OpenGov Foundation: “At-Large Councilmember David Grosso and The OpenGov Foundation today launched the beta version of MadisonDC, a free online lawmaking tool that empowers citizens to engage directly with their elected officials – and the policymaking process itself – by commenting on, proposing changes to, and debating real D.C. Council legislation. Grosso is the first-ever District elected official to give citizens the opportunity to log on and legislate, putting him at the forefront of a nation-wide movement reinventing local legislatures with technology. Three bills are now open for crowdsourcing on MadisonDC: a plan to fully legalize marijuana, a proposal to make zoning laws more friendly to urban farmers, and legislation to create open primary elections….
MadisonDC is the District of Columbia’s version of the freeMadison software that reinvents government for the Internet Age. Madison 1.0 powered the American people’s successful defense of Internet freedom from Congressional threats. It delivered the first crowdsourced bill in the history of the U.S. Congress. And now, the non-partisan, non-profit OpenGov Foundation has released Madison 2.0, empowering you to participate in your government, efficiently access your elected officials, and hold them accountable.”
CrowdOut: A mobile crowdsourcing service for road safety in digital cities
New paper by Aubry, Elian: “Nowadays cities invest more in their public services, and particularly digital ones, to improve their resident’s quality of life and attract more people. Thus, new crowdsourcing services appear and they are based on contributions made by mobile users equipped with smartphones. For example, the respect of the traffic code is essential to ensure citizens’ security and welfare in their city. In this paper, we present CrowdOut, a new mobile crowdsourcing service for improving road safety in cities. CrowdOut allows users to report traffic offence they witness in real time and to map them on a city plan. CrowdOut service has been implemented and experiments and demonstrations have been performed in the urban environment of the Grand Nancy, in France. This service allows users appropriating their urban environment with an active participation regarding the collectivity. This service also represents a tool for city administrators to help for decisions and improve their urbanization policy, or to check the impact of their policy in the city environment.”
ShouldWe
About ShouldWe.org: “ShouldWe is about all of us. We believe people deserve to know not just what decisions are being taken in their name but why. Our vision is of a world where everyone is able to interrogate policymakers’ arguments by accessing simple information about issues of public policy, and the evidence that supports it.
ShouldWe.org is a non-partisan, crowd-sourced, online guide to policy debates and the evidence which informs them. We serve journalists, analysts and advocates by aggregating the most authoritative policy information, from both sides, in one place. Our mission is to improve democratic scrutiny by resourcing journalists and other active citizens to learn more about the causes and consequences of the decisions which affect our lives.
We are a not-for-profit organisation. Please help us by contributing and editing content, telling your colleagues and friends, and letting us know how we can make ShouldWe.org better.
Learn how to create a ShouldWe page here
Find out how to help ShouldWe in other ways here.
Watch the ShouldWe video here
New crowdsourcing site like ‘Yelp’ for philanthropy
Vanessa Small in the Washington Post: “Billionaire investor Warren Buffett once said that there is no market test for philanthropy. Foundations with billions in assets often hand out giant grants to charity without critique. One watchdog group wants to change that.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has created a new Web site that posts public feedback about a foundation’s giving. Think Yelp for the philanthropy sector.
Along with public critiques, the new Web site, Philamplify.org, uploads a comprehensive assessment of a foundation conducted by researchers at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
The assessment includes a review of the foundation’s goals, strategies, partnerships with grantees, transparency, diversity in its board and how any investments support the mission.
The site also posts recommendations on what would make the foundation more effective in the community. The public can agree or disagree with each recommendation and then provide feedback about the grantmaker’s performance.
People who post to the site can remain anonymous.
NCRP officials hope the site will stir debate about the giving practices of foundations.
“Foundation leaders rarely get honest feedback because no one wants to get on the wrong side of a foundation,” said Lisa Ranghelli, a director at NCRP. “There’s so much we need to do as a society that we just want these philanthropic resources to be used as powerfully as possible and for everyone to feel like they have a voice in how philanthropy operates.”
