Why its Time for a New Approach to Civic Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Anthony Zacharzewski: “…It’s true that there has been some recent innovation around this theme, including tools designed to support audio and video-based deliberation…However, the needs of modern participation and democracy are changing in a far more fundamental way, and the civic tech field needs to do more to keep pace.

For years, civic tech has focused on the things that digital tools do well – data, numbers, and text. It has often emphasised written comments, voting ideas up and down, and the statistical analysis of responses. And perhaps most tellingly, it has focused on single events, whether participatory budgeting processes or major events such as the Conference on the Future of Europe. 

Many of these approaches are essentially digitised versions of physical processes, but we are starting to realise now that one-off processes are not enough. Rather, civic tech tools need to bring people into longer-term conversations, with wider participation. 

This is where the next generation of civic tech tools needs to focus. 

Today, it is easy for a participant in a participatory budgeting process to use a polished digital interface to suggest an idea or to vote.

However, nothing on these platforms enables people to stay in the democratic conversation once they have had their say, to stay informed on the issues in their area, or to find opportunities to participate elsewhere. Even platforms such as Decidim and Consul, which allow people to participate in multiple different processes, still have a fundamentally process- and discussion-based model…(More)”

Five-year campaign breaks science’s citation paywall

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Dalmeet Singh Chawla: “The more than 60 million scientific-journal papers indexed by Crossref — the database that registers DOIs, or digital object identifiers, for many of the world’s academic publications — now contain reference lists that are free to access and reuse.

The milestone, announced on Twitter on 18 August, is the result of an effort by the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), launched in 2017. Open-science advocates have for years campaigned to make papers’ citation data accessible under liberal copyright licences so that they can be studied, and those analyses shared. Free access to citations enables researchers to identify research trends, lets them conduct studies on which areas of research need funding, and helps them to spot when scientists are manipulating citation counts….

The move means that bibliometricians, scientometricians and information scientists will be able to reuse citation data in any way they please under the most liberal copyright licence, called CC0. This, in turn, allows other researchers to build on their work.

Before I4OC, researchers generally had to obtain permission to access data from major scholarly databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, and weren’t able to share the samples.

However, the opening up of Crossref articles’ citations doesn’t mean that all the world’s scholarly content now has open references. Although most major international academic publishers, including Elsevier, Springer Nature (which publishes Nature) and Taylor & Francis, index their papers on Crossref, some do not. These often include regional and non-English-language publications.

I4OC co-founder Dario Taraborelli, who is science programme officer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and based in San Francisco, California, says that the next challenge will be to encourage publishers who don’t already deposit reference data in Crossref to do so….(More)”.

Rethinking Intelligence In A More-Than-Human World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Amanda Rees: “We spend a lot of time debating intelligence — what does it mean? Who has it? And especially lately — can technology help us create or enhance it?

But for a species that relies on its self-declared “wisdom” to differentiate itself from all other animals, a species that consistently defines itself as intelligent and rational, Homo sapiens tends to do some strikingly foolish things — creating the climate crisis, for example, or threatening the survival of our world with nuclear disaster, or creating ever-more-powerful and pervasive algorithms. 

If we are in fact to be “wise,” we need to learn to manage a range of different and potentially existential risks relating to (and often created by) our technological interventions in the bio-social ecologies we inhabit. We need, in short, to rethink what it means to be intelligent. 

Points Of Origin

Part of the problem is that we think of both “intelligence” and “agency” as objective, identifiable, measurable human characteristics. But they’re not. At least in part, both concepts are instead the product of specific historical circumstances. “Agency,” for example, emerges with the European Enlightenment, perhaps best encapsulated in Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man.” Writing in the late 15th century, Mirandola revels in the fact that to humanity alone “it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills. … On man … the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit.”

In other words, what makes humans unique is their possession of the God-given capacity to exercise free will — to take rational, self-conscious action in order to achieve specific ends. Today, this remains the model of agency that underpins significant and influential areas of public discourse. It resonates strongly with neoliberalist reforms of economic policy, for example, as well as with debates on public health responsibility and welfare spending. 

A few hundred years later, the modern version of “intelligence” appears, again in Europe, where it came to be understood as a capacity for ordered, rational, problem-solving, pattern-recognizing cognition. Through the work of the eugenicist Francis Galton, among others, intelligence soon came to be regarded as an innate quality possessed by individuals to greater or lesser degree, which could be used to sort populations into hierarchies of social access and economic reward…(More)”.

