PEOPLE

Crowdlaw and open data policy: A perfect match?

Curated on March 16, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stephen Larrick at Sunlight: “The open government community has long envisioned a future where all public policy is collaboratively drafted online and in the open — a future in which we (the people) don’t just have a say in who writes and votes on the rules that govern our society, but are empowered in a substantive way to participate, annotating or even crafting those rules ourselves. If that future seems far away, it’s because we’ve seen few successful instances of this approach in the United States. But an increasing amount of open and collaborative online approaches to drafting legislation — a set of practices the NYU GovLab and others have called “crowdlaw” — seem to have found their niche in open data policy.

This trend has taken hold at the local level, where multiple cities have employed crowdlaw techniques to draft or revise the regulations which establish and govern open data initiatives. But what explains this trend and the apparent connection between crowdlaw and the proactive release of government information online? Is it simply that both are “open government” practices? Or is there something more fundamental at play here?…

Since 2012, several high-profile U.S. cities have utilized collaborative tools such as Google Docs,GitHub, and Madison to open up the process of open data policymaking. The below chronology of notable instances of open data policy drafted using crowdlaw techniques gives the distinct impression of a good idea spreading in American cities:….

While many cities may not be ready to take their hands off of the wheel and trust the public to help engage in meaningful decisions about public policy, it’s encouraging to see some giving it a try when it comes to open data policy. Even for cities still feeling skeptical, this approach can be applied internally; it allows other departments impacted by changes that come about through an open data policy to weigh in, too. Cities can open up varying degrees of the process, retaining as much autonomy as they feel comfortable with. In the end, utilizing the crowdlaw process with open data legislation can increase its effectiveness and accountability by engaging the public directly — a win-win for governments and their citizens alike….(More)”

Responsible Data reflection stories

Curated on March 15, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Responsible Data Forum: “Through the various Responsible Data Forum events over the past couple of years, we’ve heard many anecdotes of responsible data challenges faced by people or organizations. These include potentially harmful data management practices, situations where people have experienced gut feelings that there is potential for harm, or workarounds that people have created to avoid those situations.

But we feel that trading in these “war stories” isn’t the most useful way for us to learn from these experiences as acommunity. Instead, we have worked with our communities to build a set of Reflection Stories: a structured, well-researched knowledge base on the unforeseen challenges and (sometimes) negative consequences of usingtechnology and data for social change.

We hope that this can offer opportunities for reflection and learning, as well as helping to develop innovativestrategies for engaging with technology and data in new and responsible ways….

What we learned from the stories

New spaces, new challenges

Moving into new digital spaces is bringing new challenges, and social media is one such space where these challengesare proving very difficult to navigate. This seems to stem from a number of key points:

organisations with low levels of technical literacy and experience in tech- or data-driven projects, deciding toengage suddenly with a certain tool or technology without realising what this entails. For some, this seems to stemfrom funders being more willing to support ‘innovative’ tech projects.
organisations wishing to engage more with social media while not being aware of more nuanced understandingsof public/private spaces online, and how different communities engage with social media. (see story #2)
unpredictability and different levels of visibility: due to how privacy settings on Twitter are currently set, visibilityof users can be increased hugely by the actions of others – and once that happens, a user actually has very littleagency to change or reverse that. Sadly, being more visible on, for example, Twitter disproportionately affectswomen and minority groups in a negative way – so while ‘signal boosting’ to raise someone’s profile might be well-meant, the consequences are hard to predict, and almost impossible to reverse manually. (see story #4)
consent: related to the above point, “giving consent” can mean many different things when it comes to digitalspaces, especially if the person in question has little experience or understanding of using the technology inquestion (see stories #4 and #5).

Grey areas of responsible data

In almost all of the cases we looked at, very few decisions were concretely “right” or “wrong”. There are many, manygrey areas here, which need to be addressed on a case by case basis. In some cases, people involved really did thinkthrough their actions, and approached their problems thoughtfully and responsibly – but consequences they had notimagined, happened (see story #8).

