Remote Data Collection: Three Ways to Rethink How You Collect Data in the Field

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Magpi : “As mobile devices have gotten less and less expensive – and as millions worldwide have climbed out of poverty – it’s become quite common to see a mobile phone in every person’s hand, or at least in every family, and this means that we can utilize an additional approach to data collection that were simply not possible before….

In our Remote Data Collection Guide, we discuss these new technologies and the:

  • Key benefits of remote data collection in each of three different situations.
  • The direct impact of remote data collection on reducing the cost of your efforts.
  • How to start the process of choosing the right option for your needs….(More)”

When is the crowd wise or can the people ever be trusted?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julie Simon at NESTA: “Democratic theory has tended to take a pretty dim view of people and their ability to make decisions. Many political philosophers believe that people are at best uninformed and at worst, ignorant and incompetent.  This view is a common justification for our system of representative democracy – people can’t be trusted to make decisions so this responsibility should fall to those who have the expertise, knowledge or intelligence to do so.

Think back to what Edmund Burke said on the subject in his speech to the Electors of Bristol in 1774, “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” He reminds us that “government and legislation are matters of reason and judgement, and not of inclination”. Others, like the journalist Charles Mackay, whose book on economic bubbles and crashes,Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, had an even more damning view of the crowd’s capacity to exercise either judgement or reason.

The thing is, if you believe that ‘the crowd’ isn’t wise then there isn’t much point in encouraging participation – these sorts of activities can only ever be tokenistic or a way of legitimising the decisions taken by others.

There are then those political philosophers who effectively argue that citizens’ incompetence doesn’t matter. They argue that the aggregation of views – through voting – eliminates ‘noise’ which enables you to arrive at optimal decisions. The larger the group, the better its decisions will be.  The corollary of this view is that political decision making should involve mass participation and regular referenda – something akin to the Swiss model.

Another standpoint is to say that there is wisdom within crowds – it’s just that it’s domain specific, unevenly distributed and quite hard to transfer. This idea was put forward by Friedrich Hayek in his seminal 1945 essay on The Use of Knowledge in Society in which he argues that:

“…the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate ‘given’ resources……it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality”.

Hayek argued that it was for this reason that central planning couldn’t work since no central planner could ever aggregate all the knowledge distributed across society to make good decisions.

More recently, Eric Von Hippel built on these foundations by introducing the concept of information stickiness; information is ‘sticky’ if it is costly to move from one place to another. One type of information that is frequently ‘sticky’ is information about users’ needs and preferences.[1] This helps to account for why manufacturers tend to develop innovations which are incremental – meeting already identified needs – and why so many organisations are engaging users in their innovation processes:  if knowledge about needs and tools for developing new solutions can be co-located in the same place (i.e. the user) then the cost of transferring sticky information is eliminated…..

There is growing evidence on how crowdsourcing can be used by governments to solve clearly defined technical, scientific or informational problems. Evidently there are significant needs and opportunities for governments to better engage citizens to solve these types of problems.

There’s also a growing body of evidence on how digital tools can be used to support and promote collective intelligence….

So, the critical task for public officials is to have greater clarity over the purpose of engagement –  in order to better understand which methods of engagement should be used and what kinds of  groups should be targeted.

At the same time, the central question for researchers is when and how to tap into collective intelligence: what tools and approaches can be used when we’re looking at arenas which are often sites of contestation? Should this input be limited to providing information and expertise to be used by public officials or representatives, or should these distributed experts exercise some decision making power too? And when we’re dealing with value based judgements when should we rely on large scale voting as a mechanism for making ‘smarter’ decisions and when are deliberative forms of engagement more appropriate? These are all issues we’re exploring as part of our ongoing programme of work on democratic innovations….(More)”

You Can Help Map the Accessibility of the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Josh Cohen in Next City: “…using a web app called Project Sidewalk….The app, from a team at the University of Maryland’s Human-Computer Interaction Lab, crowdsources audit data in order to map urban accessibility. After taking a brief tutorial on what to look for and a how-to, participants “walk” the D.C. streets using Google Street View. The app provides a set of tools to mark curb ramps (or a lack of them), broken sidewalks, and obstacles in the sidewalk, and rank them on a scale of 1 to 5 for level of accessibility.

Project Sidewalk’s public beta launched on August 30. As of this writing, 212 people have participated and audited 377.5 miles of sidewalk in D.C.

“We’re starting in D.C. as a launch point because we know D.C., we live here, we can do physical audits to validate the data we’re getting,” says Jon Froehlich, a University of Maryland professor who is leading the project. “But we want to expand to 10 more cities in the next year or two.”

Project Sidewalk tutorial

Project Sidewalk wants to produce a few end products with their data too. The first is an accessibility-mapping tool that offers end-to-end route directions that takes into account a person’s particular mobility challenges. Froehlich points out that barriers for someone in an electric wheelchair might be different than someone in a manual wheelchair or someone with vision impairment. The other product is an “access score” map that ranks a neighborhood’s accessibility and highlights problem areas.

