social media

Public Open Data: The Good, the Bad, the Future

Curated on September 5, 2013May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Camille Crittenden at IDEALAB: “Some of the most powerful tools combine official public data with social media or other citizen input, such as the recent partnership between Yelp and the public health departments in New York and San Francisco for restaurant hygiene inspection ratings. In other contexts, such tools can help uncover and ultimately reduce corruption by making it easier to “follow the money.”
Despite the opportunities offered by “free data,” this trend also raises new challenges and concerns, among them, personal privacy and security. While attention has been devoted to the unsettling power of big data analysis and “predictive analytics” for corporate marketing, similar questions could be asked about the value of public data. Does it contribute to community cohesion that I can find out with a single query how much my neighbors paid for their house or (if employed by public agencies) their salaries? Indeed, some studies suggest that greater transparency leads not to greater trust in government but to resignation and apathy.
Exposing certain law enforcement data also increases the possibility of vigilantism. California law requires the registration and publication of the home addresses of known sex offenders, for instance. Or consider the controversy and online threats that erupted when, shortly after the Newtown tragedy, a newspaper in New York posted an interactive map of gun permit owners in nearby counties.
…Policymakers and officials must still mind the “big data gap.”So what does the future hold for open data? Publishing data is only one part of the information ecosystem. To be useful, tools must be developed for cleaning, sorting, analyzing and visualizing it as well. …
For-profit companies and non-profit watchdog organizations will continue to emerge and expand, building on the foundation of this data flood. Public-private partnerships such as those between San Francisco and Appallicious or Granicus, startups created by Code for America’s Incubator, and non-partisan organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and MapLight rely on public data repositories for their innovative applications and analysis.
Making public data more accessible is an important goal and offers enormous potential to increase civic engagement. To make the most effective and equitable use of this resource for the public good, cities and other government entities should invest in the personnel and equipment — hardware and software — to make it universally accessible. At the same time, Chief Data Officers (or equivalent roles) should also be alert to the often hidden challenges of equity, inclusion, privacy, and security.”

Innovating to Improve Disaster Response and Recovery

Curated on September 5, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Todd Park at OSTP blog: “Last week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) jointly challenged a group of over 80 top innovators from around the country to come up with ways to improve disaster response and recovery efforts. This diverse group of stakeholders, consisting of representatives from Zappos, Airbnb, Marriott International, the Parsons School of Design, AOL/Huffington Post’s Social Impact, The Weather Channel, Twitter, Topix.com, Twilio, New York City, Google and the Red Cross, to name a few, spent an entire day at the White House collaborating on ideas for tools, products, services, programs, and apps that can assist disaster survivors and communities…
During the “Data Jam/Think Tank,” we discussed response and recovery challenges…Below are some of the ideas that were developed throughout the day. In the case of the first two ideas, participants wrote code and created actual working prototypes.

A real-time communications platform that allows survivors dependent on electricity-powered medical devices to text or call in their needs—such as batteries, medication, or a power generator—and connect those needs with a collaborative transportation network to make real-time deliveries.
A technical schema that tags all disaster-related information from social media and news sites – enabling municipalities and first responders to better understand all of the invaluable information generated during a disaster and help identify where they can help.
A Disaster Relief Innovation Vendor Engine (DRIVE) which aggregates pre-approved vendors for disaster-related needs, including transportation, power, housing, and medical supplies, to make it as easy as possible to find scarce local resources.
A crowdfunding platform for small businesses and others to receive access to capital to help rebuild after a disaster, including a rating system that encourages rebuilding efforts that improve the community.
Promoting preparedness through talk shows, working closely with celebrities, musicians, and children to raise awareness.
A “community power-go-round” that, like a merry-go-round, can be pushed to generate electricity and additional power for battery-charged devices including cell phones or a Wi-Fi network to provide community internet access.
Aggregating crowdsourced imagery taken and shared through social media sites to help identify where trees have fallen, electrical lines have been toppled, and streets have been obstructed.
A kid-run local radio station used to educate youth about preparedness for a disaster and activated to support relief efforts during a disaster that allows youth to share their experiences.”