With nonprofit rating sites such as Guidestar and Charity Navigator, Philamplify is just one more move to create more transparency in the nonprofit sector. But the site might be one of the first to force transparency and public commentary exclusively about the organizations that give grants.
Foundation leaders are open to the site, but say that some grantmakers already use various evaluation methods to improve their strategies.
Groups such as Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the Center for Effective Philanthropy provide best practices for foundation giving.
The Council on Foundations, an Arlington-based membership organization of foundation groups, offers a list of tools and ideas for foundations to make their giving more effective.
“We will be paying close attention to Philamplify and new developments related to it as the project unfolds,” said Peter Panepento, senior vice president of community and knowledge at the Council on Foundations.
Currently there are three foundations up for review on the Web site: the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, which focuses on improving the Greater Philadelphia community; the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation in Atlanta, which gives grants in science and education; and the Lumina Foundation for Education in Indianapolis, which focuses on access to higher learning….”
Officials say Philamplify will focus on the top 100 largest foundations to start. Large foundations would include groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the foundations of companies such as Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline.
Although there are concerns about the site’s ability to keep comments objective, grantees hope it will start a dialogue that has been absent in philanthropy.
Believe the hype: Big data can have a big social impact
Annika Small at the Guardian: “Given all the hype around so called big data at the moment, it would be easy to dismiss it as nothing more than the latest technology buzzword. This would be a mistake, given that the application and interpretation of huge – often publicly available – data sets is already supporting new models of creativity, innovation and engagement.
To date, stories of big data’s progress and successes have tended to come from government and the private sector, but we’ve heard little about its relevance to social organisations. Yet big data can fuel big social change.
It’s already playing a vital role in the charitable sector. Some social organisations are using existing open government data to better target their services, to improve advocacy and fundraising, and to support knowledge sharing and collaboration between different charities and agencies. Crowdsourcing of open data also offers a new way for not-for-profits to gather intelligence, and there is a wide range of freely available online tools to help them analyse the information.
However, realising the potential of big and open data presents a number of technical and organisational challenges for social organisations. Many don’t have the required skills, awareness and investment to turn big data to their advantage. They also tend to lack the access to examples that might help demystify the technicalities and focus on achievable results.
Overcoming these challenges can be surprisingly simple: Keyfund, for example, gained insight into what made for a successful application to their scheme through using a free, online tool to create word clouds out of all the text in their application forms. Many social organisations could use this same technique to better understand the large volume of unstructured text that they accumulate – in doing so, they would be “doing big data” (albeit in a small way). At the other end of the scale, Global Giving has developed its own sophisticated set of analytical tools to better understand the 57,000+ “stories” gathered from its network.
Innovation often happens when different disciplines collide and it’s becoming apparent that most value – certainly most social value – is likely to be created at the intersection of government, private and social sector data. That could be the combination of data from different sectors, or better “data collaboration” within sectors.
The Housing Association Charitable Trust (HACT) has produced two original tools that demonstrate this. Its Community Insight tool combines data from different sectors, allowing housing providers easily to match information about their stock to a large store of well-maintained open government figures. Meanwhile, its Housing Big Data programme is building a huge dataset by combining stats from 16 different housing providers across the UK. While Community Insight allows each organisation to gain better individual understanding of their communities (measuring well-being and deprivation levels, tracking changes over time, identifying hotspots of acute need), Housing Big Data is making progress towards a much richer network of understanding, providing a foundation for the sector to collaboratively identify challenges and quantify the impact of their interventions.
Alongside this specific initiative from HACT, it’s also exciting to see programmes such as 360giving, which forge connections between a range of private and social enterprises, and lays foundations for UK social investors to be a significant source of information over the next decade. Certainly, The Big Lottery Fund’s publication of open data late last year is a milestone which also highlights how far we have to travel as a sector before we are truly “data-rich”.
At Nominet Trust, we have produced the Social Tech Guide to demonstrate the scale and diversity of social value being generated internationally – much of which is achieved through harnessing the power of big data. From Knewton creating personally tailored learning programmes, to Cellslider using the power of the crowd to advance cancer research, there is no shortage of inspiration. The UN’s Global Pulse programme is another great example, with its focus on how we can combine private and public sources to pin down the size and shape of a social challenge, and calibrate our collective response.
