PEOPLE

How’s the Weather There? Crowdsourcing App Promises Better Forecasts

Curated on March 12, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Metz at MIT Technology Review: “An app called Sunshine wants you to help it create more accurate, localized weather forecasts.
The app, currently in a private beta test, combines data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with atmospheric pressure readings captured by a smartphone. The latest iPhones, and some Android smartphones, include barometers for measuring atmospheric pressure. These sensors are generally used to determine elevation for navigation, but changes in air pressure can also signal changes in the weather.
Sunshine will also rely on users to report sudden weather hazards like fog, cofounder Katerina Stroponiati says. About 250 people spread out among the Bay Area, New York, and Dallas are now using Sunshine, she says, and the team behind it plans to release the app publicly at the end of March for the iPhone. It will be free, though some features may eventually cost extra.
While weather predictions have gotten more accurate over the years, they’re far from perfect. Weather information usually isn’t localized, either. The goal of Sunshine is to better serve places like its home base of San Francisco, where weather can be markedly different over just a few blocks.
Stroponiati aims for Sunshine to get enough people sending in data—three per square mile would be needed, according to experiments the team has conducted—that the app can be used to make weather prediction more accurate than it tends to be today. Some other apps, like PressureNet and WeatherSignal, already gather data entered manually by users, but they don’t yet offer crowdsourced forecasts….(More)”

Index: Prizes and Challenges

Curated on March 10, 2015July 19, 2019 by Shruti Sannon

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on prizes and challenges and was originally published in 2015.

This index highlights recent findings about two key techniques in shifting innovation from institutions to the general public:

Prize-Induced Contests – using monetary rewards to incentivize individuals and other entities to develop solutions to public problems; and
Grand Challenges – posing large, audacious goals to the public to spur collaborative, non-governmental efforts to solve them.

You can read more about Governing through Prizes and Challenges here. You can also watch Alph Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive, answer the GovLab’s questions about challenge authoring and defining the problem here.

Previous installments of the Index include Measuring Impact with Evidence, The Data Universe, Participation and Civic Engagement and Trust in Institutions. Please share any additional statistics and research findings on the intersection of technology in governance with us by emailing shruti at thegovlab.org.

Prize-Induced Contests

Year the British Government introduced the Longitude Prize, one of the first instances of prizes by government to spur innovation: 1714
President Obama calls on “all agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges” in his Strategy for American Innovation: September 2009
The US Office of Management and Budget issues “a policy framework to guide agencies in using prizes to mobilize American ingenuity and advance their respective core missions”: March 2010
Launch of Challenge.gov, “a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs and citizen solvers can find public-sector prize competitions”: September 2010
- Number of competitions currently live on Challenge.gov in February 2015: 22 of 399 total
- How many competitions on Challenge.gov are for $1 million or above: 23
The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act is introduced, which grants “all Federal agencies authority to conduct prize competitions to spur innovation, solve tough problems, and advance their core missions”: 2010
Value of prizes authorized by COMPETES: prizes up to $50 million
Fact Sheet and Frequently Asked Questions memorandum issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget to aid agencies to take advantage of authorities in COMPETES: August 2011
Number of prize competitions run by the Federal government from 2010 to April 2012: 150
How many Federal agencies have run prize competitions by 2012: 40
Prior to 1991, the percentage of prize money that recognized prior achievements according to an analysis by McKinsey and Company: 97%
- Since 1991, percentage of new prize money that “has been dedicated to inducement-style prizes that focus on achieving a specific, future goal”: 78%
Value of the prize sector as estimated by McKinsey in 2009: $1-2 billion
Growth rate of the total value of new prizes: 18% annually
Growth rate in charitable giving in the US: 2.5% annually
Value of the first Horizon Prize awarded in 2014 by the European Commission to German biopharmaceutical company CureVac GmbH “for progress towards a novel technology to bring life-saving vaccines to people across the planet in safe and affordable ways”: €2 million
Number of solvers registered on InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing company: 355,000+ from nearly 200 countries
- Total Challenges Posted: 2,000+ External Challenges
- Total Solution Submissions: 40,000+
- Value of the awards: $5,000 to $1+ million
- Success Rate for premium challenges: 85%

Grand Challenges

Value of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, sponsored in part by DOE to develop production-capable super fuel-efficient vehicles: $10 million
- Number of teams around the world who took part in the challenge “to develop a new generation of technologies” for production-capable super fuel-efficient vehicles: 111 teams
Time it took for the Air Force Research Laboratory to receive a workable solution on “a problem that had vexed military security forces and civilian police for years” by opening the challenge to the world: 60 days
Value of the HHS Investing in Innovation initiative to spur innovation in Health IT, launched under the new COMPETES act: $5 million program
Number of responses received by NASA for its Asteroid Grand Challenge RFI which seeks to identify and address all asteroid threats to the human population: over 400
The decreased cost of sequencing a single human genome as a result of the Human Genome Project Grand Challenge: $7000 from $100 million
Amount the Human Genome Project Grand Challenge has contributed to the US economy for every $1 invested by the US federal government: $141 for every $1 invested
The amount of funding for research available for the “Brain Initiative,” a collaboration between the National Institute of Health, DARPA and the National Science Foundation, which seeks to uncover new prevention and treatment methods for brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, autism and schizophrenia: $100 million
Total amount offered in cash awards by the Department of Energy’s “SunShot Grand Challenge,” which seeks to eliminate the cost disparity between solar energy and coal by the end of the decade: $10 million

