Paying Farmers to Welcome Birds

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jim Robbins in The New York Times: “The Central Valley was once one of North America’s most productive wildlife habitats, a 450-mile-long expanse marbled with meandering streams and lush wetlands that provided an ideal stop for migratory shorebirds on their annual journeys from South America and Mexico to the Arctic and back.

Farmers and engineers have long since tamed the valley. Of the wetlands that existed before the valley was settled, about 95 percent are gone, and the number of migratory birds has declined drastically. But now an unusual alliance of conservationists, bird watchers and farmers have joined in an innovative plan to restore essential habitat for the migrating birds.

The program, called BirdReturns, starts with data from eBird, the pioneering citizen science project that asks birders to record sightings on a smartphone app and send the information to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in upstate New York.

By crunching data from the Central Valley, eBird can generate maps showing where virtually every species congregates in the remaining wetlands. Then, by overlaying those maps on aerial views of existing surface water, it can determine where the birds’ need for habitat is greatest….

BirdReturns is an example of the growing movement called reconciliation ecology, in which ecosystems dominated by humans are managed to increase biodiversity.

“It’s a new ‘Moneyball,’ ” said Eric Hallstein, an economist with the Nature Conservancy and a designer of the auctions, referring to the book and movie about the Oakland Athletics’ data-driven approach to baseball. “We’re disrupting the conservation industry by taking a new kind of data, crunching it differently and contracting differently.”

Building a More Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Corinna Zarek at the White House: “It’s Sunshine Week again—a chance to celebrate transparency and participation in government and freedom of information. Every year in mid-March, we take stock of our progress and where we are headed to make our government more open for the benefit of citizens.
In December, 2013, the Administration announced 23 ambitious commitments to further open up government over the next two years in U.S. Government’s  second Open Government National Action Plan. Those commitments are now all underway or in development, including:
·         Launching an improved Data.gov: The updated Data.gov debuted in January, 2014, and continues to grow with thousands of updated or new government data sets being proactively made available to the public.
·         Increasing public collaboration: Through crowdsourcing, citizen science, and other methods, Federal agencies continue to expand the ways they collaborate with the public. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, for instance, recently launched its third Asteroid Grand Challenge, a broad call to action, seeking the best and brightest ideas from non-traditional partners to enhance and accelerate the work NASA is already doing for planetary defense.
·         Improving We the People: The online petition platform We the People gives the public a direct way to participate in their government and is currently incorporating improvements to make it easier for the public to submit petitions and signatures.”

The Open Data/Environmental Justice Connection

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey Warren for Wilson’s Commons Lab: “… Open data initiatives seem to assume that all data is born in the hallowed halls of government, industry and academia, and that open data is primarily about convincing such institutions to share it to the public.
It is laudable when institutions with important datasets — such as campaign finance, pollution or scientific data — see the benefit of opening it to the public. But why do we assume unilateral control over data production?
The revolution in user-generated content shows the public has a great deal to contribute – and to gain—from the open data movement. Likewise, citizen science projects that solicit submissions or “task completion” from the public rarely invite higher-level participation in research –let alone true collaboration.
This has to change. Data isn’t just something you’re given if you ask nicely, or a kind of community service we perform to support experts. Increasingly, new technologies make it possible for local groups to generate and control data themselves — especially in environmental health. Communities on the front line of pollution’s effects have the best opportunities to monitor it and the most to gain by taking an active role in the research process.
DIY Data
Luckily, an emerging alliance between the maker/Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement and watchdog groups is starting to challenge the conventional model.
The Smart Citizen project, the Air Quality Egg and a variety of projects in the Public Lab network are recasting members of the general public as actors in the framing of new research questions and designers of a new generation of data tools.
The Riffle, a <$100 water quality sensor built inside of hardware-store pipe, can be left in a creek near an industrial site to collect data around the clock for weeks or months. In the near future, when pollution happens – like the ash spill in North Carolina or the chemical spill in West Virginia – the public will be alerted and able to track its effects without depending on expensive equipment or distant labs.
This emerging movement is recasting environmental issues not as intractably large problems, but up-close-and-personal health issues — just what environmental justice (EJ) groups have been arguing for years. The difference is that these new initiatives hybridize such EJ community organizers and the technology hackers of the open hardware movement. Just as the Homebrew Computer Club’s tinkering with early prototypes led to the personal computer, a new generation of tinkerers sees that their affordable, accessible techniques can make an immediate difference in investigating lead in their backyard soil, nitrates in their tap water and particulate pollution in the air they breathe.
These practitioners see that environmental data collection is not a distant problem in a developing country, but an issue that anyone in a major metropolitan area, or an area affected by oil and gas extraction, faces on a daily basis. Though underserved communities are often disproportionally affected, these threats often transcend socioeconomic boundaries…”

