Digital Passivity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jaron Lanier in the New York Times: “I fear that 2013 will be remembered as a tragic  and dark year in the digital universe, despite the fact that a lot of wonderful advances took place.

It was the year in which tablets became ubiquitous and advanced gadgets like 3-D printers and wearable interfaces emerged as pop phenomena; all great fun. Our gadgets have widened access to our world. We now regularly communicate with people we would not have been aware of before the networked age. We can find information about almost anything, any time.

But 2013 was also the year in which we became aware of the corner we’ve backed ourselves into. We learned — through the leaks of Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, and the work of investigative journalists — how much our gadgets and our digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultra-powerful, remote organizations. We are being dissected more than we dissect.

I wish I could separate the two big trends of the year in computing — the cool gadgets and the revelations of digital spying — but I cannot.

Back at the dawn of personal computing, the idealistic notion that drove most of us was that computers were tools for leveraging human intelligence to ever-greater achievement and fulfillment. This was the idea that burned in the hearts of pioneers like Alan Kay, who a half-century ago was already drawing illustrations of how children would someday use tablets.

But tablets do something unforeseen: They enforce a new power structure. Unlike a personal computer, a tablet runs only programs and applications approved by a central commercial authority. You control the data you enter into a PC, while data entered into a tablet is often managed by someone else.

Steve Jobs, who oversaw the introduction of the spectacularly successful iPad at Apple, declared that personal computers were now ‘‘trucks’’ — tools for working-class guys in T-shirts and visors, but not for upwardly mobile cool people. The implication was that upscale consumers would prefer status and leisure to influence or self-determination.

I am not sure who is to blame for our digital passivity. Did we give up on ourselves too easily?

This would be bleak enough even without the concurrent rise of the surveillance economy. Not only have consumers prioritized flash and laziness over empowerment; we have also acquiesced to being spied on all the time.

The two trends are actually one. The only way to persuade people to voluntarily accept the loss of freedom is by making it look like a great bargain at first.

Consumers were offered free stuff (like search and social networking) in exchange for agreeing to be watched. Vast fortunes can be made by those who best use the personal data you voluntarily hand them. Instagram, introduced in 2010, had only 13 employees and no business plan when it was bought by Facebook less than two years later for $1 billion.

One can argue that network technology enhances democracy because it makes it possible, for example, to tweet your protests. But complaining is not yet success. Social media didn’t create jobs for young people in Cairo during the Arab Spring…”

20 Innovations that Mattered in 2013

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Guide from GovLoop: “The end of the year means two things: setting unrealistic New Year’s resolutions and endless retrospectives.  While we can’t force you to put down the cake and pick up a carrot, we can help you to do your job better by highlighting some of the biggest and best innovations to come out of government in the last 365 days.
The past year brought us the Interior Department’s Instagram feed and Colorado’s redesigned website. It also brought us St. Louis’ optimized data analytics that make their city safer and North Carolina’s iCenter that adopted a “try before you buy” policy.
All of these new technologies and tactics saved time and resources, critical outcomes in the current government landscape where budget cuts are making each new purchase risky.
But these were not the only buzzworthy projects for government technology in 2013. In this end-of-year issue, GovLoop analyzed the 20 best innovations in government in four different categories:

  • Mobile Apps Movers and Shakers?
  • Big Data Dynamos
  • Social Media Mavericks
  •  Website Wonders

We also asked two of the most innovative Chief Information Officers in the country to don some Google Glass’ In a year where the government shutdown and sequestration brought progress to a screeching halt, many agencies were able to rise above the inauspicious environment and produce groundbreaking and innovative programs.
For instance, when the horrible bombings brought terror to the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the local police department sprang into action. They immediately mobilized their forces on the ground. But then they did something else, too. The Boston Police Department took to Twitter. The social media team was informative, timely and, accurate. The BPD flipped the script on emergency media management. They innovated in a time of crisis and got people the information they needed in a timely and appropriate manner.
We know that oftentimes it is hard to see through the budget cuts and government shutdowns, but government innovation is all around us. Our goal with this guide is to showcase programs that are not only making a difference but demonstrate risk and reward….”

