New Harvard Business School Research Paper by Paul Healy and Karthik Ramanna (Harvard Business Review): “Corruption is the greatest impediment to conducting business in Russia, according to leaders recently surveyed by the World Economic Forum. Indeed, it’s a problem in many emerging markets, and businesses have a role to play in combating it, according to Healy and Ramanna. The authors focus on RosPil — an anticorruption entity in Russia set up by Alexey Navalny, a crusader against public and private malfeasance in that country. As of December 2011, RosPil claimed to have prevented the granting of dubious contracts worth US$1.3 billion. The organization holds corrupt politicians’ and bureaucrats’ feet to the fire largely through internet-based crowdsourcing, whereby often-anonymous people identify requests for government-issued tenders that are designed to generate kickbacks. Should entities like RosPil be supported, and should companies fashion their own responses to corruption? On the one hand, there are obvious public-relations and political risks; on the other hand, corruption can erode a firm’s competitiveness, the trust of customers and employees, and even the very legitimacy of capitalism. The authors argue that heads of many multinational companies are well positioned to combat corruption in emerging markets. Those leaders have the power to enforce policies in their organizations and networks, and they enjoy the ability to organize others in the industry against this pernicious threat.”
Challenge: Visualizing Online Takedown Requests
visualizing.org: 
“The free flow of information defines the Internet. Innovations like Wikipedia and crowdsourcing owe their existence to and are powered by the resulting streams of knowledge and ideas. Indeed, more information means more choice, more freedom, and ultimately more power for the individual and society. But — citing reasons like defamation, national security, and copyright infringement — governments, corporations, and other organizations at times may regulate and restrict information online. By blocking or filtering sites, issuing court orders limiting access to information, enacting legislation or pressuring technology and communication companies, governments and other organizations aim to censor one of the most important means of free expression in the world. What does this mean and to what extent should attempts to censor online content be permitted?…
We challenge you to visualize the removal requests in Google’s Transparency Report. What in this data should be communicated to the general public? Are there any trends or patterns in types of requests that have been complied with? Have legal and policy environments shaped what information is available and/or restricted in different countries? The data set on government requests (~1 thousand rows) provides summaries broken down by country, Google product, and reason. The data set on copyright requests, however, is much larger (~1 million rows) and includes each individual request. Use one or both data sets, by themselves or with other open data sets. We’re excited to partner with Google for this challenge, and we’re offering $5,000 in prizes.”
“The free flow of information defines the Internet. Innovations like Wikipedia and crowdsourcing owe their existence to and are powered by the resulting streams of knowledge and ideas. Indeed, more information means more choice, more freedom, and ultimately more power for the individual and society. But — citing reasons like defamation, national security, and copyright infringement — governments, corporations, and other organizations at times may regulate and restrict information online. By blocking or filtering sites, issuing court orders limiting access to information, enacting legislation or pressuring technology and communication companies, governments and other organizations aim to censor one of the most important means of free expression in the world. What does this mean and to what extent should attempts to censor online content be permitted?…We challenge you to visualize the removal requests in Google’s Transparency Report. What in this data should be communicated to the general public? Are there any trends or patterns in types of requests that have been complied with? Have legal and policy environments shaped what information is available and/or restricted in different countries? The data set on government requests (~1 thousand rows) provides summaries broken down by country, Google product, and reason. The data set on copyright requests, however, is much larger (~1 million rows) and includes each individual request. Use one or both data sets, by themselves or with other open data sets. We’re excited to partner with Google for this challenge, and we’re offering $5,000 in prizes.”
Enter
Deadline: Thursday, June 27, 2013, 11:59 pm EDT
Winner Announced: Thursday, July 11, 2013
More at http://visualizing.org/contests/visualizing-online-takedown-requests
Innovations in American Government Award
Press Release: “Today the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University announced the Top 25 programs in this year’s Innovations in American Government Award competition. These government initiatives represent the dedicated efforts of city, state, federal, and tribal governments and address a host of policy issues including crime prevention, economic development, environmental and community revitalization, employment, education, and health care. Selected by a cohort of policy experts, researchers, and practitioners, four finalists and one winner of the Innovations in American Government Award will be announced in the fall. A full list of the Top 25 programs is available here.
…A Culture of Innovation
A number of this year’s Top 25 programs foster a new culture of innovation through online collaboration and crowdsourcing. Signaling a new trend in government, these programs encourage the generation of smart solutions to existing and seemingly intractable public policy problems. LAUNCH—a partnership among NASA, USAID, the State Department, and NIKE—identifies and scales up promising global sustainability innovations created by individual citizens and organizations. The General Services Administration’s Challenge.gov uses crowdsourcing contests to solve government issues: government agencies post challenges, and the broader American public is awarded for submitting winning ideas. The Department of Transportation’s IdeaHub also uses an online platform to encourage its employees to communicate new ideas for making the department more adaptable and enterprising.”
