Chapter by Stefan Etzelstorfer, Thomas Gegenhuber and, Dennis Hilgers in Open Tourism: Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing and Co-Creation Challenging the Tourism Industry: “Companies use crowdsourcing to solve problems by using a widely dispersed and large group of individuals. Crowdsourcing and open innovation are not restricted to businesses. Governments also increasingly rely on open innovation principles to harness the expert knowledge of citizens and use citizens’ contributions to the public value creation process. While a large body of literature has examined the open government paradigm at the national level, we still know relatively little about how open government initiatives play out at the local level. Even less is known about whether open government initiatives may create positive spill overs, for example by having a trickle-down effect onto local tourism sectors. In this article, we present the City of Linz’s open government activities. More specifically, we review how the public administration implemented the interactive mapping and reporting application “Schau auf Linz“ (“Look at Linz“). Through our analysis of this case study, we show what role the local context and prior policies play in implementing open government initiatives on a local level. In addition, we discuss how this initiative, like others, leads to positive spill overs for the tourism sector….(More)”
Citizen Science and the Flint Water Crisis
The Wilson Center’s Commons Lab: “In April 2014, the city of Flint, Michigan decided to switch its water supply source from the Detroit water system to a cheaper alternative, the Flint River. But in exchange for the cheaper price tag, the Flint residents paid a greater price with one of the worst public health crises of the past decade.
Despite concerns from Flint citizens about the quality of the water, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality repeatedly attributed the problem to the plumbing system. It was 37-year-old mother of four, LeeAnne Walters who, after noticing physical and behavioral changes in her children and herself, set off a chain of events that exposed the national scandal. Eventually, with the support of Dr. Marc Edwards, an environmental engineering professor at Virginia Tech (VT), Walters discovered lead concentration levels of 13,200 parts per billion in her water, 880 times the maximum concentration allowed by law and more than twice the level the Environmental Protection Agency considers to be hazardous waste.
Citizen science emerged as an important piece of combating the Flint water crisis. Alarmed by the government’s neglect and the health issues spreading all across Flint, Edwards and Walters began the Flint Water Study, a collaboration between the Flint residents and research team from VT. Using citizen science, the VT researchers provided the Flint residents with kits to sample and test their homes’ drinking water and then analyzed the results to unearth the truth behind Flint’s water quality.
The citizen-driven project illustrates the capacity for nonprofessional scientists to use science in order to address problems that directly affect themselves and their community. While the VT team needed the Flint residents to provide water samples, the Flint residents in turn needed the VT team to conduct the analysis. In short, both parties achieved mutually beneficial results and the partnership helped expose the scandal. Surprisingly, the “traditional” problems associated with citizen science, including the inability to mobilize the local constituent base and the lack of collaboration between citizens and professional scientists, were not the obstacles in Flint….(More)”
#BuildHereNow
Crowdsourcing Campaign by Strong Towns: “Nearly every urban neighborhood in this country — whether small town or big city — has properties that could use a little love. This week at Strong Towns we’re talking about the federal rules that have made that love difficult to find, tilting the playing field so that capital and expertise flow away from walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. Over eighty years of this distortion has created a lot of opportunity for Americans to make good, high-returning investments in our core cities and neighborhoods.
WE NEED YOUR HELP TO SHOW JUST HOW MUCH POTENTIAL IS OUT THERE.
We all know that empty lot, that underutilized building, that is just waiting for the right person to come along and knit it back into the fabric of the neighborhood. Imagine that right person could actually get the financing — that the rules weren’t rigged against them — and all they needed was your encouragement. This week, let’s provide that encouragement.
Let’s shine a huge spotlight on these spaces. They don’t need expensive utilities, a new road or a tax subsidy. They just need a fair shake.
HOW CAN I PARTICIPATE?
- Get outside and take pictures of the vacant or underutilized properties in your town.
