India asks its citizens: please digitise our files

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Chambers in FutureGov: “India has asked its citizens to help digitise records so that it can move away from paper processes.

Using its crowdsourcing web site MyGov, the government wrote that “we cannot talk of Digital India and transforming India into a knowledge society if most of the transactions continue to be physical.”

It is “essential” that paper records are converted into machine readable digital versions, the government added, but “the cost of such digitisation is very large and existing budgetary constraints of government and many other organisations do not allow such lavish digitisation effort.”

Consequently, the government is asking citizens for advice on how to build a cheap content management system and tools that will allow it to crowdsource records transcriptions. Citizens would be rewarded for every word that they transcribe through a points system, which can then be recouped into cash prizes.

“The proposed platform will create earning and income generation opportunities for our literate rural and urban citizens, develop digital literacy and IT skills and include them in the making of Digital India,” the government added.

The announcement also noted the importance of privacy, suggesting that documents are split so that no portion gives any clue regarded the overall content of the document.

Instead, two people will be given the same words to transcribe, and the software will compare their statements to ensure accuracy. Only successful transcription will be rewarded with points….(More)”

Facebook’s Filter Study Raises Questions About Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Will Knight in MIT Technology Review: “Facebook is an enormously valuable source of information about social interactions.

Facebook’s latest scientific research, about the way it shapes the political perspectives users are exposed to, has led some academics to call for the company to be more open about what it chooses to study and publish.

This week the company’s data science team published a paper in the prominent journal Science confirming what many had long suspected: that the network’s algorithms filter out some content that might challenge a person’s political leanings. However, the paper also suggested that the effect was fairly small, and less significant than a user’s own filtering behavior (see “Facebook Says You Filter News More Than Its Algorithm Does”).
Several academics have pointed to limitations of the study, such as the fact that the only people involved had indicated their political affiliation on their Facebook page. Critics point out that those users might behave in a different way from everyone else. But beyond that, a few academics have noted a potential tension between Facebook’s desire to explore the scientific value of its data and its own corporate interests….

In response to the controversy over that study, Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, wrote a Facebook post that acknowledged people’s concerns and described new guidelines for its scientific research. “We’ve created a panel including our most senior subject-area researchers, along with people from our engineering, research, legal, privacy and policy teams, that will review projects falling within these guidelines,” he wrote….(More)

Enhancing Social Accountability Through ICT: Success Factors and Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Wakabi, Wairagala and  Grönlund, Åke for the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2015: “This paper examines the state of citizen participation in public accountability processes via Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It draws on three projects that use ICT to report public service delivery failures in Uganda, mainly in the education, public health and the roads sectors. While presenting common factors hampering meaningful use of ICT for citizens’ monitoring of public services and eParticipation in general, the paper studies the factors that enabled successful whistle blowing using toll free calling, blogging, radio talk shows, SMS texting, and e-mailing. The paper displays examples of the positive impacts of whistle-blowing mechanisms and draws up a list of success factors applicable to these projects. It also outlines common challenges and drawbacks to initiatives that use ICT to enable citizen participation in social accountability. The paper provides pathways that could give ICT-for-participation and for-accountability initiatives in countries with characteristics similar to Uganda a good chance of achieving success. While focusing on Uganda, the paper may be of practical value to policy makers, development practitioners and academics in countries with similar socio-economic standings….(More)”

A new approach to measuring the impact of open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at SunLight Foundation: “Strong evidence on the long-term impact of open data initiatives is incredibly scarce. The lack of compelling proof is partly due to the relative novelty of the open government field, but also to the inherent difficulties in measuring good governance and social change. We know that much of the impact of policy advocacy, for instance, occurs even before a new law or policy is introduced, and is thus incredibly difficult to evaluate. At the same time, it is also very hard to detect the causality between a direct change in the legal environment and the specific activities of a policy advocacy group. Attribution is equally challenging when it comes to assessing behavioral changes – who gets to take credit for increased political engagement and greater participation in democratic processes?

Open government projects tend to operate in an environment where the contribution of other stakeholders and initiatives is essential to achieving sustainable change, making it even more difficult to show the causality between a project’s activities and the impact it strives to achieve. Therefore, these initiatives cannot be described through simple “cause and effect” relationships, as they mostly achieve changes through their contribution to outcomes produced by a complex ecosystem of stakeholders — including journalists, think tanks, civil society organizations, public officials and many more — making it even more challenging to measure their direct impact.

