Blog from Unglue.it: “Great books deserve to be read by all of us, and we ought to be supporting the people who create these books. “Thanks for Ungluing” gives readers, authors, libraries and publishers a new way to build, sustain, and nourish the books we love.
“Thanks for Ungluing” books are Creative Commons licensed and free to download. You don’t need to register or anything. But when you download, the creators can ask for your support. You can pay what you want. You can just scroll down and download the book. But when that book has become your friend, your advisor, your confidante, you’ll probably want to show your support and tell all your friends.
We have some amazing creators participating in this launch….”
Crowdsourcing the future: predictions made with a social network
New Paper by Clifton Forlines et al: “Researchers have long known that aggregate estimations built from the collected opinions of a large group of people often outperform the estimations of individual experts. This phenomenon is generally described as the “Wisdom of Crowds”. This approach has shown promise with respect to the task of accurately forecasting future events. Previous research has demonstrated the value of utilizing meta-forecasts (forecasts about what others in the group will predict) when aggregating group predictions. In this paper, we describe an extension to meta-forecasting and demonstrate the value of modeling the familiarity among a population’s members (its social network) and applying this model to forecast aggregation. A pair of studies demonstrates the value of taking this model into account, and the described technique produces aggregate forecasts for future events that are significantly better than the standard Wisdom of Crowds approach as well as previous meta-forecasting techniques.”
VIDEO:
Collective intelligence in crises
Buscher, Monika and Liegl, Michael in: Social collective intelligence. Computational Social Sciences Series: “New practices of social media use in emergency response seem to enable broader ‘situation awareness’ and new forms of crisis management. The scale and speed of innovation in this field engenders disruptive innovation or a reordering of social, political, economic practices of emergency response. By examining these dynamics with the concept of social collective intelligence, important opportunities and challenges can be examined. In this chapter we focus on socio-technical aspects of social collective intelligence in crises to discuss positive and negative frictions and avenues for innovation. Of particular interest are ways of bridging between collective intelligence in crises and official emergency response efforts.”
Minecraft: All of Denmark virtually recreated
BBC: “The whole of Denmark has been recreated, to scale, within the virtual world of Minecraft. The whole country has been faithfully reproduced in the hugely popular title’s building-block style by the Danish government. Danish residents are urged to “freely move around in Denmark” and “find your own residential area, to build and tear down”.
Around 50 million copies of Minecraft have been sold worldwide.Known as a “sandbox” game, the title allows players to exist in a virtual world, using building blocks to create everything from basic structures to entire worlds. Minecraft was launched in 2011 by independent Swedish developer Markus “Notch” Persson.
The Danish government said the maps were created to be used as an educational tool – suggesting “virtual field trips” to hard-to-reach parts of the country.
Flat roofs
There are no specific goals to achieve other than continued survival. Recreating real-world locations is of particular interest for many players. Last year an intern working with the UK’s Ordnance Survey team built geographically accurate landscapes covering 86,000 sq miles (224,000 sq km) of Britain.The Danish project is more ambitious however, with buildings and towns reproduced in more detail. The only difference, the team behind it said, was that all roofs were flat.
It has also banned the use of one of the game’s typical tools – dynamite. The full map download of Denmark will be available until 23 October.”
Digital Humanitarians
New book by Patrick Meier on how big data is changing humanitarian response: “The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information. This flash flood of information when amplified by social media and satellite imagery is increasingly referred to as Big Data—or Big Crisis Data. Making sense of Big Crisis Data during disasters is proving an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian organizations, which explains why they’re increasingly turning to Digital Humanitarians.
Who exactly are these Digital Humanitarians? They’re you, me, all of us. Digital Humanitarians are volunteers and professionals from the world over and from all walks of life. What do they share in common? The desire to make a difference, and they do that by rapidly mobilizing online in collaboration with international humanitarian organizations. They make sense of vast volumes of social media and satellite imagery in virtually real-time to support relief efforts worldwide. How? They craft and leverage ingenious crowdsourcing solutions with trail-blazing insights from artificial intelligence.
In sum, this book charts the sudden and spectacular rise of Digital Humanitarians by sharing their remarkable, real-life stories, highlighting how their humanity coupled with innovative solutions to Big Data is changing humanitarian response forever. Digital Humanitarians will make you think differently about what it means to be humanitarian and will invite you to join the journey online.
Clicker here to be notified when the book becomes available. For speaking requests, please email Speaking@iRevolution.net.”
