The Internet for farmers without Internet

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Project Breakthrough: “Mobile Internet is rapidly becoming a primary source of knowledge for rural populations in developing countries. But not every one of the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers is connected to the Internet – which means they can struggle to solve daily agricultural challenges. With no way to access to information on things like planting, growing and selling, farmers in Asia, Latin America and Africa simply cannot grow. Many live on less than a dollar a day and don’t have smartphones to ask Google what to do.

London-based startup WeFarm is the world’s first free peer-to-peer network that spreads crowdsourced knowledge via SMS messages, which only need simple mobile phones. Since launching in November 2015, its aim has been to give remote, offline farmers access to the vital innovative insight, such as crop diversification, tackling soil erosion or changing climatic conditions. Billing itself as ‘The internet for people without the internet’, WeFarm strongly believes in the power of grassroots information. That’s why it costs nothing.

“With WeFarm we want all farmers in the world to be able to search for and access the information they need to improve their livelihoods,” Kenny Ewan, CEO tells us. The seeds for his idea were planted after many years working with indigenous communities in Latin America, based in Peru. “To me it makes perfect sense to allow farmers to connect with other farmers in order to find solutions to their problems. These farmers are experts in agriculture, and they come up with low-cost, innovative solutions, that are easy to implement.”

Farmers send questions by SMS to a local WeFarm number. Then they are connected to a huge crowdsourcing platform. The network’s back-end uses machine-learning algorithms to match them to farmers with answers. This data creates a sort of Google for agriculture…(More)”

The Wisdom of the Crowd is what science really needs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Science/Disrupt: “In a world where technology allows for global collaboration, and in a time when we’re finally championing diversity of thought, there are few barriers to getting the right people together to work on some of our most pressing problems. Governments and research labs are attempting to apply this mentality to science through what is known as ‘Citizen Science’ – research conducted in part by the public (amateur scientists) in partnership with the professionals.

The concept of Citizen Science is brilliant: moving science forward, faster, by utilising the wisdom and volume of the crowd. …

But Citizen Science goes beyond working directly with people with specific data to share. Zooniverse – the home of Citizen Science online – lists hundreds of projects which anyone can get involved with to help advance science. From mapping the galaxy and looking for comets, to seeking outAustralian wildlife and helping computers understand animal faces, the projects span across many subjects.

But when you dig deeper into the tasks being asked of these CitizenScientists, you find that – really – it’s a simple data capture activity. There’s no skill involved other than engaging your eyes to see and fingers to click and type. It’s not the wisdom of the crowd which is being tapped into.

You could argue that people are interested purely in being a part of important research – which of course is true for many – but it misses the point that scientists are simply missing out on a great resource of intellect at their fingertips.

There has been a rise of crowdsourced solutions over the last few years. rLoopis an organisation formed over Reddit to propose a Hyperloop transportation capsule; Techfugees is a Global community of technologists who team up to propose and build solutions to problems facing the increasing numbers of refugees around the world;  and XPRIZE is an open competition offering winning teams large sums of money and support to solve the global problems they select each year.

The difference between crowdsourcing and Citizen Science is that in the former, a high value is placed on ideas. There’s a general understanding that‘two minds are better than one’ and that by empowering a larger, more diverse pool of people to engage with important and purposeful work, a better solution will be found faster.

With Citizen Science, the mood is that of the public only being capable of playing hide and seek with pictures and completing menial, time consuming work that the scientists are simply too busy to do. …(More)”

Crowdsourcing: It Matters Who the Crowd Are

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alexis Comber, Peter Mooney, Ross S. Purves, Duccio Rocchini, and Ariane Walz: “Volunteered geographical information (VGI) and citizen science have become important sources data for much scientific research. In the domain of land cover, crowdsourcing can provide a high temporal resolution data to support different analyses of landscape processes. However, the scientists may have little control over what gets recorded by the crowd, providing a potential source of error and uncertainty. This study compared analyses of crowdsourced land cover data that were contributed by different groups, based on nationality (labelled Gondor and Non-Gondor) and on domain experience (labelled Expert and Non-Expert). The analyses used a geographically weighted model to generate maps of land cover and compared the maps generated by the different groups. The results highlight the differences between the maps how specific land cover classes were under- and over-estimated. As crowdsourced data and citizen science are increasingly used to replace data collected under the designed experiment, this paper highlights the importance of considering between group variations and their impacts on the results of analyses. Critically, differences in the way that landscape features are conceptualised by different groups of contributors need to be considered when using crowdsourced data in formal scientific analyses. The discussion considers the potential for variation in crowdsourced data, the relativist nature of land cover and suggests a number of areas for future research. The key finding is that the veracity of citizen science data is not the critical issue per se. Rather, it is important to consider the impacts of differences in the semantics, affordances and functions associated with landscape features held by different groups of crowdsourced data contributors….(More)”