Coordinating the Commons: Diversity & Dynamics in Open Collaborations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dissertation by Jonathan T. Morgan: “The success of Wikipedia demonstrates that open collaboration can be an effective model for organizing geographically-distributed volunteers to perform complex, sustained work at a massive scale. However, Wikipedia’s history also demonstrates some of the challenges that large, long-term open collaborations face: the core community of Wikipedia editors—the volunteers who contribute most of the encyclopedia’s content and ensure that articles are correct and consistent — has been gradually shrinking since 2007, in part because Wikipedia’s social climate has become increasingly inhospitable for newcomers, female editors, and editors from other underrepresented demographics. Previous research studies of change over time within other work contexts, such as corporations, suggests that incremental processes such as bureaucratic formalization can make organizations more rule-bound and less adaptable — in effect, less open— as they grow and age. There has been little research on how open collaborations like Wikipedia change over time, and on the impact of those changes on the social dynamics of the collaborating community and the way community members prioritize and perform work. Learning from Wikipedia’s successes and failures can help researchers and designers understand how to support open collaborations in other domains — such as Free/Libre Open Source Software, Citizen Science, and Citizen Journalism.

In this dissertation, I examine the role of openness, and the potential antecedents and consequences of formalization, within Wikipedia through an analysis of three distinct but interrelated social structures: community-created rules within the Wikipedia policy environment, coordination work and group dynamics within self-organized open teams called WikiProjects, and the socialization mechanisms that Wikipedia editors use to teach new community members how to participate.To inquire further, I have designed a new editor peer support space, the Wikipedia Teahouse, based on the findings from my empirical studies. The Teahouse is a volunteer-driven project that provides a welcoming and engaging environment in which new editors can learn how to be productive members of the Wikipedia community, with the goal of increasing the number and diversity of newcomers who go on to make substantial contributions to Wikipedia …”

L’intelligence d’une ville : ses citoyens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michel Dumais: “Tic toc! disions-nous. Bientôt la centième. Et avec la cent-unième, de nouveaux défis. Ville intelligente, disiez-vous? Je subodore le traditionnel appel de pied aux trois lettres et à une logique administrative archaïque. Et si on faisait plutôt appel à l’intelligence de ceux qui connaissent le plus leur ville, ses citoyens?

Pour régler un problème (et même à l’occasion, un «pas d’problème»), les administrations regardent du côté de ces logiciels mammouth qui, sur papier, sont censés faire tout, qui engloutissent des centaines de millions de dollars, mais qui, finalement, font les manchettes des médias parce qu’il faut y injecter encore plus d’argent. Et qui permettent aux TI d’asseoir encore plus leur contrôle sur une administration.

Bref, lorsque l’on parle de ville intelligente, plusieurs y voient le pactole. Ah! Reste que ce qui était «acceptable», hier, ne l’est plus aujourd’hui. Et que la réalisation d’une ville intelligente n’est surtout pas un défi technologique, loin de là.

LA QUESTION DU SANS-FIL
Il y a des années de cela, la simple logique eut voulu que la Ville cesse de penser «big telcos» afin de conclure rapidement une alliance avec l’organisme communautaire «Île sans fil» et ainsi favoriser le déploiement rapide sur l’île de la technologie sans fil.

Une telle alliance, un modèle dans le genre, existe.

Mais pas à Montréal. Plutôt à Québec, alors que la Ville et l’organisme communautaire «Zap Québec» travaillent main dans la main pour le plus grand bénéfice des citoyens de Québec et des touristes. Et à Montréal? On jase, on jase.

