Paper by Wilson AM and Likens GE at PLOS: “Wikipedia has quickly become one of the most frequently accessed encyclopedic references, despite the ease with which content can be changed and the potential for ‘edit wars’ surrounding controversial topics. Little is known about how this potential for controversy affects the accuracy and stability of information on scientific topics, especially those with associated political controversy. Here we present an analysis of the Wikipedia edit histories for seven scientific articles and show that topics we consider politically but not scientifically “controversial” (such as evolution and global warming) experience more frequent edits with more words changed per day than pages we consider “noncontroversial” (such as the standard model in physics or heliocentrism). For example, over the period we analyzed, the global warming page was edited on average (geometric mean ±SD) 1.9±2.7 times resulting in 110.9±10.3 words changed per day, while the standard model in physics was only edited 0.2±1.4 times resulting in 9.4±5.0 words changed per day. The high rate of change observed in these pages makes it difficult for experts to monitor accuracy and contribute time-consuming corrections, to the possible detriment of scientific accuracy. As our society turns to Wikipedia as a primary source of scientific information, it is vital we read it critically and with the understanding that the content is dynamic and vulnerable to vandalism and other shenanigans….(More)”
Collective Intelligence in Patient Organisations
New report by Lydia Nicholas and Stefana Broadbent (Nesta):”… examines patient organisations’ ever more critical role as knowledge brokers in an increasingly complex, data-rich healthcare system.
Key findings
- Patient organisations are important examples of collective intelligence practiced in challenging conditions with the aim of tackling complex problems.
- With more long term conditions and multimorbidities, more data, more available options in diagnostics, treatments, and care, knowledge is becoming one of the most critical assets of patients seeking optimal care.
- Patient organisations, working as collectives, are in an excellent position to support the work of translating, assembling and analysing the information involved in healthcare.
- Innovative patient organisations are already supporting the development of peer relationships, driving ambitious research programmes, sharing skills and unlocking the energy and expertise of patients. But they need support from better tools to extend this critical work.
Unlike many popular examples of collective intelligence such as open source software, people coming to patient organisations are not motivated by pre-existing technical skills, but by urgent personal needs. This makes them a hugely productive site of research.
The ‘thinking challenges’ patients face are enormous and complex, involving an ever-growing store of medical information, the practical and bureaucratic skills of living with a condition. Many go beyond adherence to understanding and partaking in research.
The health care system is under strain from increasing demand and resource pressure. The NHS and other healthcare networks have committed to engage and empower patients and support them in developing expertise, enabling them to take a more active role in their own care. But knowledge tools and systems that engage only with individuals tend to exacerbate existing health care divides. Health knowledge work is hard, and requires time and resources.
In this report we argue that patient organisations have a pivotal role to play in distributing the burden and benefit of knowledge work amongst participants. They need new and better tools to support their work developing connections between the many individuals and institutions of the healthcare system, driving ambitious research programmes, and facilitating peer support….(More)
Rethinking Smart Cities From The Ground Up
New report byTom Saunders and Peter Baeck (NESTA): “This report tells the stories of cities around the world – from Beijing to Amsterdam, and from London to Jakarta – that are addressing urban challenges by using digital technologies to engage and enable citizens.
Key findings
- Many ‘top down’ smart city ideas have failed to deliver on their promise, combining high costs and low returns.
- ‘Collaborative technologies’ offer cities another way to make smarter use of resources, smarter ways of collecting data and smarter ways to make decisions.
- Collaborative technologies can also help citizens themselves shape the future of their cities.
- We have created five recommendations for city government who want to make their cities smarter.
As cities bring people together to live, work and play, they amplify their ability to create wealth and ideas. But scale and density also bring acute challenges: how to move around people and things; how to provide energy; how to keep people safe.
‘Smart cities’ offer sensors, ‘big data’ and advanced computing as answers to these challenges, but they have often faced criticism for being too concerned with hardware rather than with people.
In this report we argue that successful smart cities of the future will combine the best aspects of technology infrastructure while making the most of the growing potential of ‘collaborative technologies’, technologies that enable greater collaboration between urban communities and between citizens and city governments.
