The Perils of Using Technology to Solve Other People’s Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ethan Zuckerman in The Atlantic: “I found Shane Snow’s essay on prison reform — “How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix the Prison System” — through hate-linking….

Some of my hate-linking friends began their eye-rolling about Snow’s article with the title, which references two of Silicon Valley’s most hyped technologies. With the current focus on the U.S. as an “innovation economy,” it’s common to read essays predicting the end of a major social problem due to a technical innovation.Bitcoin will end poverty in the developing world by enabling inexpensive money transfers. Wikipedia and One Laptop Per Child will educate the world’s poor without need for teachers or schools. Self driving cars will obviate public transport and reshape American cities.

The writer Evgeny Morozov has offered a sharp and helpful critique to this mode of thinking, which he calls “solutionism.” Solutionism demands that we focus on problems that have “nice and clean technological solution at our disposal.” In his book, To Save Everything, Click Here, Morozov savages ideas like Snow’s, regardless of whether they are meant as thought experiments or serious policy proposals. (Indeed, one worry I have in writing this essay is taking Snow’s ideas too seriously, as Morozov does with many of the ideas he lambastes in his book.)

The problem with the solutionist critique, though, is that it tends to remove technological innovation from the problem-solver’s toolkit. In fact, technological development is often a key component in solving complex social and political problems, and new technologies can sometimes open a previously intractable problem. The rise of inexpensive solar panels may be an opportunity to move nations away from a dependency on fossil fuels and begin lowering atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, much as developments in natural gas extraction and transport technologies have lessened the use of dirtier fuels like coal.

But it’s rare that technology provides a robust solution to a social problem by itself. Successful technological approaches to solving social problems usually require changes in laws and norms, as well as market incentives to make change at scale….

Design philosophies like participatory design and codesign bring this concept to the world of technology, demanding that technologies designed for a group of people be designed and built, in part, by those people. Codesign challenges many of the assumptions of engineering, requiring people who are used to working in isolation to build broad teams and to understand that those most qualified to offer a technical solution may be least qualified to identify a need or articulate a design problem. This method is hard and frustrating, but it’s also one of the best ways to ensure that you’re solving the right problem, rather than imposing your preferred solution on a situation…(More)”

This text-message hotline can predict your risk of depression or stress

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Clinton Nguyen for TechInsider: “When counselors are helping someone in the midst of an emotional crisis, they must not only know how to talk – they also must be willing to text.

Crisis Text Line, a non-profit text-message-based counseling service, operates a hotline for people who find it safer or easier to text about their problems than make a phone call or send an instant message. Over 1,500 volunteers are on hand 24/7 to lend support about problems including bullying, isolation, suicidal thoughts, bereavement, self-harm, or even just stress.

But in addition to providing a new outlet for those who prefer to communicate by text, the service is gathering a wellspring of anonymized data.

“We look for patterns in historical conversations that end up being higher risk for self harm and suicide attempts,” Liz Eddy, a Crisis Text Line spokesperson, tells Tech Insider. “By grounding in historical data, we can predict the risk of new texters coming in.crisis-text-line-sms

According to Fortune, the organization is using machine learning to prioritize higher-risk individuals for quicker and more effective responses. But Crisis Text Line is also wielding the data it gathers in other ways – the company has published a page of trends that tells the public which hours or days people are more likely to be affected by certain issues, as well as which US states are most affected by specific crises or psychological states.

According to the data, residents of Alaska reach out to the Text Line for LGBTQ issues more than those in other states, and Maine is one of the most stressed out states. Physical abuse is most commonly reported in North Dakota and Wyoming, while depression is more prevalent in texters from Kentucky and West Virginia.

The research comes at an especially critical time. According to studies from the National Center for Health Statistics, US suicide rates have surged to a 30-year high. The study noted a rise in suicide rates for all demographics except black men over the age of 75. Alarmingly, the suicide rate among 10- to 14-year-old girls has tripled since 1999….(More)”

The Billions We’re Wasting in Our Jails

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stephen Goldsmith  and Jane Wiseman in Governing: “By using data analytics to make decisions about pretrial detention, local governments could find substantial savings while making their communities safer….

Few areas of local government spending present better opportunities for dramatic savings than those that surround pretrial detention. Cities and counties are wasting more than $3 billion a year, and often inducing crime and job loss, by holding the wrong people while they await trial. The problem: Only 10 percent of jurisdictions use risk data analytics when deciding which defendants should be detained.

As a result, dangerous people are out in our communities, while many who could be safely in the community are behind bars. Vast numbers of people accused of petty offenses spend their pretrial detention time jailed alongside hardened convicts, learning from them how to be better criminals….

