New paper by Jennifer L. Gustetic et al in Space Policy: “In an increasingly connected and networked world, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recognizes the value of the public as a strategic partner in addressing some of our most pressing challenges. The agency is working to more effectively harness the expertise, ingenuity, and creativity of individual members of the public by enabling, accelerating, and scaling the use of open innovation approaches including prizes, challenges, and crowdsourcing. As NASA’s use of open innovation tools to solve a variety of types of problems and advance of number of outcomes continues to grow, challenge design is also becoming more sophisticated as our expertise and capacity (personnel, platforms, and partners) grows and develops. NASA has recently pivoted from talking about the benefits of challenge-driven approaches, to the outcomes these types of activities yield. Challenge design should be informed by desired outcomes that align with NASA’s mission. This paper provides several case studies of NASA open innovation activities and maps the outcomes of those activities to a successful set of outcomes that challenges can help drive alongside traditional tools such as contracts, grants and partnerships….(More)”
The Fundamentals of Policy Crowdsourcing
Article by John Prpić, Araz Taeihagh and James Melton at Policy and Internet: “What is the state of the research on crowdsourcing for policymaking? This article begins to answer this question by collecting, categorizing, and situating an extensive body of the extant research investigating policy crowdsourcing, within a new framework built on fundamental typologies from each field. We first define seven universal characteristics of the three general crowdsourcing techniques (virtual labor markets, tournament crowdsourcing, open collaboration), to examine the relative trade-offs of each modality. We then compare these three types of crowdsourcing to the different stages of the policy cycle, in order to situate the literature spanning both domains. We finally discuss research trends in crowdsourcing for public policy and highlight the research gaps and overlaps in the literature….(More)”
Citizen Urban Science
New report by Anthony Townsend and Alissa Chisholm at the Cities of Data Project: “Over the coming decades, the world will continue to urbanize rapidly amidst an historic migration of computing power off the desktop, unleashing new opportunities for data collection that reveal how cities function. In a recent report, Making Sense of the Science of Cities (bit.ly/sciencecities) we described an emerging global research movement that seeks establish a new urban science built atop this new infrastructure of instruments. But will this new intellectual venture be an inclusive endeavor? What role is 1 there for the growing ranks of increasingly well-equipped and well-informed citizen volunteers and amateur investigators to work alongside professional scientists? How are researchers, activists and city governments exploring that potential today? Finally, what can be done to encourage and accelerate experimentation?
This report examines three case studies that provide insight into emerging models of citizen science, highlighting the possibilities of citizen-university-government collaborative research, and the important role of open data platforms to enable these partnerships….(More)”
Content Volatility of Scientific Topics in Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale
Paper by Wilson AM and Likens GE at PLOS: “Wikipedia has quickly become one of the most frequently accessed encyclopedic references, despite the ease with which content can be changed and the potential for ‘edit wars’ surrounding controversial topics. Little is known about how this potential for controversy affects the accuracy and stability of information on scientific topics, especially those with associated political controversy. Here we present an analysis of the Wikipedia edit histories for seven scientific articles and show that topics we consider politically but not scientifically “controversial” (such as evolution and global warming) experience more frequent edits with more words changed per day than pages we consider “noncontroversial” (such as the standard model in physics or heliocentrism). For example, over the period we analyzed, the global warming page was edited on average (geometric mean ±SD) 1.9±2.7 times resulting in 110.9±10.3 words changed per day, while the standard model in physics was only edited 0.2±1.4 times resulting in 9.4±5.0 words changed per day. The high rate of change observed in these pages makes it difficult for experts to monitor accuracy and contribute time-consuming corrections, to the possible detriment of scientific accuracy. As our society turns to Wikipedia as a primary source of scientific information, it is vital we read it critically and with the understanding that the content is dynamic and vulnerable to vandalism and other shenanigans….(More)”
President Obama Signs Executive Order Making Presidential Innovation Fellows Program Permanent
White House Press Release: “My hope is this continues to encourage a culture of public service among our innovators, and tech entrepreneurs, so that we can keep building a government that’s as modern, as innovative, and as engaging as our incredible tech sector is. To all the Fellows who’ve served so far – thank you. I encourage all Americans with bold ideas to apply. And I can’t wait to see what those future classes will accomplish on behalf of the American people.” –- President Barack Obama
Today, President Obama signed an executive order that makes the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program a permanent part of the Federal government going forward. The program brings executives, entrepreneurs, technologists, and other innovators into government, and teams them up with Federal employees to improve programs that serve more than 150 million Americans.
