A Sandia National Laboratories Report by Zoe N. Gastelum, Meili C. Swanson, Kari Sentz and Christina Rinaudo : “Recent advances in information technology have led to an expansion of crowdsourcing activities that utilize the “power of the people” harnessed via online games, communities of interest, and other platforms to collect, analyze, verify, and provide technological solutions for challenges from a multitude of domains. To related this surge in popularity, the research team developed a taxonomy of crowdsourcing activities as they relate to international nuclear safeguards, evaluated the potential legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of crowdsourcing to support safeguards, and proposed experimental designs to test the capabilities and prospect for the use of crowdsourcing to support nuclear safeguards verification….(More)”.
Can Crowdsourcing and Collaboration Improve the Future of Human Health?
Ben Wiegand at Scientific American: “The process of medical research has been likened to searching for a needle in a haystack. With the continued acceleration of novel science and health care technologies in areas like artificial intelligence, digital therapeutics and the human microbiome we have tremendous opportunity to search the haystack in new and exciting ways. Applying these high-tech advances to today’s most pressing health issues increases our ability to address the root cause of disease, intervene earlier and change the trajectory of human health.
Global crowdsourcing forums, like the Johnson & Johnson Innovation QuickFire Challenges, can be incredibly valuable tools for searching the “haystack.” An initiative of JLABS—the no-strings-attached incubators of Johnson & Johnson Innovation—these contests spur scientific diversity through crowdsourcing, inspiring and attracting fresh thinking. They seek to stimulate the global innovation ecosystem through funding, mentorship and access to resources that can kick-start breakthrough ideas.
Our most recent challenge, the Next-Gen Baby Box QuickFire Challenge, focused on updating the 80-year-old “Finnish baby box,” a free, government-issued maternity supply kit for new parents containing such essentials as baby clothing, bath and sleep supplies packaged in a sleep-safe cardboard box. Since it first launched, the baby box has, together with increased use of maternal healthcare services early in pregnancy, helped to significantly reduce the Finnish infant mortality rate from 65 in every 1,000 live births in the 1930s to 2.5 per 1,000 today—one of the lowest rates in the world.
Partnering with Finnish innovation and government groups, we set out to see if updating this popular early parenting tool with the power of personalized health technology might one day impact Finland’s unparalleled high rate of type 1 diabetes. We issued the call globally to help create “the Baby Box of the future” as part of the Janssen and Johnson & Johnson Innovation vision to create a world without disease by accelerating science and delivering novel solutions to prevent, intercept and cure disease. The contest brought together entrepreneurs, researchers and innovators to focus on ideas with the potential to promote child health, detect childhood disease earlier and facilitate healthy parenting.
Incentive challenges like this award participants who have most effectively met a predefined objective or task. It’s a concept that emerged well before our time—as far back as the 18th century—from Napoleon’s Food Preservation Prize, meant to find a way to keep troops fed during battle, to the Longitude Prize for improved marine navigation.
Research shows that prize-based challenges that attract talent across a wide range of disciplines can generate greater risk-taking and yield more dramatic solutions….(More)”.
Crowdsourcing Judgments of News Source Quality
Paper by Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand: “The spread of misinformation and disinformation, especially on social media, is a major societal challenge. Here, we assess whether crowdsourced ratings of trust in news sources can effectively differentiate between more and less reliable sources. To do so, we ran a preregistered experiment (N = 1,010 from Amazon Mechanical Turk) in which individuals rated familiarity with, and trust in, 60 news sources from three categories: 1) Mainstream media outlets, 2) Websites that produce hyper-partisan coverage of actual facts, and 3) Websites that produce blatantly false content (“fake news”).
Our results indicate that, despite substantial partisan bias, laypeople across the political spectrum rate mainstream media outlets as far more trustworthy than either hyper-partisan or fake news sources (all but 1 mainstream source, Salon, was rated as more trustworthy than every hyper-partisan or fake news source when equally weighting ratings of Democrats and Republicans).
Critically, however, excluding ratings from participants who are not familiar with a given news source dramatically reduces the difference between mainstream media sources and hyper-partisan or fake news sites. For example, 30% of the mainstream media websites (Salon, the Guardian, Fox News, Politico, Huffington Post, and Newsweek) received lower trust scores than the most trusted fake news site (news4ktla.com) when excluding unfamiliar ratings.
This suggests that rather than being initially agnostic about unfamiliar sources, people are initially skeptical – and thus a lack of familiarity is an important cue for untrustworthiness. Overall, our findings indicate that crowdsourcing media trustworthiness judgments is a promising approach for fighting misinformation and disinformation online, but that trustworthiness ratings from participants who are unfamiliar with a given source should not be ignored….(More)”.