Additionally, given the quickly moving nature of the space, challenges can arise that simply would not have beenpossible at the start.

….Despite the very varying settings of the stories collected, the shared mitigation strategies indicate that there areindeed a few key principles that can be kept in mind throughout the development of a new tech- or data-drivenproject.

The most stark of these – and one key aspect that is underlying many of these challenges – is a fundamental lack of technical literacy among advocacy organisations. This affects the way they interact with technical partners, the decisions they make around the project, the level to which they can have meaningful input, and more. Perhaps more crucially, it also affects the ability to know what to ask for help about – ie, to ‘know the unknowns’.

Building an organisation’s technical literacy might not mean being able to answer all technical questions in-house, but rather knowing what to ask and what to expect in an answer, from others. For advocacy organisations who don’t (yet)have this, it becomes all too easy to outsource not just the actual technical work but the contextual decisions too, which should be a collaborative process, benefiting from both sets of expertise.

There seems to be a lot of scope to expand this set of stories both in terms of collecting more from other advocacy organisations, and into other sectors, too. Ultimately, we hope that sharing our collective intelligence around lessonslearned from responsible data challenges faced in projects, will contribute to a greater understanding for all of us….Read all the stories here

Crowdsourcing On-street Parking Space Detection

Curated on March 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ruizhi Liao et al in: “As the number of vehicles continues to grow, parking spaces are at a premium in city streets. Additionally, due to the lack of knowledge about street parking spaces, heuristic circling the blocks not only costs drivers’ time and fuel, but also increases city congestion. In the wake of recent trend to build convenient, green and energy-efficient smart cities, we rethink common techniques adopted by high-profile smart parking systems, and present a user-engaged (crowdsourcing) and sonar-based prototype to identify urban on-street parking spaces. The prototype includes an ultrasonic sensor, a GPS receiver and associated Arduino micro-controllers. It is mounted on the passenger side of a car to measure the distance from the vehicle to the nearest roadside obstacle. Multiple road tests are conducted around Wheatley, Oxford to gather results and emulate the crowdsourcing approach. By extracting parked vehicles’ features from the collected trace, a supervised learning algorithm is developed to estimate roadside parking occupancy and spot illegal parking vehicles. A quantity estimation model is derived to calculate the required number of sensing units to cover urban streets. The estimation is quantitatively compared to a fixed sensing solution. The results show that the crowdsourcing way would need substantially fewer sensors compared to the fixed sensing system…(More)”

Crowdsourcing Site Works to Detect Spread of Zika

Curated on March 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Suzanne Tracy at Scientific Computing Source: “Last month, the Flu Near You crowdsourcing tool expanded its data collection to include Zika, chikungunya and dengue symptoms, such as eye pain, yellow skin/eyes and joint/bone pain. Flu Near You is a free and anonymous Web site and mobile application that allows the public to report their health information by completing brief weekly surveys.

Created by epidemiologists at Harvard, Boston Children’s Hospital and The Skoll Global Threats Fund, the novel participatory disease surveillance tool is intended to complement existing surveillance systems by directly engaging the public in public health reporting. As such, it relies on voluntary participation from the general public, asking participants to take a few seconds each week to report whether they or their family members have been healthy or sick.

Using participant-reported symptoms, the site graphs and maps this information to provide local and national views of illness. Thousands of reports are analyzed and mapped to provide public health officials and researchers with real-time, anonymous information that could help prevent the next pandemic.

The survey, which launched in 2011, is conducted year-round for several reasons.

First, it is possible for an influenza outbreak to occur outside of the traditional flu season. For instance, the first wave of pandemic H1N1 hit in the spring of 2009. The project wants to capture any emerging outbreak, should something similar occur again.
Second, the project’s symptoms-based health forms allow it to monitor other diseases, such as the recently-added Zika, chikungunya and dengue, which may have different seasons than influenza….(More)

See also: http://flunearyou.org and video: Fight the flu. Save lives

Don’t know where to go when the volcano blows? Crowdsource it.