How Citizen Attachment to Neighborhoods Helps to Improve Municipal Services and Public Spaces

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daniel O’Brien, Dietmar Offenhuber, Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Melissa Sands, and Eric Gordon: “What motivates people to contact their local governments with reports about street light outages, potholes, graffiti, and other deteriorations in public spaces? Current efforts to improve government interactions with constituents operate on the premise that citizens who make such reports are motivated by broad civic values. In contrast, our recent research demonstrates that such citizens are primarily motivated by territoriality – that is, attachments to the spaces where they live. Our research focuses on Boston’s “311 system,” which provides telephone hotlines and web channels through which constituents can request non-emergency government services.

Although our study focuses on 311 users in Boston, it holds broader implications for more than 400 U.S. municipalities that administer similar systems. And our results encourage a closer look at the drivers of citizen participation in many “coproduction programs” – programs that involve people in the design and implementation of government services. Currently, 311 is just one example of government efforts to use technology to involve constituents in joint efforts.

Territorial Ties and Civic Engagement

The concept of territoriality originated in studies of animal behavior – such as bears marking trees in the forest or lions and hyenas fighting over a kill. Human beings also need to manage the ownership of objects and spaces, but social psychologists have demonstrated that human territoriality, whether at home, the workplace, or a neighborhood, entails more than the defense of objects or spaces against others. It includes maintenance and caretaking, and even extends to items shared with others….(More)”

Trust in Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

First issue of the Government Oxford Review focusing on trust (or lack of trust) in government:

“In 2016, governments are in the firing line. Their populations suspect them of accelerating globalisation for the benefit of the few, letting trade drive away jobs, and encouraging immigration so as to provide cheaper labour and to fill skills-gaps without having to invest in training. As a result the ‘anti-government’, ‘anti-expert’, ‘anti-immigration’ movements are rapidly gathering support. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, the Presidential run of Donald Trump in the United States, and the Five Star movement in Italy are but three examples.” Dean Ngaire Woods

Our contributors have shed an interesting, and innovative, light on this issue. McKinsey’s Andrew Grant and Bjarne Corydon discuss the importance of transparency and accountability of government, while Elizabeth Linos, from the Behavioural Insights Team in North America, and Princeton’s Eldar Shafir discuss how behavioural science can be utilised to implement better policy, and Geoff Mulgan, CEO at Nesta, provides insights into how harnessing technology can bring about increased collective intelligence.

The Conference Addendum features panel summaries from the 2016 Challenges of Government Conference, written by our MPP and DPhil in Public Policy students.

Documents:
PDF icon Oxford Government Review 1 – The Trust Issue
PDF icon Oxford Government Review 1 – Conference addendum (More)”

Citizen Scientist

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mary Ellen Hannibal: “…Here is a wide-ranging adventure in becoming a citizen scientist by an award-winning writer and environmental thought leader. As Mary Ellen Hannibal wades into tide pools, follows hawks, and scours mountains to collect data on threatened species, she discovers the power of a heroic cast of volunteers—and the makings of what may be our last, best hope in slowing an unprecedented mass extinction.

Digging deeply, Hannibal traces today’s tech-enabled citizen science movement to its roots: the centuries-long tradition of amateur observation by writers and naturalists. Prompted by her novelist father’s sudden death, she also examines her own past—and discovers a family legacy of looking closely at the world. With unbending zeal for protecting the planet, she then turns her gaze to the wealth of species left to fight for.

Combining original reporting, meticulous research, and memoir in impassioned prose, Citizen Scientist is a literary event, a blueprint for action, and the story of how one woman rescued herself from an odyssey of loss—with a new kind of science….(More)”

Encouraging and Sustaining Innovation in Government: Technology and Innovation in the Next Administration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by Beth Simone Noveck and Stefaan Verhulst: “…With rates of trust in government at an all-time low, technology and innovation will be essential to achieve the next administration’s goals and to deliver services more effectively and efficiently. The next administration must prioritize using technology to improve governing and must develop plans to do so in the transition… This paper provides analysis and a set of concrete recommendations, both for the period of transition before the inauguration, and for the start of the next presidency, to encourage and sustain innovation in government. Leveraging the insights from the experts who participated in a day-long discussion, we endeavor to explain how government can improve its use of using digital technologies to create more effective policies, solve problems faster and deliver services more effectively at the federal, state and local levels….

