Governing with Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Saunders and Geoff Mulgan at Nesta: “This paper provides an introduction to collective intelligence in government. It aims to be useful and relevant to governments of countries at very different levels of development. It highlights the ways in which governments are better understanding the world around them, drawing on ideas and expertise from their citizens, and encouraging greater scrutiny of their actions.

Collective intelligence is a new term to describe something which is in some respects old, but in other respects changing dramatically thanks to advances in digital technologies. It refers to the ability of large groups – a community, region, city or nation – to think and act intelligently in a way that amounts to more than the sum of their parts.

Key findings

Our analysis of government use of collective intelligence initiatives around the world finds that activities fall into four broad categories:

1. Better understanding facts and experiences: using new digital tools to gather data from many more sources.

2. Better development of options and ideas: tapping into the collective brainpower of citizens to come up with better ideas and options for action.

3. Better, more inclusive decision-making: involving citizens in decision making, from policymaking to planning and budgeting.

4. Better oversight of what is done: encouraging broader involvement in the oversight of government activity, from monitoring corruption to scrutinising budgets, helping to increase accountability and transparency….(More)”

Pushing the Limits of Collective Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stanford Innovation Lab Podcast with Tina Seelig:

“Imagine a collective brain shaped by human insights and powered by technology – that’s crowdsourcing. Michael Bernstein, computer scientist at Stanford University, explores how to harness crowdsourcing to tackle daunting challenges. In this episode of Stanford Innovation Lab, Tina Seelig meets with Michael to discuss examples of successful crowdsourcing, tools to gather collective insights, and the evolving relationship between humans and machines….(More)”

 

Esri, Waze Partnership: A Growing Trend in Sharing Data for the Benefit of All?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Justine Brown at GovTech: “Esri and Waze announced in mid-October that they’re partnering to help local governments alleviate traffic congestion and analyze congestion patterns. Called the Waze Connected Citizens Program, the program — which enables local governments that use the Esri ArcGIS platform to exchange publicly available traffic data with Waze — may represent a growing trend in which citizens and government share data for the benefit of all.

Connecting Esri and Waze data will allow cities to easily share information about the conditions of their roads with drivers, while drivers anonymously report accidents, potholes and other road condition information back to the cities. Local governments can then merge that data into their existing emergency dispatch and street maintenance systems….

Through the Connected Citizen program, Waze shares two main data sets with its government partners: Jams and Alerts….If there’s a major traffic jam in an unusual area, a traffic management center operator might be triggered to examine that area further. For example, Boston recently used Waze jam data to identify a couple of traffic-prone intersections in the Seaport district….Similarly if a Waze user reports a crash, that information shows up on the city’s existing ArcGIS map. City personnel can assess the crash and combine the Waze data with its existing data sets, if desired. The city can then notify emergency response, for example, to address the accident and send out emergency vehicles if necessary….

The Connected Citizen Program could also provide local governments an alternative to IoT investments, because a city can utilize real-time reports from the road rather than investing in sensors and IoT infrastructure. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, for instance, uses data from the Connected Citizen Program in several ways, including to monitor and detect automobile accidents on its roadways….(More)”

Portugal has announced the world’s first nationwide participatory budget

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Graça Fonseca at apolitical:”Portugal has announced the world’s first participatory budget on a national scale. The project will let people submit ideas for what the government should spend its money on, and then vote on which ideas are adopted.

Although participatory budgeting has become increasingly popular around the world in the past few years, it has so far been confined to cities and regions, and no country that we know of has attempted it nationwide. To reach as many people as possible, Portugal is also examining another innovation: letting people cast their votes via ATM machines.

‘It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK?’ Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible, told Apolitical. ‘And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.’

Although the official window for proposals begins in January, some have already been submitted to the project’s website. One suggests equipping kindergartens with technology to teach children about robotics. Using the open-source platform Arduino, the plan is to let children play with the tech and so foster scientific understanding from the earliest age.

Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture and lifelong learning, and there will be more than forty events in the new year for people to present and discuss their ideas.

The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens. Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails. Moreover, those who make the proposals often become passionate about them, campaigning for votes, flyering, making YouTube videos, going door-to-door and so fuelling a public discussion that involves ever more people in the process.

On the other side, it can bring public servants nearer to their fellow citizens by sharpening their understanding of what people want and what their priorities are. It can also raise the quality of public services by directing them more precisely to where they’re needed as well as by tapping the collective intelligence and imagination of thousands of participants….

Although it will not be used this year, because the project is still very much in the trial phase, the use of ATMs is potentially revolutionary. As Fonseca puts it, ‘In every remote part of the country, you might have nothing else, but you have an ATM.’ Moreover, an ATM could display proposals and allow people to vote directly, not least because it already contains a secure way of verifying their identity. At the moment, for comparison, people can vote by text or online, sending in the number from their ID card, which is checked against a database….(More)”.

