Paper by Johns,Melissa Marie and Saltane,Valentina for the World Bank: “… presents a new database of indicators measuring the extent to which rulemaking processes are transparent and participatory across 185 countries. The data look at how citizen engagement happens in practice, including when and how governments open the policy-making process to public input. The data also capture the use of ex ante assessments to determine the possible cost of compliance with a proposed new regulation, the likely administrative burden of enforcing the regulation, and its potential environmental and social impacts. The data show that citizens have more opportunities to participate directly in the rulemaking process in developed economies than in developing ones. Differences are also apparent among regions: rulemaking processes are significantly less transparent and inclusive in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia on average than in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development high-income countries, Europe and Central Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific. In addition, ex ante impact assessments are much more common among higher-income economies than among lower-income ones. And greater citizen engagement in rulemaking is associated with higher-quality regulation, stronger democratic regimes, and less corrupt institutions….(More)”
Playful Cities: Crowdsourcing Urban Happiness with Web Games
Daniele Quercia in Built Environment: “It is well known that the layout and configuration of urban space plugs directly into our sense of community wellbeing. The twentieth-century city planner Kevin Lynch showed that a city’s dwellers create their own personal ‘mental maps’ of the city based on features such as the routes they use and the areas they visit. Maps that are easy to remember and navigate bring comfort and ultimately contribute to people’s wellbeing. Unfortunately, traditional social science experiments (including those used to capture mental maps) take time, are costly, and cannot be conducted at city scale. This paper describes how, starting in mid-2012, a team of researchers from a variety of disciplines set about tackling these issues. They were able to translate a few traditional experiments into 1-minute ‘web games with a purpose’. This article describes those games, the main insights they offer, their theoretical implications for urban planning, and their practical implications for improvements in navigation technologies….(More)”
Measuring Scientific Impact Beyond Citation Counts
Robert M. Patton, Christopher G. Stahl and Jack C. Wells at DLib Magazine: “Measuring scientific progress remains elusive. There is an intuitive understanding that, in general, science is progressing forward. New ideas and theories are formed, older ideas and theories are confirmed, rejected, or modified. Progress is made. But, questions such as how is it made, by whom, how broadly, or how quickly present significant challenges. Historically, scientific publications reference other publications if the former publication in some way shaped the work that was performed. In other words, one publication “impacted” a latter one. The implication of this impact revolves around the intellectual content of the idea, theory, or conclusion that was formed. Several metrics such as h-index or journal impact factor (JIF) are often used as a means to assess whether an author, article, or journal creates an “impact” on science. The implied statement behind high values for such metrics is that the work must somehow be valuable to the community, which in turn implies that the author, article, or journal somehow has influenced the direction, development, or progress of what others in that field do. Unfortunately, the drive for increased publication revenue, research funding, or global recognition has lead to a variety of external factors completely unrelated to the quality of the work that can be used to manipulate key metric values. In addition, advancements in computing and data sciences field have further altered the meaning of impact on science.
The remainder of this paper will highlight recent advancements in both cultural and technological factors that now influence scientific impact as well as suggest new factors to be leveraged through full content analysis of publications….(More)”
Leveraging Mixed Expertise in Crowdsourcing
Dissertation by David Merritt: “Crowdsourcing systems promise to leverage the “wisdom of crowds” to help solve many kinds of problems that are difficult to solve using only computers. Although a crowd of people inherently represents a diversity of skill levels, knowledge, and opinions, crowdsourcing system designers typically view this diversity as noise and effectively cancel it out by aggregating responses. However, we believe that by embracing crowd workers’ diverse expertise levels, system designers can better leverage that knowledge to increase the wisdom of crowds. In this thesis, we propose solutions to a limitation of current crowdsourcing approaches: not accounting for a range of expertise levels in the crowd. The current body of work in crowdsourcing does not systematically examine this, suggesting that researchers may not believe the benefits of using mixed expertise warrants the complexities of supporting it. This thesis presents two systems, Escalier and Kurator, to show that leveraging mixed expertise is a worthwhile endeavor because it materially benefits system performance, at scale, for various types of problems. We also demonstrate an effective technique, called expertise layering, to incorporate mixed expertise into crowdsourcing systems. Finally, we show that leveraging mixed expertise enables researchers to use crowdsourcing to address new types of problems….(More)”
Informed Choice? Motivations and methods of data usage among public officials in India
Report by Rwitwika Bhattacharya and Mohitkumar Daga: “The importance of data in informing the policy-making process is being increasingly realized across the world. With India facing significant developmental challenges, use of data offers an important opportunity to improve the quality of public services. However, lack of formal structures to internalize a data-informed decision-making process impedes the path to robust policy formation. This paper seeks to highlight these challenges through a case study of data dashboard implementation in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The study suggests the importance of capacity building, improvement of data collection and engagement of non-governmental players as measures to address issues….(More)”
Designing the Next Generation of Open Data Policy
Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst at the Open Data Charter Blog: “The international Open Data Charter has emerged from the global open data community as a galvanizing document to place open government data directly in the hands of citizens and organizations. To drive this process forward, and ensure that the outcomes are both systemic and transformational, new open data policy needs to be based on evidence of how and when open data works in practice. To support this work, the GovLab, in collaboration with Omidyar Network, has recently completed research which provides vital evidence of open data projects around the world, including an analysis of 19 in-depth, impact-focused case studies and a key findings paper. All of the research is now available in an eBook published by O’Reilly Media.
