Open innovation in the public sector: A research agenda

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Atreyi Kankanhalli et al in Government Information Quarterly: “New models of innovation are emerging in the marketplace and these are rapidly replacing traditional corporate research labs as the sole source of new ideas, new technologies, and new practices. This trend is being fueled by the ready availability of venture capital, and more importantly, by the ubiquitous presence of information technologies (IT) that are enabling firms to identify and foster new ideas from a myriad of knowledge sources, which could be geographically dispersed. This de-centralized and un-directed form of innovation, referred to as “open innovation”, is gaining traction both in the private and public sectors. In this guest editorial for the Special Issue on Open Innovation in the Public Sector, we first explore the diverse issues that are engendered when implementing open innovation in the public sector, and the IT that can facilitate such initiatives. Next, we highlight the fundamental differences in terms of focus, aim, value, and external stakeholders of open innovation in the private vs. public sectors. Last, we describe an agenda for research on open innovation in the public sector based on trends and gaps in the literature as seen from papers that were submitted to this special issue. Specifically, we suggest several useful directions for future research including conducting domain-specific studies, examining the use of tools beyond social media, and expanding the existing set of research methods and theoretical foundations….(More)”

 

Pushing the Limits of Collective Intelligence

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Stanford Innovation Lab Podcast with Tina Seelig:

“Imagine a collective brain shaped by human insights and powered by technology – that’s crowdsourcing. Michael Bernstein, computer scientist at Stanford University, explores how to harness crowdsourcing to tackle daunting challenges. In this episode of Stanford Innovation Lab, Tina Seelig meets with Michael to discuss examples of successful crowdsourcing, tools to gather collective insights, and the evolving relationship between humans and machines….(More)”

 

Can you crowdsource water quality data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pratibha Mistry at The Water Blog (Worldbank): “The recently released Contextual Framework for Crowdsourcing Water Quality Data lays out a strategy for citizen engagement in decentralized water quality monitoring, enabled by the “mobile revolution.”

According to the WHO, 1.8 billion people lack access to safe drinking water worldwide. Poor source water quality, non-existent or insufficient treatment, and defects in water distribution systems and storage mean these consumers use water that often doesn’t meet the WHO’s Guidelines for Drinking Water Quality.

The crowdsourcing framework develops a strategy to engage citizens in measuring and learning about the quality of their own drinking water. Through their participation, citizens provide utilities and water supply agencies with cost-effective water quality data in near-real time. Following a typical crowdsourcing model: consumers use their mobile phones to report water quality information to a central service. That service receives the information, then repackages and shares it via mobile phone messages, websites, dashboards, and social media. Individual citizens can thus be educated about their water quality, and water management agencies and other stakeholders can use the data to improve water management; it’s a win-win.

A well-implemented crowdsourcing project both depends on and benefits end users.Source: Figure modified from Hutchings, M., Dev, A., Palaniappan, M., Srinivasan, V., Ramanathan, N., Taylor, J.  2012. “mWASH: Mobile Phone Applications for the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Sector.” Pacific Institute, Oakland, California.  114 p.  (Link to full text)

Several groups, from the private sector to academia to non-profits, have taken a recent interest in developing a variety of so-called mWASH apps (mobile phone applications for the water, sanitation, and hygiene WASH sector).  A recent academic study analyzed how mobile phones might facilitate the flow of water quality data between water suppliers and public health agencies in Africa. USAID has invested in piloting a mobile application in Tanzania to help consumers test their water for E. coli….(More)”

Arcep goes forward with crowdsourcing data for regulation in France

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IIC: “France’s regulator, Arcep, says it is taking another step towards crowdsourcing to reflect users’ experience as accurately as possible, as part of a data-centric approach to regulation. It says it has decided to bring changes to its scoreboards on network and service coverage and quality, to provide users with more reliable and more representative measurements of fixed internet access and telephone services. To this end, it intends to make use of new digital tools that will enable any user to obtain a reliable, objective and reproducible measurement of how their individual access is performing. Crowdsourcing instruments will also allow Arcep to obtain a wealth of collaboratively produced information, which will help in identifying any market failures.

