Marijn Janssen and Natalie Helbig in Government Information Quarterly: “Many policy-makers are struggling to understand participatory governance in the midst of technological changes. Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to have an impact on the ways that policy-makers and citizens engage with each other throughout the policy-making process. A set of developments in the areas of opening government data, advanced analytics, visualization, simulation, and gaming, and ubiquitous citizen access using mobile and personalized applications is shaping the interactions between policy-makers and citizens. Yet the impact of these developments on the policy-makers is unclear. The changing roles and need for new capabilities required from the government are analyzed in this paper using two case studies. Salient new roles for policy-makers are outlined focused on orchestrating the policy-making process. Research directions are identified including understand the behavior of users, aggregating and analyzing content from scattered resources, and the effective use of the new tools. Understanding new policy-makers roles will help to bridge the gap between the potential of tools and technologies and the organizational realities and political contexts. We argue that many examples are available that enable learning from others, in both directions, developed countries experiences are useful for developing countries and experiences from the latter are valuable for the former countries…(More)”
A Gargantuan Challenge for The Megalopolis: Mexico City calls citizens to help map its complex public bus system
“Mexico City, the largest and oldest urban agglomeration in the American continent. The city is home to an incredible diversity of people and cultures, and its size and its diversity also poses certain challenges. In a city with such big scale (the metropolitan area measures 4,887 mi2) transportation is one of its main problems. Finding ways to improve how people move within requires imagination and cooperation from decision makers and society alike.
The scale and dynamism of Mexico City’s public transport system represents a challenge to generate quality information. Processes for the generation of mobility data are time-consuming and expensive. Given this scenario, the best alternative for the city is to include transport users in generating this information.
The megalopolis lacks an updated, open database of its more than 1,500 bus routes. To tackle this problem, Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Mexico City’s experimental office and creative think-tank, reporting to the Mayor) partnered with 12 organizations that include NGOs and other government offices to develop Mapatón CDMX: a crowdsourcing and gamification experiment to map the city’s bus routes through civic collaboration and technology.
After one year of designing and testing a strategy, the team behind Mapatón CDMX is calling citizens to map the public transport system by participating on a city game from January 29th to February 14th 2016. The game’s goal is to map routes of licenced public transport (buses, minibuses and vans) from start to finish in order to score points, which is done through an app for Android devices that gathers GPS data from the user inside the bus.
The mappers will participate individually or in groups with friends and family for two weeks. As an incentive and once the mapping marathon is finished, those participants with higher scores will earn cash prizes and electronic devices. (A smart algorithm creates incentives to map the longest or most ignored routes, giving mappers extra points.) But what is most valuable: the data resulting will be openly available at the end of February 2016, much faster and cheaper than with traditional processes.
Mapatón CDMX is an innovative and effective way to generate updated and open information about transport routes as the game harnesses collective intelligence of the gargantuan city. Organisers consider that the open database may be used by anyone to create –for example– data driven policy, strategies for academic analysis, maps for users, applications, visualizations, among many other digital products….(More)”
Collective Intelligence in Law Reforms: When the Logic of the Crowds and the Logic of Policymaking Collide
Paper by Tanja Aitamurto: “…shows how the two virtues of collective intelligence – cognitive diversity and large crowds –turn into perils in crowdsourced policymaking. That is because of a conflict between the logic of the crowds and the logic of policymaking. The crowd’s logic differs from that of traditional policymaking in several aspects. To mention some of those: In traditional policymaking it is a small group of experts making proposals to the policy, whereas in crowdsourced policymaking, it is a large, anonymous crowd with a mixed level of expertise. The crowd proposes atomic ideas, whereas traditional policymaking is used to dealing with holistic and synthesized proposals. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced law-making process in Finland, the paper shows how the logics of the crowds and policymaking collide in practice. The conflict prevents policymaking fully benefiting from the crowd’s input, and it also hinders governments from adopting crowdsourcing more widely as a practice for deploying open policymaking practices….(More)”
Biases in collective platforms: Wikipedia, GitHub and crowdmapping
Stefana Broadbent at Nesta: “Many of the collaboratively developed knowledge platforms we discussed at our recent conference, At The Roots of Collective Intelligence, suffer from a well-known “contributors’ bias”.
