Andrew Nash for the Transportation Research Board: “Crowdsourcing is an organized way of involving people in decision-making and production. Crowdsourced products, like Wikipedia, are replacing established products. Crowdsourced services, like Uber, are replacing established services. Crowdsourced advice, like Trip Advisor, is replacing established experts. Crowdsourcing is becoming ubiquitous as people and organizations realize that it helps them make better decisions and produce better products. This paper is predicated on the belief that crowdsourcing is the key innovation needed for public transport to thrive in this age of rapid change. It presents a model structure for helping understand crowdsourcing and examples of how public transport organizations can use crowdsourcing. The paper presents a broad survey of crowdsourcing with the objective of helping practitioners and researchers implement and understand crowdsourcing projects in public transport…(More)”
Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing for Earth Observations: An Analysis of Stakeholder Opinions on the Present and Future
Suvodeep Mazumdar, Stuart Wrigley and Fabio Ciravegna in Remote Sense: “The impact of Crowdsourcing and citizen science activities on academia, businesses, governance and society has been enormous. This is more prevalent today with citizens and communities collaborating with organizations, businesses and authorities to contribute in a variety of manners, starting from mere data providers to being key stakeholders in various decision-making processes. The “Crowdsourcing for observations from Satellites” project is a recently concluded study supported by demonstration projects funded by European Space Agency (ESA). The objective of the project was to investigate the different facets of how crowdsourcing and citizen science impact upon the validation, use and enhancement of Observations from Satellites (OS) products and services. This paper presents our findings in a stakeholder analysis activity involving participants who are experts in crowdsourcing, citizen science for Earth Observations. The activity identified three critical areas that needs attention by the community as well as provides suggestions to potentially help in addressing some of the challenges identified….(More)”.
How Mobile Crowdsourcing Can Improve Occupational Safety
Batu Sayici & Beth Simone Noveck at The GovLab’s Medium: “With 150 workers dying each day from hazardous working conditions, work safety continues to be a serious problem in the U.S. Using mobile technology to collect information about workplace safety conditions from those on the ground could help prevent serious injuries and save lives by accelerating the ability to spot unsafe conditions. The convergence of wireless devices, low-cost sensors, big data, and crowdsourcing can transform the way we assess risk in our workplaces. Government agencies, labor unions, workers’ rights organizations, contractors and crowdsourcing technology providers should work together to create new tools and frameworks in a way that can improve safety and provide value to all stakeholders.
Crowdsourcing (the act of soliciting help from a distributed audience) can provide a real-time source of data to complement data collected by government agencies as part of the regulatory processes of monitoring workplace safety. Having access to this data could help government agencies to more effectively monitor safety-related legal compliance, help building owners, construction companies and procurement entities to more easily identify “responsible contractors and subcontractors,” and aid workers and unions in making more informed choices and becoming better advocates for their own protection. Just as the FitBit and Nike Wristband provide individuals with a real-time reflection of their habits designed to create the incentive for healthier living, crowdsourcing safety data has the potential to provide employers and employees alike with a more accurate picture of conditions and accelerate the time needed to take action….(More)”
All deleted tweets from politicians
Politwoops: “An archive of public tweets, deleted by politicians. Explore the tweets they would prefer you couldn’t see.”
Crowdsourcing the Egyptian Constitution
Tofigh Maboudi and Ghazal P. Nadi in Political Research Quarterly: “Drawing on empirical evidence from online citizen feedback on the 2012 Egyptian Constitution, we demonstrate that despite normative skepticism about implications of participatory constitution making, citizen participation matters. Using data of more than 650,000 online votes and comments on the constitution, we find that draft provisions with higher public approval are less likely to change and those with lower approval are more likely to change. We also find that Articles related to rights and freedoms are more likely to change based on online public input. Finally, following the boycott of the Constituent Assembly by non-Islamists, changes in draft Articles based on public feedback drop sharply. These findings highlight the conditions under which participatory constitution making becomes more effective. First, consensus among citizens over the most salient issues increases the probability that those issues would be successfully incorporated in the constitution. Second, without ex ante elite agreement over the design of the constitution, it becomes difficult to account for citizen proposals amid political clash between elites…(More)”.
Crowdsourcing Medical Data Through Gaming
Felix Morgan in The Austin Chronicle: “Video games have changed the way we play, but they also have the potential to change the way we research and solve problems, in fields such as health care and education. One game that’s made waves in medical research is Sea Hero Quest. This smartphone game has created a groundbreaking approach to data collection, leading to an earlier diagnosis of dementia. So far, 2.5 million people have played the game, providing scientists with years’ worth of data across borders and demographics.
By offering this game as a free mobile app, researchers are overcoming the ever-present problems of small sample sizes and time-consuming data gathering in empirical research. Sea Hero Quest was created by Glitchers, partnering with University College London, University of East Anglia, and Alzheimer’s Research. As players navigate mazes, shoot flares into baskets, and photograph sea creatures, they answer simple demographic questions and generate rich data sets.
“The idea of crowdsourced data-gathering games for research is a new and exciting method of obtaining data that would be prohibitively expensive otherwise,” says Paul Toprac, who along with his colleague Matt O’Hair, run the Simulation and Game Applications (SAGA) Lab at University of Texas Austin. Their team helps researchers across campus and in the private sector design, implement, and find funding for video game-based research.
O’Hair sees a lot of potential for Sea Hero Quest and other research-based games. “One of the greatest parts about the SAGA Lab is that we get to help researchers make strides in these kinds of fields,” he says.