- Upload your photos to Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #BuildHereNow
- Bonus points if you include the location and a suggestion of what you would like to see built there. (Note that turning on location services will also greatly aid us in mapping out these posts all over the country.)…(More)”
Crowd2Map Tanzania
“Crowd2Map Tanzania is a new crowdsourcing initiative aimed at creating a comprehensive map ofTanzania, including detailed depictions of all of its villages, roads and public resources (such as schools, shops, offices etc.) in OpenStreetMap and/or Google Maps, both of which are sadly rather poor at the moment. (For a convincing example, see our post about a not-so-blank-as-map-suggests Zeze village here.)
…In February 2016, Crowd2Map Tanzania was one of the 7 projects selected in the Open Seventeenchallenge, which rallies the public to use open data as a means of achieving the 17 SustainableDevelopment Goals as proposed but the UN in September 2015! We are now excited to carry on with the helpof O17 partners – Citizen Cyberlab, The GovLab, ONE and SciFabric! We’re tackling Goal 11: creatingsustainable cities & communities and Goal 4: education through technology….(More)
The city as platform
The report of the 2015 Aspen Institute Roundtable on Information Technology: “In the age of ubiquitous Internet connections, smartphones and data, the future vitality of cities is increasingly based on their ability to use digital networks in intelligent, strategic ways. While we are accustomed to thinking of cities as geophysical places governed by mayors, conventional political structures and bureaucracies, this template of city governance is under great pressure to evolve. Urban dwellers now live their lives in all sorts of hyper-connected virtual spaces, pulsating with real-time information, intelligent devices, remote-access databases and participatory crowdsourcing. Expertise is distributed, not centralized. Governance is not just a matter of winning elections and assigning tasks to bureaucracies; it is about the skillful collection and curation of information as a way to create new affordances for commerce and social life.
Except among a small class of vanguard cities, however, the far-reaching implications of the “networked city” for economic development, urban planning, social life and democracy, have not been explored in depth. The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program thus convened an eclectic group of thirty experts to explore how networking technologies are rapidly changing the urban landscape in nearly every dimension. The goal was to learn how open networks, onlinecooperation and open data can enhance urban planning and administration, and more broadly, how they might improve economic opportunity and civic engagement. The conference, the 24th Annual Aspen Roundtable on Information Technology, also addressed the implications of new digital technologies for urban transportation, public health and safety, and socio-economic inequality….(Download the InfoTech 2015 Report)”
Letting the people decide … but will government listen?
David Donaldson in The Mandarin: “If we now have the technology to allow citizens to vote directly on all issues, what job remains for public servants?
While new technology may provide new options to contribute, the really important thing is governmental willingness to actually listen, says Maria Katsonis, the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet’s director of equality.
The balance between citizen consultation and public service expertise in decision-making remains a hot debate, with South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill warning last year that while expertise in policy is important, overzealous bureaucrats and politicians can disenfranchise citizens.
The internet is assisting government to attain opinions from people more easily than ever before. SA, for example, has embraced the use of citizen juries in policy formation through its youSAy portal — though as yet on only some issues. Finland has experimented with digitally crowdsourcing input into the policymaking process.
The Victorian government, meanwhile, has received blowback around claims its recent announcement for a “skyrail” in Melbourne’s south-eastern suburbs went ahead with very little consultation…
Indeed, even a direct vote doesn’t mean the government is really listening to the people. A notable example of a government using a poorly designed popular vote to rubber stamp its own intentions was an online poll in Queensland on whether to cut public transport fares which was worded to suit the government’s own predilections.
Giving citizens the tools to contribute
Katsonis said she didn’t want to “diss crowdsourcing”; governments should think about where using it might be appropriate, and where it might not. Directly crowdsourcing legislation is perhaps not the best way to use the “wisdom of the crowd”, she suggested….The use of people’s panels to inform policy and budgeting — for example at the City of Melbourne — shows some promise as one tool to improve engagement. Participants of people’s panels — which see groups of ordinary citizens being given background information about the task at hand and then asked to come up with a proposal for what to do — tend to report a higher trust in governmental processes after they’ve gained some experience of the difficulty of making those decisions.