More than 85% of Wikipedia’s entries have been written by men
OpenStack, as with most other Open Source projects, has seen the emergence of a small group of developers who author the majority of the projects. In fact 80% of the commits have been authored by slightly less than 8% of the authors, while 90% of the commits correspond to about 17% of all the authors.
GitHub’s Be Social function allows users to “follow” other participants and receive notification of their activity. The most popular contributors tend therefore to attract other users to the projects they are working on. And Open Street Map has 1.2 million registered users, but less than 15% of them have produced the majority of the 13 million elements of information.
Research by Quattrone, Capra, De Meo (2015) showed that while the content mapped was not different between active and occasional mappers, the social composition of the power users led to a geographical bias, with less affluent areas remaining unmapped more frequently than urban centres.
These well-known biases in crowdsourcing information, also known as the ‘power users’ effect, were discussed by Professor Licia Capra from the Department of Engineering at UCL. Watch the video of her talk here.
In essence, despite the fact that crowd-sourcing platforms are inclusive and open to anyone willing to dedicate the time and effort, there is a process of self-selection. Different factors can explain why there are certain gender and socio economic groups that are drawn to specific activities, but it is clear that there is a progressive reduction of the diversity of contributors over time.
The effect is more extreme where there is the need for continuous contributions. As the Humanitarian Open StreetMap Team project data showed, humanitarian crises attract many users who contribute intensely for a short time, but only very few participants contribute regularly for a long time. Only a small proportion of power users continue editing or adding code for sustained periods. This effect begs two important questions: does the editing job of the active few skew the information made available, and what can be done to avoid this type of concentration?….
The issue of how to attract more volunteers and editors is more complex and is a constant challenge for any crowdsourcing platform. We can look back at when Wikipedia started losing contributors, which coincided with a period of tighter restrictions to the editing process. This suggests that alongside designing the interface in a way to make contributions easy to be created and shared, it is also necessary to design practices and social norms that are immediately and continuously inclusive. – (More)”
Batea: a Wikipedia hack for medical students
Tom Sullivan at HealthCareIT: “Medical students use Wikipedia in great numbers, but what if it were a more trusted source of information?
That’s the idea behind Batea, a piece of software that essentially collects data from clinical reference URLs medical students visit, then aggregates that information to share with WikiProject Medicine, such that relevant medical editors can glean insights about how best to enhance Wikipedia’s medical content.
Batea takes its name from the Spanish name for gold pan, according to Fred Trotter, a data journalist at DocGraph.
“It’s a data mining project,” Trotter explained, “so we wanted a short term that positively referenced mining.”
DocGraph built Batea with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and, prior to releasing it on Tuesday, operated beta testing pilots of the browser extension at the University of California, San Francisco and the University of Texas, Houston.
UCSF, for instance, has what Trotter described as “a unique program where medical students edit Wikipedia for credit. They helped us tremendously in testing the alpha versions of the software.”
Wikipedia houses some 25,000 medical articles that receive more than 200 million views each month, according to the DocGraph announcement, while 8,000 pharmacology articles are read more than 40 million times a month.
DocGraph is encouraging medical students around the country to download the Batea extension – and anonymously donate their clinical-related browsing history. Should Batea gain critical mass, the potential exists for it to substantively enhance Wikipedia….(More)”
Build digital democracy
Dirk Helbing & Evangelos Pournaras in Nature: “Fridges, coffee machines, toothbrushes, phones and smart devices are all now equipped with communicating sensors. In ten years, 150 billion ‘things’ will connect with each other and with billions of people. The ‘Internet of Things’ will generate data volumes that double every 12 hours rather than every 12 months, as is the case now.