These examples of data-driven social change demonstrate the huge opportunities for social enterprises to harness technology to generate insights, to drive more effective action and to fuel social change. If we are to realise this potential, we need to continue to stretch ourselves as social enterprises and social investors.”
United States federal government use of crowdsourcing grows six-fold since 2011
at E Pluribus Unum: “Citizensourcing and open innovation can work in the public sector, just as crowdsourcing can in the private sector. Around the world, the use of prizes to spur innovation has been booming for years. The United States of America has been significantly scaling up its use of prizes and challenges to solving grand national challenges since January 2011, when, President Obama signed an updated version of the America COMPETES Act into law.
According to the third congressionally mandated report released by the Obama administration today (PDF/Text), the number of prizes and challenges conducted under the America COMPETES Act has increased by 50% since 2012, 85% since 2012, and nearly six-fold overall since 2011. 25 different federal agencies offered prizes under COMPETES in fiscal year 2013, with 87 prize competitions in total. The size of the prize purses has also grown as well, with 11 challenges over $100,000 in 2013. Nearly half of the prizes conducted in FY 2013 were focused on software, including applications, data visualization tools, and predictive algorithms. Challenge.gov, the award-winning online platform for crowdsourcing national challenges, now has tens of thousands of users who have participated in more than 300 public-sector prize competitions. Beyond the growth in prize numbers and amounts, Obama administration highlighted 4 trends in public-sector prize competitions:
- New models for public engagement and community building during competitions
- Growth software and information technology challenges, with nearly 50% of the total prizes in this category
- More emphasis on sustainability and “creating a post-competition path to success”
- Increased focus on identifying novel approaches to solving problems
The growth of open innovation in and by the public sector was directly enabled by Congress and the White House, working together for the common good. Congress reauthorized COMPETES in 2010 with an amendment to Section 105 of the act that added a Section 24 on “Prize Competitions,” providing all agencies with the authority to conduct prizes and challenges that only NASA and DARPA has previously enjoyed, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which has been guiding its implementation and providing guidance on the use of challenges and prizes to promote open government.
“This progress is due to important steps that the Obama Administration has taken to make prizes a standard tool in every agency’s toolbox,” wrote Cristin Dorgelo, assistant director for grand challenges in OSTP, in a WhiteHouse.gov blog post on engaging citizen solvers with prizes:
In his September 2009 Strategy for American Innovation, President Obama called on all Federal agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges. Those efforts have expanded since the signing of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, which provided all agencies with expanded authority to pursue ambitious prizes with robust incentives.
To support these ongoing efforts, OSTP and the General Services Administration have trained over 1,200 agency staff through workshops, online resources, and an active community of practice. And NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation (COECI) provides a full suite of prize implementation services, allowing agencies to experiment with these new methods before standing up their own capabilities.
Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy famously once said that “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” This rings true, in and outside of government. The idea of governments using prizes like this to inspire technological innovation, however, is not reliant on Web services and social media, born from the fertile mind of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. As the introduction to the third White House prize report notes:
“One of the most famous scientific achievements in nautical history was spurred by a grand challenge issued in the 18th Century. The issue of safe, long distance sea travel in the Age of Sail was of such great importance that the British government offered a cash award of £20,000 pounds to anyone who could invent a way of precisely determining a ship’s longitude. The Longitude Prize, enacted by the British Parliament in 1714, would be worth some £30 million pounds today, but even by that measure the value of the marine chronometer invented by British clockmaker John Harrison might be a deal.”
Centuries later, the Internet, World Wide Web, mobile devices and social media offer the best platforms in history for this kind of approach to solving grand challenges and catalyzing civic innovation, helping public officials and businesses find new ways to solve old problem. When a new idea, technology or methodology that challenges and improves upon existing processes and systems, it can improve the lives of citizens or the function of the society that they live within….”
The advent of crowdfunding innovations for development
SciDevNet: “FundaGeek, TechMoola and RocketHub have more in common than just their curious names. These are all the monikers of crowdsourcing websites that are dedicated to raising money for science and technology projects. As the coffers that were traditionally used to fund research and development have been squeezed in recent years, several such sites have sprouted up.
