DATA – Page 499 – The Living Library

The Tragedy of the Digital Commons

Curated on June 9, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

J. Nathan Matias in the Atlantic: “….Milland and other regular Turkers navigate this precariously free market withTurkopticon, a DIY technology for rating employers created in 2008. To use it, workers install a browser plugin that extends Amazon’s website with special rating features. Before accepting a new task, workers check how others have rated the employer. After finishing, they can also leave their own rating of how well they were treated. Collective rating on Turkopticon is an act of citizenship in the digital world. This digital citizenship acknowledges that online experiences are as much a part of our common life as our schools, sidewalks, and rivers—requiring as much stewardship, vigilance, and improvement as anything else we share.

“How do you fix a broken system that isn’t yours to repair?” That’s the question that motivated the researchers Lilly Irani and Six Silberman to create Turkopticon, and it’s one that comes up frequently in digital environments dominated by large platforms with hands-off policies. (On social networks like Twitter, for example, harassment is a problem for many users.) Irani and Silberman describe Turkopticon as a “mutual aid for accountability” technology, a system that coordinates peer support to hold others accountable when platforms choose not to step in.

Mutual aid accountability is a growing response to the complex social problems people face online. On Twitter, systems like The Block Bot and BlockTogether coordinate collective judgments about alleged online harassers. The systems then collectively block tweets from accounts that a group prefers not to hear from. Last month, the advocacy organization Hollaback raised over $20,000 on Kickstarter to create support networks for people experiencing harassment. In November, I worked with the advocacy organization Women, Action, and the Media, which took a role as “authorized reporter” with Twitter. For three weeks WAM! accepted reports, sorted evidence, and forwarded serious cases to Twitter. In response, the company warned, suspended, and deleted the accounts of many alleged harassers.
These mutual aid technologies operate in the shadow of larger systems with gaps in how people are supported—even when platforms do step in, says Stuart Geiger, a Berkeley Ph.D. student. In other words, sometimes a platform’s system-wide solutions to a problem can create their own problems. For several years, Geiger and his colleague Aaron Halfaker, now a researcher at Wikimedia, were concerned that Wikipedia’s semi-automated anti-vandalism systems might be making the site unfriendly. As a graduate student unable to change Wikipedia’s code, Halfaker created Snuggle, a mutual-aid mentorship technology that tracks the site’s spam responders. When Snuggle users think a newcomer’s edits were mistakenly flagged as spam, the software coordinates Wikipedians to help those users recover from the negative experience of getting revoked.

By organizing peer support at scale, the designers of Turkopticon and its cousins draw attention to common problems, hoping to influence longer-term change on a complex issue. In time, the idea goes, requesters on Mechanical Turk might change their treatment of workers, Amazon might change its policies and software, or regulators might set new rules for digital labor. This is an approach with a long history in an area that might seem unlikely: the conservation movement. (Silberman and Irani cite the movement as inspiration for Turkopticon.)

To better understand how this approach might influence digital citizenship, I followed the history of mutual-aid accountability in a precious common network that the city of Boston enjoys every day: the Charles River. Planned, re-routed, exploited and contested, it has inspired and supported human life since before written history….(More)”

Why it is time to redesign our political system?

Curated on June 8, 2015October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Pia Mancini: “Modern political systems are out of sync with the times we are living in. While the Internet allows us unprecedented access to information, low costs for collaborating and participating, and the ability to express our desires, demands and concerns, our input in policymaking is limited to voting once every two to five years. Innovative tools, both online and offline, are needed to upgrade our democracies. Society needs instruments and processes that allow it to choose how it is governed. Institutions have to be established that reflect today’s technological, cultural and social realities and values. These institutions must be able to generate trust and provide mechanisms for social debate and collaboration, as well as social feedback loops that can accelerate institutionalised change….(More)”

Social Dimensions of Privacy

Curated on June 8, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Dorota Mokrosinska and Beate Roessler: “Written by a select international group of leading privacy scholars, Social Dimensions of Privacy endorses and develops an innovative approach to privacy. By debating topical privacy cases in their specific research areas, the contributors explore the new privacy-sensitive areas: legal scholars and political theorists discuss the European and American approaches to privacy regulation; sociologists explore new forms of surveillance and privacy on social network sites; and philosophers revisit feminist critiques of privacy, discuss markets in personal data, issues of privacy in health care and democratic politics. The broad interdisciplinary character of the volume will be of interest to readers from a variety of scientific disciplines who are concerned with privacy and data protection issues.

