A Process Model for Crowdsourcing Design: A Case Study in Citizen Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Kazjon Grace et al in Design Computing and Cognition ’14: “Crowdsourcing design has been applied in various areas of graphic design, software design, and product design. This paper draws on those experiences and research in diversity, creativity and motivation to present a process model for crowdsourcing experience design. Crowdsourcing experience design for volunteer online communities serves two purposes: to increase the motivation of participants by making them stakeholders in the success of the project, and to increase the creativity of the design by increasing the diversity of expertise beyond experts in experience design. Our process model for crowdsourcing design extends the meta-design architecture, where for online communities is designed to be iteratively re-designed by its users. We describe how our model has been deployed and adapted to a citizen science project where nature preserve visitors can participate in the design of a system called NatureNet. The major contribution of this paper is a model for crowdsourcing experience design and a case study of how we have deployed it for the design and development of NatureNet….(More)”

 

A New Source of Data for Public Health Surveillance: Facebook Likes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Steven Gittelman et al in the Journal of Medical Internet Research: “The development of the Internet and the explosion of social media have provided many new opportunities for health surveillance. The use of the Internet for personal health and participatory health research has exploded, largely due to the availability of online resources and health care information technology applications [1–8]. These online developments, plus a demand for more timely, widely available, and cost-effective data, have led to new ways epidemiological data are collected, such as digital disease surveillance and Internet surveys [8–25]. Over the past 2 decades, Internet technology has been used to identify disease outbreaks, track the spread of infectious disease, monitor self-care practices among those with chronic conditions, and to assess, respond, and evaluate natural and artificial disasters at a population level [6,8,11,12,14,15,17,22,26–28]. Use of these modern communication tools for public health surveillance has proven to be less costly and more timely than traditional population surveillance modes (eg, mail surveys, telephone surveys, and face-to-face household surveys).

The Internet has spawned several sources of big data, such as Facebook [29], Twitter [30], Instagram [31], Tumblr [32], Google [33], and Amazon [34]. These online communication channels and market places provide a wealth of passively collected data that may be mined for purposes of public health, such as sociodemographic characteristics, lifestyle behaviors, and social and cultural constructs. Moreover, researchers have demonstrated that these digital data sources can be used to predict otherwise unavailable information, such as sociodemographic characteristics among anonymous Internet users [35–38]. For example, Goel et al [36] found no difference by demographic characteristics in the usage of social media and email. However, the frequency with which individuals accessed the Web for news, health care, and research was a predictor of gender, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment, potentially providing useful targeting information based on ethnicity and income [36]. Integrating these big data sources into the practice of public health surveillance is vital to move the field of epidemiology into the 21st century as called for in the 2012 US “Big Data Research and Development Initiative” [19,39].

Understanding how big data can be used to predict lifestyle behavior and health-related data is a step toward the use of these electronic data sources for epidemiologic needs…(More)”

Inspiring and Informing Citizens Online: A Media Richness Analysis of Varied Civic Education Modalities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Brinker, David and Gastil, John and Richards, Robert C. in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (Forthcoming): “Public deliberation on the Internet is a promising but unproven practice. Online deliberation can engage large numbers of citizens at relatively low cost, but it is unclear whether such programs have substantial civic impact. One factor in determining their effectiveness may be the communicative features of the online setting in which they occur. Within a Media Richness Theory framework, we conducted a quasi-experiment to assess the civic outcomes of interventions executed online by non-profit organizations prior to the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The results assess the impact of these interventions on issue knowledge and civic attitudes. Comparisons of the interventions illustrate the importance of considering media richness online, and our discussion considers the theoretical and practical implications of these findings….(More)”