The Presidential Innovation Fellows Program is built on four key principles:
- Recruit the best our nation has to offer: Fellows include entrepreneurs, startup founders, and innovators with experience at large technology companies and startups, each of whom leverage their proven skills and technical expertise to create huge value for the public.
- Partner with innovators inside government: Working as teams, the Presidential Innovation Fellows and their partners across the government create products and services that are responsive, user-friendly, and help to improve the way the Federal government interacts with the American people.
- Deploy proven private sector strategies: Fellows leverage best practices from the private sector to deliver better, more effective programs and policies across the Federal government.
- Focus on some of the Nation’s biggest and most pressing challenges: Projects focus on topics such as improving access to education, fueling job creation and the economy, and expanding the public’s ability to access their personal health data.
Additional Details on Today’s Announcements
The Executive Order formally establishes the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program within the General Services Administration (GSA), where it will continue to serve departments and agencies throughout the Executive Branch. The Presidential Innovation Fellow Program will be administered by a Director and guided by a newly-established Advisory Board. The Director will outline steps for the selection, hiring, and deployment of Fellows within government….
Fellows have partnered with leaders at more than 25 government agencies, delivering impressive results in months, not years, driving extraordinary work and innovative solutions in areas such as health care; open data and data science; crowd-sourcing initiatives; education; veterans affairs; jobs and the economy; and disaster response and recovery. Examples of projects include:
Open Data
When government acts as a platform, entrepreneurs, startups, and the private sector can build value-added services and tools on top of federal datasets supported by federal policies. Taking this approach, Fellows and agency stakeholders have supported the creation of new products and services focused on education, health, the environment, and social justice. As a result of their efforts and the agencies they have worked with:….
Jobs and the Economy
Fellows continue to work on solutions that will give the government better access to innovative tools and services. This is also helping small and medium-sized companies create jobs and compete for Federal government contracts….
Digital Government
The Presidential Innovation Fellows Program is a part of the Administration’s strategy to create lasting change across the Federal Government by improving how it uses technology. The Fellows played a part in launching 18F within the General Services Administration (GSA) and the U.S. Digital Services (USDS) team within the Office of Management and Budget….
Supporting Our Veterans
- …Built a one-stop shop for finding employment opportunities. The Veterans Employment Center was developed by a team of Fellows working with the Department of Veterans Affairs in connection with the First Lady’s Joining Forces Initiative and the Department of Labor. This is the first interagency website connecting Veterans, transitioning Servicemembers, and their spouses to meaningful employment opportunities. The portal has resulted in cost savings of over $27 million to the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Education
- …More than 1,900 superintendents pledged to more effectively leverage education technology in their schools. Fellows working at the Department of Education helped develop the idea of Future Ready, which later informed the creation of the Future Ready District Pledge. The Future Ready District Pledge is designed to set out a roadmap to achieve successful personalized digital learning for every student and to commit districts to move as quickly as possible towards our shared vision of preparing students for success. Following the President’s announcement of this effort in 2014, more than 1,900 superintendents have signed this pledge, representing 14 million students.
Health and Patient Care
- More than 150 million Americans are able to access their health records online. Multiple rounds of Fellows have worked with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to expand the reach of theBlue Button Initiative. As a result, patients are able to access their electronic health records to make more informed decisions about their own health care. The Blue Button Initiative has received more than 600 commitments from organizations to advance health information access efforts across the country and has expanded into other efforts that support health care system interoperability….
Disaster Response and Recovery
- Communities are piloting crowdsourcing tools to assess damage after disasters. Fellows developed the GeoQ platform with FEMA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that crowdsources photos of disaster-affected areas to assess damage over large regions. This information helps the Federal government better allocate critical response and recovery efforts following a disaster and allows local governments to use geospatial information in their communities…. (More)
The 5Ps of the Crowd Economy
Crowdsourcing week: “As a first step towards a transition to a crowd – focussed organization, it helps to understand what makes up the crowd economy.