Building tech-powered public services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New publication by Sarah Bickerstaffe from IPPR (UK): “Given the rapid pace of technological change and take-up by the public, it is a question of when not if public services become ‘tech-powered’. This new paper asks how we can ensure that innovations are successfully introduced and deployed.
Can technology improve the experience of people using public services, or does it simply mean job losses and a depersonalised offer to users?
Could tech-powered public services be an affordable, sustainable solution to some of the challenges of these times of austerity?
This report looks at 20 case studies of digital innovation in public services, using these examples to explore the impact of new and disruptive technologies. It considers how tech-powered public services can be delivered, focusing on the area of health and social care in particular.
We identify three key benefits of increasing the role of technology in public services: saving time, boosting user participation, and encouraging users to take responsibility for their own wellbeing.
In terms of how to successfully implement technological innovations in public services, five particular lessons stood out clearly and consistently:

  1. User-based iterative design is critical to delivering a product that solves real-world problems. It builds trust and ensures the technology works in the context in which it will be used.
  2. Public sector expertise is essential in order for a project to make the connections necessary to initial development and early funding.
  3. Access to seed and bridge funding is necessary to get projects off the ground and allow them to scale up.
  4. Strong leadership from within the public sector is crucial to overcoming the resistance that practitioners and managers often show initially.
  5. A strong business case that sets out the quality improvements and cost savings that the innovation can deliver is important to get attention and interest from public services.

The seven headline case studies in this report are:

  • Patchwork creates an elegant solution to join up professionals working with troubled families, in an effort to ensure that frontline support is truly coordinated.
  • Casserole Club links people who like cooking with their neighbours who are in need of a hot meal, employing the simplest possible technology to grow social connections.
  • ADL Smartcare uses a facilitated assessment tool to make professional expertise accessible to staff and service users without years of training, meaning they can carry out assessments together, engaging people in their own care and freeing up occupational therapists to focus where they are needed.
  • Mental Elf makes leading research in mental health freely available via social media, providing accessible summaries to practitioners and patients who would not otherwise have the time or ability to read journal articles, which are often hidden behind a paywall.
  • Patient Opinion provides an online platform for people to give feedback on the care they have received and for healthcare professionals and providers to respond, disrupting the typical complaints process and empowering patients and their families.
  • The Digital Pen and form system has saved the pilot hospital trust three minutes per patient by avoiding the need for manual data entry, freeing up clinical and administrative staff for other tasks.
  • Woodland Wiggle allows children in hospital to enter a magical woodland world through a giant TV screen, where they can have fun, socialise, and do their physiotherapy.”

Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Data

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

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 crowdsourcing data was originally published in 2013.

As institutions seek to improve decision-making through data and put public data to use to improve the lives of citizens, new tools and projects are allowing citizens to play a role in both the collection and utilization of data. Participatory sensing and other citizen data collection initiatives, notably in the realm of disaster response, are allowing citizens to crowdsource important data, often using smartphones, that would be either impossible or burdensomely time-consuming for institutions to collect themselves. Civic hacking, often performed in hackathon events, on the other hand, is a growing trend in which governments encourage citizens to transform data from government and other sources into useful tools to benefit the public good.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Baraniuk, Chris. “Power Politechs.” New Scientist 218, no. 2923 (June 29, 2013): 36–39. http://bit.ly/167ul3J.

  • In this article, Baraniuk discusses civic hackers, “an army of volunteer coders who are challenging preconceptions about hacking and changing the way your government operates. In a time of plummeting budgets and efficiency drives, those in power have realised they needn’t always rely on slow-moving, expensive outsourcing and development to improve public services. Instead, they can consider running a hackathon, at which tech-savvy members of the public come together to create apps and other digital tools that promise to enhace the provision of healthcare, schools or policing.”
  • While recognizing that “civic hacking has established a pedigree that demonstrates its potential for positive impact,” Baraniuk argues that a “more rigorous debate over how this activity should evolve, or how authorities ought to engage in it” is needed.

Barnett, Brandon, Muki Hansteen Izora, and Jose Sia. “Civic Hackathon Challenges Design Principles: Making Data Relevant and Useful for Individuals and Communities.” Hack for Change, https://bit.ly/2Ge6z09.

  • In this paper, researchers from Intel Labs offer “guiding principles to support the efforts of local civic hackathon organizers and participants as they seek to design actionable challenges and build useful solutions that will positively benefit their communities.”
  • The authors proposed design principles are:
    • Focus on the specific needs and concerns of people or institutions in the local community. Solve their problems and challenges by combining different kinds of data.
    • Seek out data far and wide (local, municipal, state, institutional, non-profits, companies) that is relevant to the concern or problem you are trying to solve.
    • Keep it simple! This can’t be overstated. Focus [on] making data easily understood and useful to those who will use your application or service.
    • Enable users to collaborate and form new communities and alliances around data.

