Federico Guerrini in Forbes: “French people, like the citizens of many other countries, have little confidence in their government or in their members of parliament.
A recent study by the Center for Political Research of the University of Science-Po(CEVIPOF) in Paris, shows that while residents still trust, in part, their local officials, only 37% of them on average feel the same for those belonging to theNational Assembly, the Senate or the executive.
Three years before, when asked in another poll about of what sprung to mind first when thinking of politics, their first answer was “disgust”.
With this sort of background, it is perhaps unsurprising that a number of activists have decided to try and find new ways to boost political participation, using crowdsourcing, smartphone applications and online platforms to look for candidates outside of the usual circles.
There are several civic tech initiatives in place in France right now. One of the most fascinating is called LaPrimaire.org.
It’s an online platform whose main aim is to organize an open primary election,select a suitable candidate, and allow him to run for President in the 2017elections.
Launched in April by Thibauld Favre and David Guez, an engineer and a lawyer by trade, both with no connection to the political establishment, it has attracted so far 164 self-proposed candidates and some 26,000 voters. Anyone can be elected, as long as they live in France, do not belong to any political party and have a clean criminal record.
A different class of possible candidates, also present on the website, is composed by the so-called “citoyens plébiscités”, VIPs, politician or celebrities that backers of LaPrimaire.org think should run for president. In both cases, in order to qualify for the nextphase of the selection, these people have to secure the vote of at least 500 supporters by July 14….(More)”
Evangelos Niforatos, Ivan Elhart andMarc Langheinrich in Web Engineering: “Contemporary public display systems hold a significant potential to contribute to in situ crowdsourcing. Recently, public display systems have surpassed their traditional role as static content projection hotspots by supporting interactivity and hosting applications that increase overall perceived user utility. As such, we developed WeatherUSI, a web-based interactive public display application that enables passers-by to input subjective information about current and future weather conditions. In this demo paper, we present the functionality of the app, describe the underlying system infrastructure and present how we combine input streams originating from WeatherUSI app on a public display together with its mobile app counterparts for facilitating user based weather crowdsourcing….(more)”
ShareAmerica: “A mosquito’s a mosquito, right? Not when it comes to Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases.
Only two of the estimated 3,000 species of mosquitoes are capable of carrying the Zika virus in the United States, but estimates of their precise range remain hazy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Scientists could start getting better information about these pesky, but important, insects with the help of plastic cups, brown paper towels and teenage biology students.
As part of the Invasive Mosquito Project from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, secondary-school students nationwide are learning about mosquito populations and helping fill the knowledge gaps.
Simple experiment, complex problem
The experiment works like this: First, students line the cups with paper, then fill two-thirds of the cups with water. Students place the plastic cups outside, and after a week, the paper is dotted with what looks like specks of dirt. These dirt particles are actually mosquito eggs, which the students can identify and classify.
Students then upload their findings to a national crowdsourced database. Crowdsourcing uses the collective intelligence of online communities to “distribute” problem solving across a massive network.
Entomologist Lee Cohnstaedt of the U.S. Department of Agriculture coordinates the program, and he’s already thinking about expansion. He said he hopes to have one-fifth of U.S. schools participate in the mosquito species census. He also plans to adapt lesson plans for middle schools, Scouting troops and gardening clubs.
Already, crowdsourcing has “collected better data than we could have working alone,” he told the Associated Press….
In addition to mosquito tracking, crowdsourcing has been used to develop innovative responses to a number of complex challenges, from climate change to archaeologyto protein modeling….(More)”
Ana Maria Barral et al in FASEB Journal: “The Small World Initiative™ (SWI) is an innovative program that encourages students to pursue careers in science and sets forth a unique platform to crowdsource new antibiotics. It centers around an introductory biology course through which students perform original hands-on field and laboratory research in the hunt for new antibiotics. Through a series of student-driven experiments, students collect soil samples, isolate diverse bacteria, test their bacteria against clinically-relevant microorganisms, and characterize those showing inhibitory activity. This is particularly relevant since over two thirds of antibiotics originate from soil bacteria or fungi. SWI’s approach also provides a platform to crowdsource antibiotic discovery by tapping into the intellectual power of many people concurrently addressing a global challenge and advances promising candidates into the drug development pipeline. This unique class approach harnesses the power of active learning to achieve both educational and scientific goals…..We will discuss our preliminary student evaluation results, which show the compelling impact of the program in comparison to traditional introductory courses. Ultimately, the mission of the program is to provide an evidence-based approach to teaching introductory biology concepts in the context of a real-world problem. This approach has been shown to be particularly impactful on underrepresented STEM talent pools, including women and minorities….(More)”
Jack Torrance at Management Today: “The era of big data is upon us. Dozens of well-funded start-ups have sprung up of late claiming to be able to turn raw data into ‘actionable insights’ that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. But the process of actually collecting data is still not always straightforward….