In this era of big data, analytics not only can predict and prevent crime but also can discern who should be diverted from jail to treatment for underlying mental health or substance abuse issues. Avoided costs aggregating in the billions could be better spent on detaining high-risk individuals, more mental health and substance abuse treatment, more police officers and other public safety services.

Jurisdictions that do use data to make pretrial decisions have achieved not only lower costs but also greater fairness and lower crime rates. Washington, D.C., releases 85 percent of defendants awaiting trial. Compared to the national average, those released in D.C. are two and a half times more likely to remain arrest-free and one and a half times as likely to show up for court.

Louisville, Ky., implemented risk-based decision-making using a tool developed by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and now releases 70 percent of defendants before trial. Those released have turned out to be twice as likely to return to court and to stay arrest-free as those in other jurisdictions. Mesa County, Colo., and Allegheny County, Pa., both have achieved significant savings from reduced jail populations due to data-driven release of low-risk defendants.

Data-driven approaches are beginning to produce benefits not only in the area of pretrial detention but throughout the criminal justice process. Dashboards now in use in a handful of jurisdictions allow not only administrators but also the public to see court waiting times by offender type and to identify and address processing bottlenecks….(More)”

Post, Mine, Repeat: Social Media Data Mining Becomes Ordinary

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Helen Kennedy that “…argues that as social media data mining becomes more and more ordinary, as we post, mine and repeat, new data relations emerge. These new data relations are characterised by a widespread desire for numbers and the troubling consequences of this desire, and also by the possibility of doing good with data and resisting data power, by new and old concerns, and by instability and contradiction. Drawing on action research with public sector organisations, interviews with commercial social insights companies and their clients, focus groups with social media users and other research, Kennedy provides a fascinating and detailed account of living with social media data mining inside the organisations that make up the fabric of everyday life….(More)”

The Ideal Digital City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Digital Communities Special Report: “With urban areas continuing to grow at a substantial rate — from 30 percent of the world’s population in 1930 to a projected 66 percent by 2050, according to the United Nations — getting the urban experience right has become paramount. To help understand the building blocks to a successful digital city, The Digital Communities Special Report looks at five key technologies — broadband, open data, GIS, CRM and analytics — and provides a window into how they are helping city governments cope with economic, educational and societal demands.

The good news is that these essential technologies are getting cheaper, faster and better all the time. But technologies like these still cost money, need talent to run them and are dependent on the right policies if they are going to succeed. In other words, digital cities need smart thinking in order to work. Part one of this series examines the importance of broadband as a critical infrastructure and the challenges cities face in reaching universal adoption.

Part 1 | Broadband: 21st Century Infrastructure

Part 2 | Open Data & APIs: Collecting and Consuming What Cities Produce

Part 3 | GIS: An Established Technology Finds New Purpose

Part 4 | Customer Relationship Management: Diversity in Service

Part 5 | Analytics: Making Sense of City Data…(More)”

Civic Data Initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Burak Arikan at Medium: “Big data is the term used to define the perpetual and massive data gathered by corporations and governments on consumers and citizens. When the subject of data is not necessarily individuals but governments and companies themselves, we can call it civic data, and when systematically generated in large amounts, civic big data. Increasingly, a new generation of initiatives are generating and organizing structured data on particular societal issues from human rights violations, to auditing government budgets, from labor crimes to climate justice.

These civic data initiatives diverge from the traditional civil society organizations in their outcomes,that they don’t just publish their research as reports, but also open it to the public as a database.Civic data initiatives are quite different in their data work than international non-governmental organizations such as UN, OECD, World Bank and other similar bodies. Such organizations track social, economical, political conditions of countries and concentrate upon producing general statistical data, whereas civic data initiatives aim to produce actionable data on issues that impact individuals directly. The change in the GDP value of a country is useless for people struggling for free transportation in their city. Incarceration rate of a country does not help the struggle of the imprisoned journalists. Corruption indicators may serve as a parameter in a country’s credit score, but does not help to resolve monopolization created with public procurement. Carbon emission statistics do not prevent the energy deals between corrupt governments that destroy the nature in their region.

Partnership / financing network of oil refinery and thermal power plants around SOCAR (The State Oil Company of Azerbaijan). Data mapping by Network of Dispossession.

Needless to say, civic data initiatives also differ from governmental institutions, which are reluctant to share any more that they are legally obligated to. Many governments in the world simply dump scanned hardcopies of documents on official websites instead of releasing machine-readable data, which prevents systematic auditing of government activities.Civic data initiatives, on the other hand, make it a priority to structure and release their data in formats that are both accessible and queryable.

Civic data initiatives also deviate from general purpose information commons such as Wikipedia. Because they consistently engage with problems, closely watch a particular societal issue, make frequent updates,even record from the field to generate and organize highly granular data about the matter….

