Liesbet van Zoonen in Government Information Quarterly: “In this paper a framework is constructed to hypothesize if and how smart city technologies and urban big data produce privacy concerns among the people in these cities (as inhabitants, workers, visitors, and otherwise). The framework is built on the basis of two recurring dimensions in research about people’s concerns about privacy: one dimensions represents that people perceive particular data as more personal and sensitive than others, the other dimension represents that people’s privacy concerns differ according to the purpose for which data is collected, with the contrast between service and surveillance purposes most paramount. These two dimensions produce a 2 × 2 framework that hypothesizes which technologies and data-applications in smart cities are likely to raise people’s privacy concerns, distinguishing between raising hardly any concern (impersonal data, service purpose), to raising controversy (personal data, surveillance purpose). Specific examples from the city of Rotterdam are used to further explore and illustrate the academic and practical usefulness of the framework. It is argued that the general hypothesis of the framework offers clear directions for further empirical research and theory building about privacy concerns in smart cities, and that it provides a sensitizing instrument for local governments to identify the absence, presence, or emergence of privacy concerns among their citizens….(More)”
Crowdsourcing privacy policy analysis: Potential, challenges and best practices
Paper by Florian Schaub, Travis D. Breaux, and Norman Sadeh: “Privacy policies are supposed to provide transparency about a service’s data practices and help consumers make informed choices about which services to entrust with their personal information. In practice, those privacy policies are typically long and complex documents that are largely ignored by consumers. Even for regulators and data protection authorities privacy policies are difficult to assess at scale. Crowdsourcing offers the potential to scale the analysis of privacy policies with microtasks, for instance by assessing how specific data practices are addressed in privacy policies or extracting information about data practices of interest, which can then facilitate further analysis or be provided to users in more effective notice formats. Crowdsourcing the analysis of complex privacy policy documents to non-expert crowdworkers poses particular challenges. We discuss best practices, lessons learned and research challenges for crowdsourcing privacy policy analysis….(More)”
How A Videogame Can Be A Source For Innovation
Jiwon Kim at PSFK: “The nonprofit Games For Change has a mission to utilize games to change the world. More specifically, it’s to facilitate “the creation and distribution of social impact games that serve as critical tools in humanitarian and educational efforts.”….PSFK decided to explore the three finalists up to win the award for the most innovative game of 2016:
1. Life is Strange: This game is comprised of five episodes that allow the gamer to turn back the time and change a chain of events. The gamers follow the protagonist, Maxine, as she uses her power to rewind time to save her friends and her town. This game is innovative in the sense that gamers intimately interact with this intricate plot while exploring important issues such as suicide, substance issues and relationships. The game is like a beautiful animated movie with great music, except the gamer decides the ending.
2. That Dragon, Cancer: The game’s creator, Ryan Green, is a programmer who wanted to share his experience of raising a young son struggling with cancer. The narrative video game retells how Ryan’s son and the rest of his family went on an emotional roller coaster ride that lasted years. Unfortunately, his son passed away but the Green family hopes that this game provides a deep insight into this difficult journey and dealing with feelings of hope and loss. The game brings in a new perspective and a new medium for intimate stories to be shared.
3. Lumino City: This game is entirely handcrafted with paper, miniature lights and motors. Lumino City is a beautiful 10-foot high city that serves as the setting of an exciting adventure. Gamers get to be Lumi, the protagonist, as she goes off on a journey to find her grandfather. Everything about this game is innovative in the sense that the creators fuse the digital world and traditional arts and crafts together….(More).
