Hyperconnected, receptive and do-it-yourself city. An investigation into the European imaginary of crowdsourcing for urban governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Chiara Certoma, Filippo Corsini and MarcoFrey: “This paper critically explores the construction and diffusion of the socio-technical imaginary of crowdsourcing for public governance in Europe via a quali-quantitative analysis of academic publications, research and innovation projects funded by the European Commission (EC) and local initiatives. Building upon the increasing narrative of digital social participation that describes crowdsourcing processes as short ways towards democratisation of public decision-making processes, our research describes the trends and threats associated with the “hyperconnected city” imaginary advanced by (part of) scholarly research and EC policy documents and projects.

We show how, while these last describe digital-supported participation processes as (at least potentially) able to bootstrap an open governance agenda, local urban initiatives suggest the need to question this technology-optimistic imaginary.

A critical analysis of crowdsourcing for public governance prototyped and piloted in some European cities makes it evident that at local level, alternative imaginaries are emerging. We describe them in this paper as the “receptive city” (often adopted by public institutions and administration), and the “do-it-yourself city” (referring to the critical perspective of (digital) social activists) imaginaries, both emerging from local-based experiences and debates; and clarify their convergence and divergence how these differs from the above-mentioned “hyperconnected city” imaginary prefigured by EC guidelines.

The conclusive section further expands the analysis prefiguring future research possibilities promises in terms of local experiences influencing the future internet for society and digital agenda for Europe….(More)”.

Incentive Competitions and the Challenge of Space Exploration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Matthew S. Williams: “Bill Joy, the famed computer engineer who co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, once said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” This has come to be known as “Joy’s Law” and is one of the inspirations for concepts such as “crowdsourcing”.

Increasingly, government agencies, research institutions, and private companies are looking to the power of the crowd to find solutions to problems. Challenges are created and prizes offered – that, in basic terms, is an “incentive competition.”

The basic idea of an incentive competition is pretty straightforward. When confronted with a particularly daunting problem, you appeal to the general public to provide possible solutions and offer a reward for the best one. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

But in fact, this concept flies in the face of conventional problem-solving, which is for companies to recruit people with knowledge and expertise and solve all problems in-house. This kind of thinking underlies most of our government and business models, but has some significant limitations….

Another benefit to crowdsourcing is the way it takes advantage of the exponential growth in human population in the past few centuries. Between 1650 and 1800, the global population doubled, to reach about 1 billion. It took another one-hundred and twenty years (1927) before it doubled again to reach 2 billion.

However, it only took fifty-seven years for the population to double again and reach 4 billion (1974), and just fifteen more for it to reach 6 billion. As of 2020, the global population has reached 7.8 billion, and the growth trend is expected to continue for some time.

This growth has paralleled another trend, the rapid development of new ideas in science and technology. Between 1650 and 2020, humanity has experienced multiple technological revolutions, in what is a comparatively very short space of time….(More)”.

The Role of Crowdsourcing in the Healthcare Industry

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Kabir C. Sen: “The twenty first century has seen the advent of technical advances in storage, transmission and analysis of information. This has had a profound impact on the field of medicine. However, notwithstanding these advances, various obstacles remain in the world regarding the improvement of human lives through the provision of better health care. The obstacles emanate from the demand (i.e., the problem) as well as the supply (i.e., the solution) side. In some cases, the nature of the problems might not have been correctly identified. In others, a solution to a problem could be known only to a small niche of the global population. Thus, from the demand perspective, the variety of health care issues can range from the quest for a cure for a rare illness to the inability to successfully implement verifiable preventive measures for a disease that affects pockets of the global population. Alternatively, from the supply perspective, the approach to a host of health issues might vary because of fundamental differences in both medical philosophies and organizational policies.