Unlocking the Potential of Open 990 Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cinthia Schuman Ottinger & Jeff Williams: “As the movement to expand public use of nonprofit data collected by the Internal Revenue Service advances, it’s a good time to review how far the social sector has come and how much work remains to reach the full potential of this treasure trove…Organizations have employed open Form 990 data in numerous ways, including to:

  • Create new tools for donors.For instance, the Nonprofit Aid Visualizer, a partnership between Candid and Vanguard Charitable, uses open 990 data to find communities vulnerable to COVID-19, and help address both their immediate needs and long-term recovery. Another tool, COVID-19 Urgent Service Provider Support Tool, developed by the consulting firm BCT Partners, uses 990 data to direct donors to service providers that are close to communities most affected by COVID-19.
  • More efficiently prosecute charitable fraud. This includes a campaign by the New York Attorney General’s Office that recovered $1.7 million from sham charities and redirected funds to legitimate groups.
  • Generate groundbreaking findings on fundraising, volunteers, equity, and management. A researcher at Texas Tech University, for example, explored more than a million e-filed 990s to overturn long-held assumptions about the role of cash in fundraising. He found that when nonprofits encourage noncash gifts as opposed to only cash contributions, financial contributions to those organizations increase over time.
  • Shed light on harmful practices that hurt the poor. A large-scale investigative analysis of nonprofit hospitals’ tax forms revealed that 45 percent of them sent a total of $2.7 billion in medical bills to patients whose incomes were likely low enough to qualify for free or discounted care. When this practice was publicly exposed, some hospitals reevaluated their practices and erased unpaid bills for qualifying patients. The expense of mining data like this previously made such research next to impossible.
  • Help donors make more informed giving decisions. In hopes of maximizing contributions to Ukrainian relief efforts, a record number of donors are turning to resources like Charity Navigator, which can now use open Form 990 data to evaluate and rate a large number of charities based on finances, governance, and other factors. At the same time, donors informed by open 990 data can seek more accountability from the organizations they support. For example, anti-corruption researchers scouring open 990 data and other records uncovered donations by Russian oligarchs aligned with President Putin. This pressured US nonprofits that accepted money from the oligarchs to disavow this funding…(More)”.

Community science draws on the power of the crowd

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Amber Dance: “In community science, also called participatory science, non-professionals contribute their time, energy or expertise to research. (The term ‘citizen science’ is also used but can be perceived as excluding non-citizens.)

Whatever name is used, the approach is more popular than ever and even has journals dedicated to it. The number of annual publications mentioning ‘citizen science’ went from 151 in 2015 to more than 640 in 2021, according to the Web of Science database. Researchers from physiologists to palaeontologists to astronomers are finding that harnessing the efforts of ordinary people is often the best route to the answers they seek.

“More and more funding organizations are actually promoting this type of participatory- and citizen-science data gathering,” says Bálint Balázs, managing director of the Environmental Social Science Research Group in Budapest, a non-profit company focusing on socio-economic research for sustainability.

Community science is also a great tool for outreach, and scientists often delight in interactions with amateur researchers. But it’s important to remember that community science is, foremost, a research methodology like any other, with its own requirements in terms of skill and effort.

“To do a good project, it does require an investment in time,” says Darlene Cavalier, founder of SciStarter, an online clearing house that links research-project leaders with volunteers. “It’s not something where you’re just going to throw up a Google form and hope for the best.” Although there are occasions when scientific data are freely and easily available, other projects create significant costs.

No matter what the topic or approach, people skills are crucial: researchers must identify and cultivate a volunteer community and provide regular feedback or rewards. With the right protocols and checks and balances, the quality of volunteer-gathered data often rivals or surpasses that achieved by professionals.

“There is a two-way learning that happens,” says Tina Phillips, assistant director of the Center for Engagement in Science and Nature at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “We all know that science is better when there are more voices, more perspectives.”…(More)”

A Prehistory of Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Kevin Driscoll: “Over the past few years, I’ve asked dozens of college students to write down, in a sentence or two, where the internet came from. Year after year, they recount the same stories about the US government, Silicon Valley, the military, and the threat of nuclear war. A few students mention the Department of Defense’s ARPANET by name. Several get the chronology wrong, placing the World Wide Web before the internet or expressing confusion about the invention of email. Others mention “tech wizards” or “geniuses” from Silicon Valley firms and university labs. No fewer than four students have simply written, “Bill Gates.”