We at the Sunlight Foundation wanted to tackle some of the methodological challenges of the field through building an evidence base that can empower further generalizations and advocacy efforts, as well as developing a methodological framework to unpack theories of change and to evaluate the impact of open data and digital transparency initiatives. A few weeks ago, we presented our research at the Cartagena Data Festival, and today we are happy to launch the first edition of our paper, which you can read below or on Scribd.

The outputs of this research include:

  • A searchable repository of more than 100 examples on the outputs, outcomes and impacts of open data and digital technology projects;
  • Three distinctive theories of change for open data and digital transparency initiatives from the Global South;
  • A methodological framework to help develop more robust indicators of social and political change for the ecosystem of open data initiatives, by applying and revising the Outcome Mapping approach of IDRC to the field…(You can read the study at :The Social Impact of Open Data by juliakeseru)

Nepal Aid Workers Helped by Drones, Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Shirley Wang et al in the Wall Street Journal: “….It is too early to gauge the exact impact of the technology in Nepal relief efforts, which have just begun amid chaos on the ground. Aid organizations have reported hospitals are overstretched, a shortage of capacity at Katmandu’s airport is crippling aid distribution and damaged roads and the mountainous country’s difficult terrain make reaching villages difficult.

Still, technology is playing an increasing role in the global response to humanitarian crises. Within hours of Saturday’s 7.8-magnitude temblor, U.S. giants such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. were offering their networks for use in verifying survivors and helping worried friends and relatives locate their loved ones.

Advances in online mapping—long used to calculate distances and plot driving routes—and the ability of camera-equipped drones are playing an increasingly important role in coordinating emergency responses at ground zero of any disaster.

A community of nonprofit groups uses satellite images, private images and open-source mapping technology to remap areas affected by the earthquake. They mark damaged buildings and roads so rescuers can identify the worst-hit areas and assess how accessible different areas are. The technology complements more traditional intelligence from aircraft.

Such crowdsourced real-time mapping technologies were first used in the 2010 Haiti earthquake, according to Chris Grundy, a professor in Geographical Information Systems at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The technology “has been advancing a little bit every time [every situation where it is used] as we start to see what works,” said Prof. Grundy.

The American Red Cross supplied its relief team on the Wednesday night flight to Nepal from Washington, D.C. with 50 digital maps and an inch-thick pile of paper maps that help identify where the needs are. The charity has a mapping project with the British Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a crowdsourced data-sharing group.

Almost a week after the Nepal earthquake, two more people have been pulled from the rubble in Katmandu by teams of international rescuers. But hope for finding more survivors is waning. Photo: Sean McLain/The Wall Street Journal.

Mapping efforts have grown substantially since Haiti, according to Dale Kunce, head of the geographic information systems team at the American Red Cross. In the two months after the Haiti temblor, 600 mapping contributors made 1.5 million edits, while in the first 48 hours after the Nepal earthquake, 2,000 mappers had already made three million edits, Mr. Kunce said.

Some 3,400 volunteers from around the world are now inspecting images of Nepal online to identify road networks and conditions, to assess the extent of damage and pinpoint open spaces where displaced persons tend to congregate, according to Nama Budhathoki, executive director of a nonprofit technology company called Katmandu Living Labs.

His group is operating from a cramped but largely undamaged meeting room in a central-Katmandu office building to help coordinate the global effort of various mapping organizations with the needs of agencies like Doctors Without Borders and the international Red Cross community.

In recent days the Nepal Red Cross and Nepalese army have requested and been supplied with updated maps of severely damaged districts, said Dr. Budhathoki….(More)”

Global Diseases, Collective Solutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Ben Ramalingam: “Environmental disruption, mass urbanization and the runaway globalization of trade and transport have created ideal conditions for infectious diseases to emerge and spread around the world. Rapid spill-overs from local into regional and global crises reveal major gaps in the global system for dealing with infectious diseases.

A number of Global Solution Networks have emerged that address failures of systems, of institutions and of markets. At their most ambitious, they aim to change the rules of the global health game—opening up governance structures, sharing knowledge and science, developing new products, creating markets—all with the ultimate aim of preventing and treating diseases, and saving lives.

These networks have emerged in an ad-hoc and opportunistic fashion. More strategic thinking and investment is needed to build networking competencies and to identify opportunities for international institutions to best leverage new forms of collaboration and partnership. (Read the paper here).”