Wikipedia’s not as biased as you might think

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ananya Bhattacharya in Quartz: “The internet is as open as people make it. Often, people limit their Facebook and Twitter circles to likeminded people and only follow certain subreddits, blogs, and news sites, creating an echo chamber of sorts. In a sea of biased content, Wikipedia is one of the few online outlets that strives for neutrality. After 15 years in operation, it’s starting to see results

Researchers at Harvard Business School evaluated almost 4,000 articles in Wikipedia’s online database against the same entries in Encyclopedia Brittanica to compare their biases. They focused on English-language articles about US politics, especially controversial topics, that appeared in both outlets in 2012.

“That is just not a recipe for coming to a conclusion,” Shane Greenstein, one of the study’s authors, said in an interview. “We were surprised that Wikipedia had not failed, had not fallen apart in the last several years.”

Greenstein and his co-author Feng Zhu categorized each article as “blue” or “red.” Drawing from research in political science, they identified terms that are idiosyncratic to each party. For instance, political scientists have identified that Democrats were more likely to use phrases such as “war in Iraq,” “civil rights,” and “trade deficit,” while Republicans used phrases such as “economic growth,” “illegal immigration,” and “border security.”…

“In comparison to expert-based knowledge, collective intelligence does not aggravate the bias of online content when articles are substantially revised,” the authors wrote in the paper. “This is consistent with a best-case scenario in which contributors with different ideologies appear to engage in fruitful online conversations with each other, in contrast to findings from offline settings.”

More surprisingly, the authors found that the 2.8 million registered volunteer editors who were reviewing the articles also became less biased over time. “You can ask questions like ‘do editors with red tendencies tend to go to red articles or blue articles?’” Greenstein said. “You find a prevalence of opposites attract, and that was striking.” The researchers even identified the political stance for a number of anonymous editors based on their IP locations, and the trend held steadfast….(More)”

Essays on collective intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thesis by Yiftach Nagar: “This dissertation consists of three essays that advance our understanding of collective-intelligence: how it works, how it can be used, and how it can be augmented. I combine theoretical and empirical work, spanning qualitative inquiry, lab experiments, and design, exploring how novel ways of organizing, enabled by advancements in information technology, can help us work better, innovate, and solve complex problems.

The first essay offers a collective sensemaking model to explain structurational processes in online communities. I draw upon Weick’s model of sensemaking as committed-interpretation, which I ground in a qualitative inquiry into Wikipedia’s policy discussion pages, in attempt to explain how structuration emerges as interpretations are negotiated, and then committed through conversation. I argue that the wiki environment provides conditions that help commitments form, strengthen and diffuse, and that this, in turn, helps explain trends of stabilization observed in previous research.

In the second essay, we characterize a class of semi-structured prediction problems, where patterns are difficult to discern, data are difficult to quantify, and changes occur unexpectedly. Making correct predictions under these conditions can be extremely difficult, and is often associated with high stakes. We argue that in these settings, combining predictions from humans and models can outperform predictions made by groups of people, or computers. In laboratory experiments, we combined human and machine predictions, and find the combined predictions more accurate and more robust than predictions made by groups of only people or only machines.

The third essay addresses a critical bottleneck in open-innovation systems: reviewing and selecting the best submissions, in settings where submissions are complex intellectual artifacts whose evaluation require expertise. To aid expert reviewers, we offer a computational approach we developed and tested using data from the Climate CoLab – a large citizen science platform. Our models approximate expert decisions about the submissions with high accuracy, and their use can save review labor, and accelerate the review process….(More)”

Innovando para una mejor gestión: La contribución de los laboratorios de innovación pública

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Acevedo, Sebastián; and Dassen, Nicolás for IDB: “Los cambios tecnológicos, económicos y sociales de los últimos años exigen gobiernos capaces de adaptarse a nuevos desafíos y a las crecientes demandas de la ciudadanía. En muchos países y en distintos niveles de gobierno, esto ha llevado a la creación de laboratorios de innovación, unidades cuyo objetivo es promover de diversos modos la innovación en el sector público. En este trabajo se analizan los roles y desafíos de los laboratorios latinoamericanos, contrastándolos con buenas prácticas y características que la literatura ha asociado a mayores niveles de innovación en el sector público y en otras organizaciones.

A partir de una encuesta a directores de laboratorios y dos estudios de casos, se describe el panorama de los laboratorios latinoamericanos y se discuten sus desafíos para: i) trabajar sobre temas centrales de la gestión, ii) conseguir la adopción de innovaciones y el escalamiento de las mismas y iii) asegurar la sostenibilidad de estas.

En particular, hay cuatro factores clave para su desempeño en esos aspectos: dos factores político-institucionales –el apoyo del liderazgo y las redes de política– y dos factores metodológicos –la adecuación técnica de las innovaciones y la construcción de un significado compartido sobre ellas–.