In many instances, effective solutions to health care problems are lacking because of inadequate global knowledge about the particular disease. Alternatively, in other cases, a solution might exist but the relevant knowledge about it might only be available to selected pockets of the global medical community. Sometimes, the barriers to the transfer of knowledge might have their root causes in ignorance or prejudice about the initiator of the cure or solution. However, the advent of information technology has now provided an opportunity for individuals located at different geographical locations to collaborate on solutions to various problems. These crowdsourcing projects now have the potential to extract the “wisdom of crowds” for tackling problems which previously could not be solved by a group of experts (Surowiecki, 2014). Anecdotal evidence suggests that crowdsourcing has achieved some success in providing solutions for a rare medical disease (Arnold, 2014). This chapter discusses crowdsourcing’s potential to solve medical problems by designing a framework to evaluate its promises and suggest recommended future paths of actions….(More)”.

Unregulated Health Research Using Mobile Devices: Ethical Considerations and Policy Recommendations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mark A. Rothstein et al: “Mobile devices with health apps, direct-to-consumer genetic testing, crowd-sourced information, and other data sources have enabled research by new classes of researchers. Independent researchers, citizen scientists, patient-directed researchers, self-experimenters, and others are not covered by federal research regulations because they are not recipients of federal financial assistance or conducting research in anticipation of a submission to the FDA for approval of a new drug or medical device. This article addresses the difficult policy challenge of promoting the welfare and interests of research participants, as well as the public, in the absence of regulatory requirements and without discouraging independent, innovative scientific inquiry. The article recommends a series of measures, including education, consultation, transparency, self-governance, and regulation to strike the appropriate balance….(More)”.

Unleashing the Crowd: Collaborative Solutions to Wicked Business and Societal Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Ann Majchrzak and Arvind Malhotra: “This book disrupts the way practitioners and academic scholars think about crowds, crowdsourcing, innovation, and new organizational forms in this emerging period of ubiquitous access to the internet. The authors argue that the current approach to crowdsourcing unnecessarily limits the crowd to offering ideas, locking out those of us with knowledge about a problem.  They use data from 25 case studies of flash crowds — anonymous strangers answering online announcements to participate in a 7-10 day innovation challenge — half of whom were unleashed from the limitations of focusing on ideas.  Yet, these crowds were able to develop new business models, new product lines, and offer useful solutions to global problems in fields as diverse as health care insurance, software development, and societal change. This book, which offers a theory of collective production of innovative solutions explaining the practices that the crowds organically followed, will revolutionize current assumptions about how innovation and crowdsourcing should be managed for commercial as well as societal purposes….(More)”.

CROWD4EMS: a Crowdsourcing Platform for Gathering and Geolocating Social Media Content in Disaster Response

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ravi Shankar et al” Increase in access to mobile phone devices and social media networks has changed the way people report and respond to disasters. Community-driven initiatives such as Stand By Task Force (SBTF) or GISCorps have shown great potential by crowdsourcing the acquisition, analysis, and geolocation of social media data for disaster responders. These initiatives face two main challenges: (1) most of social media content such as photos and videos are not geolocated, thus preventing the information to be used by emergency responders, and (2) they lack tools to manage volunteers contributions and aggregate them in order to ensure high quality and reliable results. This paper illustrates the use of a crowdsourcing platform that combines automatic methods for gathering information from social media and crowdsourcing techniques, in order to manage and aggregate volunteers contributions. High precision geolocation is achieved by combining data mining techniques for estimating the location of photos and videos from social media, and crowdsourcing for the validation and/or improvement of the estimated location.

The evaluation of the proposed approach is carried out using data related to the Amatrice Earthquake in 2016, coming from Flickr, Twitter and Youtube. A common data set is analyzed and geolocated by both the volunteers using the proposed platform and a group of experts. Data quality and data reliability is assessed by comparing volunteers versus experts results. Final results are shown in a web map service providing a global view of the information social media provided about the Amatrice Earthquake event…(More)”.

GROW Citizens’ Observatory: Leveraging the power of citizens, open data and technology to generate engagement, and action on soil policy and soil moisture monitoring

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by M. Woods et al: “Citizens’ Observatories (COs) seek to extend conventional citizen science activities to scale up the potential of citizen sensing for environmental monitoring and creation of open datasets, knowledge and action around environmental issues, both local and global. The GROW CO has connected the planetary dimension of satellites with the hyperlocal context of farmers and their soil. GROW has faced three main interrelated challenges associated with each of the three core audiences of the observatory, namely citizens, scientists and policy makers: one is sustained citizen engagement, quality assurance of citizen-generated data and the challenge to move from data to action in practice and policy. We discuss how each of these challenges were overcome and gave way to the following related project outputs: 1) Contributing to satellite validation and enhancing the collective intelligence of GEOSS 2) Dynamic maps and visualisations for growers, scientists and policy makers 3) Social-technical innovations data art…(More)”.