London-based start-up BeMyEye (not to be confused with Be My Eyes, an iPhone app that claims to ‘help the blind see’) has built an army of casual data gatherers that report back via their phones. ‘For companies that sell their product to high street retailers or supermarkets, being able to verify the presence of their product, the adequacy of the promotions, the positioning in relation to competitors, this is all invaluable intelligence,’ CEO Luca Pagano tells MT. ‘Our crowd is able to observe and feed this information back to these brands very, very quickly.’…
They can do more than check prices in shops. Some of its clients (which include Heineken, Illy and Three) have used the service to check billboards they are paying for have actually been put up correctly. ‘We realised the level of [billboard] compliance is actually below 90%,’ says Pagano. It can also be used to generate sales leads….
BeMyEyes isn’t the only company that’s exploring this business model. San Francisco company Premise is using a similar network of data gatherers to monitor food prices and other metrics in developing countries for NGOs and governments as well as commercial organisations. It’s not hard to see why they would be an attractive proposition for clients, but the challenge for both of these businesses will be ensuring they can find enough reliable and effective data gatherers to keep the information flowing in at a high enough quality….(More)”
Joan Okitoi-Heisig at DW Akademie: “…The Mera Swasthya Meri Aawaz (MSMA) project is the first of its kind in India to track illicit maternal fees demanded in government hospitals located in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
MSMA (“My Health, My Voice”) is part of SAHAYOG, a non-governmental umbrella organization that helped launch the project. MSMA uses an Ushahidi platform to map and collect data on unofficial fees that plague India’ ostensibly “free” maternal health services. It is one of the many projects showcased in DW Akademie’s recently launched Digital Innovation Library. SAHAYOG works closely with grassroots organizations to promote gender equality and women’s health issues from a human rights perspective…
SAYAHOG sees women’s maternal health as a human rights issue. Key to the MSMA project is exposing government facilities that extort bribes from among the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
Sandhya and her colleagues are convinced that promoting transparency and accountability through the data collected can empower the women. If they’re aware of their entitlements, she says, they can demand their rights and in the process hold leaders accountable.
“Information is power,” Sandhya explains. Without this information, she says, “they aren’t in a position to demand what is rightly theirs.”
Health care providers hold a certain degree of power when entrusted with taking care of expectant mothers. Many give into bribes for fear of being otherwise neglected or abused.
With the MSMA project, however, poor rural women have technology that is easy to use and accessible on their mobile phones, and that empowers them to make complaints and report bribes for services that are supposed to be free.
MSMA is an innovative data-driven platform that combines a toll free number, an interactive voice response system (IVRS) and a website that contains accessible reports. In addition to enabling poor women to air their frustrations anonymously, the project aggregates actionable data which can then be used by the NGO as well as the government to work towards improving the situation for mothers in India….(More)”
Sean Captain at FastCompany: “These days GPS technology can get you as close as about 10 feet from your destination, close enough to see it—assuming you can see.
But those last few feet are a chasm for the blind (and GPS accuracy sometimes falls only within about 30 feet).
“Actually finding the bus stop, not the right street, but standing in the right place when the bus comes, is pretty hard,” says Dave Power, president and CEO of the Perkins School for the Blind near Boston. Helen Keller’s alma mater is developing a mobile app that will provide audio directions—contributed by volunteers—so that blind people can get close enough to the stop for the bus driver to notice them.