How Mechanical Turkers Crowdsourced a Huge Lexicon of Links Between Words and Emotion

Curated on September 5, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Physics arXiv Blog: Sentiment analysis on the social web depends on how a person’s state of mind is expressed in words. Now a new database of the links between words and emotions could provide a better foundation for this kind of analysis

One of the buzzphrases associated with the social web is sentiment analysis. This is the ability to determine a person’s opinion or state of mind by analysing the words they post on Twitter, Facebook or some other medium.
Much has been promised with this method—the ability to measure satisfaction with politicians, movies and products; the ability to better manage customer relations; the ability to create dialogue for emotion-aware games; the ability to measure the flow of emotion in novels; and so on.
The idea is to entirely automate this process—to analyse the firehose of words produced by social websites using advanced data mining techniques to gauge sentiment on a vast scale.
But all this depends on how well we understand the emotion and polarity (whether negative or positive) that people associate with each word or combinations of words.
Today, Saif Mohammad and Peter Turney at the National Research Council Canada in Ottawa unveil a huge database of words and their associated emotions and polarity, which they have assembled quickly and inexpensively using Amazon’s crowdsourcing Mechanical Turk website. They say this crowdsourcing mechanism makes it possible to increase the size and quality of the database quickly and easily….The result is a comprehensive word-emotion lexicon for over 10,000 words or two-word phrases which they call EmoLex….
The bottom line is that sentiment analysis can only ever be as good as the database on which it relies. With EmoLex, analysts have a new tool for their box of tricks.”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1308.6297: Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon

Assessing Zuckerberg’s Idea That Facebook Could Help Citizens Re-Make Their Government

Curated on August 29, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Gregory Ferenstein in TechCrunch: “Mark Zuckerberg has a grand vision that Facebook will help citizens in developing countries decide their own governments. It’s a lofty and partially attainable goal. While Egypt probably won’t let citizens vote for their next president with a Like, it is theoretically possible to use Facebook to crowdsource expertise. Governments around the world are experimenting with radical online direct democracy, but it doesn’t always work out.

Very briefly, Zuckerberg laid out his broad vision for e-government to Wired’s Steven Levy, while defending Internet.org, a new consortium to bring broadband to the developing world.

“People often talk about how big a change social media had been for our culture here in the U.S. But imagine how much bigger a change it will be when a developing country comes online for the first time ever. We use things like Facebook to share news and keep in touch with our friends, but in those countries, they’ll use this for deciding what kind of government they want to have. Getting access to health care information for the first time ever.”

When he references “deciding … government,” Zuckerberg could be talking about voting, sharing ideas, or crafting a constitution. We decided to assess the possibilities of them all….
For citizens in the exciting/terrifying position to construct a brand-new government, American-style democracy is one of many options. Britain, for instance, has a parliamentary system and has no constitution. In other cases, a government may want to heed political scientists’ advice and develop a “consensus democracy,” where more than two political parties are incentivized to work collaboratively with citizens, business, and different branches of government to craft laws.
At least once, choosing a new style of democracy has been attempted through the Internet. After the global financial meltdown wrecked Iceland’s economy, the happy citizens of the grass-covered country decided to redo their government and solicit suggestions from the public (950 Icelanders chosen by lottery and general calls for ideas through social networks). After much press about Iceland’s “crowdsourced” constitution, it crashed miserably after most of the elected leaders rejected it.
Crafting law, especially a constitution, is legally complex; unless there is a systematic way to translate haphazard citizen suggestions into legalese, the results are disastrous.
“Collaborative drafting, at large scale, at low costs, and that is inclusive, is something that we still don’t know how to do,” says Tiago Peixoto, a World Bank Consultant on participatory democracy (and one of our Most Innovative People In Democracy).
Peixoto, who helps the Brazilian government conduct some of the world’s only online policymaking, says he’s optimistic that Facebook could be helpful, but he wouldn’t use it to draft laws just yet.
While technically it is possible for social networks to craft a new government, we just don’t know how to do it very well, and, therefore, leaders are likely to reject the idea. In other words, don’t expect Egypt to decide their future through Facebook likes.”

Mapping the Twitterverse

Curated on August 29, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Phys.org: “What does your Twitter profile reveal about you? More than you know, according to Chris Weidemann. The GIST master’s student has developed an application that follows geospatial footprints.
You start your day at your favorite breakfast spot. When your order of strawberry waffles with extra whipped cream arrives, it’s too delectable not to share with your Twitter followers. You snap a photo with your smartphone and hit send. Then, it’s time to hit the books.
You tweet your friends that you’ll be at the library on campus. Later that day, palm trees silhouette a neon-pink sunset. You can’t resist. You tweet a picture with the hashtag #ILoveLA.
You may not realize that when you tweet those breezy updates and photos of food, you are sharing information about your location.
Chris Weidemann, a graduate student in the Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST) online master’s program at USC Dornsife, investigated just how much public geospatial data was generated by Twitter users and how their information—available through Twitter’s application programming interface (API)—could potentially be used by third parties. His study was published June 2013 in the International Journal of Geoinformatics…
Twitter has approximately 500 million active users, and reports show that 6 percent of users opt-in to allow the platform to broadcast their location using global positioning technology with each tweet they post. That’s about 30 million people sending geo-tagged data out into the Twitterverse. In their tweets, people can choose whether their information is displayed as a city and state, an address or pinpoint their precise latitude and longitude.
That’s only part of their geospatial footprint. Information contained in a post may reveal a user’s location. Depending upon how the account is set up, profiles may include details about their hometown, time zone and language.”