Froehlich hopes departments of transportation might adopt the tool as well. “People tasked with improving infrastructure can start to use it to triage their work or verify their own data. A lot of cities don’t have money or time to go out and map the accessibility of their streets,” he says.

Crowdsourcing and using Street View to reduce the amount of labor required to conduct audits is an important first step for Project Sidewalk, but in order to expand to cities throughout the country, they need to automate the review process as much as possible. To do that, the team is experimenting with computer learning….(More)”.

Resource Library for Cross-Sector Collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Intersector Project: “Whether you’re working on a local collective impact initiative or a national public-private partnership; whether you’re a practitioner or a researcher; whether you’re looking for basics or a detailed look at a particular topic, our Resource Library can help you find the information and tools you need for your cross-sector thinking and practice. The Library — which includes resources from research organizations, advisory groups, training organizations, academic centers and journals, and more — spans issue areas, sectors, and partnership types….(More)”

Living labs: Implementing open innovation in the public sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mila Gascó in Government Information Quarterly: “Public sector innovation is an important issue in the agenda of policymakers and academics but there is a need for a change of perspective, one that promotes a more open model of innovating, which takes advantage of the possibilities offered by collaboration between citizens, entrepreneurs and civil society as well as of new emerging technologies. Living labs are environments that can support public open innovation processes.

This article makes a practical contribution to understand the role of living labs as intermediaries of public open innovation. The analysis focuses on the dynamics of these innovation intermediaries, their outcomes, and their main challenges. In particular, it adopts a qualitative approach (fourteen semi-structured interviews and one focus group were conducted) in order to analyze two living labs: Citilab in the city of Cornellà and the network of fab athenaeums (public fab labs) in the city of Barcelona, both in Spain. After a thorough analysis of the attributes of these living labs, the article concludes that 1) living labs provide the opportunity for public agencies to meet with private sector organizations and thus function as innovation intermediaries, 2) implementing an open innovation perspective is considered more important than obtaining specific innovation results, and 3) scalability and sustainability are the main problems living labs encounter as open innovation intermediaries….(More)”

Playful Cities: Crowdsourcing Urban Happiness with Web Games

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniele Quercia in Built Environment: “It is well known that the layout and configuration of urban space plugs directly into our sense of community wellbeing. The twentieth-century city planner Kevin Lynch showed that a city’s dwellers create their own personal ‘mental maps’ of the city based on features such as the routes they use and the areas they visit. Maps that are easy to remember and navigate bring comfort and ultimately contribute to people’s wellbeing. Unfortunately, traditional social science experiments (including those used to capture mental maps) take time, are costly, and cannot be conducted at city scale. This paper describes how, starting in mid-2012, a team of researchers from a variety of disciplines set about tackling these issues. They were able to translate a few traditional experiments into 1-minute ‘web games with a purpose’. This article describes those games, the main insights they offer, their theoretical implications for urban planning, and their practical implications for improvements in navigation technologies….(More)”

Collective intelligence and international development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gina Lucarelli, Tom Saunders and Eddie Copeland at Nesta: “The mountain kingdom of Lesotho, a small landlocked country in Sub-Saharan Africa, is an unlikely place to look for healthcare innovation. Yet in 2016, it became the first country in Africa to deploy the test and treat strategy for treating people with HIV. Rather than waiting for white blood cell counts to drop, patients begin treatment as soon as they are diagnosed. This strategy is backed by the WHO as it has the potential to increase the number of people who are able to access treatment, consequently reducing transmisssion and keeping people with HIV healthy and alive for longer.

While lots of good work is underway in Lesotho, and billions have been spent on HIV programmes in the country, the percentage of the population infected with HIV has remained steady and is now almost 23%. Challenges of this scale need new ideas and better ways to adopt them.

On a recent trip to Lesotho as part of a project with the United Nations Development Group, we met various UN agencies, the World Bank, government leaders, civil society actors and local businesses, to learn about the key development issues in Lesotho and to discuss the role that ‘collective intelligence’ might play in creating better country development plans. The key question Nesta and the UN are working on is: how can we increase the impact of the UN’s work by tapping into the ideas, information and possible solutions which are distributed among many partners, the private sector, and the 2 million people of Lesotho?

…our framework of collective intelligence, a set of iterative stages which can help organisations like the UN tap into the ideas, information and possible solutions of groups and individuals which are not normally involved included in the problem solving process. For each stage, we also presented a number of examples of how this works in practice.

Collective intelligence framework – stages and examples

  1. Better understanding the facts, data and experiences: New tools, from smartphones to online communities enable researchers, practitioners and policymakers to collect much larger amounts of data much more quickly. Organisations can use this data to target their resources at the most critical issues as well as feed into the development of products and services that more accurately meet the needs of citizens. Examples include mPower, a clinical study which used an app to collect data about people with Parkinsons disease via surveys and smartphone sensors.

  2. Better development of options and ideas: Beyond data collection, organisations can use digital tools to tap into the collective brainpower of citizens to come up with better ideas and options for action. Examples include participatory budgeting platforms like “Madame Mayor, I have an idea” and challenge prizes, such as USAID’s Ebola grand challenge.