Takes an innovative approach to privacy which focuses on the social dimensions and value of privacy in contrast to the value of privacy for individuals
Addresses readers from a variety of disciplines, including law, philosophy, media studies, gender studies and political science
Addresses new privacy-sensitive areas triggered by recent technological developments (More)”

Shedding light on government, one dataset at a time

Curated on June 7, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Bill Below of the OECD Directorate for Public Governance and Territorial Development at OECD Insights: “…As part of its Open Government Data (OGD) work, the OECD has created OURdata, an index that assesses governments’ efforts to implement OGD in three critical areas: Openness, Usefulness and Re-usability. The results are promising. Those countries that began the process in earnest some five years ago, today rank very high on the scale. According to this Index, which closely follows the principles of the G8 Open Data Charter, Korea is leading the implementation of OGD initiatives with France a close second.

Those who have started the process but who are lagging (such as Poland) can draw on the experience of other OECD countries, and benefit from a clear roadmap to guide them.

Indeed, bringing one’s own country’s weaknesses out into the light is the first, and sometimes most courageous, step towards achieving the benefits of OGD. Poland has just completed its Open Government Data country review with the OECD revealing some sizable challenges ahead in transforming the internal culture of its institutions. For the moment, a supply-side rather than people-driven approach to data release is prevalent. Also, OGD in Poland is not widely understood to be a source of value creation and growth….(More)”

Data Reinvents Libraries for the 21st Century

Curated on June 7, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Shueh in GovTech: “Libraries can evoke tired assumptions. It could be a stack of battered books and yesteryear movies; that odd odor of wilted pages and circa-1970s decor; or it could be a bout of stereotypes, like obsolete encyclopedias and ruler-snapping librarians.

Whatever the case, the truth is that today libraries are proving they’re more than mausoleums of old knowledge. They’re in a state of progressive reform, rethinking services and restructuring with data. It’s a national trend as libraries modernize, strategize and recast themselves as digital platforms. They’ve taken on the role of data curator for information coming in and citizen-generated data going out….

Nate Hill is among this band of progressives. As a data zealot who believes in data’s inclination for innovation, the former deputy director for Tennessee’s Chattanooga Public Library, led a charge to transform the library into a data centric community hub. The library boasts an open data portal that it manages for the city, a civic hacker lab, a makerspace for community projects, and expanded access to in-person and online tutorials for coding and other digital skill sets….

The draw in data sharing and creating, Hill said, comes from the realization that today’s data channels are no longer one-way systems.

“I push people to the idea that now it’s about being a producer rather than just a consumer,” Hill said, “because really that whole idea of a read-write Web comes from the notion that you and I, for example, are just as capable at editing Wikipedia articles on the fly and changing information as anybody else.”

For libraries, Hill sees this as an opportunity and asks what institution can better pioneer the new frontier of information exchange. He posits the idea that, as the original public content curator, adding open data to libraries is only natural. In fact, he says it’s a logical next step when considering that traditional media like books, research journals and other sources infuse data points with rich context — something most city and state open data portals typically don’t do.

“The dream here is to treat the library as a different kind of community infrastructure,” Hill said. “You can conceivably be feeding live data about a city into an open data portal, and at the same time, turning the library into a real live information source — rather than something just static.”

In Chattanooga, an ongoing effort is in the works to do just that. The library seeks to integrate open data into its library catalog searches. Visitors researching Chattanooga’s waterfront could do a quick search and pull up local books, articles and mapping documents, but also a collection of latest data sets on water pollution and land use, for example.