The crowd in crowdsourcing: Crowdsourcing as a pragmatic research method

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lina Eklund, Isabell Stamm, Wanda Katja Liebermann at First Monday:
“Crowdsourcing, as a digital process employed to obtain information, ideas, and solicit contributions of work, creativity, etc., from large online crowds stems from business, yet is increasingly used in research. Engaging with previous literature and a symposium on academic crowdsourcing this study explores the underlying assumptions about crowdsourcing as a potential academic research method and how these affect the knowledge produced. Results identify crowdsourcing research as research about and with the crowd, explore how tasks can be productive, reconfiguring, and evaluating, and how these are linked to intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, we also identify three types of platforms: commercial platforms, research-specific platforms, and project specific platforms. Finally, the study suggests that crowdsourcing is a digital method that could be considered a pragmatic method; the challenge of a sound crowdsourcing project is to think about the researcher’s relationship to the crowd, the tasks, and the platform used….(More)”.

Crowdsourcing Reliable Local Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jane Lawrence Sumner , Emily M. Farris and Mirya R. Holman: “The adage “All politics is local” in the United States is largely true. Of the United States’ 90,106 governments, 99.9% are local governments. Despite variations in institutional features, descriptive representation, and policy-making power, political scientists have been slow to take advantage of these variations. One obstacle is that comprehensive data on local politics is often extremely difficult to obtain; as a result, data is unavailable or costly, hard to replicate, and rarely updated. We provide an alternative: crowdsourcing this data. We demonstrate and validate crowdsourcing data on local politics using two different data collection projects. We evaluate different measures of consensus across coders and validate the crowd’s work against elite and professional datasets. In doing so, we show that crowdsourced data is both highly accurate and easy to use. In doing so, we demonstrate that nonexperts can be used to collect, validate, or update local data….(More)”.

Real-time maps warn Hong Kong protesters of water cannons and riot police

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mary Hui at Quartz: “The “Be Water” nature of Hong Kong’s protests means that crowds move quickly and spread across the city. They might stage a protest in the central business district one weekend, then industrial neighborhoods and far-flung suburban towns the next. And a lot is happening at any one time at each protest. One of the key difficulties for protesters is to figure out what’s happening in the crowded, fast-changing, and often chaotic circumstances.

Citizen-led efforts to map protests in real-time are an attempt to address those challenges and answer some pressing questions for protesters and bystanders alike: Where should they go? Where have tear gas and water cannons been deployed? Where are police advancing, and are there armed thugs attacking civilians?

One of the most widely used real-time maps of the protests is HKMap.live, a volunteer-run and crowdsourced effort that officially launched in early August. It’s a dynamic map of Hong Kong that users can zoom in and out of, much like Google Maps. But in addition to detailed street and building names, this one features various emoji to communicate information at a glance: a dog for police, a worker in a yellow hardhat for protesters, a dinosaur for the police’s black-clad special tactical squad, a white speech-bubble for tear gas, two exclamation marks for danger.

HKMap during a protest on August 31, 2019.

Founded by a finance professional in his 20s and who only wished to be identified as Kuma, HKMap is an attempt to level the playing field between protesters and officers, he said in an interview over chat app Telegram. While earlier on in the protest movement people relied on text-based, on-the-ground  live updates through public Telegram channels, Kuma found these to be too scattered to be effective, and hard to visualize unless someone knew the particular neighborhood inside out.

“The huge asymmetric information between protesters and officers led to multiple occasions of surround and capture,” said Kuma. Passersby and non-frontline protesters could also make use of the map, he said, to avoid tense conflict zones. After some of his friends were arrested in late July, he decided to build HKMap….(More)”.