Buhrmester, Michael, Tracy Kwang, and Samuel D. Gosling. “Amazon’s Mechanical Turk A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6, no. 1 (January 1, 2011): 3–5. http://bit.ly/H56lER.

  • This article examines the capability of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to act a source of data for researchers, in addition to its traditional role as a microtasking platform.
  • The authors examine the demographics of MTurkers and find that “MTurk participants are slightly more demographically diverse than are standard Internet samples and are significantly more diverse than typical American college samples; (b) participation is affected by compensation rate and task length, but participants can still be recruited rapidly and inexpensively; (c) realistic compensation rates do not affect data quality; and (d) the data obtained are at least as reliable as those obtained via traditional methods.”
  • The paper concludes that, just as MTurk can be a strong tool for crowdsourcing tasks, data derived from MTurk can be high quality while also being inexpensive and obtained rapidly.

Goodchild, Michael F., and J. Alan Glennon. “Crowdsourcing Geographic Information for Disaster Response: a Research Frontier.” International Journal of Digital Earth 3, no. 3 (2010): 231–241. http://bit.ly/17MBFPs.

  • This article examines issues of data quality in the face of the new phenomenon of geographic information being generated by citizens, in order to examine whether this data can play a role in emergency management.
  • The authors argue that “[d]ata quality is a major concern, since volunteered information is asserted and carries none of the assurances that lead to trust in officially created data.”
  • Due to the fact that time is crucial during emergencies, the authors argue that, “the risks associated with volunteered information are often outweighed by the benefits of its use.”
  • The paper examines four wildfires in Santa Barbara in 2007-2009 to discuss current challenges with volunteered geographical data, and concludes that further research is required to answer how volunteer citizens can be used to provide effective assistance to emergency managers and responders.

Hudson-Smith, Andrew, Michael Batty, Andrew Crooks, and Richard Milton. “Mapping for the Masses Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing.” Social Science Computer Review 27, no. 4 (November 1, 2009): 524–538. http://bit.ly/1c1eFQb.

  • This article describes the way in which “we are harnessing the power of web 2.0 technologies to create new approaches to collecting, mapping, and sharing geocoded data.”
  • The authors examine GMapCreator and MapTube, which allow users to do a range of map-related functions such as create new maps, archive existing maps, and share or produce bottom-up maps through crowdsourcing.
  • They conclude that “these tools are helping to define a neogeography that is essentially ‘mapping for the masses,’ while noting that there are many issues of quality, accuracy, copyright, and trust that will influence the impact of these tools on map-based communication.”

Kanhere, Salil S. “Participatory Sensing: Crowdsourcing Data from Mobile Smartphones in Urban Spaces.” In Distributed Computing and Internet Technology, edited by Chittaranjan Hota and Pradip K. Srimani, 19–26. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7753. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. 2013. https://bit.ly/2zX8Szj.

  • This paper provides a comprehensive overview of participatory sensing — a “new paradigm for monitoring the urban landscape” in which “ordinary citizens can collect multi-modal data streams from the surrounding environment using their mobile devices and share the same using existing communications infrastructure.”
  • In addition to examining a number of innovative applications of participatory sensing, Kanhere outlines the following key research challenges:
    • Dealing with incomplete samples
    •  Inferring user context
    • Protecting user privacy
    • Evaluating data trustworthiness
    • Conserving energy

Public Open Sensor Data: Revolutionizing Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New Paper in Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE (Volume: 32,  Issue: 4): “Local governments have decided to take advantage of the presence of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in their cities to efficiently manage several applications in their daily responsibilities. The enormous amount of information collected by sensor devices allows the automation of several real-time services to improve city management by using intelligent traffic-light patterns during rush hour, reducing water consumption in parks, or efficiently routing garbage collection trucks throughout the city [1]. The sensor information required by these examples is mostly self-consumed by city-designed applications and managers.”