  3. Better, more inclusive decision making: Decision making and problem solving are usually left to experts, yet citizens are often best placed to make the decisions that will affect them. New digital tools make it easier than ever for governments to involve citizens in policymaking, planning and budgeting. Our D-CENT tools enable citizen involvement in decision making in a number of fields. Another example is the Open Medicine Project, which designs digital tools for healthcare in consultation with both practitioners and patients.

  4. Better oversight and improvement of what is done: From monitoring corruption to scrutinising budgets, a number of tools allow broad involvement in the oversight of public sector activity, potentially increasing accountability and transparency. The Family and Friends Test is a tool that allows NHS users in the UK to submit feedback on services they have experienced. So far, 25 million pieces of feedback have been submitted. This feedback can be used to stimulate local improvement and empower staff to carry out changes… (More)”

Crowdsourcing Tolstoy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the NewYorker: “When Leo Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter, the journalist Fyokla Tolstaya, announced that the Leo Tolstoy State Museum was looking for volunteers to proofread some forty-six thousand eight hundred pages of her relative’s writings, she hoped to generate enough interest to get the first round of corrections done in six months.

Within days, some three thousand Russians—engineers, I.T. workers, schoolteachers, retirees, a student pilot, a twenty-year-old waitress—signed on. “We were so happy and so surprised,” said Tolstaya. “They finished in fourteen days.”

Now, thanks largely to the efforts of these volunteers, nearly all of the great Russian writer’s massive body of work, including novels, diaries, letters, religious tracts, philosophical treatises, travelogues, and childhood memories, will soon be available online, in a form that can be easily downloaded, free of charge. “Of course we realized there are some novels on the Internet,” Tolstaya said. “But most [writings] are not. We in the museum decided this is not good.”…

The definitive, ninety-volume jubilee edition of Tolstoy’s works, compiled and published in Russia from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-fifties, had already been scanned by the Russian State Library. However, converting the PDFs into an easy-to-use digital format posed a challenge. For one thing, even after ABBYY, a company that specializes in translating printed documents into digital records, offered their services for free, proofreading costs were likely to be prohibitive. Charging readers to download the works was not an option. “At the end of his life, Tolstoy said, ‘I don’t need any money for my work. I want to give my work to the people,’ “ said Tolstaya. “It was important for us to make it free for everyone. It is his will.”

That was when they hit on the idea of crowdsourcing, Tolstaya said. “It’s according to Leo Tolstoy’s ideas, to do it with the help of all people around the world—vsem mirom—even the world’s hardest task can be done with the help of everyone.”…(More)”

Leveraging Mixed Expertise in Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dissertation by David Merritt: “Crowdsourcing systems promise to leverage the “wisdom of crowds” to help solve many kinds of problems that are difficult to solve using only computers. Although a crowd of people inherently represents a diversity of skill levels, knowledge, and opinions, crowdsourcing system designers typically view this diversity as noise and effectively cancel it out by aggregating responses. However, we believe that by embracing crowd workers’ diverse expertise levels, system designers can better leverage that knowledge to increase the wisdom of crowds. In this thesis, we propose solutions to a limitation of current crowdsourcing approaches: not accounting for a range of expertise levels in the crowd. The current body of work in crowdsourcing does not systematically examine this, suggesting that researchers may not believe the benefits of using mixed expertise warrants the complexities of supporting it. This thesis presents two systems, Escalier and Kurator, to show that leveraging mixed expertise is a worthwhile endeavor because it materially benefits system performance, at scale, for various types of problems. We also demonstrate an effective technique, called expertise layering, to incorporate mixed expertise into crowdsourcing systems. Finally, we show that leveraging mixed expertise enables researchers to use crowdsourcing to address new types of problems….(More)”

Crowdsourcing at Statistics Canada

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pilot project by Statistics Canada: “Our crowdsourcing pilot project will focus on mapping buildings across Canada.

If you live in Ottawa or Gatineau, you can be among the first to collaborate with us. If you live elsewhere, stay in touch! Your town or city could be next. We are very excited to work with communities across the country on this project.

As a project contributor, you can help create a free and open source of information on commercial, industrial, government and other buildings in Canada. We need your support to close this important data gap! Your work will improve your community’s knowledge of its buildings, and in turn inform policies and programs designed to help you.

An eye on the future

There are currently no accurate national-level statistics on buildings— and their attributes—that can be used to compare specific local areas. The information you submit will help to fill existing data gaps and provide new analytical opportunities that are important to data users.

This project will also teach us about the possibilities and limitations of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing data collection may become a way for Statistics Canada and other organizations around the world to collect much-needed information by reaching out to citizens.

What you can do

Using your knowledge of your neighbourhood, along with an online mapping tool called OpenStreetMap, you and other members of the public will be able to input the location, physical attributes and other features of buildings.

It all starts with you, on October 17, 2016

We will officially launch the crowdsourcing campaign for the pilot on October 17, 2016 and will provide further instructions and links to resources.

To subscribe to a distribution list for periodic updates on the project, send us an email at [email protected]. We will keep you posted!….(More)”