Sources

‘And the winner is…’ Capturing the promise of philanthropic prizes. McKinsey & Company. July 2009.
Collins, Francis and Prabhakar, Arati. BRAIN Initiative Challenges Researchers to Unlock Mysteries of Human Mind. The White House. April 02, 2013.
Facts and Stats. InnoCentive. Last accessed March 2015.
Horizon Prizes. European Commission. Last accessed March 2015.
Implementation of Federal Prize Authority: Fiscal Year 2013 Progress Report. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. May, 2014.
Implementation of Federal Prize Authority: Progress Report. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. March, 2012.
Kalil, Tom and Dorgelo, Cristin. Identifying Steps Forward in Use of Prizes to Spur Innovation. White House Blog: Office of Science and Technology Policy. April 10, 2012.
SunShot Prize: Race to 7-Day Solar. Energy.gov. Last accessed March 2015.
The History. Longitude Prize. Last accessed March 2015.

Collective Intelligence or Group Think?

Curated on March 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper analyzing “Engaging Participation Patterns in World without Oil” by Nassim JafariNaimi and Eric M. Meyers: “This article presents an analysis of participation patterns in an Alternate Reality Game, World Without Oil. This game aims to bring people together in an online environment to reflect on how an oil crisis might affect their lives and communities as a way to both counter such a crisis and to build collective intelligence about responding to it. We present a series of participation profiles based on a quantitative analysis of 1554 contributions to the game narrative made by 322 players. We further qualitatively analyze a sample of these contributions. We outline the dominant themes, the majority of which engage the global oil crisis for its effects on commute options and present micro-sustainability solutions in response. We further draw on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of this space to discuss how the design of the game, specifically its framing of the problem, feedback mechanism, and absence of subject-matter expertise, counter its aim of generating collective intelligence, making it conducive to groupthink….(More)”

Crowdsourcing America’s cybersecurity is an idea so crazy it might just work

Curated on March 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “One idea that’s starting to bubble up from Silicon Valley is the concept of crowdsourcing cybersecurity. As Silicon Valley venture capitalist Robert R. Ackerman, Jr. has pointed out, due to “the interconnectedness of our society in cyberspace,” cyber networks are best viewed as an asset that we all have a shared responsibility to protect. Push on that concept hard enough and you can see how many of the core ideas from Silicon Valley – crowdsourcing, open source software, social networking, and the creative commons – can all be applied to cybersecurity.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists are already starting to fund companies that describe themselves as crowdsourcing cybersecurity. For example, take Synack, a “crowd security intelligence” company that received $7.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins (one of Silicon Valley’s heavyweight venture capital firms), Allegis Ventures, and Google Ventures in 2014. Synack’s two founders are ex-NSA employees, and they are using that experience to inform an entirely new type of business model. Synack recruits and vets a global network of “white hat hackers,” and then offers their services to companies worried about their cyber networks. For a fee, these hackers are able to find and repair any security risks.

So how would crowdsourced national cybersecurity work in practice?

For one, there would be free and transparent sharing of computer code used to detect cyber threats between the government and private sector. In December, the U.S. Army Research Lab added a bit of free source code, a “network forensic analysis network” known as Dshell, to the mega-popular code sharing site GitHub. Already, there have been 100 downloads and more than 2,000 unique visitors. The goal, says William Glodek of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, is for this shared code to “help facilitate the transition of knowledge and understanding to our partners in academia and industry who face the same problems.”

This open sourcing of cyber defense would be enhanced with a scaled-up program of recruiting “white hat hackers” to become officially part of the government’s cybersecurity efforts. Popular annual events such as the DEF CON hacking conference could be used to recruit talented cyber sleuths to work alongside the government.

There have already been examples of communities where people facing a common cyber threat gather together to share intelligence. Perhaps the best-known example is the Conficker Working Group, a security coalition that was formed in late 2008 to share intelligence about malicious Conficker malware. Another example is the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which was created by presidential mandate in 1998 to share intelligence about cyber threats to the nation’s financial system.