Crowdsourcing medical expertise in near real time
Paper by Max H. Sims et al in Journal of Hospital Medicine: “Given the pace of discovery in medicine, accessing the literature to make informed decisions at the point of care has become increasingly difficult. Although the Internet creates unprecedented access to information, gaps in the medical literature and inefficient searches often leave healthcare providers’ questions unanswered. Advances in social computation and human computer interactions offer a potential solution to this problem. We developed and piloted the mobile application DocCHIRP, which uses a system of point-to-multipoint push notifications designed to help providers problem solve by crowdsourcing from their peers. Over the 244-day pilot period, 85 registered users logged 1544 page views and sent 45 consult questions. The median initial first response from the crowd occurred within 19 minutes. Review of the transcripts revealed several dominant themes, including complex medical decision making and inquiries related to prescription medication use. Feedback from the post-trial survey identified potential hurdles related to medical crowdsourcing, including a reluctance to expose personal knowledge gaps and the potential risk for “distracted doctoring.” Users also suggested program modifications that could support future adoption, including changes to the mobile interface and mechanisms that could expand the crowd of participating healthcare providers.”
Paying Farmers to Welcome Birds
Jim Robbins in The New York Times: “The Central Valley was once one of North America’s most productive wildlife habitats, a 450-mile-long expanse marbled with meandering streams and lush wetlands that provided an ideal stop for migratory shorebirds on their annual journeys from South America and Mexico to the Arctic and back.
Farmers and engineers have long since tamed the valley. Of the wetlands that existed before the valley was settled, about 95 percent are gone, and the number of migratory birds has declined drastically. But now an unusual alliance of conservationists, bird watchers and farmers have joined in an innovative plan to restore essential habitat for the migrating birds.
The program, called BirdReturns, starts with data from eBird, the pioneering citizen science project that asks birders to record sightings on a smartphone app and send the information to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in upstate New York.
By crunching data from the Central Valley, eBird can generate maps showing where virtually every species congregates in the remaining wetlands. Then, by overlaying those maps on aerial views of existing surface water, it can determine where the birds’ need for habitat is greatest….
BirdReturns is an example of the growing movement called reconciliation ecology, in which ecosystems dominated by humans are managed to increase biodiversity.
“It’s a new ‘Moneyball,’ ” said Eric Hallstein, an economist with the Nature Conservancy and a designer of the auctions, referring to the book and movie about the Oakland Athletics’ data-driven approach to baseball. “We’re disrupting the conservation industry by taking a new kind of data, crunching it differently and contracting differently.”
The Transformative Impact of Data and Communication on Governance
Steven Livingston at Brookings: “How do digital technologies affect governance in areas of limited statehood – places and circumstances characterized by the absence of state provisioning of public goods and the enforcement of binding rules with a monopoly of legitimate force? In the first post in this series I introduced the limited statehood concept and then described the tremendous growth in mobile telephony, GIS, and other technologies in the developing world. In the second post I offered examples of the use of ICT in initiatives intended to fill at least some of the governance vacuum created by limited statehood. With mobile phones, for example, farmers are informed of market conditions, have access to liquidity through M-Pesa and similar mobile money platforms….
This brings to mind another type of ICT governance initiative. Rather than fill in for or even displace the state some ICT initiatives can strengthen governance capacity. Digital government – the use of digital technology by the state itself — is one important possibility. Other initiatives strengthen the state by exerting pressure. Countries with weak governance sometimes take the form of extractive states or those, which cater to the needs of an elite, leaving the majority of the population in poverty and without basic public services. This is what Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson call extractive political and economic institutions. Inclusive states, on the other hand, are pluralistic, bound by the rule of law, respectful of property rights, and, in general, accountable. Accountability mechanisms such as a free press and competitive multiparty elections are instrumental to discourage extractive institutions. What ICT-based initiatives might lend a hand in strengthening accountability? We can point to three examples.
Example One: Using ICT to Protect Human Rights
Nonstate actors now use commercial, high-resolution remote sensing satellites to monitor weapons programs and human rights violations. Amnesty International’s Remote Sensing for Human Rights offers one example, and Satellite Sentinel offers another. Both use imagery from DigitalGlobe, an American remote sensing and geospatial content company. Other organizations have used commercially available remote sensing imagery to monitor weapons proliferation. The Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based NGO, revealed the Iranian nuclear weapons program in 2003 using commercial satellite imagery…
Example Two: Crowdsourcing Election Observation
Others have used mobile phones and GIS to crowdsource election observation. For the 2011 elections in Nigeria, The Community Life Project, a civil society organization, created ReclaimNaija, an elections process monitoring system that relied on GIS and amateur observers with mobile phones to monitor the elections. Each of the red dots represents an aggregation of geo-located incidents reported to the ReclaimNaija platform. In a live map, clicking on a dot disaggregates the reports, eventually taking the reader to individual reports. Rigorous statistical analysis of ReclaimNaija results and the elections suggest it contributed to the effectiveness of the election process.