Blinded by information, we need ‘digital sunglasses’. Whoever builds the filters to monetize this information determines what we see — Google and Facebook, for example. Many choices that people consider their own are already determined by algorithms. Such remote control weakens responsible, self-determined decision-making and thus society too.
The European Court of Justice’s ruling on 6 October that countries and companies must comply with European data-protection laws when transferring data outside the European Union demonstrates that a new digital paradigm is overdue. To ensure that no government, company or person with sole control of digital filters can manipulate our decisions, we need information systems that are transparent, trustworthy and user-controlled. Each of us must be able to choose, modify and build our own tools for winnowing information.
With this in mind, our research team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), alongside international partners, has started to create a distributed, privacy-preserving ‘digital nervous system’ called Nervousnet. Nervousnet uses the sensor networks that make up the Internet of Things, including those in smartphones, to measure the world around us and to build a collective ‘data commons’. The many challenges ahead will be best solved using an open, participatory platform, an approach that has proved successful for projects such as Wikipedia and the open-source operating system Linux.
A wise king?
The science of human decision-making is far from understood. Yet our habits, routines and social interactions are surprisingly predictable. Our behaviour is increasingly steered by personalized advertisements and search results, recommendation systems and emotion-tracking technologies. Thousands of pieces of metadata have been collected about every one of us (seego.nature.com/stoqsu). Companies and governments can increasingly manipulate our decisions, behaviour and feelings1.
Many policymakers believe that personal data may be used to ‘nudge’ people to make healthier and environmentally friendly decisions. Yet the same technology may also promote nationalism, fuel hate against minorities or skew election outcomes2 if ethical scrutiny, transparency and democratic control are lacking — as they are in most private companies and institutions that use ‘big data’. The combination of nudging with big data about everyone’s behaviour, feelings and interests (‘big nudging’, if you will) could eventually create close to totalitarian power.
Countries have long experimented with using data to run their societies. In the 1970s, Chilean President Salvador Allende created computer networks to optimize industrial productivity3. Today, Singapore considers itself a data-driven ‘social laboratory’4 and other countries seem keen to copy this model.
The Chinese government has begun rating the behaviour of its citizens5. Loans, jobs and travel visas will depend on an individual’s ‘citizen score’, their web history and political opinion. Meanwhile, Baidu — the Chinese equivalent of Google — is joining forces with the military for the ‘China brain project’, using ‘deep learning’ artificial-intelligence algorithms to predict the behaviour of people on the basis of their Internet activity6.
The intentions may be good: it is hoped that big data can improve governance by overcoming irrationality and partisan interests. But the situation also evokes the warning of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, that the “sovereign acting … to make the people happy according to his notions … becomes a despot”. It is for this reason that the US Declaration of Independence emphasizes the pursuit of happiness of individuals.
Ruling like a ‘benevolent dictator’ or ‘wise king’ cannot work because there is no way to determine a single metric or goal that a leader should maximize. Should it be gross domestic product per capita or sustainability, power or peace, average life span or happiness, or something else?
Better is pluralism. It hedges risks, promotes innovation, collective intelligence and well-being. Approaching complex problems from varied perspectives also helps people to cope with rare and extreme events that are costly for society — such as natural disasters, blackouts or financial meltdowns.
Centralized, top-down control of data has various flaws. First, it will inevitably become corrupted or hacked by extremists or criminals. Second, owing to limitations in data-transmission rates and processing power, top-down solutions often fail to address local needs. Third, manipulating the search for information and intervening in individual choices undermines ‘collective intelligence’7. Fourth, personalized information creates ‘filter bubbles’8. People are exposed less to other opinions, which can increase polarization and conflict9.