Citizen Science for Citizen Access to Law

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael Curtotti, Wayne Weibel, Eric McCreath, Nicolas Ceynowa, Sara Frug, and Tom R Bruce: “This paper sits at the intersection of citizen access to law, legal informatics and plain language. The paper reports the results of a joint project of the Cornell University Legal Information Institute and the Australian National University which collected thousands of crowdsourced assessments of the readability of law through the Cornell LII site. The aim of the project is to enhance accuracy in the prediction of the readability of legal sentences. The study requested readers on legislative pages of the LII site to rate passages from the United States Code and the Code of Federal Regulations and other texts for readability and other characteristics. The research provides insight into who uses legal rules and how they do so. The study enables conclusions to be drawn as to the current readability of law and spread of readability among legal rules. The research is intended to enable the creation of a dataset of legal rules labelled by human judges as to readability. Such a dataset, in combination with machine learning, will assist in identifying factors in legal language which impede readability and access for citizens. As far as we are aware, this research is the largest ever study of readability and usability of legal language and the first research which has applied crowdsourcing to such an investigation. The research is an example of the possibilities open for enhancing access to law through engagement of end users in the online legal publishing environment for enhancement of legal accessibility and through collaboration between legal publishers and researchers….(More)”

Crowdsourcing Pedestrian and Cyclist Activity Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Amy Smith: “This paper considers how crowdsourcing applications and crowdsourced data are currently being applied, as well as potential new uses for active transportation research and planning efforts of various types. The objectives of this white paper are to review crowdsourced bicycle and pedestrian data resources and crowdsourcing tools; discuss potential planning implementations of crowdsourced data for a variety of bicycle and pedestrian project types; and provide examples of how crowdsourcing is currently being used by the planning community. Due to software application turnover, many of the examples provided describe tools that may no longer be in use, have evolved significantly, or have been/will eventually be depreciated with the advance of new technologies. This paper is not intended to be a comprehensive outline of crowdsourcing applications in the transportation planning profession or a dictionary of crowdsourcing system types, but rather a resource for those interested in using crowdsourcing systems in active transportation planning and research. (Full Paper)”

Innovation spaces: transforming humanitarian practice in the United Nations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Louise Bloom and Romy Faulkner at the Oxford Refugee Studies Centre: “Since 2009 there has been a growing interest in defining and operationalising innovation for use in the humanitarian context. The increase in scale of new crises, the urbanisation of many displaced populations, and stretched financing for humanitarian assistance are forcing international aid agencies to think and act in new ways. Along with other international humanitarian actors, several United Nations (UN) bodies are engaging with new tools and practices to bring innovation to the forefront of their work. Within these agencies, there has been a growing movement to establish ‘innovation spaces’ or ‘innovation labs’. These labs take different forms – some virtual, others physical – and each is created with its own motivations unique to the context in which it operates. Despite the variation, there is a growing trend in the UN system, and more broadly in the international humanitarian community, to create labs as a way to engage in and facilitate innovation practice. This research seeks to understand the way in which innovation labs across several UN agencies are being used to foster new ways of operating within the UN’s bureaucratic structures. We ask four key questions: What form do innovation labs in UN agencies take? What motivated their initiation? What are their aims and objectives? What impact have they had and how is the impact being measured? As innovation practice gains momentum, we reflect on the future of innovation spaces as a way to foster innovation within the UN system. We conclude with six key recommendations….(More)”

Sensor Law

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Sandra Braman: “For over two decades, information policy-making for human society has been increasingly supplemented, supplanted, and/or superceded by machinic decision-making; over three decades since legal decision-making has been explicitly put in place to serve machinic rather than social systems; and over four decades since designers of the Internet took the position that they were serving non-human (machinic, or daemon) users in addition to humans. As the “Internet of Things” becomes more and more of a reality, these developments increasingly shape the nature of governance itself. This paper’s discussion of contemporary trends in these diverse modes of human-computer interaction at the system level — interactions between social systems and technological systems — introduces the changing nature of the law as a sociotechnical problem in itself. In such an environment, technological innovations are often also legal innovations, and legal developments require socio-technical analysis as well as social, legal, political, and cultural approaches.