How will this work in practice? Drawing on examples from all around the world we investigate four emerging methods which are helping city governments engage and enable citizens: the collaborative economy, crowdsourcing data, collective intelligence and crowdfunding.
Policy recommendations
- Set up a civic innovation lab to drive innovation in collaborative technologies.
- Use open data and open platforms to mobilise collective knowledge.
- Take human behaviour as seriously as technology.
- Invest in smart people, not just smart technology.
- Spread the potential of collaborative technologies to all parts of society….(More)”
Video: The power of public art
“Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director of Creative Time USA, says artists have the power “to kick open the door to social change.” In this video for the World Economic Forum, Pasternak talks about some of Creative Time’s commissions – from lighting up the New York skyline to shaking the hands of sanitation workers – and how art can help expose and heal social issues.
Click on the video to watch the full talk, or read selected quotes below”
Navigating the Health Data Ecosystem
New book on O’Reilly Media on “The “Six C’s”: Understanding the Health Data Terrain in the Era of Precision Medicine”: “Data-driven technologies are now being adopted, developed, funded, and deployed throughout the health care market at an unprecedented scale. But, as this O’Reilly report reveals, health care innovation contains more hurdles and requires more finesse than many tech startups expect. By paying attention to the lessons from the report’s findings, innovation teams can better anticipate what they’ll face, and plan accordingly.
Simply put, teams looking to apply collective intelligence and “big data” platforms to health and health care problems often don’t appreciate the messy details of using and making sense of data in the heavily regulated hospital IT environment. Download this report today and learn how it helps prepare startups in six areas:
- Complexity: An enormous domain with noisy data not designed for machine consumption
- Computing: Lack of standard, interoperable schema for documenting human health in a digital format
- Context: Lack of critical contextual metadata for interpreting health data
- Culture: Startup difficulties in hospital ecosystems: why innovation can be a two-edged sword
- Contracts: Navigating the IRB, HIPAA, and EULA frameworks
- Commerce: The problem of how digital health startups get paid
This report represents the initial findings of a study funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Subsequent reports will explore the results of three deep-dive projects the team pursued during the study. (More)”
Delhi trials participatory budget initiative
Medha Basu in FutureGov: “The Delhi government is running a participatory budget exercise to involve citizens in deciding priorities for the 2015 Budget.
The city government, which came into office in February, has set aside INR 5 million (US$78,598) for each neighbourhood and residents will decide what this money gets spent on.
The initiative, Janta Ka Budget (meaning ‘People’s Budget’), will be tested in 400 communities across the city, with the first one launched by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal last month.
….
Officials met with residents of the neighbourhood to hear what they would like to see improved in their area. Residents then voted in public meetings to decide the most popular ones.
Officials are expected to come up with cost estimates for the shortlisted projects within a week of the meeting and allocate money from the fund.
In the first session, the shortlisted projects were a library, dispensary, road repairs and CCTV cameras….(More)”
New Interactive Citizen-Generated Data Platform
DataShift: “Following a study to better understand the number, type and scale of citizen-generated data initiatives across the world, the DataShift has visualised the resulting data to create an interactive online platform. Users are presented with a definition of a citizen-generated data initiative before being invited to browse the multiple initiatives according to the various themes that they address….(More)”
Collective Intelligence or Group Think?
Paper analyzing “Engaging Participation Patterns in World without Oil” by Nassim JafariNaimi and Eric M. Meyers: “This article presents an analysis of participation patterns in an Alternate Reality Game, World Without Oil. This game aims to bring people together in an online environment to reflect on how an oil crisis might affect their lives and communities as a way to both counter such a crisis and to build collective intelligence about responding to it. We present a series of participation profiles based on a quantitative analysis of 1554 contributions to the game narrative made by 322 players. We further qualitatively analyze a sample of these contributions. We outline the dominant themes, the majority of which engage the global oil crisis for its effects on commute options and present micro-sustainability solutions in response. We further draw on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of this space to discuss how the design of the game, specifically its framing of the problem, feedback mechanism, and absence of subject-matter expertise, counter its aim of generating collective intelligence, making it conducive to groupthink….(More)”
Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia.
