Everyone can now patrol this city’s streets for crime. ACLU says that’s a bad idea

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NJ.com: “All eyes are on the city of Newark, literally.  The city recently revealed its new “Citizen Virtual Patrol” program, which places 60 cameras around the city’s intersections, putting the city’s streets, and those who venture out on them, on display seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

That isn’t startling, as cameras have been up in the city for the past dozen years, says Anthony Ambrose, the city’s public safety director.

What is new, and not found in other cities, is that police officers won’t be the only ones trolling for criminals. Now, anyone who’s willing to submit their email address and upload an app onto their home computer or phone, can watch those cameras.

Citizens can then alert police when they see suspicious activity and remain anonymous.  “Right now, in this era of society, it’s impossible to be outside without being recorded,” said Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. “We need to be able to use that technology to allow the police to do their job more efficiently and more cost effective.”

Those extra eyes, however, come at a cost. The cameras could also provide stalkers with their victim’s whereabouts, show intimate scenes and even when residents leave their homes vacant as they head out on vacation.

The American Civil Liberties Association of New Jersey is asking Newark to end the program, saying it’s a violation of privacy and the Fourth Amendment.

“Newark is crowdsourcing it’s responsibility to the public instead of engaging in policing,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha.

“There’s a fundamental difference between a civilian using their phone to record a certain area than government having cameras where people have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” Sinha said….

The city also plans to launch a campaign informing residents about the cameras.

“It’s about transparency,” Ambrose said. “We’re not saying we put cameras out there and you don’t know where they are at, we’re telling you.” …(More)”.

Crowdsourcing & Data Analytics: The New Settlement Tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Chao, Bernard and Robertson, Christopher T. and Yokum, David V: “In the jury trial rights, the State and Federal Constitutions recognize the fundamental value of having laypersons resolve civil and criminal disputes. Nonetheless, settlement allows parties to avoid the risks and cost of trials, and settlements help clear court dockets efficiently. But achieving settlement can be a challenge. Parties naturally view their cases from different perspectives, and these perspectives often cause both sides to be overly optimistic. This article describes a novel method of providing parties more accurate information about the value of their case by incorporating layperson perspectives. Specifically, we suggest that working with mediators or settlement judges, the parties should create mini-trials and then recruit hundreds of online mock jurors to render decisions. By applying modern statistical techniques to these results, the mediators can show the parties the likelihood of possible outcomes and also collect qualitative information about strengths and weaknesses for each side. These data will counter the parties’ unrealistic views and thereby facilitate settlement….(More)”.

Citizen Representation in City Government-Driven Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Benjamin Y. Clark and Jeffrey L. Brudney in Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): “This article examines the citizen representativeness of crowdsourcing achieved through 311 systems—the non-emergency and quality of life service request reporting systems used by local governments. Based on surveys of San Francisco residents conducted in 2011, 2013, and 2015, our findings suggest that no systematic biases exist in participation rates across a range of socio-economic indicators. In addition, the findings provide evidence that participation may be responding positively to the city’s responsiveness, thus creating a self-reinforcing process that benefits an increasingly diverse and representative body of users. This inquiry builds on earlier studies of Boston and San Francisco that show that 311 systems did not bias response to traditionally disadvantaged groups (lower socioeconomic status or racial/ethnic minorities) at the demand level nor from high-volume users….(More)”.

Open Social Innovation: Why and How Seekers Use Crowdsourcing for Societal Benefits

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Krithika Randhawa, Ralf Wilden Macquarie and Joel West: “Despite the increased research attention on crowdsourcing, we know little about why and how seeker organizations use this open innovation mechanism. Furthermore, previous studies have focused on profit-seeking firms, despite the use of open innovation practices by public sector organizations to achieve societal benefits. In this study, we investigate the organizational and project level choices of government (seekers) that crowdsource from citizens (solvers) to drive open social innovation, and thus develop new ways to address societal problems, a process referred to as “citizensourcing”.

Using a dataset of 18 local government seekers that use the same intermediary to conduct more than 2,000 crowdsourcing projects, we develop a model of seeker crowdsourcing implementation that links a previously-unstudied variance in seeker intent and engagement strategies, at the organizational level, to differences in project team motivation and capabilities, in turn leading to varying online engagement behaviors and ultimately project outcomes. Comparing and contrasting governmental with the more familiar corporate context, we further find that the non-pecuniary orientation of both seekers and solvers means that the motives of government crowdsourcing differ fundamentally from corporate crowdsourcing, but that the process more closely resembles a corporate-sponsored community rather than government-sponsored contests. More broadly, we offer insights on how seeker organizational factors and choices shape project-level implementation and success of crowdsourcing efforts, as well as suggest implications for open innovation activities of other smaller, geographicallybound organizations….(More)”.