Examples of areas in which sensors are already receiving legal attention are rife. A non-comprehensive listing includes privacy concerns beginning but not ending with those raised by sensors embedded in phones and geolocation devices, which are the most widely discussed and those of which the public is most aware. Sensor issues arise in environmental law, health law, marine law, intellectual property law, and as they are raised by new technologies in use for national security purposes that include those confidence- and security-building measures intended for peacekeeping. They are raised by liability issues for objects that range from cars to ovens. And sensor issues are at the core of concerns about “telemetric policing,” as that is coming into use not only in North America and Europe, but in societies such as that of Brazil as well.

Sensors are involved in every stage of legal processes, from identification of persons of interest to determination of judgments and consequences of judgments. Their use significantly alters the historically-developed distinction among types of decision-making meant to come into use at different stages of the process, raising new questions about when, and how, human decision-making needs to dominate and when, and how, technological innovation might need to be shaped by the needs of social rather than human systems.

This paper will focus on the legal dimensions of sensors used in ubiquitous embedded computing….(More)”

Does Crowdsourcing Legislation Increase Political Legitimacy? The Case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Henrik Serup Christensen, Maija Karjalainen and Laura Nurminen: “Crowdsourcing legislation gives ordinary citizens, rather than political and bureaucratic elites, the chance to cooperate to come up with innovative new policies. By increasing popular involvement, representative democracies hope to restock dwindling reserves of political legitimacy. However, it is still not clear how involvement in legislative decision making affects the attitudes of the participants. It is therefore of central concern to establish whether crowdsourcing can actually help restore political legitimacy by creating more positive attitudes toward the political system. This article contributes to this research agenda by examining the developments in attitudes among the users on the Finnish website Avoin Ministeriö (“Open Ministry”) which orchestrates crowdsourcing of legislation by providing online tools for deliberating ideas for citizens’ initiatives. The developments in attitudes are investigated with a two-stage survey of 421 respondents who answered questions concerning political and social attitudes, as well as political activities performed. The results suggest that while crowdsourcing legislation has so far not affected political legitimacy in a positive manner, it has the potential to do so….(More)”

Discovering the Language of Data: Personal Pattern Languages and the Social Construction of Meaning from Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kim Erwin; Maggee Bond; Aashika Jain in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews: “This paper attempts to address two issues relevant to the sense-making of Big Data. First, it presents a case study for how a large dataset can be transformed into both a visual language and, in effect, a ‘text’ that can be read and interpreted by human beings. The case study comes from direct observation of graduate students at the IIT Institute of Design who investigated task-switching behaviours, as documented by productivity software on a single user’s laptop and a smart phone. Through a series of experiments with the resulting dataset, the team effects a transformation of that data into a catalogue of visual primitives — a kind of iconic alphabet — that allow others to ‘read’ the data as a corpus and, more provocatively, suggest the formation of a personal pattern language. Second, this paper offers a model for human-technical collaboration in the sense-making of data, as demonstrated by this and other teams in the class. Current sense-making models tend to be data- and technology-centric, and increasingly presume data visualization as a primary point of entry of humans into Big Data systems. This alternative model proposes that meaningful interpretation of data emerges from a more elaborate interplay between algorithms, data and human beings….(More)”

 

Embracing Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jesse A. Sievers on “A Strategy for State and Local Governments Approaching “Whole Community” Emergency Planning”: “Over the last century, state and local governments have been challenged to keep proactive, emergency planning efforts ahead of the after-the-disaster, response efforts. After moving from decentralized to centralized planning efforts, the most recent policy has returned to the philosophy that a decentralized planning approach is the most effective way to plan for a disaster. In fact, under the Obama administration, a policy of using the “whole community” approach to emergency planning has been adopted. This approach, however, creates an obvious problem for state and local government practitioners already under pressure for funding, time, and the continuous need for higher and broader expertise—the problem of how to actually incorporate the whole community into emergency planning efforts. This article suggests one such approach, crowdsourcing, as an option for local governments. The crowdsourcer-problem-crowd-platform-solution (CPCPS) model is suggested as an initial framework for practitioners seeking a practical application and basic comprehension. The model, discussion, and additional examples in this essay provide a skeletal framework for state and local governments wishing to reach the whole community while under the constraints of time, budget, and technical expertise….(More).