Curated on March 10, 2016October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Frances Johnson in ThrivingEarthExchange: “In the shadow of a rumbling volcano, Quito, Ecuador solicits just-in-time advice from the world’s disaster experts…

Cotopaxi’s last large-scale eruption was in 1877, and the volcano’s level of activity suggests another one is inevitable. In addition to spewing lava, a major eruption would melt Cotopaxi’s glaciers and send a large flow of material barreling down the mountain, posing an immediate risk to people and potentially causing rivers to overflow their banks. Some 120,000 people living in the valley beneath the volcano would have a mere 12 minutes to escape the lava’s path, and more than 325,000 other area residents would have only slightly more time to evacuate. An eruption could also create significant long-term challenges across a broad area, including dangerous air quality and disruptions to infrastructure, food systems and water supplies.

As danger looms, a city gets coaching from the crowd

Aware that the city was underprepared for a significant eruption, The Governance Lab, a program of the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, volunteered its time and expertise to help local officials accelerate preparation efforts. The GovLab, which helps governments and other institutions work collaboratively to solve problems, teamed up with Linq, the city’s innovation agency.

“We were very aware that this was a time-sensitive matter—we needed experts, and we needed them fast,” explained Dinorah Cant ú-Pedraza, a human rights lawyer and Research Fellow at The GovLab who collaborated on the project. “So that’s why we decided to create online sessions focused on how innovations can solve specific problems facing the city.”…

GovLab’s “fail-fast, learn-by-doing” approach is crucial to its projects’ success in remaining responsive to the problems at hand. “That was a central element in how we worked with our partners and improved the approach as we went forward,” said Cantú-Pedraza.

To help translate the Cotopaxi crowdsourcing model for other circumstances, GovLab is working to build a network of innovators and experts that can be tapped on short notice to address problems as they emerge around the world. Although we can hope for the best in Quito and elsewhere, the reality is that we must plan for the worst…(More)

Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation

Curated on March 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani: “The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process that emphasizes users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation approaches to solve important technological and organizational problems. This view of innovation, pioneered by the economist Eric von Hippel, counters the dominant paradigm, which cast the profit-seeking incentives of firms as the main driver of technical change. In a series of influential writings, von Hippel and colleagues found empirical evidence that flatly contradicted the producer-centered model of innovation. Since then, the study of user-driven innovation has continued and expanded, with further empirical exploration of a distributed model of innovation that includes communities and platforms in a variety of contexts and with the development of theory to explain the economic underpinnings of this still emerging paradigm. This volume provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the field of user and open innovation, reflecting advances in the field over the last several decades.

The contributors—including many colleagues of Eric von Hippel—offer both theoretical and empirical perspectives from such diverse fields as economics, the history of science and technology, law, management, and policy. The empirical contexts for their studies range from household goods to financial services. After discussing the fundamentals of user innovation, the contributors cover communities and innovation; legal aspects of user and community innovation; new roles for user innovators; user interactions with firms; and user innovation in practice, describing experiments, toolkits, and crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding…(More)”

Guidance for Developing a Local Digital Response Network

Curated on March 9, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Guide by Jenny Phillips and Andrej Verity: “…Beyond the obvious desire to create the guidance document, we had three objectives when drafting:

Cover the core aspect. Six pages of concrete questions, answers and suggestions are designed to help ensure that start-up activities are well informed.
Keep it as simple and light as possible. We wanted something that an individual could quickly consume, yet find a valuable resource.
Feed into larger projects. By creating something concrete, we hope that it would feed into larger initiatives like Heather Leason and Willow Brugh’s effort to build out a Digital Responders Handbook.

So, are you a passionate individual who wants to help harness local digitally-enabled volunteers or groups in response to emergencies? Would you like to become a central figure and coordinate these groups so that any response is more than the sum of all its parts? If this describes your desire and you answered the questions positively, then this guidance is for you! Create a local Digital Response Network. And, welcome to the world of digital humanitarian response…(More)”

Opening Up Government: Citizen Innovation and New Modes of Collaboration

Curated on March 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on March 2, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

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)”