Crowdsourcing medical expertise in near real time
Paper by Max H. Sims et al in Journal of Hospital Medicine: “Given the pace of discovery in medicine, accessing the literature to make informed decisions at the point of care has become increasingly difficult. Although the Internet creates unprecedented access to information, gaps in the medical literature and inefficient searches often leave healthcare providers’ questions unanswered. Advances in social computation and human computer interactions offer a potential solution to this problem. We developed and piloted the mobile application DocCHIRP, which uses a system of point-to-multipoint push notifications designed to help providers problem solve by crowdsourcing from their peers. Over the 244-day pilot period, 85 registered users logged 1544 page views and sent 45 consult questions. The median initial first response from the crowd occurred within 19 minutes. Review of the transcripts revealed several dominant themes, including complex medical decision making and inquiries related to prescription medication use. Feedback from the post-trial survey identified potential hurdles related to medical crowdsourcing, including a reluctance to expose personal knowledge gaps and the potential risk for “distracted doctoring.” Users also suggested program modifications that could support future adoption, including changes to the mobile interface and mechanisms that could expand the crowd of participating healthcare providers.”
Good Governance – Performance Values and Procedural Values in Conflict
Paper by Gjalt de Graaf and Hester Paanakker in The American Review of Public Administration: “Good governance codes usually end with a list of public values no one could oppose. A recurrent issue is that not all of these values—however desirable they are—can be achieved at the same time. With its focus on performance and procedural values of governance, this article zooms in on the conflict between two different types of values, signifying and exemplifying how output and outcome on one hand and the process of governance on the other may coincide or collide. The main research question is, “What is the nature of value conflict in public governance and what specific conflicts between performance and procedural values do public actors perceive?” A literature review and two case studies involving aldermen and the most senior public administrators in public governance set out to answer these questions. The most frequently perceived conflict is between lawfulness and transparency in procedure, on one hand, and the attainment of effectiveness and efficiency as performance values on the other.”
Passage Of The DATA Act Is A Major Advance In Government Transparency
OpEd by Hudson Hollister in Forbes: “Even as the debate over official secrecy grows on Capitol Hill, basic information about our government’s spending remains hidden in plain sight.
Information that is technically public — federal finance, awards, and expenditures — is effectively locked within a disconnected disclosure system that relies on outdated paper-based technology. Budgets, grants, contracts, and disbursements are reported manually and separately, using forms and spreadsheets. Researchers seeking insights into federal spending must invest time and resources crafting data sets out of these documents. Without common data standards across all government spending, analyses of cross-agency spending trends require endless conversions of apples to oranges.
For a nation whose tech industry leads the world, there is no reason to allow this antiquated system to persist.
That’s why we’re excited to welcome Thursday’s unanimous Senate approval of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act — known as the DATA Act.
The DATA Act will mandate government-wide standards for federal spending data. It will also require agencies to publish this information online, fully searchable and open to everyone.
Watchdogs and transparency advocates from across the political spectrum have endorsed the DATA Act because all Americans will benefit from clear, accessible information about how their tax dollars are being spent.
It is darkly appropriate that the only organized opposition to this bill took place behind closed doors. In January, Senate sponsors Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rob Portman (R-OH) rejected amendments offered privately by the White House Office of Management and Budget. These nonpublic proposals would have gutted the DATA Act’s key data standards requirement. But Warner and Portman went public with their opposition, and Republicans and Democrats agreed to keep a strong standards mandate.
We now await swift action by the House of Representatives to pass this bill and put it on the President’s desk.
The tech industry is already delivering the technology and expertise that will use federal spending data, once it is open and standardized, to solve problems.
If the DATA Act is fully enforced, citizens will be able to track government spending on a particular contractor or from a particular program, payment by payment. Agencies will be able to deploy sophisticated Big Data analytics to illuminate, and eliminate, waste and fraud. And states and universities will be able to automate their complex federal grant reporting tasks, freeing up more tax dollars for their intended use. Our industry can perform these tasks — as soon as we get the data.
Chairman Earl Devaney’s Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board proved this is possible. Starting in 2009, the Recovery Board applied data standards to track stimulus spending. Our members’ software used that data to help inspectors general prevent and recover over $100 million in spending on suspicious grantees and contractors. The DATA Act applies that approach across the whole of government spending.
Congress is now poised to pass this landmark legislative mandate to transform spending from disconnected documents into open data. Next , the executive branch must implement that mandate.
So our Coalition’s work continues. We will press the Treasury Department and the White House to adopt robust, durable, and nonproprietary data standards for federal spending.
