Wilson Center’s Science & Technology Innovation Program

Archive for the ‘Crowdsourcing’ Category

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On the Front Lines of Citizen Science

In Citizen Science, Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing on June 18, 2013 at 3:12 pm

Ariel Levi Simons, a high school science teacher and founder of the Southern California community lab LA Makerspace, sees great benefit in taking students outside the “artificially constructed” curriculum of the classroom. And he’s looking to spread the message to other area teachers.

“LA Makerspace brings together researchers and teachers to work on projects, and only a small number of teachers who want to invest the time and energy do,” Simons says. “Most public teachers are overwhelmed with trying to maintain what they have in their classrooms, and the rule with most educators is to not give a lot of support to managing anything or connecting to anything larger.”

The community lab officially opened its doors in downtown LA earlier this year following a successful Kickstarter campaign. According to the group’s website, it offers lab space and classes for youth and adults interested in science, design and software, among other disciplines. “This space is an experiment to bridge the gap between academia and the community-at-large, establish a peer-to-peer mentorship network, and give members of all ages and abilities the chance to apprentice into a whole variety of fields ranging from industrial design to data analysis,” the site says. Read the rest of this entry »

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Collaborating With an Invisible Team: Lessons from Online Ideation

In Governance, Guest Blogger, Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing on June 11, 2013 at 11:57 am

As of this afternoon, we have 79 conflicting opinions about the best way for citizen science to support environmental research. It’s entirely our fault—we asked.

As an AAAS fellow with EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), I’ve spent the past few months immersed in the best of federal creativity. The ORD Innovation Team looks for new and better ways to solve environmental problems—and looks across the agency for ideas about how to do so. That means their brainstorming sessions don’t just involve a few people sitting around a table. Online ideation sessions help the team gather, and develop, the best suggestions. They also come with their own set of challenges.

Most online ideation platforms let you do three basic things:

  • Collect new ideas in response to a question or problem. Every person who logs onto the system can add their thoughts, and every idea appears as its own blog-like post.
  • Discuss and build on posted ideas. People critique, support, or add to what’s already been posted—these appear as comments on the original posts.
  • Vote on ideas. Suggestions with more interest get pushed toward the top of the list, allowing more people to see and comment on them. This also makes it easy to pick out, at the end of the session, the ideas that have garnered the most excitement.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Connecting Grassroots to Government Podcast #1: Eric Rasmussen

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management, Foresight, News and Events on May 6, 2013 at 2:28 pm

Editor’s note: In September 2012, the Commons Lab hosted the Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management workshop. Over two days, we spoke with a number of event participants for a series of video podcasts covering various aspect of the proceedings. The conversation below with Eric Rasmussen is the first of these podcasts. Please stay tuned: Additional installments will be posted in the coming weeks and the workshop summary report will be published in June.

Eric Rasmussen wears many hats: He is a medical doctor, a research professor for environmental security and global medicine at San Diego State University, an affiliate associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington, and the managing director at Infinitum Humanitarian Systems, a “profit-for-purpose” company in California that focuses on reducing vulnerability for systems and populations. In addition to sitting on a number of boards, Rasmussen served in the Navy for more than 25 years and was deployed more than 15 times to Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries.

In this podcast, Rasmussen discusses the limitations software developers face when moving ideas from concept to implementation in disaster response, noting that developers often have too little access to end users and too little understanding of the constraints faced by those users in the field. He also discusses the need to engage agencies and other responders early on to make sure new systems are incorporated into agency response plans and the role of policymakers in addressing these challenges.


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NEW POLICY MEMO: Cybersecurity Issues in Social Media and Crowdsourcing

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, News and Events, Reports and Publications on April 29, 2013 at 12:00 pm

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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.

