DATA – Page 503 – The Living Library

India asks its citizens: please digitise our files

Curated on May 11, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Chambers in FutureGov: “India has asked its citizens to help digitise records so that it can move away from paper processes.

Using its crowdsourcing web site MyGov, the government wrote that “we cannot talk of Digital India and transforming India into a knowledge society if most of the transactions continue to be physical.”

It is “essential” that paper records are converted into machine readable digital versions, the government added, but “the cost of such digitisation is very large and existing budgetary constraints of government and many other organisations do not allow such lavish digitisation effort.”

Consequently, the government is asking citizens for advice on how to build a cheap content management system and tools that will allow it to crowdsource records transcriptions. Citizens would be rewarded for every word that they transcribe through a points system, which can then be recouped into cash prizes.

“The proposed platform will create earning and income generation opportunities for our literate rural and urban citizens, develop digital literacy and IT skills and include them in the making of Digital India,” the government added.

The announcement also noted the importance of privacy, suggesting that documents are split so that no portion gives any clue regarded the overall content of the document.

Instead, two people will be given the same words to transcribe, and the software will compare their statements to ensure accuracy. Only successful transcription will be rewarded with points….(More)”

Governing the smart city: a review of the literature on smart urban governance

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

Review by Albert Meijer and Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar in International Review of Administrative Sciences: “Academic attention to smart cities and their governance is growing rapidly, but the fragmentation in approaches makes for a confusing debate. This article brings some structure to the debate by analyzing a corpus of 51 publications and mapping their variation. The analysis shows that publications differ in their emphasis on (1) smart technology, smart people or smart collaboration as the defining features of smart cities, (2) a transformative or incremental perspective on changes in urban governance, (3) better outcomes or a more open process as the legitimacy claim for smart city governance. We argue for a comprehensive perspective: smart city governance is about crafting new forms of human collaboration through the use of ICTs to obtain better outcomes and more open governance processes. Research into smart city governance could benefit from previous studies into success and failure factors for e-government and build upon sophisticated theories of socio-technical change. This article highlights that smart city governance is not a technological issue: we should study smart city governance as a complex process of institutional change and acknowledge the political nature of appealing visions of socio-technical governance….(More)”

Cops Increasingly Use Social Media to Connect, Crowdsource

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

Sara E. Wilson at GovTech: “Law enforcement has long used public tip lines and missing persons bulletins to recruit citizens in helping solve crime and increasing public safety. Though the need for police departments to connect with their communities is nothing new, the array of technologies available to do so is growing all the time — as are the ways in which departments use those technologies.

In fact, 81 percent of law enforcement professionals use sites such as Facebook and Twitter on the job. And 25 percent use it daily.

Much of law enforcement is crowdsourced — Amber alerts are pushed to smartphones, seeking response from citizens; officers push wanted information and crime tips to users on Facebook and Twitter in the hopes they can help; and some departments create apps to streamline the information sharing.

Take the Johns Creek, Ga., Police Department, which has deployed a tool that allows additional citizen engagement and crowdsourcing…..Using a mobile app — the SunGard Public Sector P2C Converge app, which is branded specifically for Johns Creek PD as JCPD4Me — the department can more smoothly manage public safety announcements and other social media interactions….

Another tool cops use for communicating with citizens is Nixle, which lets agencies publish alerts, advisories, community information and traffic news. Citizens register for free and receive credible, neighborhood-level public safety information via text message and email in real time.

The Oakland, Calif., Police Department (OPD) uses the platform to engage with citizens — an April 17, 2015 post on Oakland PD’s Nixle Community feed informs readers that the department’s Special Victims Section, which is working to put an end to sex trafficking in the city, arrested five individuals for solicitation of prostitution. Since Jan. 1, 2015, OPD has arrested 70 individuals from 27 cities across the state for solicitation of prostitution.

Nixle allows two-way communication as well — the Tip Watch function allows anonymous tipsters to send information to Oakland PD in three ways (text, phone, Web). Now OPD can issue a passcode to tipsters for two-way, anonymous communication to help gather more information.

On the East Coast, the Peabody, Mass., Police Department has used the My Police Department (MyPD) app by WiredBlue, which lets citizens submit tips and feedback directly to the department, since its creation….