Social Networks and Protest Participation: Evidence from 93 Million Twitter Users
Paper by Jennifer Larson et al for Political Networks Workshops & Conference 2016: “Pinning down the role of social ties in the decision to protest has been notoriously elusive, largely due to data limitations. The era of social media and its global use by protesters offers an unprecedented opportunity to observe real-time social ties and online behavior, though often without an attendant measure of real-world behavior. We collect data on Twitter activity during the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protests in Paris which, unusually, record both real-world protest attendance and high-resolution network structure. We specify a theory of participation in which an individual’s decision depends on her exposure to others’ intentions, and network position determines exposure. Our findings are strong and consistent with this theory, showing that, relative to comparable Twitter users, protesters are significantly more connected to one another via direct, indirect, triadic, and reciprocated ties. These results offer the first large-scale empirical support for the claim that social network structure influences protest participation….(More)’
The Politics of Mapping Platforms: Participatory Radiation Mapping after the Fukushima Daiichi Disaster
Paper by Jean-Christophe Plantin: “The release of the Google Maps API in 2005 spurred a trend of mapping mashups, adding cartography to online participatory culture. This article will present how the affordances of these “platforms” give shape to the online participation of concerned citizens willing to access information during an environmental crisis. Based on the analysis of the radiation mashups created after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in 2011, this article will highlight two types of online participation. First, participation as data extraction, where concerned actors either monitored data using Geiger counters or extracted and republished data from official websites. Second, participation as data aggregation, where maps were used to display and compare radiation measurements from official or crowdsourced venues. The conclusion will highlight the necessity to study how online platforms assign a place and temporality to online participation….(More)”
IRS Unleashes Flood of Searchable Charity Data
Peter Olsen-Phillips in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “The Internal Revenue Service opened a gusher of information on nonprofits Wednesday by making electronically filed Form 990s available in bulk and in a machine-friendly format.
The material will be available through the Public Data Sets area of Amazon Web Services. It will also include information from digital versions of the 990-EZ form filed by smaller nonprofits and form 990-PFs filed by private foundations.
The change means the public will have quicker and more in-depth access to the 990, the primary disclosure document for and main source of information on tax-exempt organizations. The form includes data on groups’ finances, board members, executive pay, fundraising expenses, and other aspects of their operations.
The filings were previously made public as PDF documents, requiring costly manual entry or imprecise character-recognition technology to extract the data in bulk and make it searchable. Now the information can be downloaded and parsed for free by anyone with a computer.
“With e-file data, you can easily and precisely extract individual items on the form,” Carl Malamud, an open-government advocate and the president of Public.Resource.org, wrote in an email. The nonprofit works to make public information more accessible, and Mr. Malamud has been at the forefront of efforts to liberate data on the nonprofit sector.
…Despite the enhanced transparency, much nonprofit data will remain hard to find and laborious to analyze, as nearly a third of all 990s were filed on paper in 2015.
Mr. McLean said it’s mainly smaller nonprofits that opt to file a paper 990 with the IRS, adding that he hopes recent legislative efforts to require mandatory electronic filing gain traction….(More)”.
Evolving the IRB: Building Robust Review for Industry Research
Molly Jackman & Lauri Kanerva at Wash. & Lee L. Rev. Online : “Increasingly, companies are conducting research so that they can make informed decisions about what products to build and what features to change.These data-driven insights enable companies to make responsible decisions that will improve peoples’ experiences with their products. Importantly, companies must also be responsible in how they conduct research. Existing ethical guidelines for research do not always robustly address the considerations that industry researchers face. For this reason, companies should develop principles and practices around research that are appropriate to the environments in which they operate,taking into account the values set out in law and ethics. This paper describes the research review process designed and implemented at Facebook, including the training employees receive, and the steps involved in evaluating proposed research. We emphasize that there is no one-size-fits-all model of research review that can be applied across companies, and that processes should be designed to fit the contexts in which the research is taking place. However, we hope that general principles can be extracted from Facebook’s process that will inform other companies as they develop frameworks for research review that serve their needs….(More)”.