Several civic data initiatives generate data on variety of issues at different geographies, scopes, and scales. The non-exhaustive list below have information on founders, data sources, and financial support. It is sorted according to each initiative’s founding year. Please send your suggestions to contact at graphcommons.com. See more detailed information and updates on the spreadsheet of civic data initiatives.

Open Secrets tracks data about the money flow in the US government, so it becomes more accessible for journalists, researchers, and advocates.Founded as a non-profit in 1983 by Center for Responsive Politics, gets support from variety of institutions.

PolitiFact is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics. Uses on-the-record interviews as its data source. Founded in 2007 as a non-profit organization by Tampa Bay Times. Supported by Democracy Fund, Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, FordFoundation, Knight Foundation, Craigslist Charitable Fund, and the CollinsCenter for Public Policy…..

La Fabrique de La loi (The Law Factory) maps issues of local-regional socio-economic development, public investments, and ecology in France.Started in 2014, the project builds a database by tracking bills from government sources, provides a search engine as well as an API. The partners of the project are CEE Sciences Po, médialab Sciences Po, RegardsCitoyens, and Density Design.

Mapping Media Freedom identifies threats, violations and limitations faced by members of the press throughout European Union member states,candidates for entry and neighbouring countries. Initiated by Index onCensorship and European Commission in 2004, the project…(More)”

Social Networks and Protest Participation: Evidence from 93 Million Twitter Users

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jennifer Larson et al for Political Networks Workshops & Conference 2016: “Pinning down the role of social ties in the decision to protest has been notoriously elusive, largely due to data limitations. The era of social media and its global use by protesters offers an unprecedented opportunity to observe real-time social ties and online behavior, though often without an attendant measure of real-world behavior. We collect data on Twitter activity during the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protests in Paris which, unusually, record both real-world protest attendance and high-resolution network structure. We specify a theory of participation in which an individual’s decision depends on her exposure to others’ intentions, and network position determines exposure. Our findings are strong and consistent with this theory, showing that, relative to comparable Twitter users, protesters are significantly more connected to one another via direct, indirect, triadic, and reciprocated ties. These results offer the first large-scale empirical support for the claim that social network structure influences protest participation….(More)’

The Racist Algorithm?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anupam Chander in the Michigan Law Review (2017 Forthcoming) : “Are we on the verge of an apartheid by algorithm? Will the age of big data lead to decisions that unfairly favor one race over others, or men over women? At the dawn of the Information Age, legal scholars are sounding warnings about the ubiquity of automated algorithms that increasingly govern our lives. In his new book, The Black Box Society: The Hidden Algorithms Behind Money and Information, Frank Pasquale forcefully argues that human beings are increasingly relying on computerized algorithms that make decisions about what information we receive, how much we can borrow, where we go for dinner, or even whom we date. Pasquale’s central claim is that these algorithms will mask invidious discrimination, undermining democracy and worsening inequality. In this review, I rebut this prominent claim. I argue that any fair assessment of algorithms must be made against their alternative. Algorithms are certainly obscure and mysterious, but often no more so than the committees or individuals they replace. The ultimate black box is the human mind. Relying on contemporary theories of unconscious discrimination, I show that the consciously racist or sexist algorithm is less likely than the consciously or unconsciously racist or sexist human decision-maker it replaces. The principal problem of algorithmic discrimination lies elsewhere, in a process I label viral discrimination: algorithms trained or operated on a world pervaded by discriminatory effects are likely to reproduce that discrimination.

I argue that the solution to this problem lies in a kind of algorithmic affirmative action. This would require training algorithms on data that includes diverse communities and continually assessing the results for disparate impacts. Instead of insisting on race or gender neutrality and blindness, this would require decision-makers to approach algorithmic design and assessment in a race and gender conscious manner….(More)“

What Can Civic Tech Learn From Social Movements?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stacy Donohue at Omidyar Network: “…In order to spur creative thinking about how the civic tech sector could be accelerated and expanded, we looked to Purpose, a public benefit corporation that works with NGOs, philanthropies, and brands on movement building strategies. We wanted to explore what we might learn from taking the work that Purpose has done mapping the progress of of 21st century social movements and applying its methodology to civic tech.

So why consider viewing civic tech using the lens of 21st century movements? Movements are engines of change in society that enable citizens to create new and better paths to engage with government and to seek recourse on issues that matter to millions of people.  At first glance, civic tech doesn’t appear to be a movement in the purest sense of the term, but on closer inspection, it does share some fundamental characteristics. Like a movement, civic tech is mission driven, is focused on making change that benefits the public, and in most cases enables better public input into decision making.

