Conference Paper by C. Geijer, M. Larsson, M. Stigelid: “Social sensing is becoming an alternative to static sensors. It is a way to crowdsource data collection where sensors can be placed on frequently used objects, such as mobile phones or cars, to gather important information. Increasing availability in technology, such as cheap sensors being added in cell phones, creates an opportunity to build bigger sensor networks that are capable of collecting a larger quantity and more complex data. The purpose of this paper is to highlight problems in the field, as well as their solutions. The focus lies on the use of physical sensors and not on the use of social media to collect data. Research papers were reviewed based on implemented or suggested implementations of social sensing. The discovered problems are contrasted with possible solutions, and used to reflect upon the future of the field. We found issues such as privacy, noise and trustworthiness to be problems when using a distributed network of sensors. Furthermore, we discovered models for determining the accuracy as well as truthfulness of gathered data that can effectively combat these problems. The topic of privacy remains an open-ended problem, since it is based upon ethical considerations that may differ from person to person, but there exists methods for addressing this as well. The reviewed research suggests that social sensing will become more and more useful in the future….(More).”
VoXup
Nesta: “Does your street feel safe? Would you like to change something in your neighbourhood? Is there enough for young people to do?
All basic questions, but how many local councillors have the time to put these issues to their constituents? A new web app aims to make it easier for councillors and council officers to talk to residents – and it’s all based around a series of simple questions.
Now, just a year after VoXup was created in a north London pub, Camden Council is using it to consult residents on its budget proposals.
One of VoXup’s creators, Peter Lewis, hit upon the idea after meeting an MP and being reminded of how hard it can be to get involved in decision-making….
All basic questions, but how many local councillors have the time to put these issues to their constituents? A new web app aims to make it easier for councillors and council officers to talk to residents – and it’s all based around a series of simple questions.
Now, just a year after VoXup was created in a north London pub, Camden Council is using it to consult residents on its budget proposals.
One of VoXup’s creators, Peter Lewis, hit upon the idea after meeting an MP and being reminded of how hard it can be to get involved in decision-making….
Now VoXup is being used by Camden Council to engage with residents about its spending plans.
“They’ve got to cut a lot of money and they want to know which services people would prioritise,” Lewis explains.
“So we’ve created a custom community, and most popular topics have got about 200 votes. About 650 people have taken part at some level, and it’s only just begun. We’ve seen a lot of activity – of the people who look at the web page, almost half give an opinion on something.”
‘No need for smartphone app’
What does the future hold for VoXup? Lewis, who is working on the project full-time, says one thing the team won’t be doing is building a smartphone app.
“One of the things we thought about doing was creating a mobile app, but that’s been really unnecessary – we built VoXup as a responsive web app,” he says…. (More)”.
“They’ve got to cut a lot of money and they want to know which services people would prioritise,” Lewis explains.
“So we’ve created a custom community, and most popular topics have got about 200 votes. About 650 people have taken part at some level, and it’s only just begun. We’ve seen a lot of activity – of the people who look at the web page, almost half give an opinion on something.”
‘No need for smartphone app’
What does the future hold for VoXup? Lewis, who is working on the project full-time, says one thing the team won’t be doing is building a smartphone app.
“One of the things we thought about doing was creating a mobile app, but that’s been really unnecessary – we built VoXup as a responsive web app,” he says…. (More)”.
Coop’s Citizen Sci Scoop: Try it, you might like it
Response by at PLOS: “Margaret Mead, the world-famous anthropologist said, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
The sentiment rings true for citizen science.
Yet, recent news in the citizen science world has been headlined “Most participants in citizen science projects give up almost immediately.” This was based on a study of participation in seven different projects within the crowdsourcing hub called Zooniverse. Most participants tried a project once, very briefly, and never returned.
What’s unusual about Zooniverse projects is not the high turnover of quitters. Rather, it’s unusual that even early quitters do some important work. That’s a cleverly designed project. An ethical principle of Zooniverse is to not waste people’s time. The crowdsourcing tasks are pivotal to advancing research. They cannot be accomplished by computer algorithms or machines. They require crowds of people, each chipping in a tiny bit. What is remarkable is that the quitters matter at all….
An Internet rule of thumb in that only 1% (or less) of users add new content to sites like Wikipedia. Citizen science appears to operate on this dynamic, except instead of a core group adding existing knowledge for the crowd to use, a core group is involved in making new knowledge for the crowd to use….
In citizen science, a crowd can be four or a crowd can be hundreds of thousands. A citizen scientist is not a person who will participate in any project. They are individuals – gamers, birders, stargazers, gardeners, weather bugs, hikers, naturalists, and more – with particular interests and motivations.
As my grandfather said, “Try it, you might like it.” It’s fabulous that millions are trying it. Sooner or later, when participants and projects find one another, a good match translates into a job well done….(More)”.