Working Paper by Shane Greenstein and Feng Zhu. Which source of information contains greater bias and slant—text written by an expert or that constructed via collective intelligence? Do the costs of acquiring, storing, displaying and revising information shape those differences? We evaluate these questions empirically by examining slanted and biased phrases in content on US political issues from two sources — Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia. Our overall slant measure is less (more) than zero when an article leans towards Democrat (Republican) viewpoints, while bias is the absolute value of the slant. Using a matched sample of pairs of articles from Britannica and Wikipedia, we show that, overall, Wikipedia articles are more slanted towards Democrat than Britannica articles, as well as more biased. Slanted Wikipedia articles tend to become less biased than Britannica articles on the same topic as they become substantially revised, and the bias on a per word basis hardly differs between the sources. These results have implications for the segregation of readers in online sources and the allocation of editorial resources in online sources using collective intelligence…Key concepts include:
- The costs of producing, storing, and distributing knowledge shape different biases and slants in the collective intelligence (Wikipedia) and the expert-based model (Britannica).
- Many of the differences between Wikipedia and Britannica arise because Wikipedia faces insignificant storage, production, and distribution costs. This leads to longer articles with greater coverage of more points of view. The number of revisions of Wikipedia articles results in more neutral point of view. In the best cases, it reduces slant and bias to a negligible difference with an expert-based model.
- As the world moves from reliance on expert-based production of knowledge to collectively-produced intelligence, it is unwise to blindly trust the properties of knowledge produced by the crowd. Their slants and biases are not widely appreciated, nor are the properties of the production model as yet fully understood.”…(More)
VoXup
Nesta: “Does your street feel safe? Would you like to change something in your neighbourhood? Is there enough for young people to do?
All basic questions, but how many local councillors have the time to put these issues to their constituents? A new web app aims to make it easier for councillors and council officers to talk to residents – and it’s all based around a series of simple questions.
Now, just a year after VoXup was created in a north London pub, Camden Council is using it to consult residents on its budget proposals.
One of VoXup’s creators, Peter Lewis, hit upon the idea after meeting an MP and being reminded of how hard it can be to get involved in decision-making….
All basic questions, but how many local councillors have the time to put these issues to their constituents? A new web app aims to make it easier for councillors and council officers to talk to residents – and it’s all based around a series of simple questions.
Now, just a year after VoXup was created in a north London pub, Camden Council is using it to consult residents on its budget proposals.
One of VoXup’s creators, Peter Lewis, hit upon the idea after meeting an MP and being reminded of how hard it can be to get involved in decision-making….
Now VoXup is being used by Camden Council to engage with residents about its spending plans.
“They’ve got to cut a lot of money and they want to know which services people would prioritise,” Lewis explains.
“So we’ve created a custom community, and most popular topics have got about 200 votes. About 650 people have taken part at some level, and it’s only just begun. We’ve seen a lot of activity – of the people who look at the web page, almost half give an opinion on something.”
‘No need for smartphone app’
What does the future hold for VoXup? Lewis, who is working on the project full-time, says one thing the team won’t be doing is building a smartphone app.
“One of the things we thought about doing was creating a mobile app, but that’s been really unnecessary – we built VoXup as a responsive web app,” he says…. (More)”.
“They’ve got to cut a lot of money and they want to know which services people would prioritise,” Lewis explains.
“So we’ve created a custom community, and most popular topics have got about 200 votes. About 650 people have taken part at some level, and it’s only just begun. We’ve seen a lot of activity – of the people who look at the web page, almost half give an opinion on something.”
‘No need for smartphone app’
What does the future hold for VoXup? Lewis, who is working on the project full-time, says one thing the team won’t be doing is building a smartphone app.
“One of the things we thought about doing was creating a mobile app, but that’s been really unnecessary – we built VoXup as a responsive web app,” he says…. (More)”.