Cat Jones at FirstMonday: “Interest in online ‘slacktivism’ is high both within and outside academia, and the online sharing of cause-related campaigns is increasing, but research into the extent to which ‘slacktivism’ applies to the act of sharing online content to ‘help’ a cause is limited. Slacktivism, as used in much of today’s popular discourse, is defined as ‘feel-good online activism [with] zero political or social impact’ (Morozov, 2009). Here, a survey-based analysis investigates social videos’ impacts on U.K. and U.S. viewers. Results show that the stronger viewers’ motivations are to share to help a cause, the stronger their motivations are to find out more afterwards. Further, a case study shows that social videos that motivate viewers to share the video ‘because it’s for a good cause, and I want to help’ (cause-related sharing versus, for example, to appear knowledgeable about a subject), can also prompt real-life actions, including donations. These results indicate that cause-related video sharing does have an impact, and therefore is not slacktivism by Morozov’s definition. Preliminary analysis suggests that of viewers sharing to ‘help’ causes, those discriminating in their choice of sharing audience (narrow vs. broad) are more likely to further engage than indiscriminate sharers. Result patterns from U.S. narrowcast sharers differ from those of other groups, indicating that tie strength and cultural differences may play a role in modifying slacktivist behaviors….(More)”
India asks its citizens: please digitise our files
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)”
Cops Increasingly Use Social Media to Connect, Crowdsource
In fact, 81 percent of law enforcement professionals use sites such as Facebook and Twitter on the job. And 25 percent use it daily.
Much of law enforcement is crowdsourced — Amber alerts are pushed to smartphones, seeking response from citizens; officers push wanted information and crime tips to users on Facebook and Twitter in the hopes they can help; and some departments create apps to streamline the information sharing.
Take the Johns Creek, Ga., Police Department, which has deployed a tool that allows additional citizen engagement and crowdsourcing…..Using a mobile app — the SunGard Public Sector P2C Converge app, which is branded specifically for Johns Creek PD as JCPD4Me — the department can more smoothly manage public safety announcements and other social media interactions….
Another tool cops use for communicating with citizens is Nixle, which lets agencies publish alerts, advisories, community information and traffic news. Citizens register for free and receive credible, neighborhood-level public safety information via text message and email in real time.
The Oakland, Calif., Police Department (OPD) uses the platform to engage with citizens — an April 17, 2015 post on Oakland PD’s Nixle Community feed informs readers that the department’s Special Victims Section, which is working to put an end to sex trafficking in the city, arrested five individuals for solicitation of prostitution. Since Jan. 1, 2015, OPD has arrested 70 individuals from 27 cities across the state for solicitation of prostitution.
Nixle allows two-way communication as well — the Tip Watch function allows anonymous tipsters to send information to Oakland PD in three ways (text, phone, Web). Now OPD can issue a passcode to tipsters for two-way, anonymous communication to help gather more information.
On the East Coast, the Peabody, Mass., Police Department has used the My Police Department (MyPD) app by WiredBlue, which lets citizens submit tips and feedback directly to the department, since its creation….
During the high-profile manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, the FBI asked the public for eyewitness photo and video evidence. The response from the public was so overwhelming that the server infrastructure couldn’t handle the massive inflow of data.
This large-scale crowdsourcing and data dilemma inspired a new product: the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department’s Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository (LEEDIR). Developed by CitizenGlobal Inc. and Amazon Web Services, LEEDIR pairs an app with cloud storage to help police use citizens’ smartphones as tools to gather and investigate evidence. Since its creation, the repository was used in Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2014 to investigate riots in Isla Vista.
Proponents of LEEDIR say the crowdsourcing system gives authorities a secure, central repository for the countless electronic tips that can come in during a crisis. Critics, however, claim that privacy issues come into play with this kind of policing. …(More)”
Delhi trials participatory budget initiative
Medha Basu in FutureGov: “The Delhi government is running a participatory budget exercise to involve citizens in deciding priorities for the 2015 Budget.
The city government, which came into office in February, has set aside INR 5 million (US$78,598) for each neighbourhood and residents will decide what this money gets spent on.
The initiative, Janta Ka Budget (meaning ‘People’s Budget’), will be tested in 400 communities across the city, with the first one launched by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal last month.
….
Officials met with residents of the neighbourhood to hear what they would like to see improved in their area. Residents then voted in public meetings to decide the most popular ones.
Officials are expected to come up with cost estimates for the shortlisted projects within a week of the meeting and allocate money from the fund.