We believe that better understanding the essential components of movements, and observing the ways in which civic tech does or does not behave like one, can yield insights on how we as a civic tech community can collectively drive the sector forward….

report Engines of Change: What Civic Tech Can Learn From Social Movements….provides a lot of rich insight and detail which we invite everyone to explore.  Meanwhile, we have summarized five key findings:

  1. Grassroots activity is expanding across the US – Activity is no longer centralized around San Francisco and New York; it’s rapidly growing and spreading across the US – in fact, there was an 81% increase in the number of cities hosting civic tech MeetUps from 2013 to 2015, and 45 of 50 states had at least one MeetUp on civic tech in 2015.
  2. Talk is turning to action – We are walking the talk. One way we can see this is that growth in civic tech Twitter discussion is highly correlated with the growth in GitHub contributions to civic tech projects and related Meetup events. Between 2013-2015, over 8,500 people contributed code to GitHub civic tech projects and there were over 76,000 MeetUps for civic tech events. 
  3. There is an engaged core, but it is very small in number – As with most social movements, civic tech has a definite core of highly engaged evangelists, advocates and entrepreneurs that are driving conversations, activity, and events and this is growing. The number of Meetup groups holding multiple events a quarter grew by 136% between 2013 to 2015. And likewise there was a 60% growth in Engaged Tweeters in during this time period.  However, this level of activity is dwarfed by other movements such as climate action.
  4. Civic tech is growing but still lacking scale – There are many positive indications of growth in civic tech; for example, the combination of nonprofit and for-profit funding to the sector increased by almost 120% over the period.  But while growth compares favorably to other movements, again the scale just isn’t there.
  5. Common themes, but no shared vision or identity – Purpose examined the extent to which civic tech exhibits and articulates a shared vision or identity around which members of a movement can rally. What they found is that many fewer people are discussing the same shared set of themes. Two themes – Open Data and Government Transparency – are resonating and gaining traction across the sector and could therefore form the basis of common identity for civic tech.

While each of these insights is important in its own right and requires action to move the sector forward, the main thing that strikes us is the need for a coherent and clearly articulated vision and sense of shared identity for civic tech…

Read the full report: Engines of Change: What Civic Tech Can Learn From Social Movements

Explore the data tool here….(More)”

City of Copenhagen launches data marketplace

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Wray at TMForum: “The City of Copenhagen has launched its City Data Exchange to make public and private data accessible to power innovation.

The City Data Exchange is a new service to create a ‘marketplace for data’ from public and private data providers and allow monetization. The platform has been developed by Hitachi Insight Group.

“Data is the fuel powering our digital world, but in most cities it is unused,” said Hans Lindeman, Senior Vice President, Hitachi Insight Group, EMEA. “Even where data sits in public, freely accessible databases, the cost of extracting and processing it can easily outweigh the benefits.”

The City of Copenhagen is using guidelines for a data format that is safe, secure, ensures privacy and makes data easy to use. The City Data Exchange will only accept data that has been fully anonymized by the data supplier, for example.

According to Hitachi Insight Group, “All of this spares organizations the trouble and cost of extracting and processing data from multiple sources. At the same time, proprietary data can now become a business resource that can be monetized outside an organization.”

As a way to demonstrate how data from the City Data Exchange could be used in applications, Hitachi Insight Group is developing two applications:

  • Journey Insight, which helps citizens in the region to track their transportation usage over time and understand the carbon footprint of their travel
  • Energy Insight, which allows both households and businesses to see how much energy they use.

Both are set for public launch later this year.

Another example of how data marketplaces can enable innovation is the Mind My Business mobile app, developed by Vizalytics. It brings together all the data that can affect a retailer — from real-time information on how construction or traffic issues can hurt the footfall of a business, to timely reminders about taxes to pay or new regulations to meet. The “survival app for shopkeepers” makes full use of all the relevant data sources brought together by the City Data Exchange.

The platform will offer data in different categories such as: city life, infrastructure, climate and environment, business data and economy, demographics, housing and buildings, and utilities usage. It aims to meet the needs of local government, city planners, architects, retailers, telecoms networks, utilities, and all other companies and organizations who want to understand what makes Copenhagen, its businesses and its citizens tick.

“Smart cities need smart insights, and that’s only possible if everybody has all the facts at their disposal. The City Data Exchange makes that possible; it’s the solution that will help us all to create better public spaces and — for companies in Copenhagen — to offer better services and create jobs,” said Frank Jensen, the Lord Mayor of Copenhagen.

The City Data Exchange is currently offering raw data to its customers, and later this year will add analytical tools. The cost of gathering and processing the data will be recovered through subscription and service fees, which are expected to be much lower than the cost any company or city would face in performing the work of extracting, collecting and integrating the data by themselves….(More)”