Motivations for sustained participation in crowdsourcing: The role of talk in a citizen science case study
Paper by CB. Jackson, C. Østerlund, G. Mugar, KDV. Hassman for the Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Hawai’i International Conference on System Science (HICSS-48): “The paper explores the motivations of volunteers in a large crowdsourcing project and contributes to our understanding of the motivational factors that lead to deeper engagement beyond initial participation. Drawing on the theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) and the literature on motivation in crowdsourcing, we analyze interview and trace data from a large citizen science project. The analyses identify ways in which the technical features of the projects may serve as motivational factors leading participants towards sustained participation. The results suggest volunteers first engage in activities to support knowledge acquisition and later share knowledge with other volunteers and finally increase participation in Talk through a punctuated process of role discovery…(More)”
.
Turns Out the Internet Is Bad at Guessing How Many Coins Are in a Jar
Eric B. Steiner at Wired: “A few weeks ago, I asked the internet to guess how many coins were in a huge jar…The mathematical theory behind this kind of estimation game is apparently sound. That is, the mean of all the estimates will be uncannily close to the actual value, every time. James Surowiecki’s best-selling book, Wisdom of the Crowd, banks on this principle, and details several striking anecdotes of crowd accuracy. The most famous is a 1906 competition in Plymouth, England to guess the weight of an ox. As reported by Sir Francis Galton in a letter to Nature, no one guessed the actual weight of the ox, but the average of all 787 submitted guesses was exactly the beast’s actual weight….
So what happened to the collective intelligence supposedly buried in our disparate ignorance?
Most successful crowdsourcing projects are essentially the sum of many small parts: efficiently harvested resources (information, effort, money) courtesy of a large group of contributors. Think Wikipedia, Google search results, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and KickStarter.
But a sum of parts does not wisdom make. When we try to produce collective intelligence, things get messy. Whether we are predicting the outcome of an election, betting on sporting contests, or estimating the value of coins in a jar, the crowd’s take is vulnerable to at least three major factors: skill, diversity, and independence.
A certain amount of skill or knowledge in the crowd is obviously required, while crowd diversity expands the number of possible solutions or strategies. Participant independence is important because it preserves the value of individual contributors, which is another way of saying that if everyone copies their neighbor’s guess, the data are doomed.
Failure to meet any one of these conditions can lead to wildly inaccurate answers, information echo, or herd-like behavior. (There is more than a little irony with the herding hazard: The internet makes it possible to measure crowd wisdom and maybe put it to use. Yet because people tend to base their opinions on the opinions of others, the internet ends up amplifying the social conformity effect, thereby preventing an accurate picture of what the crowd actually thinks.)
What’s more, even when these conditions—skill, diversity, independence—are reasonably satisfied, as they were in the coin jar experiment, humans exhibit a whole host of other cognitive biases and irrational thinking that can impede crowd wisdom. True, some bias can be positive; all that Gladwellian snap-judgment stuff. But most biases aren’t so helpful, and can too easily lead us to ignore evidence, overestimate probabilities, and see patterns where there are none. These biases are not vanquished simply by expanding sample size. On the contrary, they get magnified.
Given the last 60 years of research in cognitive psychology, I submit that Galton’s results with the ox weight data were outrageously lucky, and that the same is true of other instances of seemingly perfect “bean jar”-styled experiments….”
Democratizing Inequalities: Dilemmas of the New Public Participation
New book edited by Caroline W. Lee, Michael McQuarrie and Edward T. Walker: “Opportunities to “have your say,” “get involved,” and “join the conversation” are everywhere in public life. From crowdsourcing and town hall meetings to government experiments with social media, participatory politics increasingly seem like a revolutionary antidote to the decline of civic engagement and the thinning of the contemporary public sphere. Many argue that, with new technologies, flexible organizational cultures, and a supportive policymaking context, we now hold the keys to large-scale democratic revitalization.
Democratizing Inequalities shows that the equation may not be so simple. Modern societies face a variety of structural problems that limit potentials for true democratization, as well as vast inequalities in political action and voice that are not easily resolved by participatory solutions. Popular participation may even reinforce elite power in unexpected ways. Resisting an oversimplified account of participation as empowerment, this collection of essays brings together a diverse range of leading scholars to reveal surprising insights into how dilemmas of the new public participation play out in politics and organizations. Through investigations including fights over the authenticity of business-sponsored public participation, the surge of the Tea Party, the role of corporations in electoral campaigns, and participatory budgeting practices in Brazil, Democratizing Inequalities seeks to refresh our understanding of public participation and trace the reshaping of authority in today’s political environment.”