Donc, une ville intelligente. C’est une ville qui sait, à l’aide des technologies, comment harnacher ses infrastructures et les mettre au service de ses citoyens tout en réalisant des économies et en favorisant le développement durable.

C’est aussi une ville qui sait écouter et mobiliser ses citoyens, ses militants et ses entrepreneurs, tout en leur donnant des outils (comme des données utilisables) afin qu’ils puissent eux aussi créer des services destinés à leur organisation et à tous les citoyens de la ville. Sans compter que tous ces outils facilitent la prise de décisions chez les maires d’arrondissement et le comité exécutif.

Bref, une ville intelligente selon le professeur Rudolf Giffinger, c’est ça: «une économie intelligente, une mobilité intelligente, un environnement intelligent, des habitants intelligents, un mode de vie intelligent et, enfin, une administration intelligente».…

J’invite le lecteur à regarder LifeApps, une extraordinaire série télé diffusée sur le site de la chaîne AlJazeera. Le sujet: des jeunes et de moins jeunes militants, bidouilleurs, qui s’impliquent et créent des services pour leur communauté.”

NatureNet: a model for crowdsourcing the design of citizen science systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper in CSCW Companion ’14, the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing: “NatureNet is citizen science system designed for collecting bio-diversity data in nature park settings. Park visitors are encouraged to participate in the design of the system in addition to collecting bio-diversity data. Our goal is to increase the motivation to participate in citizen science via crowdsourcing: the hypothesis is that when the crowd plays a role in the design and development of the system, they become stakeholders in the project and work to ensure its success. This paper presents a model for crowdsourcing design and citizen science data collection, and the results from early trials with users that illustrate the potential of this approach.”

House Bill Raises Questions about Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Bowser for Commons Lab (Wilson Center):”A new bill in the House is raising some key questions about how crowdsourcing is understood by scientists, government agencies, policymakers and the public at large.
Robin Bravender’s recent article in Environment & Energy Daily, “House Republicans Push Crowdsourcing on Agency Science,” (subscription required) neatly summarizes the debate around H.R. 4012, a bill introduced to the House of Representatives earlier this month. The House Science, Space and Technology Committe earlier this week held a hearing on the bill, which could see a committee vote as early as next month.
Dubbed the “Secret Science Reform Act of 2014,” the bill prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from “proposing, finalizing, or disseminating regulations or assessments based upon science that is not transparent or reproducible.” If the bill is passed, EPA would be unable to base assessments or regulations on any information not “publicly available in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis.” This would include all information published in scholarly journals based on data that is not available as open source.
The bill is based on the premise that forcing EPA to use public data will inspire greater transparency by allowing “the crowd” to conduct independent analysis and interpretation. While the premise of involving the public in scientific research is sound, this characterization of crowdsourcing as a process separate from traditional scientific research is deeply problematic.
This division contrasts the current practices of many researchers, who use crowdsourcing to directly involve the public in scientific processes. Galaxy Zoo, for example, enlists digital volunteers (called “citizen scientists”) help classify more than 40 million photographs of galaxies taken by the Hubble Telescope. These crowdsourced morphological classifications are a powerful form of data analysis, a key aspect of the scientific process. Galaxy Zoo then publishes a catalogue of these classifications as an open-source data set. And the data reduction techniques and measures of confidence and bias for the data catalogue are documented in MNRAS, a peer-reviewed journal. A recent Google Scholar search shows that the data set published in MNRAS has been cited a remarkable 121 times.
As this example illustrates, crowdsourcing is often embedded in the process of formal scientific research. But prior to being published in a scientific journal, the crowdsourced contributions of non-professional volunteers are subject to the scrutiny of professional scientists through the rigorous process of peer review. Because peer review was designed as an institution to ensure objective and unbiased research, peer-reviewed scientific work is widely accepted as the best source of information for any science-based decision.
Separating crowdsourcing from the peer review process, as this legislation intends, means that there will be no formal filters in place to ensure that open data will not be abused by special interests. Ellen Silbergeld, a professor at John Hopkins University who testified at the hearing this week, made exactly this point when she pointed to data manipulation commonly practiced by tobacco lobbyists in the United States.
Contributing to scientific research is one goal of crowdsourcing for science. Involving the public in scientific research also increases volunteer understanding of research topics and the scientific process and inspires heightened community engagement. These goals are supported by President Obama’s Second Open Government National Action Plan, which calls for “increased crowdsourcing and citizen science programs” to support “an informed and active citizenry.” But H.R. 4012 does not support these goals. Rather, this legislation could further degrade the public’s understanding of science by encouraging the public to distrust professional scientists rather than collaborate with them.
Crowdsourcing benefits organizations by bringing in the unique expertise held by external volunteers, which can augment and enhance the traditional scientific process. In return, these volunteers benefit from exposure to new and exciting processes, such as scientific research. This mutually beneficial relationship depends on collaboration, not opposition. Supporting an antagonistic relationship between science-based organizations like the EPA and members of “the crowd” will benefit neither institutions, nor volunteers, nor the country as a whole.“
 