A survey of incentive engineering for crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Conor Muldoon, Michael J. O’Grady and Gregory M. P. O’Hare in the Knowledge Engineering Review: “With the growth of the Internet, crowdsourcing has become a popular way to perform intelligence tasks that hitherto would be either performed internally within an organization or not undertaken due to prohibitive costs and the lack of an appropriate communications infrastructure.

In crowdsourcing systems, whereby multiple agents are not under the direct control of a system designer, it cannot be assumed that agents will act in a manner that is consistent with the objectives of the system designer or principal agent. In situations whereby agents’ goals are to maximize their return in crowdsourcing systems that offer financial or other rewards, strategies will be adopted by agents to game the system if appropriate mitigating measures are not put in place.

The motivational and incentivization research space is quite large; it incorporates diverse techniques from a variety of different disciplines including behavioural economics, incentive theory, and game theory. This paper specifically focusses on game theoretic approaches to the problem in the crowdsourcing domain and places it in the context of the wider research landscape. It provides a survey of incentive engineering techniques that enable the creation of apt incentive structures in a range of different scenarios….(More)”.

Literature review on collective intelligence: a crowd science perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chao Yu in the International Journal of Crowd Science: “A group can be of more power and better wisdom than the sum of the individuals. Foreign scholars have noticed that for a long time and called it collective intelligence. It has emerged from the communication, collaboration, competition and brain storming, etc. Collective intelligence appears in many fields such as public decisions, voting activities, social networks and crowdsourcing.

Crowd science mainly focuses on the basic principles and laws of the intelligent activities of groups under the new interconnection model. It explores how to give full play to the intelligence agents and groups, dig their potential to solve the problems that are difficult for a single agent.

In this paper, we present a literature review on collective intelligence in a crowd science perspective. We focus on researchers’ related work, especially that under which circumstance can group show their wisdom, how to measure it, how to optimize it and its modern or future applications in the digital world. That is exactly what the crowd science pays close attention to….(More)”.

Use of data & technology for promoting waste sector accountability in Nepal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Saroj Bista at YoungInnovations: “All the Nepalese people are saddened to see waste abandoned in the Capital, Kathmandu. Among them, many are concerned to find solutions to such a problem, including Kathmandu City. A 2015 report stated that Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) alone receives 525 tonnes of waste in a day while it manages to collect 516 tonnes out if it, meaning that 8 tonnes of waste are left/abandoned….

Despite many stakeholders including the government sector, non-governmental organizations, private sectors have been working to address the problem associated with solid waste mapping in urban sector, the problem continued to exist.

YoungInnovations and Clean Up Nepal came together to discuss if we could tackle this problem. We discussed if keeping track of everybody’s efforts as well as noticing every piece of waste in the city raises accountability of stakeholders adds a value. YoungInnovations has over a decade of experience in developing data and evidence-based tech solutions to problem. Clean Up Nepal is a civil society organization working to provide an enabling environment to improve solid waste management and water, sanitation and hygiene in Nepal by working closely with local communities and relevant stakeholders. In this, both the organizations agreed to work mixing the expertise of each other to offer the government with an technology that avails stakeholders with proper data related to solid waste and its management.

Also, the preliminary idea was tested with some ongoing initiatives of such kind (Waste Atlas, Letsdoitworld etc) while consultations were held with some of the organizations like The GovLab, ICIMOD learn from their expertise on open data as well as environmental aspects. A remarkable example of smart waste management being carried out in Ulaanbaatar, Capital of Mongolia did motivate us to test the idea in Nepal….

Nepal Waste Map Web App

Nepal Waste Map web is a composite of several features primarily focused at the following:

  1. Display of key stats and information about solid waste
  2. Admin panel to interact with the data for taking possible actions (update, edit and delete)…

Nepal Waste Map Mobile

A Mobile App primarily reflects Nepal Waste Map in the mobile phones. Most of the features resemble with the Nepal Waste Map Web App.

However, some functionalities in the app are key in terms of data aspects:

Crowdsourcing Functionality

Any public (users) who use the app can report issues related to illegal waste dumping and waste esp. Plastic burning. Example: if I saw somebody burning plastic wastes, I can use the app for reporting such an incident along with the photo as evidence as well as coordinates. The admin of the web app can view the report in a real time and take action (not limited to defined as acknowledge and marking resolved)…(More)”.

