crowdsourcing

A new data viz tool shows what stories are being undercovered in countries around the world

Curated on March 21, 2016October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jospeh Lichterman at NiemanLab: “It’s a common lament: Though the Internet provides us access to a nearly unlimited number of sources for news, most of us rarely venture beyond the same few sources or topics. And as news consumption shifts to our phones, people are using even fewer sources: On average, consumers access 1.52 trusted news sources on their phones, according to the 2015 Reuters Digital News Report, which studied news consumption across several countries.

To try and diversify people’s perspectives on the news, Jigsaw — the techincubator, formerly known as Google Ideas, that’s run by Google’s parentcompany Alphabet — this week launched Unfiltered.News, an experimentalsite that uses Google News data to show users what topics are beingunderreported or are popular in regions around the world.

Unfiltered.News’ main data visualization shows which topics are most reported in countries around the world. A column on the right side of the page highlights stories that are being reported widely elsewhere in the world, but aren’t in the top 100 stories on Google News in the selected country. In the United States yesterday, five of the top 10 underreported topics, unsurprisingly, dealt with soccer. In China, Barack Obama was the most undercovered topic….(More)”

Crowdsourcing On-street Parking Space Detection

Curated on March 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ruizhi Liao et al in: “As the number of vehicles continues to grow, parking spaces are at a premium in city streets. Additionally, due to the lack of knowledge about street parking spaces, heuristic circling the blocks not only costs drivers’ time and fuel, but also increases city congestion. In the wake of recent trend to build convenient, green and energy-efficient smart cities, we rethink common techniques adopted by high-profile smart parking systems, and present a user-engaged (crowdsourcing) and sonar-based prototype to identify urban on-street parking spaces. The prototype includes an ultrasonic sensor, a GPS receiver and associated Arduino micro-controllers. It is mounted on the passenger side of a car to measure the distance from the vehicle to the nearest roadside obstacle. Multiple road tests are conducted around Wheatley, Oxford to gather results and emulate the crowdsourcing approach. By extracting parked vehicles’ features from the collected trace, a supervised learning algorithm is developed to estimate roadside parking occupancy and spot illegal parking vehicles. A quantity estimation model is derived to calculate the required number of sensing units to cover urban streets. The estimation is quantitatively compared to a fixed sensing solution. The results show that the crowdsourcing way would need substantially fewer sensors compared to the fixed sensing system…(More)”

Crowdsourcing Site Works to Detect Spread of Zika

Curated on March 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Suzanne Tracy at Scientific Computing Source: “Last month, the Flu Near You crowdsourcing tool expanded its data collection to include Zika, chikungunya and dengue symptoms, such as eye pain, yellow skin/eyes and joint/bone pain. Flu Near You is a free and anonymous Web site and mobile application that allows the public to report their health information by completing brief weekly surveys.

Created by epidemiologists at Harvard, Boston Children’s Hospital and The Skoll Global Threats Fund, the novel participatory disease surveillance tool is intended to complement existing surveillance systems by directly engaging the public in public health reporting. As such, it relies on voluntary participation from the general public, asking participants to take a few seconds each week to report whether they or their family members have been healthy or sick.

Using participant-reported symptoms, the site graphs and maps this information to provide local and national views of illness. Thousands of reports are analyzed and mapped to provide public health officials and researchers with real-time, anonymous information that could help prevent the next pandemic.

The survey, which launched in 2011, is conducted year-round for several reasons.

First, it is possible for an influenza outbreak to occur outside of the traditional flu season. For instance, the first wave of pandemic H1N1 hit in the spring of 2009. The project wants to capture any emerging outbreak, should something similar occur again.
Second, the project’s symptoms-based health forms allow it to monitor other diseases, such as the recently-added Zika, chikungunya and dengue, which may have different seasons than influenza….(More)

See also: http://flunearyou.org and video: Fight the flu. Save lives

Don’t know where to go when the volcano blows? Crowdsource it.

Curated on March 10, 2016October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Frances Johnson in ThrivingEarthExchange: “In the shadow of a rumbling volcano, Quito, Ecuador solicits just-in-time advice from the world’s disaster experts…

Cotopaxi’s last large-scale eruption was in 1877, and the volcano’s level of activity suggests another one is inevitable. In addition to spewing lava, a major eruption would melt Cotopaxi’s glaciers and send a large flow of material barreling down the mountain, posing an immediate risk to people and potentially causing rivers to overflow their banks. Some 120,000 people living in the valley beneath the volcano would have a mere 12 minutes to escape the lava’s path, and more than 325,000 other area residents would have only slightly more time to evacuate. An eruption could also create significant long-term challenges across a broad area, including dangerous air quality and disruptions to infrastructure, food systems and water supplies.

As danger looms, a city gets coaching from the crowd

Aware that the city was underprepared for a significant eruption, The Governance Lab, a program of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, volunteered its time and expertise to help local officials accelerate preparation efforts. The GovLab, which helps governments and other institutions work collaboratively to solve problems, teamed up with Linq, the city’s innovation agency.

“We were very aware that this was a time-sensitive matter—we needed experts, and we needed them fast,” explained Dinorah Cant ú-Pedraza, a human rights lawyer and Research Fellow at The GovLab who collaborated on the project. “So that’s why we decided to create online sessions focused on how innovations can solve specific problems facing the city.”…

GovLab’s “fail-fast, learn-by-doing” approach is crucial to its projects’ success in remaining responsive to the problems at hand. “That was a central element in how we worked with our partners and improved the approach as we went forward,” said Cantú-Pedraza.

