Paper by Jay A. Pandit, Jennifer M. Radin, Giorgio Quer & Eric J. Topol: “At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, analog tools such as nasopharyngeal swabs for PCR tests were center stage and the major prevention tactics of masking and physical distancing were a throwback to the 1918 influenza pandemic. Overall, there has been scant regard for digital tools, particularly those based on smartphone apps, which is surprising given the ubiquity of smartphones across the globe. Smartphone apps, given accessibility in the time of physical distancing, were widely used for tracking, tracing and educating the public about COVID-19. Despite limitations, such as concerns around data privacy, data security, digital health illiteracy and structural inequities, there is ample evidence that apps are beneficial for understanding outbreak epidemiology, individual screening and contact tracing. While there were successes and failures in each category, outbreak epidemiology and individual screening were substantially enhanced by the reach of smartphone apps and accessory wearables. Continued use of apps within the digital infrastructure promises to provide an important tool for rigorous investigation of outcomes both in the ongoing outbreak and in future epidemics…(More)”.
Meet the fact-checkers decoding Sri Lanka’s meltdown
Article by Nilesh Christopher: “On the evening of May 3, the atmosphere at Galle Face Green, an esplanade along the coastline of Sri Lanka’s capital city of Colombo, was carnivalesque. Parents strolled on sidewalks with toddlers hoisted on their shoulders. Teenagers wearing bandanas played the flute and blew plastic horns. People climbed atop makeshift podiums to address the crowds, greeted by scattered applause.
The crowd of a few hundred was part of a series of protests that had been underway since mid-March, demanding the ouster of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. For months, the country has been trapped in a brutal economic crisis: Sri Lanka is currently unable to pay for imports of essentials, such as food, medicines, and fuel. Populist tax cuts, an abrupt ban on fertilizer imports, decimated crop yields, and the collapse of tourism during the pandemic all helped to push the country into the worst economic crisis it has faced since gaining independence in 1948.
The island nation owes nearly $7 billion this year and has next to no foreign reserves left. “We don’t have any gas. We don’t have fuel and some food items. We lose power for three to four hours daily now,” Nalin Chamara, 42, a hotelier protesting with his family and children, told Rest of World. Meanwhile, the presidential family at one point controlled around 70% of the nation’s budget and ran it as a family business, spending billions of dollars of borrowed money on vanity projects, such as an extravagant airport and cricket stadium that now sit almost entirely unused.
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne walked among the Galle Face Green crowds, surveying the scene. He pointed out where demonstrators had jury-rigged their own electricity supply by welding solar panels atop an open truck and connecting them to a battery. The power generated was being used to charge over two dozen smartphones inside a big blue tent, which also contained a library housing 15,000 books. “This is what Sri Lankans will do if you let them build stuff. Fucking build infrastructure from scratch,” Wijeratne said. The protest featured a giant middle finger monument made of plastic bottles, directed at the Rajapaksas. “Our real educational export should be B.Sc. in protest,” Wijeratne said.
Wijeratne, 29 years old, is best known as the author of Numbercaste, a science fiction novel about a near-future world where people’s importance in society is decided based on the all-powerful Number, a credit score determined by their social circle and social network data. But he is also the chief executive of Watchdog, a research collective based in Colombo that uses fact-checking and open source intelligence (OSINT) methods to investigate Sri Lanka’s ongoing crisis. As part of its work, he and his 12-member team of coders, journalists, economists, and students track, time stamp, geolocate, and document videos of protests shared online.
Watchdog’s protest tracker has emerged as the most comprehensive online archive of the historic events unfolding in Sri Lanka. Its data set, which comprises 597 different protests and 49 conflicts, has been used by global news organizations to demonstrate the extent of public pushback.
“[Our] core mission is simple,” Wijeratne told Rest of World. “We want to help people understand the infrastructure they use. The concrete, the laws, the policies, and the social contracts that they live under. We want to help people understand the causality of how they came to be and how they operate.”…(More)”.
Judging Deliberation: An Assessment of the Crowdsourced Icelandic Constitutional Project
Paper by Delia Popescu and Matthew Loveland: “This study explores deliberation as a lived experience between individuals engaged in putatively deliberative practices. While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are fewer empirical studies that address its online counterpart. The authors review current theoretical conceptualizations and operationalize a measure of deliberation, and then apply the measure to the case of the debate fostered by the Constitutional Council online public platform dedicated to drafting the Icelandic constitution – the first “crowdsourced” constitutional project in the world. This is the first effort to both quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the nature of deliberation in the case of Iceland. Generally, this exploration is meant to identify and analyze markers of deliberation in a setting that aspires to foster such exchanges. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this work for future political theory and related empirical investigation….(More).”
Ukraine shows us the power of the 21st Century Citizen
Essay by Matt Leighninger: “This is a new kind of war, waged by a new kind of citizen.
The failure of the Russian forces to subdue Ukraine quickly has astonished experts, officials, and journalists worldwide. It shouldn’t. The Ukrainian resistance is just the latest example of the new attitudes and abilities of 21st century citizens.
