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)”
Can the crowd deliver more open government?
at GovernmentNews: “…Crowdsourcing and policy making was the subject of a lecture by visiting academic Dr Tanja Aitamurto at Victoria’s Swinburne University of Technology earlier this month. Dr Aitamurto wrote “Crowdsourcing for Democracy: New Era in Policy-Making” and led the design and implementation of the Finnish Experiment, a pioneering case study in crowdsourcing policy making.
She spoke about how Scandinavian countries have used crowdsourcing to “tap into the collective intelligence of a large and diverse crowd” in an “open ended knowledge information search process” in an open call for anybody to participate online and complete a task.
It has already been used widely and effectively by companies such as Proctor and Gamble who offer a financial reward for solutions to their R&D problems.
The Finnish government recently used crowdsourcing when it came to reform the country’s Traffic Act following a rash of complaints to the Minister of the Environment about it. The Act, which regulates issues such as off-road traffic, is an emotive issue in Finland where snow mobiles are used six months of the year and many people live in remote areas.
The idea was for people to submit problems and solutions online, covering areas such as safety, noise, environmental protection, the rights of snowmobile owners and landowners’ rights. Everyone could see what was written and could comment on it.
Dr Aitamurto said crowdsourcing had four stages:
• The problem mapping space, where people were asked to outline the issues that needed solving
• An appeal for solutions
• An expert panel evaluated the comments received based on the criteria of: effectiveness, cost efficiency, ease of implementation and fairness. The crowd also had the chance to evaluate and rank solutions online
• The findings were then handed over to the government for the law writing process
Dr Aitamurto said active participation seemed to create a strong sense of empowerment for those involved.
She said some people reported that it was the first time in their lives they felt they were really participating in democracy and influencing decision making in society. They said it felt much more real than voting in an election, which felt alien and remote.
“Participation becomes a channel for advocacy, not just for self-interest but a channel to hear what others are saying and then also to make yourself heard. People expected a compromise at the end,” Dr Aitamurto said.
Being able to participate online was ideal for people who lived remotely and turned crowdsourcing into a democratic innovation which brought citizens closer to policy and decision making between elections.
Other benefits included reaching out to tap into new pools of knowledge, rather than relying on a small group of homogenous experts to solve the problem.
“When we use crowdsourcing we actually extend our knowledge search to multiple, hundreds of thousands of distant neighbourhoods online and that can be the power of crowdsourcing: to find solutions and information that we wouldn’t find otherwise. We find also unexpected information because it’s a self-selecting crowd … people that we might not have in our networks already,” Dr Aitamurto said.
The process can increase transparency as people interact on online platforms and where the government keeps feedback loops going.
Dr Aitamurto is also a pains to highlight what crowdsourcing is not and cannot be, because participants are self-selecting and not statistically representative.
“The crowd doesn’t make decisions, it provides information. It’s not a method or tool for direct democracy and it’s not a public opinion poll either”.
Crowdsourcing has fed into policy in other countries too, for example, during Iceland’s constitutional reform and in the United States where the federal Emergency Management Agency overhauled its strategy after a string of natural disasters.
Australian government has been getting in on the act using cloud-based software Citizen Space to gain input into a huge range of topics. While much of it is technically consultation, rather than feeding into actual policy design, it is certainly a step towards more open government.
British company Delib, which is behind the software, bills it as “managing, publicising and archiving all of your organisation’s consultation activity”.
One council who has used Citizens Space is Wyong Shire on the NSW Central Coast. The council has used the consultation hub to elicit ratepayers’ views on a number of topics, including a special rate variation, community precinct forums, strategic plans and planning decisions.
One of Citizen Space’s most valuable features is the section ‘we asked, you said, we did’….(More)”
Content Volatility of Scientific Topics in Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale
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)”