ReclaimNaija: Election Incident Reporting System Map
Example Three: Using Genetic Analysis to Identify War Crimes
In recent years, more powerful computers have led to major breakthroughs in biomedical science. The reduction in cost of analyzing the human genome has actually outpaced Moore’s Law. This has opened up new possibilities for the use of genetic analysis in forensic anthropology. In Guatemala, the Balkans, Argentina, Peru and in several other places where mass executions and genocides took place, forensic anthropologists are using genetic analysis to find evidence that is used to hold the killers – often state actors – accountable…”
In Austria, council uses app to crowdsource community issues
Springwise: “Civic authorities can’t be everywhere at once and often rely on citizens to inform them of the improvements that need making. The NYPD already launched its own crowdsourcing crime reports app, and now the Bürgerforum Vorarlberg mobile app is enabling citizens to flag community issues that need addressing by sending photos and text direct to the council.
Available for all residents to download from the App Store and Google Play, the app has been developed by Vorarlberg news outlets VN and Vol.at. Users who have found a problem on the streets of the Austrian province can take a photo and add a caption, while the app automatically adds a geolocation tag. The issue is then added to a map of complaints and concerns filed by other residents. The idea is that local authorities can then easily see the issues that need to be dealt with.
Website: www.buergerforum.vol.at
Contact: www.twitter.com/vorarlberg“
Effective metrics for measurement and target setting in online citizen engagement
Mathew Crozier at Bang the Table: “Target setting and measurement are arguably the most important aspects of any engagement process. If we are unable to properly understand the results, then have we really respected the community’s time and effort contributing to our project?
In building the latest version of the EngagementHQ software we not only thought about new tools and ways to engage the community, we also watched the ways our clients had been using the reports and set ourselves to thinking about how we could build a set of metrics for target setting and the measurement of results that will remain relevant as we add more and more functionality to EngagementHQ.
Things have changed a lot since we designed our old reports. You can now get information from your community using forums, guestbooks, a story tool, interactive mapping, surveys, quick polls, submission forms, a news feed with discussions or the QandA tool. You can provide information to the community not just through library, dates, photos and FAQs but also using videos, link boxes and embedded content from all over the web.
Our old reports could tell you that 600 people had viewed the documents and it could tell you that 70 people had read the FAQs but you could not tell if they were the same people so you didn’t really know how many people had accessed information through your site. Generally we used those who had viewed documents in the library as a proxy but as time goes on our more engaging clients are communicating less and less through documents and more through other channels.
Similarly, whilst registrations were a good proxy for engagement (why else would you sign up?), it was failing to keep pace with the technology. You can now configure all our tools to require sign up or to be exempt from it these days so the proxy doesn’t hold. Moreover, many of our clients bulk load groups into the database and therefore inflate the registrations number.
What we came up with was a simple solution. We would calculate Aware, Informed and Engaged cohorts in the reports.
Aware – a measure of the number of people who have visited your project;
Informed – a measure of the visitors who have clicked to access further information resources, to learn more;
Engaged – a measure of the number of people who have given you feedback using any of the means available on the site.”
In building the latest version of the EngagementHQ software we not only thought about new tools and ways to engage the community, we also watched the ways our clients had been using the reports and set ourselves to thinking about how we could build a set of metrics for target setting and the measurement of results that will remain relevant as we add more and more functionality to EngagementHQ.
Things have changed a lot since we designed our old reports. You can now get information from your community using forums, guestbooks, a story tool, interactive mapping, surveys, quick polls, submission forms, a news feed with discussions or the QandA tool. You can provide information to the community not just through library, dates, photos and FAQs but also using videos, link boxes and embedded content from all over the web.
Our old reports could tell you that 600 people had viewed the documents and it could tell you that 70 people had read the FAQs but you could not tell if they were the same people so you didn’t really know how many people had accessed information through your site. Generally we used those who had viewed documents in the library as a proxy but as time goes on our more engaging clients are communicating less and less through documents and more through other channels.
Similarly, whilst registrations were a good proxy for engagement (why else would you sign up?), it was failing to keep pace with the technology. You can now configure all our tools to require sign up or to be exempt from it these days so the proxy doesn’t hold. Moreover, many of our clients bulk load groups into the database and therefore inflate the registrations number.
What we came up with was a simple solution. We would calculate Aware, Informed and Engaged cohorts in the reports.
Aware – a measure of the number of people who have visited your project;
Informed – a measure of the visitors who have clicked to access further information resources, to learn more;
Engaged – a measure of the number of people who have given you feedback using any of the means available on the site.”