While social media has been getting a lot of attention in this “TikTok War,” the real story is the growing determination and capacity of ordinary people. Around the world, ordinary people are fundamentally different from people of generations past. They have dramatically higher levels of education, far less deference to authority figures, and much greater facility with technology.
These trends have changed citizenship itself. We need to understand this shift so that societies, especially democratic ones, can figure out how to adapt, both in war and peace.
The war in Ukraine is instructive, in at least four ways.
First, citizens now have the ability to make their own media; Ukrainians, under attack, are mass-producing reality TV. Thanks to footage produced by thousands of people and viewed by millions, the war has a constantly unfolding cast of characters. Ukrainian farmers towing Russian vehicles, a soldier moonwalking in a field, people joyriding on a captured Russian tank, and a little girl singing “Let It Go” in a Kiev bomb shelter have become relatable, inspiring figures in the conflict. Seemingly every time Ukrainians have success on the battlefield, they upload videos of burned tanks and downed planes…(More)”.
Crowdsourcing and COVID-19: How public administrations mobilize crowds to find solutions to problems posed by the pandemic
Paper by Ana Colovic, Annalisa Caloffi, and Federica Rossi: “We discuss how public administrations have used crowdsourcing to find solutions to specific problems posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and to what extent crowdsourcing has been instrumental in promoting open innovation and service co-creation. We propose a conceptual typology of crowdsourcing challenges based on the degree of their openness and collaboration with the crowd that they establish. Using empirical evidence collected in 2020 and 2021, we examine the extent to which these types have been used in practice. We discuss each type of crowdsourcing challenge identified and draw implications for public policy…(More)”.
“Medical Matchmaking” provides personalized insights
Matthew Hempstead at Springwise: “Humanity is a collection of unique individuals who represent a complex mixture of medical realities. Yet traditional medicine is based on a ‘law of averages’ – treating patients based on generalisations about the population as a whole. This law of averages can be misleading, and in a world where the average American spends 52 hours looking for health information online each year, generalisations create misunderstandings. Information provided by ‘Dr. Google’ or Facebook is inadequate and doesn’t account for the specific characteristics of each individual.
Israeli startup Alike has come up with a novel multidisciplinary solution to this problem – using health data and machine learning to match people who are alike on a holistic level. The AI’s matchmaking takes into account considerations such as co-morbidities, lifestyle factors, age, and gender.
Patients are then put into contact with an anonymised community of ‘Alikes’ – people who share their exact clinical journey, lifestyle, and interests. Members of this community can share or receive relevant and personalised insights that help them to better manage their conditions.
The new technology is possible due to regulatory changes that make it possible for everyone to gain instant electronic access to their personal health records. The app allows users to automatically create a health profile through a direct connection with their health provider.
Given the sensitive nature of medical information, Alike has put in place stringent privacy controls. The data shared on the app is completely de-identified, which means all personal identifiers are removed. Every user is verified by their healthcare provider, and further measures including data encryption and data fuzzing are employed. This means that patients can benefit from the insights of other patients while maintaining their privacy…(More)”.
Tracking symptoms of respiratory diseases online can give a picture of community health
Article by Mvuyo Makhasi, Cheryl Cohen and Sibongile Walaza: “Participatory surveillance has not yet been implemented in African countries. There has only ever been one pilot study, in Tanzania. In 2016, a pilot study of a mobile app called AfyaData was implemented for participatory surveillance in Tanzania. The aim was to establish a platform where members of the community could report any symptoms they encountered. Based on the clinical data provided these would be grouped into categories of diseases. In the pilot study most of the reported cases were related to the digestive system. The second most frequently reported cases were related to the respiratory system. This demonstrated the potential of obtaining close to real-time data on diseases directly from the community….
Participatory surveillance is in place in 11 European countries that form part of the InfluenzaNet network. Here it’s been shown to address some of the limitations of traditional facility-based systems. For example, it can detect the start of the flu season up to two weeks earlier than traditional facility-based surveillance. This allows public health officials to plan and respond earlier to seasonal outbreaks.
Self-reporting systems provide similar and complementary data to facility-based surveillance. They show:
- variations over time in cases of acute respiratory tract infection
- time to peak of incidence of acute cases
- the peak intensity of acute cases
- a comparison between participatory and facility-based surveillance trends.
The same analysis can now be done for COVID-19 cases, which were previously not included in participatory surveillance platforms.
The systems enable analysis of health-seeking behaviour in people who don’t see a doctor or nurse. For example, people may use home-based remedies, search for guidelines on the internet or consult traditional healers. Health-seeking surveys are often conducted in research studies for a defined period of time, but data is not routinely collected. Participatory surveillance is a longitudinal and systematic way of collecting information about health-seeking behaviour related to respiratory diseases.
Vaccine effectiveness estimates can also be determined through participatory surveillance data. This includes vaccine coverage for seasonal influenza and COVID-19 and information on how these vaccines perform in preventing illness. These data can be compared with vaccine effectiveness estimates from facility-based surveillance…(More)”.