Cybersecurity Issues in Social Media and Crowdsourcing
Wilson Center: ” The Commons Lab today released a new policy memo exploring the vulnerabilities facing the widespread use and acceptance of social media and crowdsourcing. This is the second publication in the project’s policy memo series.
Using real-world examples, security expert George Chamales describes the most-pressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in this space and calls for the development of best practices to address these vulnerabilities, ultimately concluding that it is possible for institutions to develop trust in the emerging technologies. From the memo’s executive summary:
Individuals and organizations interested in using social media and crowdsourcing currently lack two key sets of information: a systematic assessment of the vulnerabilities in these technologies and a comprehensive set of best practices describing how to address those vulnerabilities. Identifying those vulnerabilities and developing those best practices are necessary to address a growing number of incidents ranging from innocent mistakes to targeted attacks that have claimed lives and cost millions of dollars.
Click here to read the full memo on Scribd.
Primer on Crowdfunding
Primer by ValuationApp: “Crowdfunding can be defined as raising funds from the general public usually through internet platforms in order to support a project started by an individual or an organization….Crowdfunding is essentially a subset of Crowdsourcing; a process where organizations reach out to their customers and the general public, and outsource some of their functions to the public in order to get feedback, ideas and solutions. In crowdsourcing, the participants either work for free or for a very small amount…the first historically documented crowdfunding event was the completion of the Statue of Liberty in 1885, where the city reached out to the crowd through newspapers and part of the money required to build the statue was contributed by the citizens…
Several benefits of crowdfunding have been discussed in the previous sections, so in this section let’s cut right to the chase and present points in the most compact form. Through crowdfunding, individuals and organizations can:
- Reach out to a wide range of people all over the world.
- Raise large amounts of funds while simultaneously creating their own brand identity.
- Gain valuable feedback on the product/service/project they are raising the funds for.
- Turn funders into future customers.
- Stop depending on large investment from investors and thus enjoy minimum interference from the investors.
- Increase public awareness about their products and gain free word of mouth marketing on social media.”
"Imagery to the Crowd"
Description: “The Humanitarian Information Unit (HIU), a division within the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues at the U.S. Department of State, is working to increase the availability of spatial data in areas experiencing humanitarian emergencies. Built from a crowdsourcing model, the new “Imagery to the Crowd” process publishes high-resolution commercial satellite imagery, purchased by the Unites States Government, in a web-based format that can be easily mapped by volunteers.
The digital map data generated by the volunteers are stored in a database maintained by OpenStreetMap (OSM), a UK-registered non-profit foundation, under a license that ensures the data are freely available and open for a range of uses (http://osm.org). Inspired by the success of the OSM mapping effort after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the Imagery to the Crowd process harnesses the combined power of satellite imagery and the volunteer mapping community to help aid agencies provide informed and effective humanitarian assistance, and plan recovery and development activities.
5-minute Ignite Talk about Imagery to the Crowd:
Data for the Boston Marathon Investigation Will Be Crowdsourced
WIRED: “The investigation of Monday’s deadly twin bombings in Boston will rely to an extraordinary extent on crowdsourced surveillance, provided by Marathon spectators’ cellphone photos, Vine videos, and Instagram feeds….There are limits to the crowdsourcing. The data used in the investigation will be crowdsourced. The investigation will not be. A crowdsourced investigation runs a high risk of becoming a witchhunt, as we saw in the Newton shooting spree.”
Crowdscaling
“Crowdscaling taps into the energy of people around the world that want to contribute. […] It grows and scales its impact outward by empowering the success of others.”
Let’s consider these numbers that were shared in February of this year:
- 3,190 TEDx events have happened around the world (since 2009)
- 800 cities around the world have hosted one or more TEDx event
- 126 countries have hosted one or more TEDx events
- 12,900 TEDxTalks have been delivered
The first TEDx organizer, Krisztina “Z” Holly, explains these numbers of growth in the Huffington Post as resulting from “crowdscaling”:
“Like crowdsourcing, crowdscaling taps into the energy of people around the world that want to contribute. But while crowdsourcing pulls in ideas and content from outside the organization, crowdscaling grows and scales its impact outward by empowering the success of others.”
Krisztina identifies two critical success factors behind “crowdscaling”:
- Adopting a “platform” model of institutional organization
“It is a business strategy that, instead of using a top-down, command-and-control approach for growth, builds on the nature of today’s hyper-connected, open, and globalized world to leverage customers, partners, even competitors. Organizations can achieve enormous scale and influence by creating the platform on which others can build, and aligning stakeholders so they feel partial ownership of the movement.”
- Strong commitment from the top
“While the approach requires only modest investment, it does need a large commitment from the top. It can make typical leaders very uneasy, because they are no longer in complete control. (Imagine having over a thousand volunteer teams, who aren’t employed by you and can’t be fired by you, creating events around the world in your name! That’s enough to give a typical corporate executive night sweats.)”