Feasibility Study of Using Crowdsourcing to Identify Critical Affected Areas for Rapid Damage Assessment: Hurricane Matthew Case Study
Paper by Faxi Yuan and Rui Liu at the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction: “…rapid damage assessment plays a critical role in crisis management. Collection of timely information for rapid damage assessment is particularly challenging during natural disasters. Remote sensing technologies were used for data collection during disasters. However, due to the large areas affected by major disasters such as Hurricane Matthew, specific data cannot be collected in time such as the location information.
Social media can serve as a crowdsourcing platform for citizens’ communication and information sharing during natural disasters and provide the timely data for identifying affected areas to support rapid damage assessment during disasters. Nevertheless, there is very limited existing research on the utility of social media data in damage assessment. Even though some investigation of the relationship between social media activities and damages was conducted, the employment of damage-related social media data in exploring the fore-mentioned relationship remains blank.
This paper for the first time, establishes the index dictionary by semantic analysis for the identification of damage-related tweets posted during Hurricane Matthew in Florida. Meanwhile, the insurance claim data from the publication of Florida Office of Insurance Regulation is used as a representative of real hurricane damage data in Florida. This study performs a correlation analysis and a comparative analysis of the geographic distribution of social media data and damage data at the county level in Florida. We find that employing social media data to identify critical affected areas at the county level during disasters is viable. Damage data has a closer relationship with damage-related tweets than disaster-related tweets….(More)”.
StatCan now crowdsourcing cannabis data
Kyle Duggan at iPolitics: “The national statistics agency is launching a crowdsourcing project to find out how much weed Canadians are consuming and how much it costs them.
Statistics Canada is searching for the best picture of consumption it can find ahead of legalization, and is turning to average Canadians to improve its rough estimates about a product that’s largely been accessed illegally by the population.
Thursday it released a suite of “experimental” data that make up its current best guesses on Canadian consumption habits, along with a crowdsourcing website and app to get its own estimates – a project officials said is an experiment itself.
Statscan is also rolling out a quarterly cannabis survey this year.
The agency has been combing through historical research on legal and illegal cannabis prices, scraping price data from illegal vendors online and, for some data, is relying largely on the self-reporting website priceofweed.com to assemble as much pot information as possible, even if it’s not perfect data.
The agency has been quietly preparing for the July legalization deadline by compiling health, justice and economic datasets and scouring to fill in the blanks where it can. Come July, legal cannabis will suddenly also need to be rolled into other important data products, like the GDP accounts….(More)”.
Congress Is Broken. CrowdLaw Could Help Fix It.
Beth Noveck in Forbes: “The way Congress makes law is simply no longer viable. In David Schoenbrod’s recent book DC Confidential, he outlines “five tricks” politicians use to take credit in front of television cameras in order to further political party agendas while passing the blame and the buck to future generations for bad legislation. Although Congress makes the laws that govern all Americans, people also feel disenfranchised. One study concludes that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” But technology offers the promise of improving both the quality and accountability of lawmaking by opening up the process to more and more diverse expertise and input from the public at every stage of the legislative process. We call such open and participatory lawmaking: “CrowdLaw.”
Moving Beyond the Ballot Box
Around the world, there are already over two dozen examples of local legislatures and national parliaments turning to the internet to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of the laws they make; we need to do the same here if we are to begin to fix congressional dysfunction.
For example, Finland’s Citizen’s Initiative Act at the national level, like Madrid’s Decide initiative at the local level, allows any member of the public with the requisite signatures to propose new legislation, meaning that not only interest groups and politicians get to set the agenda for lawmaking.
In France, the Parlement & Citoyens platform allows the public to respond to a problem posed by a representative by contributing information about both causes and solutions. Relevant citizen input is then synthesized, debated, and incorporated into the resulting draft legislation. This brings greater empiricism into the legislative process through public contribution of expertise….(More)”.
Using new data sources for policymaking
Technical report by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission: “… synthesises the results of our work on using new data sources for policy-making. It reflects a recent shift from more general considerations in the area of Big Data to a more dedicated investigation of Citizen Science, and it summarizes the state of play. With this contribution, we start promoting Citizen Science as an integral component of public participation in policy in Europe.
The particular need to focus on the citizen dimension emerged due to (i) the increasing interest in the topic from policy Directorate-Generals (DGs) of the European Commission (EC); (ii) the considerable socio-economic impact policy making has on citizens’ life and society as a whole; and (iii) the clear potentiality of citizens’ contributions to increase the relevance of policy making and the effectiveness of policies when addressing societal challenges.