In the first session, the shortlisted projects were a library, dispensary, road repairs and CCTV cameras….(More)”
Worldwide accessibility map is crowdsourced by users
Springwise: “There are a growing number of apps such as Handimap and Blue Badge Style which offer city guides for users in wheelchairs — informing them which venues are accessible and which do not have disabled facilities. AXS Map does the same, but utilizes crowdsourced information to cover a much wider range of places and venues.
AXS Map is a free app, hailing from Canada, which aims to make the world a more accessible place for those with mobility problems. Users can access the platform via smartphone or desktop: they can browse any given area for accessible restaurants, shops, public restrooms or anything else via the searchable map. The database is made up of crowdsourced reviews submitted by the users themselves and includes ratings and information about entryways and restrooms.
The organization also host Mapathons, which aim to get new communities in towns and cities which are not yet covered involved: participants are encouraged to form teams and compete to see who can rate the most venues in a given area. Mapathons have taken place all over the USA and there are upcoming events in New York and Istanbul. Where should the AXS Mappers head next?” (More: AXS Map)
Nepal Aid Workers Helped by Drones, Crowdsourcing
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)”
How crowdsourcing could help simplify America’s tax code
Mihir A. Desai in Fortune: “By soliciting ideas from large groups, the U.S. can come up with the right policies to reform the nation’s tax code — similar to the way complex computer systems are managed around the world….
Addressing complexity in the tax code requires analogizing to other complex systems and drawing on the research that demonstrates how to manage that complexity. Indeed, there is a well-developed literature on how to manage complex systems that can provide the foundation for simplifying the tax code. In particular, we know a lot about how to manage the evolution of software codes. This analogy yields two primary lessons.
First, “over the wall” engineering is highly problematic and “concurrent” engineering is preferred. Throwing completed ideas “over the wall” to the next part of the production process limits learning and engenders complexity relative to a concurrent and iterative production process. Currently, policy ideas are often developed without a clear vision of the associated language and with even less attention to the perspective of administrators. As with software, this yields bulky and contradictory language that could be avoided if the practice of policy formulation and drafting were a collaborative activity with the administrative agency in charge of enforcement. While the 1998 IRS Reform Act calls for such an approach, the reality does not live up to the law’s aspiration.
Second, and more radically, we should embark on an effort to crowd source the code. Much as the development of software capitalizes on a distributed talent pool, our legislative and regulatory processes on taxes could be opened up radically during comment and drafting.
Currently, the code is managed much as it was 50 years ago – in a fundamentally closed manner. Laws and regulations are drafted by small groups in a non-transparent way that pays little attention to the overall architecture of the tax system. As a consequence, vested interests can influence the management of complexity toward their advantage and complexity grows by ignoring interrelationships.
Research shows that effective management of complex codes – be it Linux or the tax code – requires three things. First, the code must be mapped so that the interrelationships, technically and conceptually, of different parts of the code and associated regulations and rulings become manifest. Second, this mapping enables modularization whereby the code is reorganized into pieces that reflect these relationships. Finally, this modularization provides the foundation for opening up the code to experts throughout society – so-called crowdsourcing – who contribute suggestions for rationalization and simplification.
By mapping, modularizing and opening the code and associated regulations, we could draw upon widespread expertise, provide transparency on a critical process, address the imbalance in resources between the taxing authority and sophisticated taxpayers and begin the process of simplifying the code and its administrative guidance. In the limit, one could imagine a detailed mapping of the tax code and associated regulations hosted by the IRS much as software code is mapped. This mapping would then serve as a guide to reorganizing laws and regulations over time. While decision making rights would remain with Congress and the IRS, opinions on policies would then be solicited widely and the drafting of laws and regulations could be aided by experts around the country through an open platform.
The commentary and drafting process that is so critical to policy formulation and administration would be completely open in real time. …(More)”
How Crowdsourcing And Machine Learning Will Change The Way We Design Cities
Now, that data is being used to predict what parts of cities feel the safest. StreetScore, a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab’s Macro Connections and Camera Culture groups, uses an algorithm to create a super high-resolution map of urban perceptions. The algorithmically generated data could one day be used to research the connection between urban perception and crime, as well as informing urban design decisions.