The objective over time: to reflect the user experience as accurately as possible, as part of a data-centric approach to regulation. “The aim of making information transparent is to allow citizen-consumers to steer the market”. To be able to commit fully to this new approach, an adjustment must be made to the current regulatory framework, and Arcep has launched a public consultation on a draft decision, amending the framework decision of 2013 on measuring and publishing fixed service QoS indicators. In particular, provisions regarding the quality of fixed internet access and telephone services, which have become superfluous, will be removed starting in the second half of 2017….(More)”

Towards Scalable Governance: Sensemaking and Cooperation in the Age of Social Media

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Iyad Rahwan in Philosophy & Technology: “Cybernetics, or self-governance of animal and machine, requires the ability to sense the world and to act on it in an appropriate manner. Likewise, self-governance of a human society requires groups of people to collectively sense and act on their environment. I argue that the evolution of political systems is characterized by a series of innovations that attempt to solve (among others) two ‘scalability’ problems: scaling up a group’s ability to make sense of an increasingly complex world, and to cooperate in increasingly larger groups. I then explore some recent efforts toward using the Internet and social media to provide alternative means for addressing these scalability challenges, under the banners of crowdsourcing and computer-supported argumentation. I present some lessons from those efforts about the limits of technology, and the research directions more likely to bear fruit….(More)”

OpenStreetMap in Israel and Palestine – ‘Game changer’ or reproducer of contested cartographies?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Christian Bittner in Political Geography: “In Israel and Palestine, map-making practices were always entangled with contradictive spatial identities and imbalanced power resources. Although an Israeli narrative has largely dominated the ‘cartographic battlefield’, the latest chapter of this story has not been written yet: collaborative forms of web 2.0 cartographies have restructured power relations in mapping practices and challenged traditional monopolies on map and spatial data production. Thus, we can expect web 2.0 cartographies to be a ‘game changer’ for cartography in Palestine and Israel.

In this paper, I review this assumption with the popular example of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Following a mixed methods approach, I comparatively analyze the genesis of OSM in Israel and Palestine. Although nationalist motives do not play a significant role on either side, it turns out that the project is dominated by Israeli and international mappers, whereas Palestinians have hardly contributed to OSM. As a result, social fragmentations and imbalances between Israel and Palestine are largely reproduced through OSM data. Discussing the low involvement of Palestinians, I argue that OSM’s ground truth paradigm might be a watershed for participation. Presumably, the project’s data are less meaningful in some local contexts than in others. Moreover, the seemingly apolitical approach to map only ‘facts on the ground’ reaffirms present spatio-social order and thus the power relations behind it. Within a Palestinian narrative, however, many aspects of the factual material space might appear not as neutral physical objects but as results of suppression, in which case, any ‘accurate’ spatial representation, such as OSM, becomes objectionable….(More)”

The Crowd is Always There: A Marketplace for Crowdsourcing Crisis Response

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Presentation by Patrick Meier at the Emergency Social Data Summit organized by the Red Cross …on “Collaborative Crisis Mapping” (the slides are available here): “What I want to expand on is the notion of a “marketplace for crowdsourcing” that I introduced at the Summit. The idea stems from my experience in the field of conflict early warning, the Ushahidi-Haiti deployment and my observations of the Ushahidi-DC and Ushahidi-Russia initiatives.

The crowd is always there. Paid Search & Rescue (SAR) teams and salaried emergency responders aren’t. Nor can they be on the corners of every street, whether that’s in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Washington DC or Sukkur, Pakistan. But the real first responders, the disaster affected communities, are always there. Moreover, not all communities are equally affected by a crisis. The challenge is to link those who are most affected with those who are less affected (at least until external help arrives).

This is precisely what PIC Net and the Washington Post did when they  partnered to deploy this Ushahidi platform in response to the massive snow storm that paralyzed Washington DC earlier this year. They provided a way for affected residents to map their needs and for those less affected to map the resources they could share to help others. You don’t need to be a professional disaster response professional to help your neighbor dig out their car.

