Anne Marie Warren, Ainin Sulaiman and Noor Ismawati Jaafar in Government Information Quaterly: “This paper tests the extent to which social media is shaping civic engagement initiatives to build trust among people and increase trust in their institutions, particularly the government, police and justice systems. A survey of 502 citizens showed that using social media for civic engagement has a significant positive impact on trust propensity and that this trust had led to an increase in trust towards institutions. Interestingly, while group incentives encouraged citizens to engage online for civic matters, it is civic publications through postings on social media that intensify the urge of citizens for civic action to address social issues. Post-hoc analysis via ten interviews with social activists was conducted to further examine their perceptions on trust towards institutions. The overall findings suggest that institutions, in their effort to promote a meaningful and trusting citizen engagement, need to enhance trust among the public by fostering social capital via online civic engagement and closing the public–police disengagement gap”
Revolutionising Digital Public Service Delivery: A UK Government Perspective
Paper by Alan W. Brown, Jerry Fishenden, and Mark Thompson: ” For public sector organizations across the world, the pressures for improved
efficiency during the past decades are now accompanied by an equally strong need to revolutionise service delivery to create solutions that better meet citizens’ needs; to develop channels that offer efficiency and increase inclusion to all citizens being served; and to re-invent supply chains to deliver services faster, cheaper, and more effectively. But how do government organisations ensure investment in digital transformation delivers the intended outcomes after earlier “online government” and “e-government” initiatives produced little in terms of significant, sustainable benefits? Here we focus on how digitisation, built on open standards, is transforming the public sector’s relationship with its citizens. This paper provides a perspective of digital change efforts across the UK government as an illustration of the improvements taking place more broadly in the public sector. It provides a vision for the future of our digital world, revealing the symbiotic relationship between organisational change and digitisation, and offering insights into public service delivery in the digital economy.”
Coordinating the Commons: Diversity & Dynamics in Open Collaborations
Dissertation by Jonathan T. Morgan: “The success of Wikipedia demonstrates that open collaboration can be an effective model for organizing geographically-distributed volunteers to perform complex, sustained work at a massive scale. However, Wikipedia’s history also demonstrates some of the challenges that large, long-term open collaborations face: the core community of Wikipedia editors—the volunteers who contribute most of the encyclopedia’s content and ensure that articles are correct and consistent — has been gradually shrinking since 2007, in part because Wikipedia’s social climate has become increasingly inhospitable for newcomers, female editors, and editors from other underrepresented demographics. Previous research studies of change over time within other work contexts, such as corporations, suggests that incremental processes such as bureaucratic formalization can make organizations more rule-bound and less adaptable — in effect, less open— as they grow and age. There has been little research on how open collaborations like Wikipedia change over time, and on the impact of those changes on the social dynamics of the collaborating community and the way community members prioritize and perform work. Learning from Wikipedia’s successes and failures can help researchers and designers understand how to support open collaborations in other domains — such as Free/Libre Open Source Software, Citizen Science, and Citizen Journalism.
In this dissertation, I examine the role of openness, and the potential antecedents and consequences of formalization, within Wikipedia through an analysis of three distinct but interrelated social structures: community-created rules within the Wikipedia policy environment, coordination work and group dynamics within self-organized open teams called WikiProjects, and the socialization mechanisms that Wikipedia editors use to teach new community members how to participate.To inquire further, I have designed a new editor peer support space, the Wikipedia Teahouse, based on the findings from my empirical studies. The Teahouse is a volunteer-driven project that provides a welcoming and engaging environment in which new editors can learn how to be productive members of the Wikipedia community, with the goal of increasing the number and diversity of newcomers who go on to make substantial contributions to Wikipedia …”
True Collective Intelligence? A Sketch of a Possible New Field
Paper by Geoff Mulgan in Philosophy & Technology :” Collective intelligence is much talked about but remains very underdeveloped as a field. There are small pockets in computer science and psychology and fragments in other fields, ranging from economics to biology. New networks and social media also provide a rich source of emerging evidence. However, there are surprisingly few useable theories, and many of the fashionable claims have not stood up to scrutiny. The field of analysis should be how intelligence is organised at large scale—in organisations, cities, nations and networks. The paper sets out some of the potential theoretical building blocks, suggests an experimental and research agenda, shows how it could be analysed within an organisation or business sector and points to the possible intellectual barriers to progress.”