When the wisdom of crowds meets the kindness of strangers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Kelsey (NHS) on why patient and citizen participation is fundamental to high quality health and care services: “…But above all my priority is to improve the way in which health and care services listen to people  – and can therefore act and change. The work of entrepreneurs and apps developers like Patients Like Me, Patient Opinion and iwantgreatcare confirms the benefits of real time patient and citizen participation. The challenge is to do this at scale: open the doors, invite the whole community into the job of improving our national health service. Share decision making. Everybody needs the opportunity – and should be encouraged – to participate.
In April, the NHS did something unprecedented – it launched the Friends and Family Test (FFT), the first time a health service has reported a single measure of patient satisfaction for every hospital. It asked people to say whether they would recommend local inpatient and A&E services; the results are published every month on NHS Choices. By October more than 1m people had participated and hundreds of thousands had volunteered additional real time comments and feedback to local hospitals. ‘Great news’, said David Cameron – who has championed FFT from the start – in a tweet to mark the milestone, ‘giving patients a stronger voice in the NHS’.
This is the boldest move yet to promote patient voice at volume in the NHS and to concentrate our collective focus on improvement in care. At Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Trust, patients reported they could not sleep at night so staff have launched a ‘comfort at night’ campaign and developed a protocol for patient experience ‘never events’. In Lewisham, patients complained about poor communication and staff attitudes. They now plan daily visits for each patient. In Hull, bereaved families complained they had to pay car parking fees; the Trust has now given free passes to relatives in mourning. Routine feedback enables a different kind of conversation between the patient and the clinician. It is a catalyst for change. Commissioners will have to demonstrate how they are improving FFT for local communities to qualify for Quality Premium incentives.
This kind of customer insight is fundamental to the way we make choices as consumers. The NHS is not a hotel chain, nor a city authority: but there are vital lessons it can learn from Amazon and Trip Adviser about the power of transparency and feedback. In New York, more than 90,000 people every day share their views by phone, email and tweet on rubbish collections, potholes and dangerous buildings – and the city has become safer and cleaner.
Friends and family has its critics: people worry about the potential for gaming, for example. But the evidence, after six months, is of overwhelming human benefit and that’s why every maternity unit started to offer FFT to patients in October and why every NHS service will do so from 2015. It’s also why we are now requiring that every local organisation should offer people the chance to comment on, as well as rate, services from next year (most already do).
Some people ask me how we are ensuring the focus on transparency and participation is inclusive. We have launched Care Connect, a pilot project to test how giving people access by telephone and social media could improve feedback and complaints.  Recognising that digital exclusion is an issue in some of our communities, we have started a partnership with the Tinder Foundation to help 100,000 people learn how to go online for health benefit. None of these initiatives exist in isolation, nor do I see them as ‘silver bullets’.  My aim is to work with and build on existing good practice to make people’s voices heard and help the NHS act on them.
In a characteristically thoughtful talk last week, MT Rainey, social activist and former marketing guru, issued this challenge to the NHS: ‘How will we make the wisdom of the crowd meet the kindness of strangers?’ How do the tools of our age – big data, the internet, the mobile phone – meet the values of our species: compassion and honesty and doing our best for others? Friends and family is a good start. We are witnessing the birth of a new knowledge economy and a new social movement. The future is open.”