More recently, friends at Global Voices launched the most ambitious crowdsourcing initiative in Russia in response to the massive forest fires. But they didn’t use this Ushahidi platform to map the fires. Instead, they customized the public map so that those who needed help could find those who wanted to help. In effect, they created an online market place to crowdsource crisis response. You don’t need professional certification in disaster response to drive someone’s grandparents to the next town over.

There’s a lot that disaster affected populations can (and already do) to help each other out in times of crisis. What may help is to combine the crowdsourcing of crisis information with what I call crowdfeeding in order to create an efficient market place for crowdsourcing response. By crowdfeeding, I mean taking crowdsourced information and feeding it right back to the crowd. Surely they need that information as much if not more than external, paid responders who won’t get to the scene for hours or days….(More)”

Esri, Waze Partnership: A Growing Trend in Sharing Data for the Benefit of All?

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Justine Brown at GovTech: “Esri and Waze announced in mid-October that they’re partnering to help local governments alleviate traffic congestion and analyze congestion patterns. Called the Waze Connected Citizens Program, the program — which enables local governments that use the Esri ArcGIS platform to exchange publicly available traffic data with Waze — may represent a growing trend in which citizens and government share data for the benefit of all.

Connecting Esri and Waze data will allow cities to easily share information about the conditions of their roads with drivers, while drivers anonymously report accidents, potholes and other road condition information back to the cities. Local governments can then merge that data into their existing emergency dispatch and street maintenance systems….

Through the Connected Citizen program, Waze shares two main data sets with its government partners: Jams and Alerts….If there’s a major traffic jam in an unusual area, a traffic management center operator might be triggered to examine that area further. For example, Boston recently used Waze jam data to identify a couple of traffic-prone intersections in the Seaport district….Similarly if a Waze user reports a crash, that information shows up on the city’s existing ArcGIS map. City personnel can assess the crash and combine the Waze data with its existing data sets, if desired. The city can then notify emergency response, for example, to address the accident and send out emergency vehicles if necessary….

The Connected Citizen Program could also provide local governments an alternative to IoT investments, because a city can utilize real-time reports from the road rather than investing in sensors and IoT infrastructure. The Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, for instance, uses data from the Connected Citizen Program in several ways, including to monitor and detect automobile accidents on its roadways….(More)”

A Better Reykjavik and a stronger community: The benefits of crowdsourcing and e-democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dyfrig Williams at Medium: “2008 was a difficult time in Iceland. All three of the country’s major privately owned banks went under, which prompted a financial crisis that enveloped the country and even reached local authorities in Wales.

The Better Reykjavik website was launched before the municipal elections and became a hub for online participation.

  • 70,000 people participated out of a population of 120,000
  • 12,000 registered users submitted over 3,300 ideas and5,500 points for and against
  • 257 ideas were formally reviewed, and 165 have been accepted since 2011

As an external not-for-profit website, Better Reykjavik was better able to involve people because it wasn’t perceived to be part of pre-existing political structures.

Elected members

In the run up to the elections, the soon to be Mayor Jón Gnarr championed the platform at every opportunity. This buy-in from a prominent figure was key, as it publicised the site and showed that there was buy-in for the work at the highest level.

How does it work?

The website enables people to have a direct say in the democratic process. The website gives the space for people to propose, debate and rate ways that their community can be improved. Every month the council is obliged to discuss the 10–15 highest rated ideas from the website….(More)

Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making

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(Open Access) book edited by Bitange Ndemo and Tim Weiss: “Presenting rigorous and original research, this volume offers key insights into the historical, cultural, social, economic and political forces at play in the creation of world-class ICT innovations in Kenya. Following the arrival of fiber-optic cables in 2009, Digital Kenya examines why the initial entrepreneurial spirit and digital revolution has begun to falter despite support from motivated entrepreneurs, international investors, policy experts and others. Written by engaged scholars and professionals in the field, the book offers 15 eye-opening chapters and 14 one-on-one conversations with entrepreneurs and investors to ask why establishing ICT start-ups on a continental and global scale remains a challenge on the “Silicon Savannah”. The authors present evidence-based recommendations to help Kenya to continue producing globally impactful  ICT innovations that improve the lives of those still waiting on the side-lines, and to inspire other nations to do the same….(More)”