Overcoming 'Tragedies of the Commons' with a Self-Regulating, Participatory Market Society
Paper by Dirk Helbing; “Our society is fundamentally changing. These days, almost nothing works without a computer chip. Processing power doubles every 18 months and will exceed the capabilities of human brains in about ten years from now. Some time ago, IBM’s Big Blue computer already beat the best chess player. Meanwhile, computers perform about 70 percent of all financial transactions, and IBM’s Watson advises customers better than human telephone hotlines. Will computers and robots soon replace skilled labor? In many European countries, unemployment is reaching historical heights. The forthcoming economic and social impact of future information and communication technologies (ICT) will be huge – probably more significant than that caused by the steam engine, or by nano- or biotechnology.
The storage capacity for data is growing even faster than computational capacity. Within just a year we will soon generate more data than in the entire history of humankind. The “Internet of Things” will network trillions of sensors. Unimaginable amounts of data will be collected. Big Data is already being praised as the “oil of the 21st century”. What opportunities and risks does this create for our society, economy, and environment?”
Smart Governance: A Roadmap for Research and Practice
New report by Hans J. Scholl and Margit C. Scholl: “It has been the object of this article to make the case and present a roadmap for the study of the phenomena of smart governance as well as smart and open governance as an enactment of smart governance in practice. As a concept paper, this contribution aimed at sparking interest and at inspiring scholarly and practitioner discourse in this area of study inside the community of electronic government research and practice, and beyond. The roadmap presented here comprises and details seven elements of smart governance along with eight areas of focus in practice.
Smart governance along with its administrative enactment of smart and open government, it was argued, can help effectively address the three grand challenges to 21st century societal and individual well-being, which are (a) the Third Industrial Revolution with the information revolution at its core, (b) the rapidity of change and the lack of timely and effective government intervention, and (c) expansive government spending and exorbitant public debt financing. Although not seen as a panacea, it was also argued that smart governance principles could guide the relatively complex administrative enactment of smart and open government more intelligently than traditional static and inflexible governance approaches could do.
Since much of the road ahead metaphorically speaking leads through uncharted territory, dedicated research is needed that accompanies projects in this area and evaluates them. Research could further be embedded into practical projects providing for fast and systematic learning. We believe that such embedding of research into smart governance projects should become an integral part of smart projects’ agendas.”
The Web at 25 in the U.S.
Paper by Lee Rainie and Susannah Fox from Pew: “The overall verdict: The internet has been a plus for society and an especially good thing for individual users… This report is the first part of a sustained effort through 2014 by the Pew Research Center to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Lee wrote a paper on March 12, 1989 proposing an “information management” system that became the conceptual and architectural structure for the Web. He eventually released the code for his system—for free—to the world on Christmas Day in 1990. It became a milestone in easing the way for ordinary people to access documents and interact over a network of computers called the internet—a system that linked computers and that had been around for years. The Web became especially appealing after Web browsers were perfected in the early 1990s to facilitate graphical displays of pages on those linked computers.”
The Power of Knowledge,' by Jeremy Black
Book review by Roger Kimball: “It’s surprising to me that the English historian Jeremy Black isn’t better known on these shores. He has written dozens of books on subjects as various as the Battle of Waterloo, the history of the slave trade, both world wars and the rise of European power in the 18th century. His bibliography includes books about maps and naval power, and even “The Politics of James Bond.” What is more, he commands an engaging prose style and possesses an outlook appealingly grounded in the principles of a high but undoctrinaire Toryism. This combination of fluency and wide-ranging erudition are conspicuously on display in “The Power of Knowledge,” an ambitious, synoptic, “big idea” book that is likely to extend the frontiers of Mr. Black’s audience in this country.
The thesis of the book is neatly encapsulated in the title of Chapter 13: “Information Is All.” The idea that there is an intimate link between knowledge and what we might call administrative power is perennial. It is inscribed in the nature of things that the more you know, the more you control.
The technological side of that syllogism, Mr. Black notes, didn’t really come to the fore until the 17th century. “Knowledge is Power,” wrote Francis Bacon, enunciating a principle that seems obvious only because we have been the beneficiaries of the processes he helped to define. Writing a few years later, René Descartes promised that his method of inquiry would make man “the master and possessor of nature.” Descartes looked forward to all manner of material benefits, not least in the realm of medicine. He was prescient.
Mr. Black touches on Bacon and Descartes in his chapter on the Scientific Revolution, but his focus is much more encompassing. He begins his story with the formation of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century and describes how the Great Khan’s superior deployment of information, prominently including his command of trade along the Silk Road, stood behind the creation of the largest contiguous empire in history.
The technological side of that syllogism, Mr. Black notes, didn’t really come to the fore until the 17th century. “Knowledge is Power,” wrote Francis Bacon, enunciating a principle that seems obvious only because we have been the beneficiaries of the processes he helped to define. Writing a few years later, René Descartes promised that his method of inquiry would make man “the master and possessor of nature.” Descartes looked forward to all manner of material benefits, not least in the realm of medicine. He was prescient.