Where next for citizen science? Innovative uses for crowd sourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

VIDEO: “Thanks to new technologies , citizen science has seen huge growth over the past decade, opening up important scientific research to the masses and harnessing the power of the crowd. Ranging from classifying new galaxies to monitoring wildlife in the Serengeti, the Zooniverse stable of citizen science projects led by Dr Chris Lintott has seen incredible success. But what does the future hold for citizen science — does it have the power to help in real life situations such as disaster zones? And what are the implications when dealing with huge amounts of potentially sensitive data in real time?
This seminar is part of the Oxford Martin School Hilary Term seminar series: Blurring the lines: the changing dynamics between man and machine…www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk”

EPA Launches New Citizen Science Website

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has revamped its Citizen Science website to provide new resources and success stories to assist the public in conducting scientific research and collecting data to better understand their local environment and address issues of concern. The website can be found at www.epa.gov/region2/citizenscience.
“Citizen Science is an increasingly important part of EPA’s commitment to using sound science and technology to protect people’s health and safeguard the environment,” said Judith A. Enck, EPA Regional Administrator. “The EPA encourages the public to use the new website as a tool in furthering their scientific investigations and developing solutions to pollution problems.”
The updated website now offers detailed information about air, water and soil monitoring, including recommended types of equipment and resources for conducting investigations. It also includes case studies and videotapes that showcase successful citizen science projects in New York and New Jersey, provides funding opportunities, quality assurance information and workshops and webinars.”

Google Global Impact Award Expands Zooniverse

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “A $1.8 million Google Global Impact Award will enable Zooniverse, a nonprofit collaboration led by the Adler Planetarium and the University of Oxford, to make setting up a citizen science project as easy as starting a blog and could lead to thousands of innovative new projects around the world, accelerating the pace of scientific research.
The award supports the further development of the Zooniverse, the world’s leading ‘citizen science’ platform, which has already given more than 900,000 online volunteers the chance to contribute to science by taking part in activities including discovering planets, classifying plankton or searching through old ship’s logs for observations of interest to climate scientists. As part of the Global Impact Award, the Adler will receive $400,000 to support the Zooniverse platform.
With the Google Global Impact Award, Zooniverse will be able to rebuild their platform so that research groups with no web development expertise can build and launch their own citizen science projects.
“We are entering a new era of citizen science – this effort will enable prolific development of science projects in which hundreds of thousands of additional volunteers will be able to work alongside professional scientists to conduct important research – the potential for discovery is limitless,” said Michelle B. Larson, Ph.D., Adler Planetarium president and CEO. “The Adler is honored to join its fellow Zooniverse partner, the University of Oxford, as a Google Global Impact Award recipient.”
The Zooniverse – the world’s leading citizen science platform – is a global collaboration across several institutions that design and build citizen science projects. The Adler is a founding partner of the Zooniverse, which has already engaged more than 900,000 online volunteers as active scientists by discovering planets, mapping the surface of Mars and detecting solar flares. Adler-directed citizen science projects include: Galaxy Zoo (astronomy), Solar Stormwatch (solar physics), Moon Zoo (planetary science), Planet Hunters (exoplanets) and The Milky Way Project (star formation). The Zooniverse (zooniverse.org) also includes projects in environmental, biological and medical sciences. Google’s investment in the Adler and its Zooniverse partner, the University of Oxford, will further the global reach, making thousands of new projects possible.”