Eyeing the library data movement at scale, Hill said he could easily envision a network of public libraries that act as local data hubs, retrieving and funneling data into larger state and national data portals….(More).

A Research Roadmap for Human Computation

Curated on June 5, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv : “The wisdom of the crowd has become so powerful and so accessible via the Internet that it has become a resource in its own right. Various services now tap into this rich supply of human cognition, such as Wikipedia, Duolingo, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

So important is this resource that scientists have given it a name; they call it human computation. And a rapidly emerging and increasingly important question is how best to exploit it.

Today, we get an answer of sorts thanks to a group of computer scientists, crowdsourcing pioneers, and visionaries who have created a roadmap for research into human computation. The team, led by Pietro Michelucci at the Human Computation Institute, point out that human computation systems have been hugely successful at tackling complex problems from identifying spiral galaxies to organizing disaster relief.

But their potential is even greater still, provided that human cognition can be efficiently harnessed on a global scale. Last year, they met to discuss these issues and have now published the results of their debate.

The begin by pointing out the extraordinary successes of human computation….then describe the kinds of projects they want to create. They call one idea Project Houston after the crowdsourced effort on the ground that helped bring back the Apollo 13 astronauts after an on-board explosion on the way to the moon.

Their idea is that similar help can be brought to bear from around the world when individuals on earth find themselves in trouble. By this they mean individuals who might be considering suicide or suffering from depression, for example.

The plan is to use state-of-the-art speech analysis and natural language understanding to detect stress and offer help. This would come in the form of composite personalities made up from individuals with varying levels of expertise in the crowd, supported by artificial intelligence techniques. “Project Houston could provide a consistently kind and patient personality even if the “crowd” changes completely over time,” they say.

Another idea is to build on the way that crowdsourcing helps people learn. One example of this is Duolingo, an app that offers free language lessons while simultaneously acting as a document translation service. “Why stop with language learning and translation?” they ask.

A similar approach could help people learn new skills as they work online, a process that should allow them to take on more complex roles. One example is in the field of radiology, where an important job is to recognize tumors on x-ray images. This is a task that machine vision algorithms do not yet perform reliably…..

Yet another idea would be to crowdsource information that helps the poorest families in America find social welfare programs. These programs are often difficult to navigate and represent a disproportionate hardship for the people who are most likely to benefit from them: those who are homeless, who have disabilities, who are on low income, and so on.

The idea is that the crowd should take on some of this burden freeing up this group for other tasks, like finding work, managing health problems and so on.

These are worthy goals but they raise some significant questions. Chief among these is the nature of the ethical, legal, and social implications of human computation. How can this work be designed to allow meaningful and dignified human participation? How can the outcomes be designed so that the most vulnerable people can benefit from it? And what is the optimal division of labor between machines and humans to produce a specific result?

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1505.07096 : A U.S. Research Roadmap for Human Computation”

Field experimenting in economics: Lessons learned for public policy

Curated on June 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert Metcalfe at OUP Blog: “Do neighbourhoods matter to outcomes? Which classroom interventions improve educational attainment? How should we raise money to provide important and valued public goods? Do energy prices affect energy demand? How can we motivate people to become healthier, greener, and more cooperative? These are some of the most challenging questions policy-makers face. Academics have been trying to understand and uncover these important relationships for decades.

Many of the empirical tools available to economists to answer these questions do not allow causal relationships to be detected. Field experiments represent a relatively new methodological approach capable of measuring the causal links between variables. By overlaying carefully designed experimental treatments on real people performing tasks common to their daily lives, economists are able to answer interesting and policy-relevant questions that were previously intractable. Manipulation of market environments allows these economists to uncover the hidden motivations behind economic behaviour more generally. A central tenet of field experiments in the policy world is that governments should understand the actual behavioural responses of their citizens to changes in policies or interventions.