Fifth, reducing pluralism is as bad as losing biodiversity, because our economies and societies are like ecosystems with millions of interdependencies. Historically, a reduction in diversity has often led to political instability, collapse or war. Finally, by altering the cultural cues that guide peoples’ decisions, everyday decision-making is disrupted, which undermines rather than bolsters social stability and order.
Big data should be used to solve the world’s problems, not for illegitimate manipulation. But the assumption that ‘more data equals more knowledge, power and success’ does not hold. Although we have never had so much information, we face ever more global threats, including climate change, unstable peace and socio-economic fragility, and political satisfaction is low worldwide. About 50% of today’s jobs will be lost in the next two decades as computers and robots take over tasks. But will we see the macroeconomic benefits that would justify such large-scale ‘creative destruction’? And how can we reinvent half of our economy?
The digital revolution will mainly benefit countries that achieve a ‘win–win–win’ situation for business, politics and citizens alike10. To mobilize the ideas, skills and resources of all, we must build information systems capable of bringing diverse knowledge and ideas together. Online deliberation platforms and reconfigurable networks of smart human minds and artificially intelligent systems can now be used to produce collective intelligence that can cope with the diverse and complex challenges surrounding us….(More)” See Nervousnet project
What is Citizensourcing?
Cities are a powerhouse of collective intelligence. Thanks to modern technologies, time has come to unlock the wisdom of the crowd.
Yesterday
Today
Tomorrow
Meaningful meetings: how can meetings be made better?
Geoff Mulgan at NESTA: “Many of us spend much of our time in meetings and at conferences. But too often these feel like a waste of time, or fail to make the most of the knowledge and experience of the people present.
Meetings have changed – with much more use of online tools, and a growing range of different meeting formats. But our sense is that meetings could be much better run and achieve better results.
This paper tries to help. It summarises some of what’s known about how meetings work well or badly; makes recommendations about how to make meetings better; and showcases some interesting recent innovations. It forms part of a larger research programme at Nesta on collective intelligence which is investigating how groups and organisations can make the most of their brains, and of the technologies they use.
We hope the paper will be helpful to anyone designing or running meetings of any kind, and that readers will contribute good examples, ideas and evidence which can be added into future versions….(More)”
The Future of Public Participation: Better Design, Better Laws, Better Systems
Tina Nabatchi, Emma Ertinger and Matt Leighninger in Conflict Resolution Quaterly: “In the late 1980s and early 1990s, conflict resolution practitioners faced a dilemma: they understood how to design better ADR processes but were often unsure of their authority to offer ADR and were entrenched in systems that made it difficult to use ADR. Today, public participation faces a similar dilemma. We know what good participation looks like, but using better participation is challenging because of legal and systemic impediments. This need not be the case. In this article, we assert that tapping the full potential of public participation requires better designs, better laws, and better systems….(More)”
Collective Intelligence Meets Medical Decision-Making
Paper by Max Wolf, Jens Krause, Patricia A. Carney, Andy Bogart, Ralf H. Kurvers indicating that “The Collective Outperforms the Best Radiologist”: “While collective intelligence (CI) is a powerful approach to increase decision accuracy, few attempts have been made to unlock its potential in medical decision-making. Here we investigated the performance of three well-known collective intelligence rules (“majority”, “quorum”, and “weighted quorum”) when applied to mammography screening. For any particular mammogram, these rules aggregate the independent assessments of multiple radiologists into a single decision (recall the patient for additional workup or not). We found that, compared to single radiologists, any of these CI-rules both increases true positives (i.e., recalls of patients with cancer) and decreases false positives (i.e., recalls of patients without cancer), thereby overcoming one of the fundamental limitations to decision accuracy that individual radiologists face. Importantly, we find that all CI-rules systematically outperform even the best-performing individual radiologist in the respective group. Our findings demonstrate that CI can be employed to improve mammography screening; similarly, CI may have the potential to improve medical decision-making in a much wider range of contexts, including many areas of diagnostic imaging and, more generally, diagnostic decisions that are based on the subjective interpretation of evidence….(More)”