Despite the internet’s staggering scale and global reach, its folk histories are surprisingly narrow. This mismatch reflects the uncertain definition of “the internet.” When nonexperts look for internet origin stories, they want to know about the internet as they know it, the internet they carry around in their pockets, the internet they turn to, day after day. Yet the internet of today is not a stable object with a single, coherent history. It is a dynamic socio-technical phenomenon that came into being during the 1990s, at the intersection of hundreds of regional, national, commercial, and cooperative networks—only one of which was previously known as “the internet.” In short, the best-known histories describe an internet that hasn’t existed since 1994. So why do my students continue to repeat stories from 25 years ago? Why haven’t our histories kept up?

The standard account of internet history took shape in the early 1990s, as a mixture of commercial online services, university networks, and local community networks mutated into something bigger, more commercial, and more accessible to the general public. As hype began to build around the “information superhighway,” people wanted a backstory. In countless magazines, TV news reports, and how-to books, the origin of the internet was traced back to ARPANET, the computer network created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency during the Cold War. This founding mythology has become a resource for advancing arguments on issues related to censorship, national sovereignty, cybersecurity, privacy, net neutrality, copyright, and more. But with only this narrow history of the early internet to rely on, the arguments put forth are similarly impoverished…(More)”.

Uncovering the genetic basis of mental illness requires data and tools that aren’t just based on white people

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Hailiang Huang: “Mental illness is a growing public health problem. In 2019, an estimated 1 in 8 people around the world were affected by mental disorders like depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. While scientists have long known that many of these disorders run in families, their genetic basis isn’t entirely clear. One reason why is that the majority of existing genetic data used in research is overwhelmingly from white people.

In 2003, the Human Genome Project generated the first “reference genome” of human DNA from a combination of samples donated by upstate New Yorkers, all of whom were of European ancestry. Researchers across many biomedical fields still use this reference genome in their work. But it doesn’t provide a complete picture of human genetics. Someone with a different genetic ancestry will have a number of variations in their DNA that aren’t captured by the reference sequence.

When most of the world’s ancestries are not represented in genomic data sets, studies won’t be able to provide a true representation of how diseases manifest across all of humanity. Despite this, ancestral diversity in genetic analyses hasn’t improved in the two decades since the Human Genome Project announced its first results. As of June 2021, over 80% of genetic studies have been conducted on people of European descent. Less than 2% have included people of African descent, even though these individuals have the most genetic variation of all human populations.

To uncover the genetic factors driving mental illness, I, Sinéad Chapman and our colleagues at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have partnered with collaborators around the world to launch Stanley Global, an initiative that seeks to collect a more diverse range of genetic samples from beyond the U.S. and Northern Europe, and train the next generation of researchers around the world. Not only does the genetic data lack diversity, but so do the tools and techniques scientists use to sequence and analyze human genomes. So we are implementing a new sequencing technology that addresses the inadequacies of previous approaches that don’t account for the genetic diversity of global populations…(More).

Cloud labs and remote research aren’t the future of science – they’re here

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Tom Ireland: “Cloud labs mean anybody, anywhere can conduct experiments by remote control, using nothing more than their web browser. Experiments are programmed through a subscription-based online interface – software then coordinates robots and automated scientific instruments to perform the experiment and process the data. Friday night is Emerald’s busiest time of the week, as scientists schedule experiments to run while they relax with their families over the weekend.

There are still some things robots can’t do, for example lifting giant carboys (containers for liquids) or unwrapping samples sent by mail, and there are a few instruments that just can’t be automated. Hence the people in blue coats, who look a little like pickers in an Amazon warehouse. It turns out that they are, in fact, mostly former Amazon employees.

Plugging an experiment into a browser forces researchers to translate the exact details of every step into unambiguous code

Emerald originally employed scientists and lab technicians to help the facility run smoothly, but they were creatively stifled with so little to do. Poaching Amazon employees has turned out to be an improvement. “We pay them twice what they were getting at Amazon to do something way more fulfilling than stuffing toilet paper into boxes,” says Frezza. “You’re keeping someone’s drug-discovery experiment running at full speed.”