The algorithm, created by Nikhil Naik, a Ph.D. student in the Camera Culture lab, breaks an image down into its composite features—such as building texture, colors, and shapes. Based on how Place Pulse volunteers rated similar features, the algorithm assigns the streetscape a perceived safety score between 1 and 10. These scores are visualized as geographic points on a map, designed by MIT rising sophomore Jade Philipoom. Each image available from Google Maps in the two cities are represented by a colored dot: red for the locations that the algorithm tags as unsafe, and dark green for those that appear safest. The site, now limited to New York and Boston, will be expanded to feature Chicago and Detroit later this month, and eventually, with data collected from a new version of Place Pulse, will feature dozens of cities around the world….(More)”
A Process Model for Crowdsourcing Design: A Case Study in Citizen Science
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)”
21st-Century Public Servants: Using Prizes and Challenges to Spur Innovation
Jenn Gustetic at the Open Government Initiative Blog: “Thousands of Federal employees across the government are using a variety of modern tools and techniques to deliver services more effectively and efficiently, and to solve problems that relate to the missions of their Agencies. These 21st-century public servants are accomplishing meaningful results by applying new tools and techniques to their programs and projects, such as prizes and challenges, citizen science and crowdsourcing, open data, and human-centered design.
Prizes and challenges have been a particularly popular tool at Federal agencies. With 397 prizes and challenges posted on challenge.gov since September 2010, there are hundreds of examples of the many different ways these tools can be designed for a variety of goals. For example:
- NASA’s Mars Balance Mass Challenge: When NASA’s Curiosity rover pummeled through the Martian atmosphere and came to rest on the surface of Mars in 2012, about 300 kilograms of solid tungsten mass had to be jettisoned to ensure the spacecraft was in a safe orientation for landing. In an effort to seek creative concepts for small science and technology payloads that could potentially replace a portion of such jettisoned mass on future missions, NASA released the Mars Balance Mass Challenge. In only two months, over 200 concepts were submitted by over 2,100 individuals from 43 different countries for NASA to review. Proposed concepts ranged from small drones and 3D printers to radiation detectors and pre-positioning supplies for future human missions to the planet’s surface. NASA awarded the $20,000 prize to Ted Ground of Rising Star, Texas for his idea to use the jettisoned payload to investigate the Mars atmosphere in a way similar to how NASA uses sounding rockets to study Earth’s atmosphere. This was the first time Ted worked with NASA, and NASA was impressed by the novelty and elegance of his proposal: a proposal that NASA likely would not have received through a traditional contract or grant because individuals, as opposed to organizations, are generally not eligible to participate in those types of competitions.
- National Institutes of Health (NIH) Breast Cancer Startup Challenge (BCSC): The primary goals of the BCSC were to accelerate the process of bringing emerging breast cancer technologies to market, and to stimulate the creation of start-up businesses around nine federally conceived and owned inventions, and one invention from an Avon Foundation for Women portfolio grantee. While NIH has the capacity to enable collaborative research or to license technology to existing businesses, many technologies are at an early stage and are ideally suited for licensing by startup companies to further develop them into commercial products. This challenge established 11 new startups that have the potential to create new jobs and help promising NIH cancer inventions support the fight against breast cancer. The BCSC turned the traditional business plan competition model on its head to create a new channel to license inventions by crowdsourcing talent to create new startups.
These two examples of challenges are very different, in terms of their purpose and the process used to design and implement them. The success they have demonstrated shouldn’t be taken for granted. It takes access to resources (both information and people), mentoring, and practical experience to both understand how to identify opportunities for innovation tools, like prizes and challenges, to use them to achieve a desired outcome….
Last month, the Challenge.gov program at the General Services Administration (GSA), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)’s Innovation Lab, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and a core team of Federal leaders in the prize-practitioner community began collaborating with the Federal Community of Practice for Challenges and Prizes to develop the other half of the open innovation toolkit, the prizes and challenges toolkit. In developing this toolkit, OSTP and GSA are thinking not only about the information and process resources that would be helpful to empower 21st-century public servants using these tools, but also how we help connect these people to one another to add another meaningful layer to the learning environment…..
Creating an inventory of skills and knowledge across the 600-person (and growing!) Federal community of practice in prizes and challenges will likely be an important resource in support of a useful toolkit. Prize design and implementation can involve tricky questions, such as:
- Do I have the authority to conduct a prize or challenge?
- How should I approach problem definition and prize design?
- Can agencies own solutions that come out of challenges?
- How should I engage the public in developing a prize concept or rules?
- What types of incentives work best to motivate participation in challenges?
- What legal requirements apply to my prize competition?
- Can non-Federal employees be included as judges for my prizes?
- How objective do the judging criteria need to be?
- Can I partner to conduct a challenge? What’s the right agreement to use in a partnership?
- Who can win prize money and who is eligible to compete? …(More)