From Crowdsourcing to Extreme Citizen Science: Participatory Research for Environmental Health

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

P.B. English, M.J. Richardson, and C. Garzón-Galvis in the Annual Review of Public Health: “Environmental health issues are becoming more challenging, and addressing them requires new approaches to research design and decision-making processes. Participatory research approaches, in which researchers and communities are involved in all aspects of a research study, can improve study outcomes and foster greater data accessibility and utility as well as increase public transparency. Here we review varied concepts of participatory research, describe how it complements and overlaps with community engagement and environmental justice, examine its intersection with emerging environmental sensor technologies, and discuss the strengths and limitations of participatory research. Although participatory research includes methodological challenges, such as biases in data collection and data quality, it has been found to increase the relevance of research questions, result in better knowledge production, and impact health policies. Improved research partnerships among government agencies, academia, and communities can increase scientific rigor, build community capacity, and produce sustainable outcomes….(More)”

Ethical Concerns of and Risk Mitigation Strategies for Crowdsourcing Contests and Innovation Challenges: Scoping Review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joseph D Tucker at the Journal of  Medical Internet Research: “Crowdsourcing contests (also called innovation challenges, innovation contests, and inducement prize contests) can be used to solicit multisectoral feedback on health programs and design public health campaigns. They consist of organizing a steering committee, soliciting contributions, engaging the community, judging contributions, recognizing a subset of contributors, and sharing with the community.

Objective: This scoping review describes crowdsourcing contests by stage, examines ethical problems at each stage, and proposes potential ways of mitigating risk.

Methods: Our analysis was anchored in the specific example of a crowdsourcing contest that our team organized to solicit videos promoting condom use in China. The purpose of this contest was to create compelling 1-min videos to promote condom use. We used a scoping review to examine the existing ethical literature on crowdsourcing to help identify and frame ethical concerns at each stage.

Results: Crowdsourcing has a group of individuals solve a problem and then share the solution with the public. Crowdsourcing contests provide an opportunity for community engagement at each stage: organizing, soliciting, promoting, judging, recognizing, and sharing. Crowdsourcing poses several ethical concerns: organizing—potential for excluding community voices; soliciting—potential for overly narrow participation; promoting—potential for divulging confidential information; judging—potential for biased evaluation; recognizing—potential for insufficient recognition of the finalist; and sharing—potential for the solution to not be implemented or widely disseminated.

Conclusions: Crowdsourcing contests can be effective and engaging public health tools but also introduce potential ethical problems. We present methods for the responsible conduct of crowdsourcing contests… (More)”.

How tech used to track the flu could change the game for public health response

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cathie Anderson in the Sacramento Bee: “Tech entrepreneurs and academic researchers are tracking the spread of flu in real-time, collecting data from social media and internet-connected devices that show startling accuracy when compared against surveillance data that public health officials don’t report until a week or two later….

Smart devices and mobile apps have the potential to reshape public health alerts and responses,…, for instance, the staff of smart thermometer maker Kinsa were receiving temperature readings that augured the surge of flu patients in emergency rooms there.

Kinsa thermometers are part of the movement toward the Internet of Things – devices that automatically transmit information to a database. No personal information is shared, unless users decide to input information such as age and gender. Using data from more than 1 million devices in U.S. homes, the staff is able to track fever as it hits and use an algorithm to estimate impact for a broader population….

Computational researcher Aaron Miller worked with an epidemiological team at the University of Iowa to assess the feasibility of using Kinsa data to forecast the spread of flu. He said the team first built a model using surveillance data from the CDC and used it to forecast the spread of influenza. Then the team created a model where they integrated the data from Kinsa along with that from the CDC.

“We got predictions that were … 10 to 50 percent better at predicting the spread of flu than when we used CDC data alone,” Miller said. “Potentially, in the future, if you had granular information from the devices and you had enough information, you could imagine doing analysis on a really local level to inform things like school closings.”

While Kinsa uses readings taken in homes, academic researchers and companies such as sickweather.com are using crowdsourcing from social media networks to provide information on the spread of flu. Siddharth Shah, a transformational health industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, pointed to an award-winning international study led by researchers at Northeastern University that tracked flu through Twitter posts and other key parameters of flu.

When compared with official influenza surveillance systems, the researchers said, the model accurately forecast the evolution of influenza up to six weeks in advance, much earlier than prior models. Such advance warnings would give health agencies significantly more time to expand upon medical resources or to alert the public to measures they can take to prevent transmission of the disease….

For now, Shah said, technology will probably only augment or complement traditional public data streams. However, he added, innovations already are changing how diseases are tracked. Chronic disease management, for instance, is going digital with devices such as Omada health that helps people with Type 2 diabetes better manage health challenges and Noom, a mobile app that helps people stop dieting and instead work toward true lifestyle change….(More).