Aida Akl at VOA TECHtonics: “The crisis that plunged east Ukraine into war in November 2013 has damaged or destroyed critical infrastructure and limited access to areas caught up in fighting between Ukraine’s government forces and pro-Russian rebels. In order to assess damage, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) turned to crowdsourcing to help restore social infrastructure as part of a United Nations, European Union and World Bank Recovery and Peacebuilding Assessment for Eastern Ukraine….
Using an interactive map, ReDonbass, and a mobile app (Android and iOS), people of Donetsk and Lugansk regions can report damaged homes, hospitals, schools, kindergartens or libraries.
The easy-to-use interactive tool allows any person with a mobile phone and access to the Internet to download the most accurate data about the building in its location, photographs of the damage, and the status of the recovery phase. After that, the Ukrainian government and international donors will use the data to better plan reconstruction.
Information from the map will contribute to an ongoing Recovery and Peacebuilding Assessment for Eastern Ukraine. UNDP is part of the assessment that brings the United Nations, the European Union and the World Bank Group together to analyze the impact of the conflict and offer recommendations for short-term recovery and peacebuilding over the next two years….The map has also proven to be very useful for the experts from the Ukrainian Government and a recently launched UNDP-Government of Japan project aiming to restore critical infrastructure for social care and services. They [are] using it to identify schools, orphanages, elderly homes, and social services centers that need to be restored and rebuilt first….(More)”.
Citizen Science: Catch, Click and Submit Contest
Wilson Commons Lab: “The inaugural Catch, Click and Submit Contest begins on Feb 21st in honor of the National Invasive Species Awareness Week running Feb 22nd through the 28th. The contest, which calls on anglers to photograph and report non-native fish species caught during the derby, will award prizes to various categories such as “Most Unusual Catch” and “Most Species”. Submissions from the contest will aid researchers in developing a better understanding of the distribution of fish species throughout Florida waterways.
By engaging the existing angler community, the contest hopes to increase public awareness of the potential impacts that arise from non-native fish species. “The Catch, Click and Submit Contest offers anglers the opportunity to assist natural resource managers in finding nonnative species by doing what they enjoy – fishing!” said biologist Kelly Gestring. “The early detection of a new, nonnative species could provide a better opportunity to control or even eradicate a population.” The hope is that participants will choose to target non-native fish for consumption in the future, helping to control invasive populations…(More).”
Crowdsourcing Dilemma
New paper by Victor Naroditskiy, Nicholas R. Jennings, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Manuel Cebrian: “Crowdsourcing offers unprecedented potential for solving tasks efficiently by tapping into the skills of large groups of people. A salient feature of crowdsourcing—its openness of entry—makes it vulnerable to malicious behavior. Such behavior took place in a number of recent popular crowdsourcing competitions. We provide game-theoretic analysis of a fundamental tradeoff between the potential for increased productivity and the possibility of being set back by malicious behavior. Our results show that in crowdsourcing competitions malicious behavior is the norm, not the anomaly—a result contrary to the conventional wisdom in the area. Counterintuitively, making the attacks more costly does not deter them but leads to a less desirable outcome. These findings have cautionary implications for the design of crowdsourcing competitions…(More)”
Training the next generation of public leaders
Thanks to the generous support of the Knight Foundation, this term the Governance Lab Academy – a training program designed to promote civic engagement and innovation – is launching a series of online coaching programs.
Geared to the teams and individuals inside and outside of government planning to undertake a new project or trying to figure out how to make an existing project even more effective and scalable, these programs are designed to help participants working in civic engagement and innovation develop effective projects from idea to implementation.
Convened by leading experts in their fields, coaching programs meet exclusively online once a week for four weeks or every other week for eight weeks. They include frequent and constructive feedback, customized and original learning materials, peer-to-peer support, mentoring by topic experts and individualized coaching from those with policy, technology, and domain expertise.
There is no charge to participants but each program is limited to 8-10 project teams or individuals.
You can see the current roster of programs below and check out the website for more information (including FAQs), to sign up and to suggest a new program.
- Citizen Science on the Web, starting the week of March 2, 2015.
- Civic Tech for Local Legislatures and Legislators, starting the week of March 2, 2015.
- Freedom of Information and FOIA Project Coaching: Breaking Down the Walls and Opening Up Communications, starting the week of March 2, 2015.
- Citizen Engagement Projects, starting the week of March 2, 2015.