Twitter’s activist roots: How Twitter’s past shapes its use as a protest tool

Curated on August 29, 2013October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Radio Netherlands Worldwide: “Surprised when demonstrators from all over the world took to Twitter as a protest tool? Evan “Rabble” Henshaw-Plath, member of Twitter’s founding team, was not. Rather, he sees it as a return to its roots: Inspired by protest coordination tools like TXTMob, and shaped by the values and backgrounds of Twitter’s founders, he believes activist potential was built into the service from the start.

It took a few revolutions before Twitter was taken seriously. Critics claimed that its 140-character limit only provided space for the most trivial thoughts: neat for keeping track of Ashton Kutcher’s lunch choices, but not much else. It made the transition from Silicon Valley toy into Middle East protest tool seem all the more astonishing.
Unless, Twitter co-founder Evan Henshaw-Plath argues, you know the story of how Twitter came to be. Evan Henshaw-Plath was the lead developer at Odeo, the company that started and eventually became Twitter. TXTMob, an activist tool deployed during the 2004 Republican National Convention in the US to coordinate protest efforts via SMS was, says Henshaw-Plath, a direct inspiration for Twitter.
Protest 1.0
In 2004, while Henshaw-Plath was working at Odeo, he and a few other colleagues found a fun side-project in working on TXTMob, an initiative by what he describes as a “group of academic artist/prankster/hacker/makers” that operated under the ostensibly serious moniker of Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA). Earlier IAA projects included small graffiti robots on wheels that spray painted slogans on pavements during demonstrations, and a pudgy talking robot with big puppy eyes made to distribute subversive literature to people who ignored less-cute human pamphleteers.
TXTMob was a more serious endeavor than these earlier projects: a tactical protest coordination tool. With TXTMob, users could quickly exchange text messages with large groups of other users about protest locations and police crackdowns….”

The New Reality of Social Production

Curated on August 23, 2013October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Don Peppers on LinkedIn: “…Waze is yet another example of social production, or the increasingly common use of connected people working together to create value with little or no actual economic incentives involved. Instead, social production is based on a completely different set of principles – sharing and giving, rather than trading and selling. It is an important aspect of what some are now calling the “sharing economy,” and systems like Waze are ever more rapidly replacing or supplementing large portions of the commercial economy, as Martha Rogers and I document in our book Extreme Trust.
In the commercial economy, where profit-making entities operate, what you pay for determines what you get. I pay you, and you give me something of value. I may be a customer buying a product or service, or you may be the boss paying my salary, but either way neither of us is volunteering. We are trading our time or money for value in return. In the commercial economy, we all expect to pay for the things we want. When you pay the grocer $6 for a 12-pack of Diet Coke by the can, you don’t begrudge him the money. And you wouldn’t even consider asking the grocer to give you the soda voluntarily, for free – the way a Waze participant voluntarily reports a new hazard for other participants.
An economic system based on money, as ours is, facilitates the efficient division of labor, enabling us to accomplish more and more complex tasks by dividing them into simple components. The end result is that you don’t have to wire your own smartphone together or harvest your own wheat for your morning bagel. The division-of-labor principle has allowed technology to become so complex that none of us today could ever make even the simplest manufactured products all by ourselves.
But because of the very efficient way in which people are now electronically connected, many social production tasks can also be parsed up and allocated bit by bit among assorted different players – just talk to any of the 3.4 million volunteer coders and developers who work on the more than 300,000 different open-source software projects now registered at Sourceforge, for example. Moreover, these tasks are sometimes so complex, diffused, or difficult that accomplishing them with a commercial model just wouldn’t be practical. Imagine what it would have taken for Waze’s organizers to identify and monitor traffic hazards across the nation on their own, for instance. A small army of paid scouts or robotic monitors would have been required, continually updating the system, and the cost would have made the whole project completely unrealistic…”