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)”
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.”
With the DIY kit available online, all anyone needs to make their own Geiger counter is a soldering iron and the suggested directions.
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)
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)
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)”
DataDrivenJournalism: “In 2011, the team at Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris program with the objective of better documenting the amount of marine debris found in the world’s oceans. This global citizen science program trains volunteer scuba divers from across the globe to conduct underwater surveys, generating quantitative data on the debris they see. After cleaning this data for quality assurance, it is then published on their interactive Dive Against Debris Map. This data and visualization informs the team’s advocacy work, ultimately seeking to generate changes in policy.
The impact of marine debris is devastating, killing marine life and changing their habitats and ecosystems. Animals are extremely vulnerable to ingestion or entanglement which leads to death, as they are unable to distinguish between what is trash and what is not.
Beyond this, as microscopic pieces of plastic enter the food chain, most seafood ingested by humans also likely contains marine debris.
Project AWARE is a growing movement of scuba divers protecting the ocean, with a long history of working on the marine debris issue. Through its work, the Project AWARE team found that there was a significant lack of data available regarding underwater marine debris.
To remedy this, the Dive Against Debris program was launched in 2011. The programs seeks to collect and visualise data generated by their volunteers, then use this data to influence policy changes and raise social awareness around the world. This data collection is unique in that it focuses exclusively on yielding data about the types and quantities of marine debris items found beneath in the ocean, an issue Hannah Pragnell-Raasch, a Program Specialist with Project AWARE, told us “has previously been disregarded as out of sight, out of mind, as the everyday person is not exposed to the harmful impacts.”
To date, Dive Against Debris surveys have been conducted in over 50 countries, with the top reporting countries being the United States, Thailand and Greece. As more divers get involved with Dive Against Debris, Project AWARE continues to bring visibility to the problem of marine debris and helps to identify target areas for waste prevention efforts.
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Anyone can take part in a Dive Against Debris survey, as long as they are a certified diver. As described in their “Action Zone”, scuba divers can either “join” or “create” an action. To further support the program, Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris Distinctive Specialty, a course of divers, which “aims to equip students (scuba divers) with the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct their own Dive Against Debris Surveys.”
Before the data appears on the interactive Dive Against Debris Map, it goes through a quality review in order to ensure data integrity. The survey leader at Project AWARE corrects any data inconsistencies. Then, as the focus is exclusively on what is found underwater, all land data is removed. Project AWARE Aware aims to create “an accurate perspective about underwater marine debris, that policy-makers simply cannot ignore”…. Explore the Dive Against Debris project here…. (More)
Edward Glaeser, Andrew Hillis, Scott Kominers and Michael Luca in American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings: “The proliferation of big data makes it possible to better target city services like hygiene inspections, but city governments rarely have the in-house talent needed for developing prediction algorithms. Cities could hire consultants, but a cheaper alternative is to crowdsource competence by making data public and offering a reward for the best algorithm. A simple model suggests that open tournaments dominate consulting contracts when cities can tolerate risk and when there is enough labor with low opportunity costs. We also report on an inexpensive Boston-based restaurant tournament, which yielded algorithms that proved reasonably accurate when tested “out-of-sample” on hygiene inspections….(More)”
Laurence Grinyer at UK’s Open Policy Making Blog: “At the end of the last parliament, the Cabinet Office Open Policy Making team launched the Open Policy Making toolkit. This was about giving policy makers the actual tools that will enable them to develop policy that is well informed, creative, tested, and works. The starting point was addressing their needs and giving them what they had told us they needed to develop policy in an ever changing, fast paced and digital world. In a way, it was the culmination of the open policy journey we have been on with departments for the past 2 years. In the first couple of months we saw thousands of unique visits….
Our first version toolkit has been used by 20,000 policy makers. This gave us a huge audience to talk to to make sure that we continue to meet the needs of policy makers and keep the toolkit relevant and useful. Although people have really enjoyed using the toolkit, user testing quickly showed us a few problems…
We knew what we needed to do. Help people understand what Open Policy Making was, how it impacted their policy making, and then to make it as simple as possible for them to know exactly what to do next.
So we came up with some quick ideas on pen and paper and tested them with people. We quickly discovered what not to do. People didn’t want a philosophy— they wanted to know exactly what to do, practical answers, and when to do it. They wanted a sort of design manual for policy….