One of the benefits of that system is the chance to give participants the tools to understand those processes for themselves, rather than going in cold, as some other direct participation tools do….
Despite the risks, processes such as citizens’ panels are still a more nuanced approach than calls for frequent referenda or the new breed of internet-based political parties, such as Australia’s Online Direct Democracy, that promise their members of parliament will vote however a majority of voters tell them to….(More)”
Donating Your Selfies to Science
Linda Poon at CityLab: “It’s not only your friends and family who follow your online selfies and group photos. Scientists are starting to look at them, too, though they’re more interested in what’s around you. In bulk, photos can reveal weather patterns across multiple locations, air quality of a place over time, the dynamics of a neighborhood—all sorts of information that helps researchers study cities.
At the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a research group is using crowdsourced photos to create a low-cost alternative to air-pollution sensors. Called AirTick, the smartphone app they’ve designed will collect photos from users and analyze how hazy the environment looks. It’ll then check each image against official air quality data, and through machine-learning the app will eventually be able to predict pollution levels based on an image alone.
AirTick creator Pan Zhengziang said in a promotional video last month that the growing concern among the public over air quality can make programs like this a success—especially in Southeast Asia, where smog has gotten so bad that governments have had to shut down schools and suspend outdoor activities. “In Singapore’s recent haze episode, around 250,000 people [have] shared their concerns via Twitter,” he said. “This has made crowdsourcing-based air quality monitoring a possibility.”…(More)”
How Citizen Science Changed the Way Fukushima Radiation is Reported
Ari Beser at National Geographic: “It appears the world-changing event didn’t change anything, and it’s disappointing,”said Pieter Franken, a researcher at Keio University in Japan (Wide Project), the MIT Media Lab (Civic Media Centre), and co-founder of Safecast, a citizen-science network dedicated to the measurement and distribution of accurate levels of radiation around the world, especially in Fukushima. “There was a chance after the disaster for humanity to innovate our thinking about energy, and that doesn’t seem like it’s happened. But what we can change is the way we measure the environment around us.”
Franken and his founding partners found a way to turn their email chain, spurred by the tsunami, into Safecast; an open-source network that allows everyday people to contribute to radiation-monitoring.
“We literally started the day after the earthquake happened,” revealed Pieter. “A friend of mine, Joi Ito, the director of MIT Media Lab, and I were basically talking about what Geiger counter to get. He was in Boston at the time and I was here in Tokyo, and like the rest of the world, we were worried, but we couldn’t get our hands on anything. There’s something happening here, we thought. Very quickly as the disaster developed, we wondered how to get the information out. People were looking for information, so we saw that there was a need. Our plan became: get information, put it together and disseminate it.”
An e-mail thread between Franken, Ito, and Sean Bonner, (co-founder of CRASH Space, a group that bills itself as Los Angeles’ first hackerspace), evolved into a network of minds, including members of Tokyo Hackerspace, Dan Sythe, who produced high-quality Geiger counters, and Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s former Chief Technical Officer. On April 15, the group that was to become Safecast sat down together for the first time. Ozzie conceived the plan to strap a Geiger counter to a car and somehow log measurements in motion. This would became the bGeigie, Safecast’s future model of the do-it-yourself Geiger counter kit.
Armed with a few Geiger counters donated by Sythe, the newly formed team retrofitted their radiation-measuring devices to the outside of a car. Safecast’s first volunteers drove up to the city of Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture, and took their own readings around all of the schools. Franken explained, “If we measured all of the schools, we covered all the communities; because communities surround schools. It was very granular, the readings changed a lot, and the levels were far from academic, but it was our start. This was April 24, 6 weeks after the disaster. Our thinking changed quite a bit through this process.”