Archivists Make Sure the Internet Doesn’t Forget Russia’s War on Ukraine
Karl Bode at VICE: “As the Russian invasion of Ukraine accelerates, professional and hobbyist archivists alike are rushing to preserve Ukraine’s online history, cataloging and storing everything from Ukrainian government and university websites, to the torrent of news and social media posts related to the accelerating conflict.
The Internet Archive has been archiving the broader conflict in Ukraine since 2014. But as Ukraine government websites face prolonged outages due to sustained cyber attack—as well as the looming risk of defacement or deletion—the organization has taken on another monumental task: backing up the entirety of the Ukrainian Internet.
Using the crowdsourced auto-archiving software running on a virtual machine they’ve dubbed Archive Team Warrior, the organization has leveraged volunteers around the world, many of whom have donated countless terabytes of storage capacity for the project. These volunteers have been steadily backing up the Ukrainian Internet since before the war began.
All told, 68 million items (web pages, documents, and other files) comprising more than 2.5 TB of data have already been hoovered up from various websites across the .ua top level Ukrainian domain. A second project dubbed Ukr-net aims to preserve tens of millions of additional items and terabytes of additional data across the Ukrainian Internet.
Elsewhere, organizations like the Center For Information Resilience have built a crowdsourced map attempting to document every single war-related post to social media made in the region, ranging from civilian photos of the movement of heavy Russian weaponry, to Ukranian government claims of alleged bombing raids on kindergardens…(More)”.
Crowdsourcing research questions in science
Paper by Susanne Beck, Tiare-Maria Brasseur, Marion Poetz and Henry Sauermann: “Scientists are increasingly crossing the boundaries of the professional system by involving the general public (the crowd) directly in their research. However, this crowd involvement tends to be confined to empirical work and it is not clear whether and how crowds can also be involved in conceptual stages such as formulating the questions that research is trying to address. Drawing on five different “paradigms” of crowdsourcing and related mechanisms, we first discuss potential merits of involving crowds in the formulation of research questions (RQs). We then analyze data from two crowdsourcing projects in the medical sciences to describe key features of RQs generated by crowd members and compare the quality of crowd contributions to that of RQs generated in the conventional scientific process. We find that the majority of crowd contributions are problem restatements that can be useful to assess problem importance but provide little guidance regarding potential causes or solutions. At the same time, crowd-generated research questions frequently cross disciplinary boundaries by combining elements from different fields within and especially outside medicine. Using evaluations by professional scientists, we find that the average crowd contribution has lower novelty and potential scientific impact than professional research questions, but comparable practical impact. Crowd contributions outperform professional RQs once we apply selection mechanisms at the level of individual contributors or across contributors. Our findings advance research on crowd and citizen science, crowdsourcing and distributed knowledge production, as well as the organization of science. We also inform ongoing policy debates around the involvement of citizens in research in general, and agenda setting in particular.Author links open overlay panel…(More)”.
Public Provides NASA with New Innovations through Prize Competitions, Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science Opportunities
NASA Report: “Whether problem-solving during the pandemic, establishing a long-term presence at the Moon, or advancing technology to adapt to life in space, NASA has leveraged open innovation tools to inspire solutions to some of our most timely challenges – while using the creativity of everyone from garage tinkerers to citizen scientists and students of all ages.
Open Innovation: Boosting NASA Higher, Faster, and Farther highlights some of those breakthroughs, which accelerate space technology development and discovery while giving the public a gateway to work with NASA. Open innovation initiatives include problem-focused challenges and prize competitions, data hackathons, citizen science, and crowdsourcing projects that invite the public to lend their skills, ideas, and time to support NASA research and development programs.
NASA engaged the public with 56 public prize competitions and challenges and 14 citizen science and crowdsourcing activities over fiscal years 2019 and 2020. NASA awarded $2.2 million in prize money, and members of the public submitted over 11,000 solutions during that period.
“NASA’s accomplishments have hardly been NASA’s alone. Tens of thousands more individuals from academic institutions, private companies, and other space agencies also contribute to these solutions. Open innovation expands the NASA community and broadens the agency’s capacity for innovation and discovery even further,” said Amy Kaminski, Prizes, Challenges, and Crowdsourcing program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We harness the perspectives, expertise, and enthusiasm of ‘the crowd’ to gain diverse solutions, speed up projects, and reduce costs.”
This edition of the publication highlights:
- How NASA used open innovation tools to accelerate the pace of problem-solving during the COVID-19 pandemic, enabling a sprint of creativity to create valuable solutions in support of this global crisis
- How NASA invited everyone to embrace the Moon as a technological testing ground through public prize competitions and challenges, sparking development that could help prolong human stays on the Moon and lay the foundation for human exploration to Mars and beyond
- How citizen scientists gather, sort, and upload data, resulting in fruitful partnerships between the public and NASA scientists
- How NASA’s student-focused challenges have changed lives and positively impacted underserved communities…(More)”.