New paper by et al in PLoS ONE: “Over the last decade, there have been significant changes in data sharing policies and in the data sharing environment faced by life science researchers. Using data from a 2013 survey of over 1600 life science researchers, we analyze the effects of sharing policies of funding agencies and journals. We also examine the effects of new sharing infrastructure and tools (i.e., third party repositories and online supplements). We find that recently enacted data sharing policies and new sharing infrastructure and tools have had a sizable effect on encouraging data sharing. In particular, third party repositories and online supplements as well as data sharing requirements of funding agencies, particularly the NIH and the National Human Genome Research Institute, were perceived by scientists to have had a large effect on facilitating data sharing. In addition, we found a high degree of compliance with these new policies, although noncompliance resulted in few formal or informal sanctions. Despite the overall effectiveness of data sharing policies, some significant gaps remain: about one third of grant reviewers placed no weight on data sharing plans in their reviews, and a similar percentage ignored the requirements of material transfer agreements. These patterns suggest that although most of these new policies have been effective, there is still room for policy improvement.”
CaseCommons
About: “The vision of Case Commons is to support the transformation of public human services through innovative technology. In the 21st century, web-native, real time technology and analytics all have the potential to radically change how public human services agencies meet the needs of the country’s most vulnerable children and families.
To fulfill this vision, we have designed and built revolutionary software for child welfare. Called Casebook, our tool has been collaboratively developed with agencies and practitioners, uses intuitive design to meet the needs of human services caseworkers and administrators, and is centered on the person and their family rather than isolated “cases.” Casebook helps support child welfare workers and policy makers in their effort to make decisions based on data, rather than on anecdote.
The mission of our organization is to:
• Change Lives: above all, Case Commons seeks to better serve, and to improve outcomes and life opportunities for vulnerable children and their families;
• Help the Helpers: Case Commons believes that new technology can and must support – not hinder – the frontline workers who serve our nation’s most vulnerable children and families; and
• Measure Results: Case Commons uses the latest technology to improve the quality and timeliness of data and analytics so that everyone can make better decisions. Supervisors can better support their workers, policymakers can understand what works, and everyone can use greater knowledge to transform service delivery and improve lives.
…
Casebook is a powerful example of technology innovation at work, and Case Commons is helping to lead a growing movement to revolutionize how government puts technology to work for Americans.
Read our paper on Casebook and the future of government innovation.“
Crowdsourcing and collaborative translation: mass phenomena or silent threat to translation studies?
Article by Alberto Fernandez Costales: ” This article explores the emerging phenomenon of amateur translation and tries to shed some light on the implications this process may have both for Translation Studies as an academic discipline and for the translation industry itself. The paper comments on the main activities included within the concept of fan translation and approaches the terminological issues concerning the categorization of “non-professional translation”. In addition, the article focuses on the existing differences between collaborative translation and crowdsourcing, and posits new hypotheses regarding the development of these initiatives and the possible erosion of the boundaries which separate them. The question of who-does-what in the industry of translation is a major issue to be addressed in order to gain a clear view of the global state of translation today.”
Real-time information about public transport's position using crowdsourcing
Paper by Nikos Souliotis et al, published at PCI ’14 Proceedings of the 18th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics: “Nowadays there is a multitude of mobile and tablet applications being developed in order to facilitate or disrupt every day tasks. Many of these are location based. A technique to serve in providing information and content is crowdsourcing. This technique is based on the public contributing information or resources giving them the opportunity to become both service providers and recipients at the same time.
Taking into account the above and after observing passengers using the public transport system, we came to the conclusion that it would be useful to be able to determine which transport medium (i.e which bus line out of a number running concurrently) is nearer at any given moment. This information allows for better decision making and choice of transportation.
For this we propose the development of an application to show the position of a selected transport vehicle. The position will be calculated based on geo-tracking provided by passengers boarded on a vehicle. This will allow for real time information to the application users in order to be able to determine their optimal route.”
Taking into account the above and after observing passengers using the public transport system, we came to the conclusion that it would be useful to be able to determine which transport medium (i.e which bus line out of a number running concurrently) is nearer at any given moment. This information allows for better decision making and choice of transportation.
For this we propose the development of an application to show the position of a selected transport vehicle. The position will be calculated based on geo-tracking provided by passengers boarded on a vehicle. This will allow for real time information to the application users in order to be able to determine their optimal route.”
Open Data as Universal Service. New perspectives in the Information Profession
Paper by L. Fernando Ramos Simón et al in Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences: “The Internet provides a global information flow, which improves living conditions in poor countries as well as in rich countries. Owing to its abundance and quality, public information (meteorological, geographic, transport information. and also the content managed in libraries, archives and museums) is an incentive for change, becoming invaluable and accessible to all citizens. However, it is clear that Open Data plays a significant role and provides a business service in the digital economy. Nevertheless, it is unknown how this amount of public data may be introduced as universal service to make it available to all citizens in matters of education, health, culture . In fact, a function or role which has traditionally been assumed by libraries. In addition, information professionals will have to acquire new skills that enable them to assume a new role in the information management: data management (Open Data) and content management (Open Content). Thus, this study analyzes new roles, which will be assumed by new information professionals such as metadata, interoperability, access licenses, information search and retrieval tools and applications for data queries…”
Open Source Governance—A More Ambitious Cousin of Collaborative Governance
New paper by Ani Matei & Sergiu Ioan Irimia in the International Journal of Public Administration: “Open source represents a model generally known for its success in software production. The objective of this article is to establish a new strategic approach of using open source development principles for managing collaborative arrangements between citizens and public administration. The identity of open source governance is developed by highlighting how it is different from its main “competitor”—collaborative governance, and from other two popular concepts—open government and e-democracy. The other sections are designed to answer to public managers regarding why and what to adopt from this governance model for public sector services.”