Field experiments represent a departure from laboratory experiments. Traditionally, laboratory experiments create experimental settings with tight control over the decision environment of undergraduate students. While these studies also allow researchers to make causal statements, policy-makers are often concerned subjects in these experiments may behave differently in settings where they know they are being observed or when they are permitted to sort out of the market.

For example, you might expect a college student to contribute more to charity when she is scrutinized in a professor’s lab than when she can avoid the ask altogether. Field experiments allow researchers to make these causal statements in a setting that is more generalizable to the behaviour policy-makers are directly interested in.

To date, policy-makers traditionally gather relevant information and data by using focus groups, qualitative evidence, or observational data without a way to identify causal mechanisms. It is quite easy to elicit people’s intentions about how they behave with respect to a new policy or intervention, but there is increasing evidence that people’s intentions are a poor guide to predicting their behaviour.

However, we are starting to see a small change in how governments seek to answer pertinent questions. For instance, the UK tax office (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) now uses field experiments across some of its services to improve the efficacy of scarce taxpayers money. In the US, there are movements toward gathering more evidence from field experiments.

In the corporate world, experimenting is not new. Many of the current large online companies—such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft—are constantly using field experiments matched with big data to improve their products and deliver better services to their customers. More and more companies will use field experiments over time to help them better set prices, tailor advertising, provide a better customer journey to increase welfare, and employ more productive workers…(More).

Why Technology Hasn’t Delivered More Democracy

Curated on June 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Collection of POVs aggregated by Thomas Carothers at Foreign Policy: “New technologies offer important tools for empowerment — yet democracy is stagnating. What’s up?…

THe current moment confronts us with a paradox. The first fifteen years of this century have been a time of astonishing advances in communications and information technology, including digitalization, mass-accessible video platforms, smart phones, social media, billions of people gaining internet access, and much else. These revolutionary changes all imply a profound empowerment of individuals through exponentially greater access to information, tremendous ease of communication and data-sharing, and formidable tools for networking. Yet despite these changes, democracy — a political system based on the idea of the empowerment of individuals — has in these same years become stagnant in the world. The number of democracies today is basically no greater than it was at the start of the century. Many democracies, both long-established ones and newer ones, are experiencing serious institutional debilities and weak public confidence.

How can we reconcile these two contrasting global realities — the unprecedented advance of technologies that facilitate individual empowerment and the overall lack of advance of democracy worldwide? To help answer this question, I asked six experts on political change, all from very different professional and national perspectives. Here are their responses, followed by a few brief observations of my own.

1. Place a Long Bet on the Local By Martin Tisné

2. Autocrats Know How to Use Tech, Too By Larry Diamond

3. Limits on Technology Persist By Senem Aydin Düzgit

4. The Harder Task By Rakesh Rajani

5. Don’t Forget Institutions By Diane de Gramont

6. Mixed Lessons from Iran By Golnaz Esfandiari

7. Yes, It’s Complicated byThomas Carothers…(More)”

Signal: Understanding What Matters in a World of Noise,

Curated on June 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen Few: “In this age of so-called Big Data, organizations are scrambling to implement new software and hardware to increase the amount of data they collect and store. However, in doing so they are unwittingly making it harder to find the needles of useful information in the rapidly growing mounds of hay. If you don’t know how to differentiate signals from noise, adding more noise only makes things worse. When we rely on data for making decisions, how do we tell what qualifies as a signal and what is merely noise? In and of itself, data is neither. Assuming that data is accurate, it is merely a collection of facts. When a fact is true and useful, only then is it a signal. When it’s not, it’s noise. It’s that simple. In Signal, Stephen Few provides the straightforward, practical instruction in everyday signal detection that has been lacking until now. Using data visualization methods, he teaches how to apply statistics to gain a comprehensive understanding of one’s data and adapts the techniques of Statistical Process Control in new ways to detect not just changes in the metrics but also changes in the patterns that characterize data…(More)”