Of course, there are some drawbacks to this crowdsourcing idea. For one, such a collaborative approach to cybersecurity might open the door to government cyber defenses being infiltrated by the enemy. Ackerman makes the point that you never really know who’s contributing to any community. Even on a site such as Github, it’s theoretically possible that an ISIS hacker or someone like Edward Snowden could download the code, reverse engineer it, and then use it to insert “Trojan Horses” intended for military targets into the code…. (More)

Open data could turn Europe’s digital desert into a digital rainforest

Curated on March 2, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Joanna Roberts interviews Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich at Horizon: “…If we want to be competitive, Europe needs to find its own way. How can we differentiate ourselves and make things better? I believe Europe should not engage in the locked data strategy that we see in all these huge IT giants. Instead, Europe should engage in open data, open innovation, and value-sensitive design, particularly approaches that support informational self-determination. So everyone can use this data, generate new kinds of data, and build applications on top. This is going to create ever more possibilities for everyone else, so in a sense that will turn a digital desert into a digital rainforest full of opportunities for everyone, with a rich information ecosystem.’…
The Internet of Things is the next big emerging information communication technology. It’s based on sensors. In smartphones there are about 15 sensors; for light, for noise, for location, for all sorts of things. You could also buy additional external sensors for humidity, for chemical substances and almost anything that comes to your mind. So basically this allows us to measure the environment and all the features of our physical, biological, economic, social and technological environment.
‘Imagine if there was one company in the world controlling all the sensors and collecting all the information. I think that might potentially be a dystopian surveillance nightmare, because you couldn’t take a single step or speak a single word without it being recorded. Therefore, if we want the Internet of Things to be consistent with a stable democracy then I believe we need to run it as a citizen web, which means to create and manage the planetary nervous system together. The citizens themselves would buy the sensors and activate them or not, would decide themselves what sensor data they would share with whom and for what purpose, so informational self-determination would be at the heart, and everyone would be in control of their own data.’….
A lot of exciting things will become possible. We would have a real-time picture of the world and we could use this data to be more aware of what the implications of our decisions and actions are. We could avoid mistakes and discover opportunities we would otherwise have missed. We will also be able to measure what’s going on in our society and economy and why. In this way, we will eventually identify the hidden forces that determine the success or failure of a company, of our economy or even our society….(More)”

The crowd-sourcing web project bringing amateur and professional archaeologists together

Curated on March 2, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Jackson at Culture 24: “With only limited funds and time, professional archaeologists consistently struggle to protect and interpret the UK’s vast array of archaeological finds and resources. Yet there are huge pools of amateur groups and volunteers who are not only passionate but also skilled and knowledgeable about archaeology in the UK.
Now a new web platform called MicroPasts has been produced in a collaboration between University College London (UCL) and the British Museum to connect institutions and volunteers so that they can create, fund and work on archaeological projects together.
Work by UCL postdoctoral researchers Chiara Bonacchi and Adi Keinan-Schoonbaert and British Museum post doc researcher Jennifer Wexler established much of the ground work including the design, implementation and the public engagement aspects of the of the new site.
According to one of the project leaders, Professor Andrew Bevan at UCL, MicroPasts emerged from a desire to harness the expertise (and manpower) of volunteers and to “pull together crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding in a way that hadn’t been tried before”.
Although there are many crowd-sourcing portals online, they are either specific to one project (DigVentures, for example, which conducted the world’s first crowd-funded dig in 2012) or can be used to create almost anything you can imagine (such as Kickstarter).
MicroPasts was also inspired by Crowdcrafting, which encourages citizen science projects and, like MicroPasts, offers a platform for volunteers and researchers with an interest in a particular subject to come together to create and contribute to projects….(More)”

Mobile customer service gives city residents a voice with government

Curated on March 1, 2015October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lauren Horwitz at TechTarget: “When social scientists James Wilson and George Kelling devised their broken windows theory during the 1980s, they couldn’t have imagined smartphones as tools to keep neighborhoods safe and clean. But for the city of Philadelphia, a new online initiative known as Philly 311 turns mobile devices into frontline tools for citizens to report problems and engage with local government.
Until just a few months ago, when Philadelphia residents wanted to report a graffiti-riddled building, they would have to call the city’s customer contact center. Some residents toted around hefty physical binders to track issues. But today, they can use mobile phones to report incidents and track them online without having to make a call or stop by the contact center.
With Philly 311, which launched in December 2014, residents can take photos of wayward trash littering a street, “geolocate” the incident with a mobile phone,…
With initiatives like Philly 311, the city has experienced changes in resident interaction with government. Between 2013 and 2014, for example, mobile phone use to report incidents to the city’s contact center exploded, with communication increasing more than 300%. Walk-in communication with the contact center decreased by 9%, by contrast, and email communications by 1%. Mobile reporting of incidents can thus promote some contact center efficiencies, in which incidents are automatically reported by phone and routed to the appropriate department. Lue said that the city has made the shift to accommodate residents’ need for more effective and scalable multichannel options….(More)”

Governance in the Information Era

Curated on February 24, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Erik W. Johnston:” Policy informatics is addressing governance challenges and their consequences, which span the seeming inability of governments to solve complex problems and the disaffection of people from their governments. Policy informatics seeks approaches that enable our governance systems to address increasingly complex challenges and to meet the rising expectations of people to be full participants in their communities. This book approaches these challenges by applying a combination of the latest American and European approaches in applying complex systems modeling, crowdsourcing, participatory platforms and citizen science to explore complex governance challenges in domains that include education, environment, and health.(More)