Uncle Sam Wants You…To Crowdsource Science
Neal Ungerleider at Co-Labs: “It’s not just for the private sector anymore: Government scientists are embracing crowdsourcing. At a White House-sponsored workshop in late November, representatives from more than 20 different federal agencies gathered to figure out how to integrate crowdsourcing and citizen scientists into various government efforts. The workshop is part of a bigger effort with a lofty goal: Building a set of best practices for the thousands of citizens who are helping federal agencies gather data, from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to NASA….Perhaps the best known federal government crowdsourcing project is Nature’s Notebook, a collaboration between the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Park Service which asks ordinary citizens to take notes on plant and animal species during different times of year. These notes are then cleansed and collated into a massive database on animal and plant phenology that’s used for decision-making by national and local governments. The bulk of the observations, recorded through smartphone apps, are made by ordinary people who spend a lot of time outdoors….Dozens of government agencies are now asking the public for help. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention runs a student-oriented, Mechanical Turk-style “micro-volunteering” service called CDCology, the VA crowdsources design of apps for homeless veterans, while the National Weather Service distributes a mobile app called mPING that asks ordinary citizens to help fine-tune public weather reports by giving information on local conditions. The Federal Communication Commission’s Measuring Broadband America app, meanwhile, allows citizens to volunteer information on their Internet broadband speeds, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Sensor Toolbox asks users to track local air pollution….
As of now, however, when it comes to crowdsourcing data for government scientific research, there’s no unified set of standards or best practices. This can lead to wild variations in how various agencies collect data and use it. For officials hoping to implement citizen science projects within government, the roadblocks to crowdsourcing include factors that crowdsourcing is intended to avoid: limited budgets, heavy bureaucracy, and superiors who are skeptical about the value of relying on the crowd for data.
Benforado and Shanley also pointed out that government agencies are subject to additional regulations, such as the Paperwork Reduction Act, which can make implementation of crowdsourcing projects more challenging than they would be in academia or the private sector… (More)”
Making Futures – Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy
Book edited by Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson and Richard Topgaard: “Innovation and design need not be about the search for a killer app. Innovation and design can start in people’s everyday activities. They can encompass local services, cultural production, arenas for public discourse, or technological platforms. The approach is participatory, collaborative, and engaging, with users and consumers acting as producers and creators. It is concerned less with making new things than with making a socially sustainable future. This book describes experiments in innovation, design, and democracy, undertaken largely by grassroots organizations, non-governmental organizations, and multi-ethnic working-class neighborhoods.
These stories challenge the dominant perception of what constitutes successful innovations. They recount efforts at social innovation, opening the production process, challenging the creative class, and expanding the public sphere. The wide range of cases considered include a collective of immigrant women who perform collaborative services, the development of an open-hardware movement, grassroots journalism, and hip-hop performances on city buses. They point to the possibility of democratized innovation that goes beyond solo entrepreneurship and crowdsourcing in the service of corporations to include multiple futures imagined and made locally by often-marginalized publics. (More) “
Gamifying Cancer Research Crowdsources the Race for the Cure
Jason Brick at PSFK: “Computer time and human hours are among of the biggest obstacles in the face of progress in the fight against cancer. Researchers have terabytes of data, but only so many processors and people with which to analyze it. Much like the SETI program (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), it’s likely that big answers are already in the information we’ve collected. They’re just waiting for somebody to find them.
Reverse the Odds, a free mobile game from Cancer Research UK, accesses the combined resources of geeks and gamers worldwide. It’s a simple app game, the kind you play in line at the bank or while waiting at the dentist’s office, in which you complete mini puzzles and buy upgrades to save an imaginary world.
Each puzzle of the game is a repurposing of cancer data. Players find patterns in the data — the exact kind of analysis grad students and volunteers in a lab look for — and the results get compiled by Cancer Research UK for use in finding a cure. Errors are expected and accounted for because the thousands of players expected will round out the occasional mistake….(More)”
Crowdsourcing Data to Fight Air Pollution
Jason Brick at PSFK: “Air pollution is among the most serious environmental problems of the modern age. Although pollution in developed nations like the USA and Germany has fallen since the 1980s, air quality in growing technological countries — especially in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) group — grows worse with each year. In 2012, 3.7 million people died as a direct result of problems caused by chronic exposure to bad air, and tens of millions more were made ill.
There is no easy solution to such a complex and widespread problem, but Breathe offers a fix for one aspect and solves it in two ways.
The first way is the device itself: a portable plastic brick smaller than a bar of soap that monitors the presence and concentration of toxic gases and other harmful substances in the air, in real time throughout your day. It records the quality and, if it reaches unacceptably dangerous levels, warns you immediately with an emergency signal. Plug the device into your smart phone, and it keeps a record of air quality by time and location you can use to avoid the most polluted times of day and places in your area.
The second solution is the truly innovative aspect of this project. Via the Breathe app, any user who wants to can add her data to a central database that keeps statistics worldwide. Individuals can then use that data to plan vacations, time outdoor activities or schedule athletic events. Given enough time, Breathe could accumulate enough data to be used to affect policy by identifying the most polluted areas in a city, county or nation so the authorities can work on a more robust solution….(More)”