Perkins’s app is one of 29 projects that recently received a total of $20 million in funding from Google.org’s Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities awards. Several of the winning initiatives rely on crowdsourced information to help the disabled—be they blind, in a wheelchair, or cognitively impaired. It’s a commonsense approach to tackling big logistical projects in a world full of people who have snippets of downtime during which they might perform bite-size acts of kindness online. But moving these projects from being just clever concepts to extensive services, based on the goodwill of volunteers, is going to be quite a hurdle.
People with limited mobility may have trouble traversing the last few feet between them and a wheelchair ramp, automatic doors, or other accommodations that aren’t easy to find (or may not even exist in some places).Wheelmap, based in Berlin, is trying to help by building online maps of accessible locations. Its website incorporates crowdsourced data. The site lets users type in a city and search for accessible amenities such as restaurants, hotels, and public transit.
Paris-based J’accede (which received 500,000 euros from Google, which is the equivalent of about $565,000) provides similar capabilities in both a website and an app, with a slicker design somewhat resembling TripAdvisor.
Both services have a long way to go. J’accede lists 374 accessible bars/restaurants in its hometown and a modest selection in other French cities like Marseille. “We still have a lot of work to do to cover France,” says J’accede’s president Damien Birambeau in an email. The goal is to go global though, and the site is available in English, German, and Spanish, in addition to French. Likewise, Wheelmap (which got 825,000 euros, or $933,000) performs best in the German capital of Berlin and cities like Hamburg, but is less useful in other places.
These sites face the same challenge as many other volunteer-based, crowdsourced projects: getting a big enough crowd to contribute information to the service. J’accede hopes to make the process easier. In June, it will connect itself with Google Places, so contributors will only need to supply details about accommodations at a site; information like the location’s address and phone number will be pulled in automatically. But both J’accede and Wheelmap recognize that crowdsourcing has its limits. They are now going beyond voluntary contributions, setting up automated systems to scrape information from other databases of accessible locations, such as those maintained by governments.
Wheelmap and J’accede are dwarfed by general-interest crowdsourced sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, which offer some information about accessibility, too. For instance, among the many filters they offer users searching for restaurants—such as price range and cuisine type—TripAdvisor and Yelp both offer a Wheelchair Accessible checkbox. Applying that filter to Parisian establishments brings up about 1,000 restaurants on TripAdvisor and 2,800 in Yelp.
So what can Wheelmap and J’accede provide that the big players can’t? Details. “A person in a wheelchair, for example, will face different obstacles than a partially blind person or a person with cognitive disabilities,” says Birambeau. “These different needs and profiles means that we need highly detailed information about the accessibility of public places.”…(More)”
Tanja Aitamurto and Hélène Landemore in Policy & Internet: “This article examines the emergence of democratic deliberation in a crowdsourced law reform process. The empirical context of the study is a crowdsourced legislative reform in Finland, initiated by the Finnish government. The findings suggest that online exchanges in the crowdsourced process qualify as democratic deliberation according to the classical definition. We introduce the term “crowdsourced deliberation” to mean an open, asynchronous, depersonalized, and distributed kind of online deliberation occurring among self-selected participants in the context of an attempt by government or another organization to open up the policymaking or lawmaking process. The article helps to characterize the nature of crowdsourced policymaking and to understand its possibilities as a practice for implementing open government principles. We aim to make a contribution to the literature on crowdsourcing in policymaking, participatory and deliberative democracy and, specifically, the newly emerging subfield in deliberative democracy that focuses on “deliberative systems.”…(More)”
Kendra L. Smith and Lindsey Collins at Planetizen: “Over the past decade, crowdsourcing has grown to significance through crowdfunding, crowd collaboration, crowd voting, and crowd labor. The idea behind crowdsourcing is simple: decentralize decision-making by utilizing large groups of people to assist with solving problems, generating ideas, funding, generating data, and making decisions. We have seen crowdsourcing used in both the private and public sectors. In a previous article, “Empowered Design, By ‘the Crowd,'” we discuss the significant role crowdsourcing can play in urban planning through citizen engagement.