How do we make user-centered design and open policy making as understood as agile?
We decided to organise the tools around the journey of a policy maker. What might a policy maker need to understand their users? How could they co-design ideas? How could they test policy? We looked at what tools and techniques they could use at the beginning, middle and end of a project, and organised tools accordingly.
We also added sections to remove confusion and hesitation. Our opening section ‘Getting started with Open Policy Making’ provides people with a clear understanding of what open policy making might mean to them, but also some practical considerations. Sections for limited timeframes and budgets help people realise that open policy can be done in almost any situation.
And finally we’ve created a much cleaner and simpler design that lets people show as much or little of the information as they need….
Springwise: “We recently saw an initiative that empowered startup talent in a Finnish refugee camp, and now Design Museum Dharavi is a mobile museum that will provide a platform for makers in the Mumbai neighborhood.
The initiative is a brainchild of artist Jorge Rubio and Creative Industries Fund NL. Taking the model of a pop-up, it will stop at various locations throughout the neighborhood. Despite being an ‘informal settlement’, Dharavi is famed for producing very little waste due to a culture of recycling and repurposing. The mobile museum will showcase local makers, enable them to connect with potential clients and run workshops, ultimately elevating the global social perception towards life in the so-called ‘slums’. Home to over a million people, Dharavi has the additional tourism pull from appearing on the film Slumdog Millionaire…..(More)”
Marijn Janssen and Natalie Helbig in Government Information Quarterly: “Many policy-makers are struggling to understand participatory governance in the midst of technological changes. Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to have an impact on the ways that policy-makers and citizens engage with each other throughout the policy-making process. A set of developments in the areas of opening government data, advanced analytics, visualization, simulation, and gaming, and ubiquitous citizen access using mobile and personalized applications is shaping the interactions between policy-makers and citizens. Yet the impact of these developments on the policy-makers is unclear. The changing roles and need for new capabilities required from the government are analyzed in this paper using two case studies. Salient new roles for policy-makers are outlined focused on orchestrating the policy-making process. Research directions are identified including understand the behavior of users, aggregating and analyzing content from scattered resources, and the effective use of the new tools. Understanding new policy-makers roles will help to bridge the gap between the potential of tools and technologies and the organizational realities and political contexts. We argue that many examples are available that enable learning from others, in both directions, developed countries experiences are useful for developing countries and experiences from the latter are valuable for the former countries…(More)”
“Mexico City, the largest and oldest urban agglomeration in the American continent. The city is home to an incredible diversity of people and cultures, and its size and its diversity also poses certain challenges. In a city with such big scale (the metropolitan area measures 4,887 mi2) transportation is one of its main problems. Finding ways to improve how people move within requires imagination and cooperation from decision makers and society alike.
The scale and dynamism of Mexico City’s public transport system represents a challenge to generate quality information. Processes for the generation of mobility data are time-consuming and expensive. Given this scenario, the best alternative for the city is to include transport users in generating this information.
The megalopolis lacks an updated, open database of its more than 1,500 bus routes. To tackle this problem, Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Mexico City’s experimental office and creative think-tank, reporting to the Mayor) partnered with 12 organizations that include NGOs and other government offices to develop Mapatón CDMX: a crowdsourcing and gamification experiment to map the city’s bus routes through civic collaboration and technology.
After one year of designing and testing a strategy, the team behind Mapatón CDMX is calling citizens to map the public transport system by participating on a city game from January 29th to February 14th 2016. The game’s goal is to map routes of licenced public transport (buses, minibuses and vans) from start to finish in order to score points, which is done through an app for Android devices that gathers GPS data from the user inside the bus.
The mappers will participate individually or in groups with friends and family for two weeks. As an incentive and once the mapping marathon is finished, those participants with higher scores will earn cash prizes and electronic devices. (A smart algorithm creates incentives to map the longest or most ignored routes, giving mappers extra points.) But what is most valuable: the data resulting will be openly available at the end of February 2016, much faster and cheaper than with traditional processes.
Mapatón CDMX is an innovative and effective way to generate updated and open information about transport routes as the game harnesses collective intelligence of the gargantuan city. Organisers consider that the open database may be used by anyone to create –for example– data driven policy, strategies for academic analysis, maps for users, applications, visualizations, among many other digital products….(More)”