Revealing Cultural Ecosystem Services through Instagram Images
Paper by Paulina Guerrero, Maja Steen Møller, Anton Stahl Olafsson, and Bernhard Snizek on “The Potential of Social Media Volunteered Geographic Information for Urban Green Infrastructure Planning and Governance”: “With the prevalence of smartphones, new ways of engaging citizens and stakeholders in urban planning and governance are emerging. The technologies in smartphones allow citizens to act as sensors of their environment, producing and sharing rich spatial data useful for new types of collaborative governance set-ups. Data derived from Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) can support accessible, transparent, democratic, inclusive, and locally-based governance situations of interest to planners, citizens, politicians, and scientists. However, there are still uncertainties about how to actually conduct this in practice. This study explores how social media VGI can be used to document spatial tendencies regarding citizens’ uses and perceptions of urban nature with relevance for urban green space governance. Via the hashtag #sharingcph, created by the City of Copenhagen in 2014, VGI data consisting of geo-referenced images were collected from Instagram, categorised according to their content and analysed according to their spatial distribution patterns. The results show specific spatial distributions of the images and main hotspots. Many possibilities and much potential of using VGI for generating, sharing, visualising and communicating knowledge about citizens’ spatial uses and preferences exist, but as a tool to support scientific and democratic interaction, VGI data is challenged by practical, technical and ethical concerns. More research is needed in order to better understand the usefulness and application of this rich data source to governance….(More)”
Customers, Users or Citizens? Inclusion, Spatial Data and Governance in the Smart City
Paper by Linnet Taylor, Christine Richter, Shazade Jameson and Carmen Perez de Pulgar: “This report discusses the use and governance of spatial data in Amsterdam’s smart city projects. How much does spatial data tell the city about its people, and how is that likely to change in the next decade? The project focuses especially on those who may be marginalised or challenged by increasing visibility due to the use of big data in the future smart city: various groups were interviewed including immigrants, children, sex workers, opt-outs of smart technologies, and technology developers. They were asked how they felt about their personal ‘data-sphere’, the level of data-awareness and the kind of consultation they would like to see as citizens of a smart city, and how they felt about increasing interaction between the city and private-sector partners around digital data. The report presents a social roadmap for the datafied city’s future, and addresses the question of how the city can build an inclusive and responsive spatial data governance infrastructure….(More)”
Digital Government: overcoming the systemic failure of transformation
Paul Waller and Vishanth Weerakkody: “This Working Paper contains propositions regarding the use of digital technology to “transform” government that significantly conflict with received wisdom in academia and governments across the world. It counters assertions made in countless political, official and commercial statements and reports produced over past decades….
The “transformation of government” has often been proposed as an objective of e-government; frequently presented as a phase in stage models following the provision online of information and transactions. Yet in literature or official documents there is no established definition of transformation as applied to government. Implicitly or explicitly, it mostly refers to a change in organisational form, signalled by the terms “joining-up” or “integration”, of government. In some work,
In some work, transformation is limited to changing processes or “services”— though “services” is a term unhelpfully applied to a multitude of entities. There is in academic or other literature little evidence of any type of “transformation” achieved beyond a change in an administrative process, nor a robust framework of benefits one might deliver. This begs the questions of what it actually means in reality and why it might be a desired goal.
In essence, what we aim to do in this paper is to develop a structured frame of reference for making sense of how information and communications technologies (ICT), in all their forms, really fit within the world of government and public administration — exactly the challenge set by Professor Christopher Hood in his 2007 paper:
“But we need to have a way of assessing current developments in administrative technologies with those of other eras, such as development of telephones, cars, radios, and fingerprinting in police work in the early part of the twentieth century, or of exact methods of measurement on excise tax collection in the eighteenth century. And if the analysis of the changes such developments bring is to amount to anything more than a breathless tour d’horizon of the latest technological gizmos in public policy (much though governments themselves have a liking for that sort of approach), it needs to be related to some foundational analysis that is, in some way, technology-free and rooted in the nature of government as a social and legal phenomenon.”
After a brief historical review, the paper starts by considering what governments and public administrations actually do: specifically, policy design and implementation through policy instruments. It redefines transformation in terms of changing the policy instrument set chosen to implement policy and sets out broad rationales for how and why ICT can enable this. It proposes a frame of reference of terminology, concepts and objects that enable the examination of not only such transformation, but e-government in general as it has developed over two decades. …(More)”