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UPDATE: After Arrest, Authorities Caution Against Crowdsourced Criminal Intelligence Analysis

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management, Foresight, Technology and the Law on April 22, 2013 at 2:02 pm

During last week’s frenzied pursuit of suspects after the Boston Marathon bombings, we commented on the danger of attempting to crowdsource a criminal investigation. After Friday’s arrest of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, new information on how law enforcement located the suspect has shed light on the process. Despite good intentions, intelligence analysis of this type is a poor fit for untrained amateurs. From the Washington Post:

[T]he social media revolution meant that the FBI and Boston authorities were under intense pressure to move even faster, because thousands of amateur sleuths were mimicking the official investigation, inspecting digital images of the crowd on Boylston Street and making their own often wildly irresponsible conclusions about who might be the bombers.

On an investigative forum of Reddit.com, since removed from the site, users compiled thousands of photos, studied them for suspicious backpacks and sent their favorite theories spinning out into the wider Internet.

“Find people carrying black bags,” wrote the Reddit forum’s unnamed moderator. “If they look suspicious, then post them. Then people will try and follow their movements using all the images.”

The moderator defended this strategy by arguing that “it’s been proven that a crowd of thousands can do things like this much quicker and better. . . . I’d take thousands of people over a select few very smart investigators any day.”

In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social mediacomplicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials. Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were wrongly being targeted as suspects in the news media and on the Internet.

Fortunately, the suspect was apprehended and critiques of Reddit’s investigative techniques were swift and emphatic. But this could have easily gone much worse. This experience provides an example of where the wisdom of the crowd can be anything but wise.

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NEW REPORT: Privacy and Missing Persons after Natural Disasters

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management, Governance, Reports and Publications on April 22, 2013 at 10:58 am

priv_imgSeveral recent natural disasters have illustrated the need for humanitarian groups, volunteers and policymakers to understand privacy issues when searching for missing persons in the aftermath of these crises.

The Commons Lab and the Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy (CLIP) at Fordham Law School have teamed up on a new report looking at these legal and policy issues. The report, “Privacy and Missing Persons after Natural Disasters,” can be found online here.

From the press release:

The report offers a roadmap to the legal and policy issues surrounding privacy and missing persons following natural disasters. It provides strategies that humanitarian organizations, private sector organizations, volunteers and policymakers can pursue to help those affected by major natural disasters.  For example, the report recommends that the United States government exercise existing legal authority to support appropriate sharing of personal information about missing persons following natural disasters.  More broadly, the report recommends that those developing technologies to share information about missing persons implement design principles that carefully balance privacy consistent with existing legal obligations. The report also calls on privacy policy makers, legislators, and regulators to take steps to clarify how privacy rules apply to missing persons activities in identified key areas so that missing persons activities can proceed without the threat of legal liability. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Boston Marathon Bombings and the Limitations of Crowdsourced Intelligence

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management, Technology and the Law on April 18, 2013 at 4:43 pm

In the wake of the horrific bombings at this week’s Boston Marathon, a complex web of agencies has been furiously searching for suspects. Intelligence analysis is already a challenge, and attempting to identify suspects at a massively popular public event is even more difficult. Eager to scoop this major story, news outlets have repeatedly “broke” pieces on suspects only to retract them quickly. The paucity of information has been exacerbated by dubious crowd-based efforts to aid the search.

Popular news aggregator Reddit quickly created a subReddit entitled “FindBostonBombers,” inviting community members to share information and photos of the scene before, during and after the explosions. While the forum contains multiple disclaimers discouraging racism and posting of personal information, the limitations of this type of analysis quickly became apparent. These well-intentioned efforts have led to multiple false positives, and major outlets who eagerly seized the opportunity to beat the rush have been forced to back off: the “person of interest” was in fact a local high school student. Read the rest of this entry »

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New Tech Challenge: Can Technology Can Be Used to Stop Atrocities?

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management, News and Events on March 7, 2013 at 1:53 pm

If you think so, the U.S. Agency for International Development and Humanity United want to hear from you. The groups have announced a competition for people looking to apply technology to the prevention of atrocities around the world. And it’s not too late to get involved. Here is a March 6 statement with some more detail:

Despite a global effort to prevent atrocities including genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rape, millions remain at risk. In an effort to combat future atrocities, today the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Humanity United launched the second and final round of the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention and competition, an innovative approach to developing new ways to combat and prevent the worst human rights violations.

The Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention encourages individuals, groups and organizations to apply technology-based solutions to the most significant challenges surrounding atrocity prevention. Submitted in the form of prototypes or concept papers, proposals are reviewed by a prestigious panel of judges comprised of human rights and technology experts and U.S. government leaders. Winners receive cash prizes. Humanity United and USAID will also explore the possibility of piloting and scaling the most promising innovations. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Specter of “Preemptive Government”

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Foresight, Governance on March 4, 2013 at 12:22 pm

Last week, reporter Alex Howard published an interview on O’Reilly’s Strata blog that discusses a new use of Big Data in the form of “preemptive government.” This concept refers to emerging technologies that are able to sift through large, heterogeneous datasets and make predictive judgements about everything from crime to building or business code violations.

The phrase “preemptive government” itself sounds like it was torn from the pages of a Philip K. Dick story, with government agents targeting potential violators of the law before any violation occurs. In the piece, former Indianapolis mayor (and former New York City deputy mayor) Stephen Goldsmith acknowledges that the concept raises some very thorny ethical questions, particularly around disproportionate police attention and profiling. Issues around data collection, retention and usage all bear on how such preemptive governance would be conducted. From a conceptual standpoint, preemptive governance could be construed as a new form of surreptitious surveillance.

But it could be a two-way street. As Goldsmith acknowledges, inasmuch as preemptive governance relies on crowdsourced forms of data production, it can enable citizens to participate in the ways their environments are governed. Much like how participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) to some degree enabled citizens to use technologies to influence urban administration, crowdsourcing data production opens new connections between citizens and their government. Also, like PGIS, this process is likely to be fraught with social and political challenges that bear exploring, in particular how marginalized communities are impacted.

Research is needed to understand whether Big Data, crowdsourcing, and, perhaps, preemptive government can increase government efficiency, and how this impacts different social groups. Are some people marginalized by these processes? Are others given a greater voice in governance? What kinds of problems can these processes address?

In the meantime, policymakers could look to these technologies as ways to improve operations and to increase transparency, while figuring out how to navigate legal and social frameworks of privacy and confidentiality. In an ideal world, these technologies can be leveraged to empower everyday people to positively influence the ways they are governed.

About the author

Ryan Burns, PhC, is a doctoral candidate in geography at University of Washington-Seattle. He is currently serving as a research assistant with the Commons Lab of the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is studying the social and political implications of geographic technologies, particularly the ways new mapping and social media technologies are being integrated into disaster management strategies.

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Is Social Media a Cybersecurity Gamechanger?

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Foresight, News and Events, Reports and Publications on February 26, 2013 at 4:07 pm

The Commons Lab today released a new policy memo analyzing the increased potential of social media to exacerbate conflict situations and create cybersecurity threats – a potential “gamechanger” as the United States seeks to ramp up its cybersecurity efforts. The brief is the first in the program’s Policy Memo Series.

Using recent riots in India as an example, Dr. Rebecca Goolsby, a program officer with the Office of Naval Research, describes in the policy memo how social media channels can quickly disseminate false information and argues that social media users must develop a “healthy skepticism” when dealing with information from outlets like Twitter and Facebook to avoid this new brand of cyber-attack. From the executive summary:

Social media is responsible for much positive change in the world. But these new tools can be used by bad actors to foment strife and undermine stability, as seen during violent incidents in the Assam state of northeast India in July 2012. Cybersecurity efforts must take into account the growing potential for cyber-attack using social media, where hoax messages are incorporated into a stream of otherwise legitimate messages, and understand how quickly mobile apps and text services can disseminate false information. Authorities and volunteers must develop a healthy skepticism about information derived from these systems and new research and tools are needed to facilitate the self-policing of social media.

Click here to read the full memo on Scribd.

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