In 2013, general crowdsourcing site Kickstarter saw a total of US$480 million pledged to its projects by three million backers. That’s up from US$320 million in 2012, US$99 million in 2011 and just US$28million in 2010. Kickstarter expects the figures to climb further this year, and not just for popular projects such as films and books.
Science and technology projects — particularly those involving simple designs — are starting to make waves on these sites. And new sites, such as those bizarrely named ones, are now catering specifically for scientific projects, widening the choice of platforms on offer and raising crowdsourcing’s profile among the global scientific community online.
All this means that crowdsourcing is fast becoming one of the most significant innovations in funding the development of technology that can aid poor communities….
A good example of how crowdsourcing can help the developing world is the GravityLight, a product launched on Indiegogo over a year ago that uses gravity to create light. Not only did UK design company Therefore massively exceed its initial funding target — ultimately raising $US400,000 instead of a planned US$55,000 — it amassed a global network of investors and distributors that has allowed the light to be trialled in 26 countries as of last December.
The light was developed in-house after Therefore was given a brief to produce a cheap solar-powered lamp by private clients. Although this project faltered, the team independently set out to produce a lamp to replace the ubiquitous and dangerous kerosene lamps widely used in remote areas in Africa. After several months of development, Therefore had designed a product that is powered by a rope with a heavy weight on its end being slowly drawn through the light’s gears (see video)…
Crowdfunding is not always related to a specific product. Earlier this year, Indiegogo hosted a project hoping to build a clean energy store in a Ugandan village. The idea is to create an ongoing supply chain for technologies such as cleaner-burning stoves, water filters and solar lights that will improve or save lives, according to ENVenture, the project’s creators. [1] The US$2,000 target was comfortably exceeded…”
Sharing in a Changing Climate
Helen Goulden in the Huffington Post: “Every month, a social research agency conducts a public opinion survey on 30,000 UK households. As part of this households are asked about what issues they think are the most important; things such as crime, unemployment, inequality, public health etc. Climate change has ranked so consistently low on these surveys that they don’t both asking any more.
On first glance, it would appear that most people don’t care about a changing climate.
Yet, that’s simply not true. Many people care deeply, but fleetingly – in the same way they may consider their own mortality before getting back to thinking about what to have for tea. And others care, but fail to change their behaviour in a way that’s proportionate to their concerns. Certainly that’s my unhappy stomping ground.
Besides what choices do we really have? Even the most progressive, large organisations have been glacial to move towards any form of real form of sustainability. For many years we have struggled with the Frankenstein-like task of stitching ‘sustainability’ onto existing business and economic models and the results, I think, speak for themselves.
That the Collaborative Economy presents us with an opportunity – in Napster-like ways – to disrupt and evolve toward something more sustainable is compelling idea. Looking out to a future filled with opportunities to reconfigure how we produce, consume and dispose of the things we want and need to live, work and play.
Whether the journey toward sustainability is short or long, it will be punctuated with a good degree of turbulence, disruption and some largely unpredictable events. How we deal with those events and what role communities, collaboration and technology play may set the framework and tone for how that future evolves. Crises and disruption to our entrenched living patterns present ripe opportunities for innovation and space for adopting new behaviours and practices.
No-one is immune from the impact of erratic and extreme weather events. And if we accept that these events are going to increase in frequency, we must draw the conclusion that emergency state and government resources may be drawn more thinly over time.
Across the world, there is a fairly well organised state and international infrastructure for dealing with emergencies , involving everyone from the Disaster Emergency Committee, the UN, central and local government and municipalities, not for profit organisations and of course, the military. There is a clear reason why we need this kind of state emergency response; I’m not suggesting that we don’t.
But through the rise of open data and mass participation in platforms that share location, identity and inventory, we are creating a new kind of mesh; a social and technological infrastructure that could considerably strengthen our ability to respond to unpredictable events.