- Tech Procurement Projects: Making the Supply Chain Work, starting the week of March 16, 2015.
- Leveraging Crowds in the Public Sector, starting the week of March 23, 2015.
- Open Source Technology Practices For Civic Engagement Projects, starting the week of April 6, 2015.
- Humanitarian Innovation Project Collaborative, starting the week of April 6, 2015.
- Lab Design: Bringing Agility and Empiricism to Public Problems, starting the week of April 6, 2015.
- Open Data Data-Driven Decisions for All, starting the week of April 6, 2015.
- Data Analytics for Change, dates TBD.
- Open Contracting Projects, dates TBD.
Faculty includes:
- Brian Behlendorf, Managing Director at Mithril Capital Management and Co-Founder Apache
- Alexandra Clare, Founder of Iraq Re:Coded
- Brian Forde, Senior Former Advisor to the U.S. CTO, White House Office of Science Technology and Policy
- Francois Grey, Coordinator of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, Geneva
- Gavin Hayman, Executive Director of the Open Contracting Partnership
- Clay Johnson, CEO of The Department for Better Technology and Former Presidential Innovation Fellow
- Benjamin Kallos, New York City Council Member and Chair of the Committee on Governmental Operations of the New York City Council
- Karim Lakhani, Lumry Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School
- Amen Ra Mashariki, Chief Analytics Officer of New York City
- Geoff Mulgan, Chief Executive of NESTA
- Miriam Nisbet, Former Director of the Office of Government Information Services
- Beth Noveck, Founder and CEO of The GovLab
- Tiago Peixoto, Open Government Specialist at The World Bank
- Arnaud Sahuguet, Chief Technology Officer of The GovLab
- Joeri van den Steenhoven, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of MaRS Solutions Lab
- Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of The GovLab
Innovation Labs: Leveraging Openness for Radical Innovation?
Paper by Gryszkiewicz, Lidia and Lykourentzou, Ioanna and Toivonen, Tuukka: “A growing range of public, private and civic organisations, from Unicef through Nesta to Tesco, now run units known as ‘innovation labs’. The hopeful assumption they share is that labs, by building on openness among other features, can generate promising solutions to grand challenges of the future. Despite their seeming proliferation and popularisation, the underlying innovation paradigm embodied by labs has so far received scant academic attention. This is a missed opportunity, because innovation labs are potentially fruitful vehicles for leveraging openness for radical innovation. Indeed, they not only strive to span organisational, sectoral and geographical boundaries by bringing a variety of uncommon actors together to embrace radical ideas and out-of-the box thinking, but they also aim to apply the concept of openness throughout the innovation process, including the experimentation and development phases. While the phenomenon of labs clearly forms part of a broader trend towards openness, it seems to transcend traditional conceptualisations of open innovation (Chesbrough, 2006), open strategy (Whittington et al., 2011), open science (David, 1998) or open government (Janssen et al., 2012). What are innovation labs about, how do they differ from other innovation efforts and how do they embrace openness to create breakthrough innovations? This short exploratory paper is an introduction to a larger empirical study aiming to answer these questions….(More).”
Surveying the citizen science landscape
Paper by Andrea Wiggins and Kevin Crowston in First Monday: “Citizen science has seen enormous growth in recent years, in part due to the influence of the Internet, and a corresponding growth in interest. However, the few stand-out examples that have received attention from media and researchers are not representative of the diversity of the field as a whole, and therefore may not be the best models for those seeking to study or start a citizen science project. In this work, we present the results of a survey of citizen science project leaders, identifying sub-groups of project types according to a variety of features related to project design and management, including funding sources, goals, participant activities, data quality processes, and social interaction. These combined features highlight the diversity of citizen science, providing an overview of the breadth of the phenomenon and laying a foundation for comparison between citizen science projects and to other online communities….(More).”
Schemes used by South Australia to include citizens in policy making
Joshua Chambers at Future Gov Asia: “…South Australia has pioneered a number of innovative methods to try to include its residents in policymaking. …The highest profile participatory programme run by the state government is the Citizens’ Jury initiative, …The Citizens’ Jury takes a randomly selected, representative group of citizens through a process to hear arguments and evidence much like a jury in a trial, before writing an independent report which makes recommendations to government.
There were 37 members of the jury, hearing evidence on Thursday evenings and Saturdays over a five week period. They heard from motorists associations, cycling associations, and all sorts of other interested groups.