The research found that open data is making an impact in four core ways, including:…(More)”
Responsible Data in Agriculture
Report by Lindsay Ferris and Zara Rahman for GODAN: “The agriculture sector is creating increasing amounts of data, from many different sources. From tractors equipped with GPS tracking, to open data released by government ministries, data is becoming ever more valuable, as agricultural business development and global food policy decisions are being made based upon data. But the sector is also home to severe resource inequality. The largest agricultural companies make billions of dollars per year, in comparison with subsistence farmers growing just enough to feed themselves, or smallholder farmers who grow enough to sell on a year-by-year basis. When it comes to data and technology, these differences in resources translate to stark power imbalances in data access and use. The most well resourced actors are able to delve into new technologies and make the most of those insights, whereas others are unable to take any such risks or divert any of their limited resources. Access to and use of data has radically changed the business models and behaviour of some of those well resourced actors, but in contrast, those with fewer resources are receiving the same, limited access to information that they always have.
In this paper, we have approached these issues from a responsible data perspective, drawing upon the experience of the Responsible Data community1 who over the past three years have created tools, questions and resources to deal with the ethical, legal, privacy and security challenges that come from new uses of data in various sectors. This piece aims to provide a broad overview of some of the responsible data challenges facing these actors, with a focus on the power imbalance between actors, and looking into how that inequality affects behaviour when it comes to the agricultural data ecosystem. What are the concerns of those with limited resources, when it comes to this new and rapidly changing data environment? In addition, what are the ethical grey areas or uncertainties that we need to address in the future? As a first attempt to answer these questions, we spoke to 14 individuals with various perspectives on the sector to understand what the challenges are for them and for the people they work with. We also carried out desk research to dive deeper into these issues, and we provide here an analysis of our findings and responsible data challenges….(More)”
Crowdsourcing: It Matters Who the Crowd Are
Paper by Alexis Comber, Peter Mooney, Ross S. Purves, Duccio Rocchini, and Ariane Walz: “Volunteered geographical information (VGI) and citizen science have become important sources data for much scientific research. In the domain of land cover, crowdsourcing can provide a high temporal resolution data to support different analyses of landscape processes. However, the scientists may have little control over what gets recorded by the crowd, providing a potential source of error and uncertainty. This study compared analyses of crowdsourced land cover data that were contributed by different groups, based on nationality (labelled Gondor and Non-Gondor) and on domain experience (labelled Expert and Non-Expert). The analyses used a geographically weighted model to generate maps of land cover and compared the maps generated by the different groups. The results highlight the differences between the maps how specific land cover classes were under- and over-estimated. As crowdsourced data and citizen science are increasingly used to replace data collected under the designed experiment, this paper highlights the importance of considering between group variations and their impacts on the results of analyses. Critically, differences in the way that landscape features are conceptualised by different groups of contributors need to be considered when using crowdsourced data in formal scientific analyses. The discussion considers the potential for variation in crowdsourced data, the relativist nature of land cover and suggests a number of areas for future research. The key finding is that the veracity of citizen science data is not the critical issue per se. Rather, it is important to consider the impacts of differences in the semantics, affordances and functions associated with landscape features held by different groups of crowdsourced data contributors….(More)”
How Citizen Attachment to Neighborhoods Helps to Improve Municipal Services and Public Spaces
Paper by Daniel O’Brien, Dietmar Offenhuber, Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Melissa Sands, and Eric Gordon: “What motivates people to contact their local governments with reports about street light outages, potholes, graffiti, and other deteriorations in public spaces? Current efforts to improve government interactions with constituents operate on the premise that citizens who make such reports are motivated by broad civic values. In contrast, our recent research demonstrates that such citizens are primarily motivated by territoriality – that is, attachments to the spaces where they live. Our research focuses on Boston’s “311 system,” which provides telephone hotlines and web channels through which constituents can request non-emergency government services.
Although our study focuses on 311 users in Boston, it holds broader implications for more than 400 U.S. municipalities that administer similar systems. And our results encourage a closer look at the drivers of citizen participation in many “coproduction programs” – programs that involve people in the design and implementation of government services. Currently, 311 is just one example of government efforts to use technology to involve constituents in joint efforts.
Territorial Ties and Civic Engagement
The concept of territoriality originated in studies of animal behavior – such as bears marking trees in the forest or lions and hyenas fighting over a kill. Human beings also need to manage the ownership of objects and spaces, but social psychologists have demonstrated that human territoriality, whether at home, the workplace, or a neighborhood, entails more than the defense of objects or spaces against others. It includes maintenance and caretaking, and even extends to items shared with others….(More)”
Law in the Future
Paper by Benjamin Alarie, Anthony Niblett and Albert Yoon: “The set of tasks and activities in which humans are strictly superior to computers is becoming vanishingly small. Machines today are not only performing mechanical or manual tasks once performed by humans, they are also performing thinking tasks, where it was long believed that human judgment was indispensable. From self-driving cars to self-flying planes; and from robots performing surgery on a pig to artificially intelligent personal assistants, so much of what was once unimaginable is now reality. But this is just the beginning of the big data and artificial intelligence revolution. Technology continues to improve at an exponential rate. How will the big data and artificial intelligence revolutions affect law? We hypothesize that the growth of big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning will have important effects that will fundamentally change the way law is made, learned, followed, and practiced. It will have an impact on all facets of the law, from the production of micro-directives to the way citizens learn of their legal obligations. These changes will present significant challenges to human lawmakers, judges, and lawyers. While we do not attempt to address all these challenges, we offer a short and positive preview of the future of law: a world of self-driving law, of legal singularity, and of the democratization of the law…(More)”