Mr. Black touches on Bacon and Descartes in his chapter on the Scientific Revolution, but his focus is much more encompassing. He begins his story with the formation of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century and describes how the Great Khan’s superior deployment of information, prominently including his command of trade along the Silk Road, stood behind the creation of the largest contiguous empire in history.
The guiding theme of this book is the complex linkage (what Mr. Black calls “synergies”) between information and power—political power, above all, but also military, economic and technological power. The increasingly sophisticated acquisition and manipulation of information, Mr. Black argues, is “a defining characteristic of modernity,” and it fueled the rise and shaped the distinctiveness of the West from the 18th century through the early 21st.
Part of what makes modernity modern—and a large part of what has made the West its crucible—is the interpenetration of information and technique under the guidance of an increasingly secularized idea of human flourishing. Other cultures made local contributions to this drama, but Mr. Black is right: The breathtaking spectacle of modern technological achievement has been overwhelmingly a Western achievement. This fact has been a source of great sadness for politically correct exponents of multiculturalism. Mr. Black knows this, but he early on hedges his account to avoid “triumphalism.”
As Mr. Black concedes, many of the master terms of his narrative are “porous.” What, after all, is information? It is data, yes, but also statistics, rumor, propaganda and practical know-how. All enter into the story he tells, but their aggregation makes for an argument that is more kaleidoscopic than discursive.
The very breadth of Mr. Black’s subject makes reading “The Power of Knowledge” partly thrilling, partly vertiginous. It is a long journey that Mr. Black engages here, but all of the stops are express stops. There is no lingering. In a section on advances in maritime charting, for example, he mentions that an equivalent was the development during the Renaissance of one-point perspective using mathematical rules. True enough, but that rich topic is confined to a few sentences. Still, the book bristles with interesting tidbits. I took some smuggish satisfaction in knowing that the term “bureaucracy” was coined by a Frenchman (de Gournay) but that we owe “scientist” to the British geologist William Whewell.
Although deeply grounded in history from the Middle Ages on down, this book also conjures with contemporary issues. Some are technical, like the vistas of information unraveled in the human genome project. Some are political. Until fairly recently, Mr. Black notes, central governments lacked the mechanisms to intervene consistently in everyday life. That, as anyone who can pronounce the acronym “NSA” knows, has changed dramatically. Mr. Black devotes an entire chapter to what he calls “the scrutinized society.” The effort to control public opinion and the flow of information has been most flagrant in totalitarian regimes, but he shows that in democracies, too, information is “filtered and deployed as part of the battle for public opinion.”…
Are bots taking over Wikipedia?
Kurzweil News: “As crowdsourced Wikipedia has grown too large — with more than 30 million articles in 287 languages — to be entirely edited and managed by volunteers, 12 Wikipedia bots have emerged to pick up the slack.
The bots use Wikidata — a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and bots — to exchange information between entries and between the 287 languages.
Which raises an interesting question: what portion of Wikipedia edits are generated by humans versus bots?
To find out (and keep track of other bot activity), Thomas Steiner of Google Germany has created an open-source application (and API): Wikipedia and Wikidata Realtime Edit Stats, described in an arXiv paper.
The percentages of bot vs. human edits as shown in the application is constantly changing. A KurzweilAI snapshot on Feb. 20 at 5:19 AM EST showed an astonishing 42% of Wikipedia being edited by bots. (The application lists the 12 bots.)
Anonymous vs. logged-In humans (credit: Thomas Steiner)
The percentages also vary by language. Only 5% of English edits were by bots; but for Serbian pages, in which few Wikipedians apparently participate, 96% of edits were by bots.
The application also tracks what percentage of edits are by anonymous users. Globally, it was 25 percent in our snapshot and a surprising 34 percent for English — raising interesting questions about corporate and other interests covertly manipulating Wikipedia information.
NatureNet: a model for crowdsourcing the design of citizen science systems
Paper in CSCW Companion ’14, the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing: “NatureNet is citizen science system designed for collecting bio-diversity data in nature park settings. Park visitors are encouraged to participate in the design of the system in addition to collecting bio-diversity data. Our goal is to increase the motivation to participate in citizen science via crowdsourcing: the hypothesis is that when the crowd plays a role in the design and development of the system, they become stakeholders in the project and work to ensure its success. This paper presents a model for crowdsourcing design and citizen science data collection, and the results from early trials with users that illustrate the potential of this approach.”