To help translate the Cotopaxi crowdsourcing model for other circumstances, GovLab is working to build a network of innovators and experts that can be tapped on short notice to address problems as they emerge around the world. Although we can hope for the best in Quito and elsewhere, the reality is that we must plan for the worst…(More)

Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation

Curated on March 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani: “The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process that emphasizes users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation approaches to solve important technological and organizational problems. This view of innovation, pioneered by the economist Eric von Hippel, counters the dominant paradigm, which cast the profit-seeking incentives of firms as the main driver of technical change. In a series of influential writings, von Hippel and colleagues found empirical evidence that flatly contradicted the producer-centered model of innovation. Since then, the study of user-driven innovation has continued and expanded, with further empirical exploration of a distributed model of innovation that includes communities and platforms in a variety of contexts and with the development of theory to explain the economic underpinnings of this still emerging paradigm. This volume provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the field of user and open innovation, reflecting advances in the field over the last several decades.

The contributors—including many colleagues of Eric von Hippel—offer both theoretical and empirical perspectives from such diverse fields as economics, the history of science and technology, law, management, and policy. The empirical contexts for their studies range from household goods to financial services. After discussing the fundamentals of user innovation, the contributors cover communities and innovation; legal aspects of user and community innovation; new roles for user innovators; user interactions with firms; and user innovation in practice, describing experiments, toolkits, and crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding…(More)”

Guidance for Developing a Local Digital Response Network

Curated on March 9, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Guide by Jenny Phillips and Andrej Verity: “…Beyond the obvious desire to create the guidance document, we had three objectives when drafting:

Cover the core aspect. Six pages of concrete questions, answers and suggestions are designed to help ensure that start-up activities are well informed.
Keep it as simple and light as possible. We wanted something that an individual could quickly consume, yet find a valuable resource.
Feed into larger projects. By creating something concrete, we hope that it would feed into larger initiatives like Heather Leason and Willow Brugh’s effort to build out a Digital Responders Handbook.

So, are you a passionate individual who wants to help harness local digitally-enabled volunteers or groups in response to emergencies? Would you like to become a central figure and coordinate these groups so that any response is more than the sum of all its parts? If this describes your desire and you answered the questions positively, then this guidance is for you! Create a local Digital Response Network. And, welcome to the world of digital humanitarian response…(More)”

Opening Up Government: Citizen Innovation and New Modes of Collaboration

Curated on March 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Stefan Etzelstorfer, Thomas Gegenhuber and, Dennis Hilgers in Open Tourism: Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing and Co-Creation Challenging the Tourism Industry: “Companies use crowdsourcing to solve problems by using a widely dispersed and large group of individuals. Crowdsourcing and open innovation are not restricted to businesses. Governments also increasingly rely on open innovation principles to harness the expert knowledge of citizens and use citizens’ contributions to the public value creation process. While a large body of literature has examined the open government paradigm at the national level, we still know relatively little about how open government initiatives play out at the local level. Even less is known about whether open government initiatives may create positive spill overs, for example by having a trickle-down effect onto local tourism sectors. In this article, we present the City of Linz’s open government activities. More specifically, we review how the public administration implemented the interactive mapping and reporting application “Schau auf Linz“ (“Look at Linz“). Through our analysis of this case study, we show what role the local context and prior policies play in implementing open government initiatives on a local level. In addition, we discuss how this initiative, like others, leads to positive spill overs for the tourism sector….(More)”

Crowd2Map Tanzania

Curated on February 22, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“Crowd2Map Tanzania is a new crowdsourcing initiative aimed at creating a comprehensive map ofTanzania, including detailed depictions of all of its villages, roads and public resources (such as schools, shops, offices etc.) in OpenStreetMap and/or Google Maps, both of which are sadly rather poor at the moment. (For a convincing example, see our post about a not-so-blank-as-map-suggests Zeze village here.)

…In February 2016, Crowd2Map Tanzania was one of the 7 projects selected in the Open Seventeenchallenge, which rallies the public to use open data as a means of achieving the 17 SustainableDevelopment Goals as proposed but the UN in September 2015! We are now excited to carry on with the helpof O17 partners – Citizen Cyberlab, The GovLab, ONE and SciFabric! We’re tackling Goal 11: creatingsustainable cities & communities and Goal 4: education through technology….(More)

The city as platform

Curated on February 18, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The report of the 2015 Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology: “In the age of ubiquitous Internet connections, smartphones and data, the future vitality of cities is increasingly based on their ability to use digital networks in intelligent, strategic ways. While we are accustomed to thinking of cities as geophysical places governed by mayors, conventional political structures and bureaucracies, this template of city governance is under great pressure to evolve. Urban dwellers now live their lives in all sorts of hyper-connected virtual spaces, pulsating with real-time information, intelligent devices, remote-access databases and participatory crowdsourcing. Expertise is distributed, not centralized. Governance is not just a matter of winning elections and assigning tasks to bureaucracies; it is about the skillful collection and curation of information as a way to create new affordances for commerce and social life.

Except among a small class of vanguard cities, however, the far-reaching implications of the “networked city” for economic development, urban planning, social life and democracy, have not been explored in depth. The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program thus convened an eclectic group of thirty experts to explore how networking technologies are rapidly changing the urban landscape in nearly every dimension. The goal was to learn how open networks, onlinecooperation and open data can enhance urban planning and administration, and more broadly, how they might improve economic opportunity and civic engagement. The conference, the 24th Annual Aspen Roundtable on Information Technology, also addressed the implications of new digital technologies for urban transportation, public health and safety, and socio-economic inequality….(Download the InfoTech 2015 Report)”