During the high-profile manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, the FBI asked the public for eyewitness photo and video evidence. The response from the public was so overwhelming that the server infrastructure couldn’t handle the massive inflow of data.

This large-scale crowdsourcing and data dilemma inspired a new product: the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository (LEEDIR). Developed by CitizenGlobal Inc. and Amazon Web Services, LEEDIR pairs an app with cloud storage to help police use citizens’ smartphones as tools to gather and investigate evidence. Since its creation, the repository was used in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2014 to investigate riots in Isla Vista.

Proponents of LEEDIR say the crowdsourcing system gives authorities a secure, central repository for the countless electronic tips that can come in during a crisis. Critics, however, claim that privacy issues come into play with this kind of policing. …(More)”

A new approach to measuring the impact of open data

Curated on May 6, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Júlia Keserű at SunLight Foundation: “Strong evidence on the long-term impact of open data initiatives is incredibly scarce. The lack of compelling proof is partly due to the relative novelty of the open government field, but also to the inherent difficulties in measuring good governance and social change. We know that much of the impact of policy advocacy, for instance, occurs even before a new law or policy is introduced, and is thus incredibly difficult to evaluate. At the same time, it is also very hard to detect the causality between a direct change in the legal environment and the specific activities of a policy advocacy group. Attribution is equally challenging when it comes to assessing behavioral changes – who gets to take credit for increased political engagement and greater participation in democratic processes?

Open government projects tend to operate in an environment where the contribution of other stakeholders and initiatives is essential to achieving sustainable change, making it even more difficult to show the causality between a project’s activities and the impact it strives to achieve. Therefore, these initiatives cannot be described through simple “cause and effect” relationships, as they mostly achieve changes through their contribution to outcomes produced by a complex ecosystem of stakeholders — including journalists, think tanks, civil society organizations, public officials and many more — making it even more challenging to measure their direct impact.

We at the Sunlight Foundation wanted to tackle some of the methodological challenges of the field through building an evidence base that can empower further generalizations and advocacy efforts, as well as developing a methodological framework to unpack theories of change and to evaluate the impact of open data and digital transparency initiatives. A few weeks ago, we presented our research at the Cartagena Data Festival, and today we are happy to launch the first edition of our paper, which you can read below or on Scribd.

The outputs of this research include:

A searchable repository of more than 100 examples on the outputs, outcomes and impacts of open data and digital technology projects;
Three distinctive theories of change for open data and digital transparency initiatives from the Global South;
A methodological framework to help develop more robust indicators of social and political change for the ecosystem of open data initiatives, by applying and revising the Outcome Mapping approach of IDRC to the field…(You can read the study at :The Social Impact of Open Data by juliakeseru)

Nepal Aid Workers Helped by Drones, Crowdsourcing

Curated on May 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Shirley Wang et al in the Wall Street Journal: “….It is too early to gauge the exact impact of the technology in Nepal relief efforts, which have just begun amid chaos on the ground. Aid organizations have reported hospitals are overstretched, a shortage of capacity at Katmandu’s airport is crippling aid distribution and damaged roads and the mountainous country’s difficult terrain make reaching villages difficult.

Still, technology is playing an increasing role in the global response to humanitarian crises. Within hours of Saturday’s 7.8-magnitude temblor, U.S. giants such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. were offering their networks for use in verifying survivors and helping worried friends and relatives locate their loved ones.

Advances in online mapping—long used to calculate distances and plot driving routes—and the ability of camera-equipped drones are playing an increasingly important role in coordinating emergency responses at ground zero of any disaster.

A community of nonprofit groups uses satellite images, private images and open-source mapping technology to remap areas affected by the earthquake. They mark damaged buildings and roads so rescuers can identify the worst-hit areas and assess how accessible different areas are. The technology complements more traditional intelligence from aircraft.

Such crowdsourced real-time mapping technologies were first used in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, according to Chris Grundy, a professor in Geographical Information Systems at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The technology “has been advancing a little bit every time [every situation where it is used] as we start to see what works,” said Prof. Grundy.

The American Red Cross supplied its relief team on the Wednesday night flight to Nepal from Washington, D.C. with 50 digital maps and an inch-thick pile of paper maps that help identify where the needs are. The charity has a mapping project with the British Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a crowdsourced data-sharing group.