The broad recommendations are:

  • Scale Data Driven Governance: Platforms such as data.gov represent initial steps in the direction of enabling data-driven governance. Much more can be done, however, to open-up data and for the agencies to become better consumers of data, to improve decision-making and scale up evidence-based governance. This includes better use of predictive analytics, more public engagement; and greater use of cutting-edge methods like machine learning.
  • Scale Collaborative Innovation: Collaborative innovation takes place when government and the public work together, thus widening the pool of expertise and knowledge brought to bear on public problems. The next administration can reach out more effectively, not just to the public at large, but to conduct targeted outreach to public officials and citizens who possess the most relevant skills or expertise for the problems at hand.
  • Promote a Culture of Innovation: Institutionalizing a culture of technology-enabled innovation will require embedding and institutionalizing innovation and technology skills more widely across the federal enterprise. For example, contracting, grants and personnel officials need to have a deeper understanding of how technology can help them do their jobs more efficiently, and more people need to be trained in human-centered design, gamification, data science, data visualization, crowdsourcing and other new ways of working.
  • Utilize Evidence-Based Innovation: In order to better direct government investments, leaders need a much better sense of what works and what doesn’t. The government spends billions on research in the private and university sectors, but very little experimenting with, testing, and evaluating its own programs. The next administration should continue developing an evidence-based approach to governance, including a greater use of methods like A/B testing (a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs the best); establishing a clearinghouse for success and failure stories and best practices; and encouraging overseers to be more open to innovation.
  • Make Innovation a Priority in the Transition: The transition period represents a unique opportunity to seed the foundations for long-lasting change. By explicitly incorporating innovation into the structure, goals and activities of the transition teams, the next administration can get a fast start in implementing policy goals and improving government operations through innovation approaches….(More)”

Questioning Big Data: Crowdsourcing crisis data towards an inclusive humanitarian response

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Femke Mulder, Julie Ferguson, Peter Groenewegen, Kees Boersma, and Jeroen Wolbers in Big Data and Society: “The aim of this paper is to critically explore whether crowdsourced Big Data enables an inclusive humanitarian response at times of crisis. We argue that all data, including Big Data, are socially constructed artefacts that reflect the contexts and processes of their creation. To support our argument, we qualitatively analysed the process of ‘Big Data making’ that occurred by way of crowdsourcing through open data platforms, in the context of two specific humanitarian crises, namely the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. We show that the process of creating Big Data from local and global sources of knowledge entails the transformation of information as it moves from one distinct group of contributors to the next. The implication of this transformation is that locally based, affected people and often the original ‘crowd’ are excluded from the information flow, and from the interpretation process of crowdsourced crisis knowledge, as used by formal responding organizations, and are marginalized in their ability to benefit from Big Data in support of their own means. Our paper contributes a critical perspective to the debate on participatory Big Data, by explaining the process of in and exclusion during data making, towards more responsive humanitarian relief….(More)”.

Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence: Crowdsourcing Approach

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Literature review by Sanket Subhash Khanwalkar: “Despite heavy investment by the United States and several other national governments, terrorism related problems are rising at an alarming rate. Lone-wolf terrorism, in particular, in the last decade, has caused 70% of all terrorism related deaths in the US and the West. This literature survey describes lone-wolf terrorism in detail to analyse its structure, characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. It also investigates crowdsourcing intelligence, as an unorthodox approach to counter lone-wolf terrorism, by reviewing its current state-of-the-art and identifying the areas for improvement….(More)”

Effect of Government Data Openness on a Knowledge-based Economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jae-Nam Lee, Juyeon Ham and Byounggu Choi at Procedia Computer Science: “Many governments have recently begun to adopt the concept of open innovation. However, studies on the openness of government data and its effect on the global competitiveness have not received much attention. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the effects of government data openness on a knowledge-based economy at the government level. The proposed model was analyzed using secondary data collected from three different reports. The findings indicate that government data openness positively affects the formation of knowledge bases in a country and that the level of knowledge base of a country positively affects the global competitiveness of a country….(More)”