Además, se identifican dos diferencias principales entre la mayoría de los laboratorios relevados aquí y la experiencia de otras regiones, descripta por la literatura existente: un foco más intenso en temas de gobierno abierto y menos actividades para el testeo controlado de innovaciones, como experimentos aleatorios y evaluaciones de impacto. Finalmente, se presentan conclusiones y recomendaciones para la consolidación de los laboratorios como canales efectivos para gestionar innovaciones, manejando los riesgos inherentes, y modernizar la gestión… (More Español)

Participatory Budgeting in the United States: A Guide for Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Victoria Gordon, Jeffery L. Osgood, Jr., Daniel Boden: “Although citizen engagement is a core public service value, few public administrators receive training on how to share leadership with people outside the government.Participatory Budgeting in the United States serves as a primer for those looking to understand a classic example of participatory governance, engaging local citizens in examining budgetary constraints and priorities before making recommendations to local government. Utilizing case studies and an original set of interviews with community members, elected officials, and city employees, this book provides a rare window onto the participatory budgeting process through the words and experiences of the very individuals involved. The central themes that emerge from these fascinating and detailed cases focus on three core areas: creating the participatory budgeting infrastructure; increasing citizen participation in participatory budgeting; and assessing and increasing the impact of participatory budgeting. This book provides students, local government elected officials, practitioners, and citizens with a comprehensive understanding of participatory budgeting and straightforward guidelines to enhance the process of civic engagement and democratic values in local communities….(More)”

Remote Data Collection: Three Ways to Rethink How You Collect Data in the Field

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Magpi : “As mobile devices have gotten less and less expensive – and as millions worldwide have climbed out of poverty – it’s become quite common to see a mobile phone in every person’s hand, or at least in every family, and this means that we can utilize an additional approach to data collection that were simply not possible before….

In our Remote Data Collection Guide, we discuss these new technologies and the:

  • Key benefits of remote data collection in each of three different situations.
  • The direct impact of remote data collection on reducing the cost of your efforts.
  • How to start the process of choosing the right option for your needs….(More)”

When is the crowd wise or can the people ever be trusted?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julie Simon at NESTA: “Democratic theory has tended to take a pretty dim view of people and their ability to make decisions. Many political philosophers believe that people are at best uninformed and at worst, ignorant and incompetent.  This view is a common justification for our system of representative democracy – people can’t be trusted to make decisions so this responsibility should fall to those who have the expertise, knowledge or intelligence to do so.

Think back to what Edmund Burke said on the subject in his speech to the Electors of Bristol in 1774, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” He reminds us that “government and legislation are matters of reason and judgement, and not of inclination”. Others, like the journalist Charles Mackay, whose book on economic bubbles and crashes,Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, had an even more damning view of the crowd’s capacity to exercise either judgement or reason.

The thing is, if you believe that ‘the crowd’ isn’t wise then there isn’t much point in encouraging participation – these sorts of activities can only ever be tokenistic or a way of legitimising the decisions taken by others.

There are then those political philosophers who effectively argue that citizens’ incompetence doesn’t matter. They argue that the aggregation of views – through voting – eliminates ‘noise’ which enables you to arrive at optimal decisions. The larger the group, the better its decisions will be.  The corollary of this view is that political decision making should involve mass participation and regular referenda – something akin to the Swiss model.

Another standpoint is to say that there is wisdom within crowds – it’s just that it’s domain specific, unevenly distributed and quite hard to transfer. This idea was put forward by Friedrich Hayek in his seminal 1945 essay on The Use of Knowledge in Society in which he argues that:

“…the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate ‘given’ resources……it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality”.

Hayek argued that it was for this reason that central planning couldn’t work since no central planner could ever aggregate all the knowledge distributed across society to make good decisions.

More recently, Eric Von Hippel built on these foundations by introducing the concept of information stickiness; information is ‘sticky’ if it is costly to move from one place to another. One type of information that is frequently ‘sticky’ is information about users’ needs and preferences.[1] This helps to account for why manufacturers tend to develop innovations which are incremental – meeting already identified needs – and why so many organisations are engaging users in their innovation processes:  if knowledge about needs and tools for developing new solutions can be co-located in the same place (i.e. the user) then the cost of transferring sticky information is eliminated…..

There is growing evidence on how crowdsourcing can be used by governments to solve clearly defined technical, scientific or informational problems. Evidently there are significant needs and opportunities for governments to better engage citizens to solve these types of problems.

There’s also a growing body of evidence on how digital tools can be used to support and promote collective intelligence….

So, the critical task for public officials is to have greater clarity over the purpose of engagement –  in order to better understand which methods of engagement should be used and what kinds of  groups should be targeted.

At the same time, the central question for researchers is when and how to tap into collective intelligence: what tools and approaches can be used when we’re looking at arenas which are often sites of contestation? Should this input be limited to providing information and expertise to be used by public officials or representatives, or should these distributed experts exercise some decision making power too? And when we’re dealing with value based judgements when should we rely on large scale voting as a mechanism for making ‘smarter’ decisions and when are deliberative forms of engagement more appropriate? These are all issues we’re exploring as part of our ongoing programme of work on democratic innovations….(More)”