And we won’t stop with spending transparency. The American people deserve access to open data across all areas of government activity — financial regulatory reporting, legislative actions, judicial filings, and much more….”
In defense of “slacktivism”: The Human Rights Campaign Facebook logo as digital activism
Stephanie Vie in First Monday: “This paper examines the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Marriage Equality logo as an example of a meme to further understandings of memetic transmission in social media technologies. The HRC meme is an important example of how even seemingly insignificant moves such as adopting a logo and displaying it online can serve to combat microaggressions, or the damaging results of everyday bias and discrimination against marginalized groups. This article suggests that even small moves of support, such as changing one’s Facebook status to a memetic image, assist by demonstrating a supportive environment for those who identify with marginalized groups and by drawing awareness to important causes. Often dismissed as “slacktivism,” I argue instead that the digital activism made possible through social media memes can build awareness of crucial issues, which can then lead to action.”
Benchmarking open government: An open data perspective
Paper by N Veljković, S Bogdanović-Dinić, and L Stoimenov in Government Information Quarterly: “This paper presents a benchmark proposal for the Open Government and its application from the open data perspective using data available on the U.S. government’s open data portal (data.gov). The benchmark is developed over the adopted Open Government conceptual model, which describes Open Government through data openness, transparency, participation and collaboration. Resulting in two measures, that is, one known as the e-government openness index (eGovOI) and the other Maturity, the benchmark indicates the progress of government over time, the efficiency of recognizing and implementing new concepts and the willingness of the government to recognize and embrace innovative ideas.”
How government can promote open data
Michael Chui, Diana Farrell, and Kate Jackson from McKinsey: “Institutions and companies across the public and private sectors have begun to release and share vast amounts of information in recent years, and the trend is only accelerating. Yet while some information is easily accessible, some is still trapped in paper records. Data may be free or come at a cost. And there are tremendous differences in reuse and redistribution rights. In short, there are degrees when it comes to just how “open” data is and, as a result, how much value it can create.
While businesses and other private organizations can make more information public, we believe that government has a critical role in unleashing the economic potential of open data. A recent McKinsey report, Open data: Unlocking innovation and performance with liquid information,1 identified more than $3 trillion in economic value globally that could be generated each year in seven domains through increasingly “liquid” information that is machine readable, accessible to a broad audience at little or no cost, and capable of being shared and distributed. These sources of value include new or increased revenue, savings, and economic surplus that flow from the insights provided by data as diverse as census demographics, crop reports, and information on product recalls.
Sitting at the nexus of key stakeholders—citizens, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—government is ideally positioned to extract value from open data and to help others do the same. We believe government can spur value creation at all levels of society by concurrently fulfilling four important open-data roles (exhibit):
Government can serve as an open-data provider, catalyst, user, and policy maker to create value and mitigate risks.
Quizz: Targeted Crowdsourcing with a Billion (Potential) Users
Using Social Media to Measure Labor Market Flows
Paper by Dolan Antenucci, Michael Cafarella, Margaret C. Levenstein, Christopher Ré, and Matthew D. Shapiro: “Social media enable promising new approaches to measuring economic activity and analyzing economic behavior at high frequency and in real time using information independent from standard survey and administrative sources. This paper uses data from Twitter to create indexes of job loss, job search, and job posting. Signals are derived by counting job-related phrases in Tweets such as “lost my job.” The social media indexes are constructed from the principal components of these signals. The University of Michigan Social Media Job Loss Index tracks initial claims for unemployment insurance at medium and high frequencies and predicts 15 to 20 percent of the variance of the prediction error of the consensus forecast for initial claims. The social media indexes provide real-time indicators of events such as Hurricane Sandy and the 2013 government shutdown. Comparing the job loss index with the search and posting indexes indicates that the Beveridge Curve has been shifting inward since 2011.
The University of Michigan Social Media Job Loss index is update weeklyand is available at http://econprediction.eecs.umich.edu/.”
Public Procurement as a Means to Stimulate Innovation for a Better World: A Matter of Knowledge Management
Paper by Max Rolfstam: “Public procurement is the central sourcing mechanism evoked to directly secure the delivery of public services. It may however also be used to achieve certain social outcomes and secondary effects. This paper attempts to contribute with knowledge regarding a particular secondary effect, the role of public procurement as a means to stimulate innovation. The paper discusses public procurement of innovation as a knowledge policy in the learning economy, and scrutinizes it from a knowledge management perspective, eventually to connect aspects of learning to institutional levels.”