Further south in the San Francisco Bay Area are two more cloud labs, run by the company Strateos. Racks of gleaming life science instruments – incubators, mixers, mass spectrometers, PCR machines – sit humming inside large Perspex boxes known as workcells. The setup is arguably even more futuristic than at Emerald. Here, reagents and samples whizz to the correct workcell on hi-tech magnetic conveyor belts and are gently loaded into place by dextrous robot arms. Researchers’ experiments are “delocalised”, as Strateos’s executive director of operations, Marc Siladi, puts it…(More)”.

The End of Real Social Networks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Daron Acemoglu: “Social media platforms are not only creating echo chambers, propagating falsehoods, and facilitating the circulation of extremist ideas. Previous media innovations, dating back at least to the printing press, did that, too, but none of them shook the very foundations of human communication and social interaction.

CAMBRIDGE – Not only are billions of people around the world glued to their mobile phones, but the information they consume has changed dramatically – and not for the better. On dominant social-media platforms like Facebook, researchers have documented that falsehoods spread faster and more widely than similar content that includes accurate information. Though users are not demanding misinformation, the algorithms that determine what people see tend to favor sensational, inaccurate, and misleading content, because that is what generates “engagement” and thus advertising revenue.

As the internet activist Eli Pariser noted in 2011, Facebook also creates filter bubbles, whereby individuals are more likely to be presented with content that reinforces their own ideological leanings and confirms their own biases. And more recent research has demonstrated that this process has a major influence on the type of information users see.

Even leaving aside Facebook’s algorithmic choices, the broader social-media ecosystem allows people to find subcommunities that align with their interests. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If you are the only person in your community with an interest in ornithology, you no longer have to be alone, because you can now connect with ornithology enthusiasts from around the world. But, of course, the same applies to the lone extremist who can now use the same platforms to access or propagate hate speech and conspiracy theories.

No one disputes that social-media platforms have been a major conduit for hate speech, disinformation, and propaganda. Reddit and YouTube are breeding grounds for right-wing extremism. The Oath Keepers used Facebook, especially, to organize their role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol. Former US President Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim tweets were found to have fueled violence against minorities in the US.

True, some find such observations alarmist, noting that large players like Facebook and YouTube (which is owned by Google/Alphabet) do much more to police hate speech and misinformation than their smaller rivals do, especially now that better moderation practices have been developed. Moreover, other researchers have challenged the finding that falsehoods spread faster on Facebook and Twitter, at least when compared to other media.

Still others argue that even if the current social-media environment is treacherous, the problem is transitory. After all, novel communication tools have always been misused. Martin Luther used the printing press to promote not just Protestantism but also virulent anti-Semitism. Radio proved to be a powerful tool in the hands of demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin in the US and the Nazis in Germany. Both print and broadcast outlets remain full of misinformation to this day, but society has adjusted to these media and managed to contain their negative effects…(More)”.

The Low Threshold for Face Recognition in New Delhi

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Varsha Bansal: “Indian law enforcement is starting to place huge importance on facial recognition technology. Delhi police, looking into identifying people involved in civil unrest in northern India in the past few years, said that they would consider 80 percent accuracy and above as a “positive” match, according to documents obtained by the Internet Freedom Foundation through a public records request.

Facial recognition’s arrival in India’s capital region marks the expansion of Indian law enforcement officials using facial recognition data as evidence for potential prosecution, ringing alarm bells among privacy and civil liberties experts. There are also concerns about the 80 percent accuracy threshold, which critics say is arbitrary and far too low, given the potential consequences for those marked as a match. India’s lack of a comprehensive data protection law makes matters even more concerning.

The documents further state that even if a match is under 80 percent, it would be considered a “false positive” rather than a negative, which would make that individual “subject to due verification with other corroborative evidence.”

“This means that even though facial recognition is not giving them the result that they themselves have decided is the threshold, they will continue to investigate,” says Anushka Jain, associate policy counsel for surveillance and technology with the IFF, who filed for this information. “This could lead to harassment of the individual just because the technology is saying that they look similar to the person the police are looking for.” She added that this move by the Delhi Police could also result in harassment of people from communities that have been historically targeted by law enforcement officials…(More)”