely through social networks:
I am actively searching through Facebook for people celebrating the Brexit leave victory, but the filter bubble is SO strong, and extends SO far into things like Facebook’s custom search that I can’t find anyone who is happy *despite the fact that over half the country is clearly jubilant today* and despite the fact that I’m *actively* looking to hear what they are saying.
This echo-chamber problem is now SO severe and SO chronic that I can only beg any friends I have who actually work for Facebook and other major social media and technology to urgently tell their leaders that to not act on this problem now is tantamount to actively supporting and funding the tearing apart of the fabric of our societies … We’re getting countries where one half just doesn’t know anything at all about the other.
But asking technology companies to “do something” about the filter bubble presumes that this is a problem that can be easily fixed – rather than one baked into the very idea of social networks that are designed to give you what you and your friends want to see….(More)”