In the last few years we have seen a sharp rise in the number of tools and crowdsourcing platforms and open source sensor networks that are focused on observing, predicting or responding to extreme events:
• Apps like Shake Alert, which emits a minute warning that an earthquake is coming
• Rio’s sensor network, which measures rainfall outside the city and can predict flooding
• Open Source sensor software Arduino which is being used to crowd-source weather and pollution data
• Propeller Health, which is using Asthma sensors on inhalers to crowd-source pollution hotspots
• Safecast, which was developed for crowdsourcing radiation levels in Japan
Increasingly we have the ability to deploy open source, distributed and networked sensors and devices for capturing and aggregating data that can help us manage our responses to extreme weather (and indeed, other kinds of) events.
Look at platforms like LocalMind and Foursquare. Today, I might be using them to find out whether there’s a free table at a bar or finding out what restaurant my friends are in. But these kind of social locative platforms present an infrastructure that could be life-saving in any kind of situation where you need to know where to go quickly to get out of trouble. We know that in the wake of disruptive events and disasters, like bombings, riots etc, people now intuitively and instinctively take to technology to find out what’s happening, where to go and how to co-ordinate response efforts.
During the 2013 Bart Strike in San Francisco, ventures like Liquid Space and SideCar enabled people to quickly find alternative places to work, or alternatives to public transport, to mitigate the inconvenience of the strike. The strike was a minor inconvenience compared to the impact of a hurricane and flood but nevertheless, in both those instances, ventures decided waive their fees; as did AirBnB when 1,400 New York AirBnB hosts opened their doors to people who had been left homeless through Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The impulse to help is not new. The matching of people’s offers of help and resources to on-the-ground need, in real time, is.”
The Surprising Accuracy Of Crowdsourced Predictions About The Future
Adele Peters in FastCo-Exist: “If you have a question about what’s going to happen next in Syria or North Korea, you might get more accurate predictions by asking a group of ordinary people than from foreign policy experts or even, possibly, CIA agents with classified information. Over the last few years, the Good Judgment Project has proven that crowdsourcing predictions is a surprisingly accurate way to forecast the future.
The project, sponsored by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence office, is currently working with 3,000 people to test their ability to predict outcomes in everything from world politics to the economy. They aren’t experts, just people who are interested in the news.
“We just needed lots of people; we had very few restrictions,” says Don Moore, an associate professor at University of California-Berkeley, who co-led the project. “We wanted people who were interested, and curious, who were moderately well-educated and at least aware enough of the world around them that they listened to the news.”
The group has tackled 250 questions in the experiment so far. None of them have been simple; current questions include whether Turkey will get a new constitution and whether the U.S. and the E.U. will reach a trade deal. But the group consistently got answers right more often than individual experts, just through some simple online research and, in some cases, discussions with each other.
The crowdsourced predictions are even reportedly more accurate than those from intelligence agents. One report says that when “superpredictors,” the people who are right most often, are grouped together in teams, they can outperform agents with classified information by as much as 30%. (The researchers can’t confirm this fact, since the accuracy of spies is, unsurprisingly, classified).
…Crowdsourcing could be useful for any type of prediction, Moore says, not only what’s happening in world politics. “Every major decision depends on a forecast of the future,” he explains. “A company deciding to launch a new product has to figure out what sales might be like. A candidate trying to decide whether to run for office has to forecast how they’ll do in the election. In trying to decide whom to marry, you have to decide what your future looks like together.”
“The way corporations do forecasting now is an embarrassment,” he adds. “Many of the tools we’re developing would be enormously helpful.”
The project is currently recruiting new citizen predictors here.”
Thanks-for-Ungluing launches!
Blog from Unglue.it: “Great books deserve to be read by all of us, and we ought to be supporting the people who create these books. “Thanks for Ungluing” gives readers, authors, libraries and publishers a new way to build, sustain, and nourish the books we love.
“Thanks for Ungluing” books are Creative Commons licensed and free to download. You don’t need to register or anything. But when you download, the creators can ask for your support. You can pay what you want. You can just scroll down and download the book. But when that book has become your friend, your advisor, your confidante, you’ll probably want to show your support and tell all your friends.
We have some amazing creators participating in this launch….”