Data isn't a four-letter word

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Speech by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda: “I want to talk about data too: the opportunity as well as the threat.
Making data the engine of the European economy: safeguarding fundamental rights capturing the data boost, and strengthening our defences.
Data is at a cross-roads. We have opportunities; open data, big data, datamining, cloud computing. Tim Berners Lee, creator of the world wide web, saw the massive potential of open data. As he put it, if you put that data online, it will be used by other people to do wonderful things, in ways that you could never imagine.
On the other hand, we have threats: to our privacy and our values, and to the openness that makes it possible to innovate, trade and exchange.
Get it right and we can safeguard a better economic future. Get it wrong, and we cut competitiveness without protecting privacy. So we remain dependent on the digital developments of others: and just as vulnerable to them.
How do we find that balance? Not with hysteria; nor by paralysis. Not by stopping the wonderful things, simply to prevent the not-so-wonderful. Not by seeing data as a dirty word.
We are seeing a whole economy develop around data and cloud computing. Businesses using them, whole industries depending on them, data volumes are increasing exponentially. Data is not just an economic sideshow, it is a whole new asset class; requiring new skills and creating new jobs.
And with a huge range of applications. From decoding human genes to predicting the traffic, and even the economy. Whatever you’re doing these days, chances are you’re using big data (like translation, search, apps, etc).
There is increasing recognition of the data boost on offer. For example, open data can make public administrations more transparent and stimulate a rich innovative market. That is what the G8 Leaders recognised in June, with their Open Data Charter. For scientists too, open data and open access offer new ways to research and progress.
That is a philosophy the Commission has shared for some time. And that is what our ‘Open Data’ package of December 2011 is all about. With new EU laws to open up public administrations, and a new EU Open Data Portal. And all EU-funded scientific publications available under open access.
Now not just the G8 and the Commission are seeing this data opportunity: but the European Council too. Last October, they recognised the potential of big data innovation, the need for a single market in cloud computing; and the urgency of Europe capitalising on both.
We will be acting on that. Next spring, I plan a strategic agenda for research on data. Working with private partners and national research funders to shape that agenda, and get the most bang for our research euro.
And, beyond research, there is much we can do to align our work and support secure big data. From training skilled workers, to modernising copyright for data and text mining, to different actors in the value chain working together: for example through a public-private partnership.
…Empowering people is not always easy in this complex online world. I want to see technical solutions emerge that can do that, give users control over their desired level of privacy, how their data will be used, and making it easier to verify online rights are respected.
How can we do that? How can we ensure systems that are empowering, transparent, and secure? There are a number of subtleties in play. Here’s my take.
First, companies engaged in big data will need to start thinking about privacy protection at every stage: and from system development, to procedures and practices.
This is the principle of “privacy by design”, set out clearly in the proposed Data Protection Regulation. In other words, from now on new business ideas have two purposes: delivering a service and protecting privacy at the right level.
Second, also under the regulation, big data applications that might put fundamental rights at risk would require the company to carry out a “Privacy Impact Assessment”. This is another good way to combine innovation and privacy: ensuring you think about any risks from the start.
Third, sometimes, particularly for personal data, a company might realise they need user consent. Consent is a cornerstone of data protection rules, and should stay that way.
But we need to get smart, and apply common sense to consent. Users can’t be expected to know everything. Nor asked to consent to what they cannot realistically understand. Nor presented with false dilemmas, a black-and-white choice between consenting or getting shut out of services.
Fourth, we can also get smart when it comes to anonymisation. Sometimes, full anonymisation means losing important information, so you can no longer make the links between data. That could make the difference between progress or paralysis. But using pseudonyms can let you to analyse large amounts of data: to spot, for example, that people with genetic pattern X also respond well to therapy Y.
So it is understandable why the European Parliament has proposed a more flexible data protection regime for this type of data. Companies would be able to process the data on grounds of legitimate interest, rather than consent. That could make all the positive difference to big data: without endangering privacy.
Of course, in those cases, companies still to minimise privacy risks. Their internal processes and risk assessments must show how they comply with the guiding principles of data protection law. And – if something does go wrong – the company remains accountable.
Indeed company accountability is another key element of our proposal. And here again we welcome the European Parliament’s efforts to reinforce that. Clearly, you might assure accountability in different ways for different companies. But standards for compliance and processes could make a real difference.
A single data protection law for Europe would be a big step forward. National fortresses and single market barriers just make it harder for Europe to lead in digital, harder for Europe to become the natural home of secure online services. Data protection cannot mean data protectionism. Rather, it means safeguarding privacy does not come at the expense of innovation: with laws both flexible and future proof, pragmatic and proportionate, for a changing world….
But data protection rules are really just the start. They are only part of our response to the Snowden revelations….”

We must create a culture of “open data makers”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rufus Pollock (@rufuspollock), Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation: “Open data and open knowledge are fundamentally about empowerment, about giving people – citizens, journalists, NGOs, companies and policy-makers – access to the information they need to understand and shape the world around them.

Through openness, we can ensure that technology and data improve science, governance, and society. Without it, we may see the increasing centralisation of knowledge – and therefore power – in the hands of the few, and a huge loss in our potential, individually and collectively, to innovate, understand, and improve the world around us.

Open data is data that can be freely accessed, used, built upon and shared by anyone, for any purpose. With digital technology – from mobiles to the internet – increasingly everywhere, we’re seeing a data revolution. Its a revolution both in the amount of data available and in our ability to use, and share, that data. And it’s changing everything we do – from how we travel home from work to how scientists do research, to how government set policy….

its about people, the people who use data, and the people who use the insights from that data to drive change. We need to create a culture of “open data makers”, people able and ready to make apps and insights with open data. We need to connect open data with those who have the best questions and the biggest needs – a healthcare worker in Zambia, the London commuter travelling home – and go beyond the data geeks and the tech savvy.”

Book Review: Three Harbingers of Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Howard Rheingold reviews the following books in Strategy and Business:
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013)
Marina Gorbis
The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World
(Free Press, 2013)
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture
(New York University Press, 2013)
“Whether you invest, build, teach, research, regulate, investigate, heal, entertain, or sell, major changes in how you do what you do are looming. “Big data,” much in the media spotlight recently—particularly for the revelations of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) surveillance of “metadata”—is probably already changing how you do your work. But socialstructing and spreadable media, two new terms that signal similarly momentous shifts, may still be unfamiliar. This year’s best business books on digitization can equip you to better understand all three phenomena and the changes that they will enable and engender….”