Data-based Civic Participation
New workshop paper by C. A. Le Dantec in HCOMP 2014/Citizen + X: Workshop on Volunteer-based Crowdsourcing in Science, Public Health and Government, Pittsburgh, PA. November 2, 2014: “Within the past five years, a new form of technology -mediated public participation that experiments with crowdsourced data production in place of community discourse has emerged. Examples of this class of system include SeeClickFix, PublicStuff, and Street Bump, each of which mediate feedback about local neighborhood issues and help communities mobilize resources to address those issues. The experiments being playing out by this new class of services are derived from a form of public participation built on the ideas of smart cities where residents and physical environments are instrumented to provide data to improve operational efficiency and sustainability (Caragliu, Del Bo, and Nijkamp 2011). Ultimately, smart cities is the application to local government all the efficiencies that computing has always promised—efficiencies of scale, of productivity, of data—minus the messiness and contention of citizenship that play out through more traditional modes of public engagement and political discourse.
The question then, is what might it look like to incorporate more active forms of civic participation and issue advocacy in an app- and data-driven world? To begin to explore this question, my students and I have developed a smartphone app as part of a larger regional planning partnership with the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Regional Commission. The app, called Cycle Atlanta, enables cyclists to record their ride data —where they have gone, why they went there, what kind of cyclist they are— in an effort to both generate data for planners developing new bicycling infrastructure and to broaden public participation and input in the creation of those plans…”
The Impact of Open Government on Innovation: Does Government Transparency Drive Innovation?
Paper by Deogirikar, Anjelika: “This study adds to the body of research on open government by empirically measuring the association of government transparency and innovation. The study uses Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) as a proxy measure of government transparency. It assumes that an increase in government transparency increases applied innovation activity, which is measured as the number of annual patents by country residents. The study also tests whether the association is different for countries participating in the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a voluntary multi-stakeholder international collaboration of 63 countries who have committed to make their governments more transparent. The analysis uses fixed effects regression on panel data from 1996 to 2011 for 95 countries, including 54 OGP members. Although the empirical results do not support the hypothesis that transparency and innovation are positively correlated for countries participating in the OGP, this finding contributes to the literature on open government by making an initial attempt to quantify the association of transparency and innovation. Additional future research demonstrating a positive relationship between transparency and innovation could help to justify implementation of open government policies and participation in the Open Government Partnership.”
Proof: How Crowdsourced Election Monitoring Makes a Difference
Patrick Meier at iRevolution: “My colleagues Catie Bailard & Steven Livingston have just published the results of their empirical study on the impact of citizen-based crowdsourced election monitoring. Readers of iRevolution may recall that my doctoral dissertation analyzed the use of crowdsourcing in repressive environments and specifically during contested elections. This explains my keen interest in the results of my colleagues’ news data-driven study, which suggests that crowdsourcing does have a measurable and positive impact on voter turnout.
Catie and Steven are “interested in digitally enabled collective action initiatives” spearheaded by “nonstate actors, especially in places where the state is incapable of meeting the expectations of democratic governance.” They are particularly interested in measuring the impact of said initiatives. “By leveraging the efficiencies found in small, incremental, digitally enabled contributions (an SMS text, phone call, email or tweet) to a public good (a more transparent election process), crowdsourced elections monitoring constitutes [an] important example of digitally-enabled collective action.” To be sure, “the successful deployment of a crowdsourced elections monitoring initiative can generate information about a specific political process—information that would otherwise be impossible to generate in nations and geographic spaces with limited organizational and administrative capacity.”
To this end, their new study tests for the effects of citizen-based crowdsourced election monitoring efforts on the 2011 Nigerian presidential elections. More specifically, they analyzed close to 30,000 citizen-generated reports of failures, abuses and successes which were publicly crowdsourced and mapped as part of the Reclaim Naija project. Controlling for a number of factors, Catie and Steven find that the number and nature of crowdsourced reports is “significantly correlated with increased voter turnout.”
In conclusion, the authors argue that “digital technologies fundamentally change information environments and, by doing so, alter the opportunities and constraints that the political actors face.” This new study is an important contribution to the literature and should be required reading for anyone interested in digitally-enabled, crowdsourced collective action. Of course, the analysis focuses on “just” one case study, which means that the effects identified in Nigeria may not occur in other crowdsourced, election monitoring efforts. But that’s another reason why this study is important—it will no doubt catalyze future research to determine just how generalizable these initial findings are.”
Creating a national citizen engagement process for energy policy
Paper by Nick Pidgeon et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): “This paper examines some of the science communication challenges involved when designing and conducting public deliberation processes on issues of national importance. We take as our illustrative case study a recent research project investigating public values and attitudes toward future energy system change for the United Kingdom. National-level issues such as this are often particularly difficult to engage the public with because of their inherent complexity, derived from multiple interconnected elements and policy frames, extended scales of analysis, and different manifestations of uncertainty. With reference to the energy system project, we discuss ways of meeting a series of science communication challenges arising when engaging the public with national topics, including the need to articulate systems thinking and problem scale, to provide balanced information and policy framings in ways that open up spaces for reflection and deliberation, and the need for varied methods of facilitation and data synthesis that permit access to participants’ broader values. Although resource intensive, national-level deliberation is possible and can produce useful insights both for participants and for science policy.”