1. The people. The crowd economy is empowering, inclusive, disruptive and human centric.
Human-centric values need to be embedded in applications geared towards the crowd economy where the community is the starting point. The crowd economy or collective action is not about mob behavior but very targeted cooperative solutions that help communities better their lives. People-powered platforms are forging these interconnections between users that are breaking down the barriers between creators, producers and end users. By empowering people, organizations are finding new, previously unimagined pathways and solutions to complex problems.
2. The purpose. The crowd economy creates meaningful experiences and shared value.
The crowd economy embodies a culture of shared value creation and social responsibility that distinguishes itself from the traditional one-dimensional thinking and practices of the old economy. People driven initiatives often embody a larger mission to create solutions that work for, and, with all stakeholders. There is more than one channel of communication and the notion that everyone can further his or her purpose is life changing.
3. The platform. Crowds need a medium to interact and produce results.
This pillar of the crowd economy has manifested in the form of technology, connectivity and mobile networks. Soon the Internet of Things will contribute to this medium, amplifying human interactions with powerful data. Platforms like Airbnb and Uber have become synonymous with peer marketplaces and have led to new business paradigms taking shape.
4. The participation. Co-creation and participation are emphasized in the crowd economy and communities take an active stake in crafting positive futures.
The power of participation to accelerate innovation is best seen through crowdfunding, that has enabled early ideas get a jumpstart. Crowd verdict is critical to validate business plans and ideas and working with them only bring financial support but also value product input and iteration.
5. The productivity. Crowd economy fosters faster, cheaper, better and resource efficient processes.
Digital crowd applications for civic activities, disaster relief and humanitarian work are creating widespread impact. Helping and participation comes naturally to us and the networked web has fitted this mindset with wings. …(More)”
Citizen Science used in studying Seasonal Variation in India
Rohin Daswani at the Commons Lab, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: “Climate change has started affecting many countries around the world. While every country is susceptible to the risks of global warming some countries, such as India, are especially vulnerable.
India’s sheer dependence on rainfall to irrigate its vast agricultural lands and to feed its economy makes it highly vulnerable to climate change. A report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts global temperature will increase between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees Celsius and sea levels will rise 82cm (32 in) by the late 21st century. But what effect will the changing rainfall pattern have on the seasonal variation?
One way to study seasonal variation in India is to analyze the changing patterns of flowering and fruiting of common trees like the Mango and Amaltas trees. SeasonWatch , a program part of the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS), the biological wing of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, does exactly that. It is an India-wide program that studies the changing seasons by monitoring the seasonal cycles of flowering, fruiting and leaf flush of common trees. And how does it do that? It does it by utilizing the idea of Citizen Science. Anybody, be it children or adults, interested in trees and the effects of climate change can participate. All they have to do is register, select a tree near them and monitor it every week. The data is uploaded to a central website and is analyzed for changing patterns of plant life, and the effects of climate change on plant life cycle. The data is also open source so anyone can get access to it if they wish to. With all this information one could answer questions which were previously impossible to answer such as:
- How does the flowering of Neem change across India?
- Is fruiting of Tamarind different in different parts of the country depending on rainfall in the previous year?
- Is year to year variation in flowering and fruiting time of Mango related to Winter temperatures?
Using Citizen Science and crowdsourcing, programs such as SeasonWatch have expanded the scope and work of conservation biology in various ecosystems across India….(More)”
Weathernews thinks crowdsourcing is the future of weather
Andrew Freedman at Mashable: “The weather forecast of the future will be crowdsourced, if one Japanese weather firm sees its vision fulfilled.
On Monday, Weathernews Inc. of Japan announced a partnership with the Chinese firm Moji to bring Weathernews’ technology to the latter company’s popular MoWeather app.
The benefit for Weathernews, in addition to more users and entry into the Chinese market, is access to more data that can then be turned into weather forecasts.
The company says that this additional user base, when added to its existing users, will make Weathernews “the largest crowdsourced weather service in the world,” with 420 million users across 175 countries.