The idea of using crowdsourcing for data collection is relatively new, but using gaming for research is something that has been well established. Last year at SXSW, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari, made a statement that video games were the key to understanding and treating dementia and related issues, which certainly seems possible based on the preliminary results from Sea Hero Quest. “We have had about 35 years of research using games as a medium,” Toprac says. “However, only recently have we used games as a tool for explicit data gathering.”…(More)”
Fighting Ebola with information
Larissa Fast and Adele Waugaman at Global Innovation Exchange: What can be learned from the use of data, information, and digital technologies, such as mobile-based systems and internet connectivity, during the Ebola outbreak response in West Africa? What worked, what didn’t, and how can we apply these lessons to improve data and information flows in the future? This report details key findings and recommendations about the collection, management, analysis, and use of paper-based and digital data and information, drawing upon the insights of more than 130 individuals and organizations who worked tirelessly to end the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 and 2015….(More)”
Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science, and Data-sharing
Sapien Labs: “The future of human neuroscience lies in crowdsourcing, citizen science and data sharing but it is not without its minefields.
A recent Scientific American article by Daniel Goodwin, “Why Neuroscience Needs Hackers,” makes the case that neuroscience, like many fields today, is drowning in data, begging for application of advances in computer science like machine learning. Neuroscientists are able to gather realms of neural data, but often without big data mechanisms and frameworks to synthesize them.
The SA article describes the work of Sebastian Seung, a Princeton neuroscientist, who recently mapped the neural connections of the human retina from an “overwhelming mass” of electron microscopy data using state of the art A.I. and massive crowd-sourcing. Seung incorporated the A.I. into a game called “Eyewire” where 1,000s of volunteers scored points while improving the neural map. Although the article’s title emphasizes advanced A.I., Dr. Seung’s experiment points even more to crowdsourcing and open science, avenues for improving research that have suddenly become easy and powerful with today’s internet. Eyewire perhaps epitomizes successful crowdsourcing — using an application that gathers, represents, and analyzes data uniformly according to researchers’ needs.
Crowdsourcing is seductive in its potential but risky for those who aren’t sure how to control it to get what they want. For researchers who don’t want to become hackers themselves, trying to turn the diversity of data produced by a crowd into conclusive results might seem too much of a headache to make it worthwhile. This is probably why the SA article title says we need hackers. The crowd is there but using it depends on innovative software engineering. A lot of researchers could really use software designed to flexibly support a diversity of crowdsourcing, some AI to enable things like crowd validation and big data tools.
The Potential
The SA article also points to Open BCI (brain-computer interface), mentioned here in other posts, as an example of how traditional divisions between institutional and amateur (or “citizen”) science are now crumbling; Open BCI is a community of professional and citizen scientists doing principled research with cheap, portable EEG-headsets producing professional research quality data. In communities of “neuro-hackers,” like NeurotechX, professional researchers, entrepreneurs, and citizen scientists are coming together to develop all kinds of applications, such as “telepathic” machine control, prostheses, and art. Other companies, like Neurosky sell EEG headsets and biosensors for bio-/neuro-feedback training and health-monitoring at consumer affordable pricing. (Read more in Citizen Science and EEG)
Tan Le, whose company Emotiv Lifesciences, also produces portable EEG head-sets, says, in an article in National Geographic, that neuroscience needs “as much data as possible on as many brains as possible” to advance diagnosis of conditions such as epilepsy and Alzheimer’s. Human neuroscience studies have typically consisted of 20 to 50 participants, an incredibly small sampling of a 7 billion strong humanity. For a single lab to collect larger datasets is difficult but with diverse populations across the planet real understanding may require data not even from thousands of brains but millions. With cheap mobile EEG-headsets, open-source software, and online collaboration, the potential for anyone can participate in such data collection is immense; the potential for crowdsourcing unprecedented. There are, however, significant hurdles to overcome….(More)”
Public Sector Entrepreneurship and the Integration of Innovative Business Models
Book edited by Mateusz Lewandowski and Barbara Kożuch: “While private, for-profit businesses have typically been the most experienced with entrepreneurship, the study of public sector business models is coming to the forefront of entrepreneurial discussions. This shift has allowed researchers and practitioners to expand on their knowledge of positive business choices and paved the way for more profitable business empires.
Public Sector Entrepreneurship and the Integration of Innovative Business Models is a comprehensive source of academic research that discusses the latest entrepreneurial strategies, achievements, and challenges in public sector contexts. Highlighting relevant topics such as public management, crowdsourcing, municipal cooperation, and public sector marketing, this is an ideal resource for managers, practitioners, researchers, and professionals interested in learning more about public sector business ideals, and how these models are shaping positive entrepreneurial communities around the world….(More)”
Montreal monitoring city traffic via drivers’ Bluetooth
Springwise: “Rather than rely on once-yearly spot checks of traffic throughout the city, Montreal, Canada, decided to build a more comprehensive picture of what was working well, and what wasn’t working very well, around the city. Working with traffic management company Orange Traffic, the city installed more than 100 sensors along the busiest vehicular routes. The sensors pick up mobile phone Bluetooth signals, making the system inexpensive to use and install as no additional hardware or devices are needed.
Once the sensors pick up a Bluetooth signal, they track it through several measurement points to get an idea of how fast or slow traffic is moving. The data is sent to the city’s Urban Mobility Management Center. City officials are keen to emphasize that no personal data is recorded as Bluetooth signals cannot be linked to individuals. Traffic management and urban planning teams will be able to use the data to redesign problematic intersections and improve the overall mobility of the city’s streets and transport facilities.
Smart cities are those making safety and efficiency a priority, from providing digital driver licenses in India to crowdsourcing a map of cars in bike lanes in New York City….(More)”