They used Basecamp software to ensure that jurors stayed connected when not at meetings, hosting discussions in a private space to consider the evidence they heard. …The jurors prepared 21 recommendations, ranging from decreasing speed in the city to a schools programme…. The Government supports the majority of the recommendations and will investigate the remaining three.
The government has also committed to provide jurors with an update every 6 months on the progress being made in this area.
Lessons and challenges
As would be expected with an innovative new scheme, it hasn’t always been smooth. One lesson learned from the first initiative was that affected agencies need to be engaged in advance, and briefed throughout the process, so that they can prepare their responses and resources. ….
Aside from the Citizens’ Jury, the Government of South Australia is also pioneering other approaches to include citizens in policy making. Fund My Idea is a crowdsourcing site that allows citizens to propose new projects. …(More)”
Citizen Science in America’s DNA
Keynote by NOAA Chief Scientist, Dr. Richard Spinrad at the forum entitled, Tracking a Changing Climate: “Citizen science is part of America’s DNA. For centuries, citizens not trained in science have helped shaped our understanding of Earth.
Thomas Jefferson turned Lewis and Clark into citizen scientists when he asked them to explore the landscape, wildlife and weather during their journeys of the West.They investigated plants, animals and geography, and came back with maps, sketches and journals. These new data were some of the first pieces of environmental intelligence defining our young nation. President Jefferson instilled citizen science in my own agency’s DNA by creating the Survey of the Coast, a NOAA legacy agency focused on charting and protecting the entire coast of our Nation.
The National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program, begun in 1890, is an outstanding example of citizen science. Last year, NOAA honored an observer who has provided weather observations every day for 80 years. Volunteer citizen scientists have transcribed more than 68,000 pages of Arctic ship logs, adding to the long-term climate record by populating a database with historic weather and sea ice observations. Also, citizen scientists are providing new estimates of cyclone intensity by interpreting satellite images.
There is tremendous value in the capability of citizen scientists to feed local data into their own communities’ forecasts. In September 2013, for example, formal observation systems and tracking instruments were washed out when extreme floods struck Colorado and New Mexico. By ensuring that real-time forecasts were still integrated into the National Weather Service Flood Warning System, the reports of about 200 citizen scientists contributed to what has been called the best mapped extreme rain event in Colorado history and possibly nationwide.
The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) Network played a pivotal role in this mapping. CoCoRaHS also shows how citizen science can help make data collection straightforward and inexpensive. To measure the impact and size of hail, for example, it uses a Styrofoam sheet covered with tin foil, creating a “hail pad” that has proven to be quite accurate.
The recognized value of citizen science is growing rapidly. NOAA has an app to crowdsource real-time precipitation data. If you feel a raindrop, or spot a snowflake, report it through NOAA’s mPING app. Precipitation reports have already topped 600,000, and the National Weather Service uses them to fine-tune forecasts…(More).”
Social Sensing and Crowdsourcing: the future of connected sensors
Conference Paper by C. Geijer, M. Larsson, M. Stigelid: “Social sensing is becoming an alternative to static sensors. It is a way to crowdsource data collection where sensors can be placed on frequently used objects, such as mobile phones or cars, to gather important information. Increasing availability in technology, such as cheap sensors being added in cell phones, creates an opportunity to build bigger sensor networks that are capable of collecting a larger quantity and more complex data. The purpose of this paper is to highlight problems in the field, as well as their solutions. The focus lies on the use of physical sensors and not on the use of social media to collect data. Research papers were reviewed based on implemented or suggested implementations of social sensing. The discovered problems are contrasted with possible solutions, and used to reflect upon the future of the field. We found issues such as privacy, noise and trustworthiness to be problems when using a distributed network of sensors. Furthermore, we discovered models for determining the accuracy as well as truthfulness of gathered data that can effectively combat these problems. The topic of privacy remains an open-ended problem, since it is based upon ethical considerations that may differ from person to person, but there exists methods for addressing this as well. The reviewed research suggests that social sensing will become more and more useful in the future….(More).”
New Journal: Citizen Science: Theory and Practice
“Citizen Science: Theory and Practice is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by Ubiquity Press on behalf of the Citizen Science Association. It focuses on advancing the field of citizen science by providing a venue for citizen science researchers and practitioners – scientists, information technologists, conservation biologists, community health organizers, educators, evaluators, urban planners, and more – to share best practices in conceiving, developing, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining projects that facilitate public participation in scientific endeavors in any discipline.”