…So far, though, mobile phones have not proven to be more reliable weather sensors than the network of thousands of far more expensive and specialized surface weather observation sites throughout the world, but crowdsourcing’s day in the sun may be close at hand. As Weathernews leaders were quick to point out to Mashable in an interview, the existing weather observing network on which most forecasts rely has significant drawbacks that makes crowdsourcing especially appealing outside the U.S.
For example, most surface weather stations are in wealthy nations, primarily in North America and Europe. There’s a giant forecasting blind spot over much of Africa, where many countries lack a national weather agency. However, these countries do have rapidly growing mobile phone networks that, if utilized in certain ways, could provide a way to fill in data gaps and make weather forecasts more accurate, too.
“At Weathernews, we have a core belief that more weather data is better,” said Weathernews managing director Tomohiro Ishibashi.
“So having access to the additional datasets from MoWeather’s vast user community allows us to provide more accurate and safer weather forecasting for all,” he said. “Our advanced algorithms analyze these new datasets and put them in our existing computer forecasting models.”
Weathernews is trying to use observations that most weather companies might regard as interesting but not worth the effort to tailor for computer modeling. For example, photos of clouds are a potential way to ground truth weather satellite imagery, Ishibashi told Mashable.
“For us the picture of the sky… has a lot of information,” he said. (The company’s website refers to such observations as “eye-servation.”)…
Compared to Weathernews’ ambitions, AccuWeather’s recent decision to incorporate crowdsourced data into its iOS app seems more traditional, like a TV weather forecaster adding a few new “weather watchers” to their station’s network during local television’s heyday in the 1980s and 90s.
Now, we’re all weather watchers….(More)”
Crowdsourcing: a survey of applications
Paper by Jayshri Namdeorao Ganthade, Sunil R. Gupta: “Crowdsourcing, itself a multidisciplinary field, can be well-served by incorporating theories and methods from affective computing. We present a various applications which are based on crowdsourcing. The direction of research on principles and methods can enable to solve a general problem via human computation systems. Crowdsourcing is nothing but an act of outsourcing tasks to a large group of people through an open request via the Internet. It has become popular among social scientists as a source to recruit research participants from the general public for studies. Crowdsourcing is introduced as the new online distributed problem solving model in which networked people collaborate to complete a task and produce the result. However, the idea of crowdsourcing is not new, and can be traced back to Charles Darwin. Darwin was interested in studying the universality of facial expressions in conveying emotions. For this, it required large amount of database and for this he had to consider a global population to get more general conclusions.
This paper provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, guidelines for using crowdsourcing, and its applications in various fields. Finally, this article proposes conclusion which is based upon applications of crowdsourcing….(More)”.
This paper provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, guidelines for using crowdsourcing, and its applications in various fields. Finally, this article proposes conclusion which is based upon applications of crowdsourcing….(More)”.
How Collaboration and Crowdsourcing are Changing Legal Research
Susan Martin at Legal Current/ThomsonReuters: “Bob Ambrogi, lawyer, consultant and blogger at Law Sites, spoke at a well-attended session this morning at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Annual Meeting. Titled “Playing Well With Others: How Collaboration and Crowdsourcing are Changing Legal Research,” Ambrogi’s presentation began with a light-hearted scolding of lawyers and legal professionals who simply “aren’t very good at sharing.”
“Crowdsourcing requires sharing and lawyers tend to be very possessive, so that makes it difficult,” said Ambrogi….
Why would a legal researcher want to do this? To establish credibility, according to Ambrogi. “Blogging is another way of doing this. It’s a good example of pulling together all the commentary out there so it lives in one place,” he said. “The more we can tap into the collective knowledge out there and use professionals to share their own legal materials in one central space…that’s a real benefit.”
Ambrogi then shared some examples of crowdsourcing gone wrong, where sites were built and abandoned or simply not updated enough to be effective. Examples include Spindle Law, Jurify and Standardforms.org.
He then went on to showcase three examples of great crowdsourced sites:
- casetext
- Wex, from Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Dictionary (LII)
- CanLII Connects from the Canadian Legal Info Institute
So how can lawyers learn to play well with others? Ambrogi offered the following tips, in closing:
- Make it easy to contribute
- Make it rewarding to contribute
- Make the content useful to others
- Success will breed success. (More)”