We explicitly concentrate on Citizen Science (or public participation in scientific research) as a way to engage people in practical work, and to develop a mutual understanding between the participants from civil society, research institutions and the public sector by working together on a topic that is of common interest.
Acknowledging this new priority, this report concentrates on the topic of Citizen Science and presents already ongoing collaborations and recent achievements. The presented work particularly addresses environment-related policies, Open Science and aspects of Better Regulation. We then introduce the six phases of the ‘cyclic value chain of Citizen Science’ as a concept to frame citizen engagement in science for policy. We use this structure in order to detail the benefits and challenges of existing approaches – building on the lessons that we learned so far from our own practical work and thanks to the knowledge exchange from third parties. After outlining additional related policy areas, we sketch the future work that is required in order to overcome the identified challenges, and translate them into actions for ourselves and our partners.
Next steps include the following:
Develop a robust methodology for data collection, analysis and use of Citizen Science for EU policy;
Provide a platform as an enabling framework for applying this methodology to different policy areas, including the provision of best practices;
Offer guidelines for policy DGs in order to promote the use of Citizen Science for policy in Europe;
Experiment and evaluate possibilities of overarching methodologies for citizen engagement in science and policy, and their case specifics; and
Continue to advance interoperability and knowledge sharing between currently disconnected communities of practise. …(More)”.
Developing online illustrative and participatory tools for urban planning: towards open innovation and co-production through citizen engagement
Virpi Oksman and Minna Kulju in the International Journal of Services Technology and Management: “This article examines the challenge of involving various stakeholders in urban planning through user-driven innovation and collaborative design and leveraging these processes to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. Consequently, we introduce a novel illustrative and participatory tool combining mixed reality visualisations with user-centred interactions and feedback-tools so as to promote user insights and involve them in design.
This article analyses how these co-design services should be designed and offered to users in order to effectively support public participation and citizen-governance collaboration in future urban planning projects. We conclude that, in order to provide real benefit and value for urban planning and smart city solutions, participatory service should be integrated as part of the decision-making. Adoption of this kind of services system also means reforming of some of work processes in governance and planning how to exploit the results of the participatory processes to make informed decisions….(More)”
Data-Intensive Approaches To Creating Innovation For Sustainable Smart Cities
Science Trends: “Located at the complex intersection of economic development and environmental change, cities play a central role in our efforts to move towards sustainability. Reducing air and water pollution, improving energy efficiency while securing energy supply, and minimizing vulnerabilities to disruptions and disturbances are interconnected and pose a formidable challenge, with their dynamic interactions changing in highly complex and unpredictable manners….
The Beijing City Lab demonstrates the usefulness of open urban data in mapping urbanization with a fine spatiotemporal scale and reflecting social and environmental dimensions of urbanization through visualization at multiple scales.
The basic principle of open data will generate significant opportunities for promoting inter-disciplinary and inter-organizational research, producing new data sets through the integration of different sources, avoiding duplication of research, facilitating the verification of previous results, and encouraging citizen scientists and crowdsourcing approaches. Open data also is expected to help governments promote transparency, citizen participation, and access to information in policy-making processes.
Despite a significant potential, however, there still remain numerous challenges in facilitating innovation for urban sustainability through open data. The scope and amount of data collected and shared are still limited, and the quality control, error monitoring, and cleaning of open data is also indispensable in securing the reliability of the analysis. Also, the organizational and legal frameworks of data sharing platforms are often not well-defined or established, and it is critical to address the interoperability between various data standards, balance between open and proprietary data, and normative and legal issues such as the data ownership, personal privacy, confidentiality, law enforcement, and the maintenance of public safety and national security….
These findings are described in the article entitled Facilitating data-intensive approaches to innovation for sustainability: opportunities and challenges in building smart cities, published in the journal Sustainability Science. This work was led by Masaru Yarime from the City University of Hong Kong….(More)”.
“Crowdsourcing” ten years in: A review
Kerri Wazny at the Journal of Global Health: “First coined by Howe in 2006, the field of crowdsourcing has grown exponentially. Despite its growth and its transcendence across many fields, the definition of crowdsourcing has still not been agreed upon, and examples are poorly indexed in peer–reviewed literature. Many examples of crowdsourcing have not been scaled–up past the pilot phase.
In spite of this, crowdsourcing has great potential, especially in global health where resources are lacking. This narrative review seeks to review both indexed and grey crowdsourcing literature broadly in order to explore the current state of the field….(More)”.