Almost a week after the Nepal earthquake, two more people have been pulled from the rubble in Katmandu by teams of international rescuers. But hope for finding more survivors is waning. Photo: Sean McLain/The Wall Street Journal.

Mapping efforts have grown substantially since Haiti, according to Dale Kunce, head of the geographic information systems team at the American Red Cross. In the two months after the Haiti temblor, 600 mapping contributors made 1.5 million edits, while in the first 48 hours after the Nepal earthquake, 2,000 mappers had already made three million edits, Mr. Kunce said.

Some 3,400 volunteers from around the world are now inspecting images of Nepal online to identify road networks and conditions, to assess the extent of damage and pinpoint open spaces where displaced persons tend to congregate, according to Nama Budhathoki, executive director of a nonprofit technology company called Katmandu Living Labs.

His group is operating from a cramped but largely undamaged meeting room in a central-Katmandu office building to help coordinate the global effort of various mapping organizations with the needs of agencies like Doctors Without Borders and the international Red Cross community.

In recent days the Nepal Red Cross and Nepalese army have requested and been supplied with updated maps of severely damaged districts, said Dr. Budhathoki….(More)”

Apple Has Plans for Your DNA

Curated on May 6, 2015October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Antonio Regalado at MIT Technology Review: “…Apple is collaborating with U.S. researchers to launch apps that would offer some iPhone owners the chance to get their DNA tested, many of them for the first time, according to people familiar with the plans.

The apps are based on ResearchKit, a software platform Apple introduced in March that helps hospitals or scientists run medical studies on iPhones by collecting data from the devices’ sensors or through surveys.

The first five ResearchKit apps, including one called mPower that tracks symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, quickly recruited thousands of participants in a few days, demonstrating the reach of Apple’s platform.

“Apple launched ResearchKit and got a fantastic response. The obvious next thing is to collect DNA,” says Gholson Lyon, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who isn’t involved with the studies.

Nudging iPhone owners to submit DNA samples to researchers would thrust Apple’s devices into the center of a widening battle for genetic information. Universities, large technology companies like Google (see “Google Wants to Store Your Genome”), direct-to-consumer labs, and even the U.S. government (see “U.S. to Develop DNA Study of One Million People”) are all trying to amass mega-databases of gene information to uncover clues about the causes of disease (see “Internet of DNA”).

In two initial studies planned, Apple isn’t going to directly collect or test DNA itself. That will be done by academic partners. The data would be maintained by scientists in a computing cloud, but certain findings could appear directly on consumers’ iPhones as well. Eventually, it’s even possible consumers might swipe to share “my genes” as easily as they do their location….(More)”

The Incredible Jun: A Town that Runs on Social Media

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

Deb Roy and William Powers in the Huffington Post: “For the last four years, a town in southern Spain has been conducting a remarkable experiment in civic life. Jun (pronounced “hoon”) has been using Twitter as its principal medium for citizen-government communication. Leading the effort is Jun’s Mayor, José Antonio Rodríguez Salas, a passionate believer in the power of technology to solve problems and move society forward.

Since launching the initiative in 2011, Rodríguez Salas has been recruiting his 3,500 townspeople to not only join the social network but have their Twitter accounts locally verified at town hall. This extra step isn’t necessary to participate in the conversation – Twitter is open to anyone – but it helps town employees know they’re dealing with actual residents.

In the most basic scenario, a citizen who has a question, request or complaint tweets it to the mayor or one of his staff, who work to resolve the matter. For instance, in the sequence of tweets shown below (which we pulled from the 2014 Twitter data and translated into English), at 10:48 pm a citizen tells the mayor that a street lamp is out on Maestro Antonio Linares Street. Nine minutes later, the mayor replies that he’ll have the town electrician fix it the next day. The mayor’s tweet includes the Twitter handle of the electrician, who is automatically notified that he’s been mentioned and sees the exchange. That tweet is a public promise that the town will indeed take action, and to underline this it ends with the hashtag #JunGetsMoving. The next day, the electrician tweets a photo of the repaired fixture, thanking the citizen for his help and repeating the hashtag.

A citizen alerts the mayor to a broken street lamp. Two tweets later, it’s fixed.

Governments have been responding to citizens for centuries. But digital networks have made it possible to build much faster, more efficient feedback loops. Each of the participants in the above transaction wrote a single text of less than 140 characters, and in less than 24 hours the problem was solved….(More)”