Urban Data Games: creating smart citizens for smart cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Wolff, Annika; Kortuem, Gerd and Cavero, Jose: “A bottom-up approach to smart cities places citizens in an active role of contributing, analysing and interpreting data in pursuit of tackling local urban challenges and building a more sustainable future city. This vision can only be realised if citizens have sufficient data literacy skills and experience of large, complex, messy, ever expanding data sets. Schools typically focus on teaching data handling skills using small, personally collected data sets obtained through scientific experimentation, leading to a gap between what is being taught and what will be needed as big data and analytics become more prevalent. This paper proposes an approach to teaching data literacy in the context of urban innovation tasks, using an idea of Urban Data Games. These are supported by a set of training data and resources that will be used in school trials for exploring the problems people have when dealing with large data and trialling novel approaches for teaching data literacy….(More)”

A sentiment analysis of U.S. local government tweets: The connection between tone and citizen involvement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Staci M. Zavattaro, P. Edward French, and Somya D. Mohanty: “As social media tools become more popular at all levels of government, more research is needed to determine how the platforms can be used to create meaningful citizen–government collaboration. Many entities use the tools in one-way, push manners. The aim of this research is to determine if sentiment (tone) can positively influence citizen participation with government via social media. Using a systematic random sample of 125 U.S. cities, we found that positive sentiment is more likely to engender digital participation but this was not a perfect one-to-one relationship. Some cities that had an overall positive sentiment score and displayed a participatory style of social media use did not have positive citizen sentiment scores. We argue that positive tone is only one part of a successful social media interaction plan, and encourage social media managers to actively manage platforms to use activities that spur participation….(More)”

Serious Gaming Takes Flight

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dennis Glenn at “Chief Learning Officer” Media: “Gamification is one of the hottest topics in corporate learning today, yet we don’t entirely trust it. So before delving into how leaders can take a reasoned, serious approach to use games in learning environments, let’s get one thing straight: Gamification is different from serious gaming.

Gamification places nongame experiences into a gamelike environment. Serious games are educational experiences specifically designed to deliver formative or summative assessments based on predetermined learning objectives. Gamification creates an experience; serious games promote task or concept mastery. The underlying aim of serious games concentrates the user’s effort on mastery of a specific task, with a feedback loop to inform users of their progress toward that goal….

In addition to simulations and gamification, many corporate learning leaders are turning to serious games, which demand social engagement. For instance, consider the World of Warcraft wiki, which has more than 101,000 players and contributors helping others master the online game.

Some of the most important benefits to gaming:

  • Accepting failure, which is seen as a benefit to mastery.
  • Rewarding players with appropriate and timely feedback.
  • Making social connections and feeling part of something bigger.

In serious games, frequent feedback — when accompanied by specific instruction — can dramatically reduce the time to mastery. Because the computer will record all data during the assessment, learning leaders can identify specific pathways to mastery and offer them to learners.

This feedback loop leads to self-reflection and that can be translated into learning, according the 2014 paper titled “Working Paper: Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance.” Authors Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano and Bradley Staats found that individuals performed significantly better on subsequent tasks when thinking about what they learned from the previously completed task.

Social learning is the final link to understanding mastery learning. In a recent massive open online course, titled “Design and Development of Educational Technology MITx: 11.132x,” instructor Scot Osterweil said our understanding of literacy is rooted in a social environment and in interactions with other people and the world. But again, engagement is key. Gaming provides the structure needed to engage with peers, often irrespective of cultural and language differences….(More)”.

Preparing for Responsible Sharing of Clinical Trial Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michelle M. Mello et al in the New England Journal of Medicine: “Data from clinical trials, including participant-level data, are being shared by sponsors and investigators more widely than ever before. Some sponsors have voluntarily offered data to researchers, some journals now require authors to agree to share the data underlying the studies they publish, the Office of Science and Technology Policy has directed federal agencies to expand public access to data from federally funded projects, and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have proposed the expansion of access to data submitted in regulatory applications. Sharing participant-level data may bring exciting benefits for scientific research and public health but may also have unintended consequences. Thus, expanded data sharing must be pursued thoughtfully.

We provide a suggested framework for broad sharing of participant-level data from clinical trials and related technical documents. After reviewing current data-sharing initiatives, potential benefits and risks, and legal and regulatory implications, we propose potential governing principles and key features for a system of expanded access to participant-level data and evaluate several governance structures….(More)”