Crowdsourcing in the public sector represents a more inclusive form of governance that incorporates a multi-stakeholder approach; it goes beyond regular forms of community engagement and allows citizens to participate in decision-making. When citizens help inform decision-making, new opportunities are created for cities—opportunities that are beginning to unfold for planners. However, despite its obvious utility, planners underutilize crowdsourcing. A key reason for its underuse can be attributed to a lack of credibility and accountability in crowdsourcing endeavors.
Crowdsourcing credibility speaks to the capacity to trust a source and discern whether information is, indeed, true. While it can be difficult to know if any information is definitively true, indicators of fact or truth include where information was collected, how information was collected, and how rigorously it was fact-checking or peer reviewed. However, in the digital universe of today, individuals can make a habit of posting inaccurate, salacious, malicious, and flat-out false information. The realities of contemporary media make it more difficult to trust crowdsourced information for decision-making, especially for the public sector, where the use of inaccurate information can impact the lives of many and the trajectory of a city. As a result, there is a need to establish accountability measures to enhance crowdsourcing in urban planning.
Establishing Accountability Measures
For urban planners considering crowdsourcing, establishing a system of accountability measures might seem like more effort than it is worth. However, that is simply not true. Recent evidence has proven traditional community engagement (e.g., town halls, forums, city council meetings) is lower than ever. Current engagement also tends to focus on problems in the community rather than the development of the community. Crowdsourcing offers new opportunities for ongoing and sustainable engagement with the community. It can be simple as well.
The following four methods can be used separately or together (we hope they are used together) to help establish accountability and credibility in the crowdsourcing process:
Agenda setting
Growing a crowdsourcing community
Facilitators/subject matter experts (SME)
Microtasking
In addition to boosting credibility, building a framework of accountability measures can help planners and crowdsourcing communities clearly define their work, engage the community, sustain community engagement, acquire help with tasks, obtain diverse opinions, and become more inclusive….(More)”
Esther Landhuis at NPR: “Though it’s the world’s top infectious killer, tuberculosis is surprisingly tricky to diagnose. Scientists think that video gamers can help them create a better diagnostic test.
An online puzzle released Monday will see whether the researchers are right. Players of a Web-based game called EteRNA will try to design a sensor molecule that could potentially make diagnosing TB as easy as taking a home pregnancy test. The TB puzzle marks the launch of “EteRNA Medicine.”
The idea of rallying gamers to fight TB arose as two young Stanford University professors chatted over dinner at a conference last May. Rhiju Das, a biochemist who helped create EteRNA, told bioinformatician Purvesh Khatri about the game, which challenges nonexperts to design RNA molecules that fold into target shapes.
RNA molecules play key roles in biology and disease. Some brain disorders can be traced to problems with RNA folding. Viruses such as H1N1 flu and HIV depend on RNA elements to replicate and infect cells.
Das wants to “fight fire with fire” — that is, to disrupt the RNA involved in a disease or virus by crafting new tools that are themselves made of RNA molecules. EteRNA players learn RNA design principles with each puzzle they solve.
Khatri was intrigued by the notion of engaging the public to solve problems. His lab develops novel diagnostics using publicly available data sets. The team had just published a paper on a set of genes that could help diagnose sepsis and had other papers under review on influenza and TB.
In an “Aha!” moment during their dinner chat, Khatri says, he and Das realized “how awesome it would be to sequentially merge our two approaches — to use public data to find a diagnostic marker for a disease, and then use the public’s help to develop the test.”
TB seemed opportune as it has a simple diagnostic signature — a set of three human genes that turn up or down predictably after TB infection. When checked across gene data on thousands of blood samples from 14 groups of people around the globe, the behavior of the three-gene set readily identified people with active TB, distinguishing them from individuals who had latent TB or other diseases.
Those findings, published in February, have gotten serious attention — not only from curious patients and doctors but also from humanitarian groups eager to help bring a better TB test to market. It can currently take several tests to tell whether a person has active TB, including a chest X-ray and sputum test. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has started sending data to help the Stanford team validate a test based on the newly identified TB gene signature, says study leader Khatri, who works at the university’s Center for Biomedical Informatics Research….(More)”