Since their first tour of Koriyama, with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, Safecast’s team of volunteers have developed the bGeigie handheld radiation monitor, that anyone can buy on Amazon.com and construct with suggested instructions available online. So far over 350 users have contributed 41 million readings, using around a thousand fixed, mobile, and crowd-sourced devices….(More)
Five ways tech is crowdsourcing women’s empowerment
Zara Rahman in The Guardian: “Around the world, women’s rights advocates are crowdsourcing their own data rather than relying on institutional datasets.
Citizen-generated data is especially important for women’s rights issues. In many countries the lack of women in positions of institutional power, combined with slow, bureaucratic systems and a lack of prioritisation of women’s rights issues means data isn’t gathered on relevant topics, let alone appropriately responded to by the state.
Even when data is gathered by institutions, societal pressures may mean it remains inadequate. In the case of gender-based violence, for instance, women often suffer in silence, worrying nobody will believe them or that they will be blamed. Providing a way for women to contribute data anonymously or, if they so choose, with their own details, can be key to documenting violence and understanding the scale of a problem, and thus deciding upon appropriate responses.
Crowdsourcing data on street harassment in Egypt
Using open source platform Ushahidi, HarassMap provides women with a way to document incidences of street harassment. The project, which began in 2010, is raising awareness of how common street harassment is, giving women’s rights advocates a concrete way to highlight the scale of the problem….
Documenting experiences of reporting sexual harassment and violence to the police in India
Last year, The Ladies Finger, a women’s zine based in India, partnered with Amnesty International to support its Ready to Report campaign, which aimed to make it easier for survivors of sexual violence to file a police complaint. Using social media and through word of mouth, it asked the community if they had experiences to share about reporting sexual assault and harassment to the police. Using these crowdsourced leads, The Ladies Finger’s reporters spoke to people willing to share their experiences and put together a series of detailed contextualised stories. They included a piece that evoked a national outcry and spurred the Uttar Pradesh government to make an arrest for stalking, after six months of inaction….
Reporting sexual violence in Syria
Women Under Siege is a global project by Women’s Media Centre that is investigating how rape and sexual violence is used in conflicts. Its Syria project crowdsources data on sexual violence in the war-torn country. Like HarassMap, it uses the Ushahidi platform to geolocate where acts of sexual violence take place. Where possible, initial reports are contextualised with deeper media reports around the case in question….
Finding respectful gynaecologists in India
After recognising that many women in her personal networks were having bad experiences with gynaecologists in India, Delhi-based Amba Azaad began – with the help of her friends – putting together a list of gynaecologists who had treated patients respectfully called Gynaecologists We Trust. As the site says, “Finding doctors who are on our side is hard enough, and when it comes to something as intimate as our internal plumbing, it’s even more difficult.”…
Ending tech-related violence against women
In 2011, Take Back the Tech, an initiative from the Association for Progressive Communications, started a map gathering incidences of tech-related violence against women. Campaign coordinator Sara Baker says crowdsourcing data on this topic is particularly useful as “victims/survivors are often forced to tell their stories repeatedly in an attempt to access justice with little to no action taken on the part of authorities or intermediaries”. Rather than telling that story multiple times and seeing it go nowhere, their initiative gives people “the opportunity to make their experience visible (even if anonymously) and makes them feel like someone is listening and taking action”….(More)
Private Provision of Public Goods via Crowdfunding
Paper by Robert Chovanculiak and Marek Hudík: “Private provision of public goods is typically associated with three main problems: (1) high organization costs, (2) the assurance problem, and (3) the free-rider problem. We argue that technologies which enable crowdfunding (the method of funding projects by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people via the internet), have made the overall conditions for private provision of public goods more favorable: these technologies lowered the organization costs and enabled to employ more efficient mechanisms which reduce the assurance and free-rider problems. It follows that if the reason for government provision of public goods is higher efficiency as suggested by the standard theory, then with the emergence of crowdfunding we should observe a decline of the government role in this area….(More)”