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.

Simons, who oversees the lab’s citizen science program, says the opportunity to learn science by doing research unconstrained by the bounds of grade levels “gives students the opportunity to learn things they would not learn at a high school or, even, college level.” Simons adds, “Science projects are hands on, which pushes the kids.” In some cases at the lab, ninth graders are working on material science and physical chemistry projects at an undergraduate or even graduate level, he says.

DECO, one of the newest research projects at the lab, is a physics outreach project that aims to connect high school and university students to current research in astroparticle physics—an emerging field that studies fundamental particles from outer space. DECO is also part of a larger global sensor web, a large-scale aggregation of data that include geo-tags that look at the correlation between phenomena across the planet.

The DECO project will set up a distributed cosmic-ray detector network using only android phones, which will monitor the incoming flux of high-energy radiation from space in real time. The aggregated data will be compiled in a database to be posted online and made accessible to researchers, students, citizen scientists and others under a creative commons license. The information will also enable members of the public to conduct their own research with the tools provided as a result of the project.

“The idea is to create a free app for people to download on their android phones and will run for eight or nine hours a night and send data back to the server,” Simons says.  At the moment, “There is no business model on that end, just that it will be a public good for researchers and outreach in general.”

While the app will measure the high-energy radiation from solar space, the bigger goal is to eventually track other kinds of environmental data in the global sensor web by pulling information off of accelerometers—a device that measures acceleration or vibration of structures and motions.

“The DECO flagship project is working on how far we can push our phone hardware to route the data,” Simons says. “We do this with all sorts of other data and aggregate in a distributive fashion.”

In addition to Simons and his Android phone, the program is being supported by a Java developer at the University of California-Irvine and a post-doctoral fellow at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Simons says the idea has endless possibility, but needs to be fully funded to reach its true potential.

DECO is in the preliminary stages of development and the app is still being tested. To move the project forward, more teacher participation is necessary. “The main limitation is in terms of engagement with schools,” Simons says.  “It’s hard getting ahold of teachers and administrators.”

Another limitation is cost. LA Makerspace has grown via a steady flow of funding, but additional funding is needed to launch the DECO project. “We need a grant to buy all of the [server] space [to hold all of the aggregated data] or have someone donate it to us,” Simons says. “I’m actually trying to find someone to host our data pro bono.”

The goal is to have six android phones running in the background—not including the phones of participants—that will accumulate information at a rate of approximately 500 megabytes per week. Paying for a developer to manage the heaps of gathered data would cost upwards of $40,000-50,000 a year and a physical server would cost about $800 to build, Simons says. A virtual server would cost around $400 to use, he adds.

And the actual app is needed to garner public participation in the project and collect enough data—something that cannot be done until there is enough online space to hold all of the information. “We haven’t put it out to the public because if all of the sudden we release it, people would overwhelm the server,” he says.

Despite the challenges, Simons says DECO is a project that could change the way the public and scientists interact with one another to discover the world, a relationship he describes as symbiotic.

“The good thing about this citizen science project is that it is mutually beneficial,” Simons says.

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.

The Innovation Team keeps these sessions open on the EPA intranet for about a week. Most people participate towards the beginning and end of the session, so longer sessions don’t tend to get much more input. And the short time frame keeps excitement high and participation fast-paced.

Some of the Innovation Team’s ideation sessions have asked participants to highlight creative work that’s already been done, and help identify lessons from those projects for future work. Others, like the current session, ask people to suggest directions for specific projects. In this case, the goal was to find out which EPA research questions might benefit from volunteers doing data collection and analysis. Citizen science is an area ripe for exploration—provided we know where it will do the most good and save the most resources.

I’ve learned a few things by watching these sessions:

• If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. Federal workers are a busy bunch, and get frequent updates on a lot of important (and important-seeming) projects. Ongoing outreach is necessary, not only to remind people to check in, but to make sure they know what practical results will come out of their time investment.
• Stay focused—but not too focused. Too broad a topic won’t interest many people, and the conversation that does result will be all over the place. Too narrow, and few people will feel like they have anything to contribute. Starting with a short, clear statement of the problem is vital.
• Stay positive. Ideas can be fragile things, and people are less likely to contribute if they think they’ll just get shot down. The improv concept of “yes, and…” is a good one—try to keep the discussion centered around constructive suggestions.

Online ideation can be a useful way to gather creative suggestions from a big organization, and to start conversations between people who wouldn’t normally get the chance to collaborate. And the all important question in government: What are the results?  They’ve been good in the past, and the current session promises to be effective as well. Among those 79 ideas, there are some real gems.

About the Author

Ruthanna Gordon is a cognitive psychologist focused on the intersections between culture, innovation, and sustainability. She is currently a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow with EPA’s Office of Research and Development. Find her on Twitter at @green_minds.

How did GitHub become a part of this project?

I was working as a Presidential Innovation Fellow when the process to create the Open Data Policy began. Anyone within government is used to seeing documents circulate with no real idea of when it was edited, by whom, whether it was the most current version, and so on. This is very opaque. So while we’re working on open data policy, the process itself was very not open. Open source developers within the Innovation Fellows started talking about using GitHub to create the actual document. Lowering the barrier to entry was always the idea—we want people editing this and sharing their perspectives.

GitHub is often a code repository for private use. Are their structural or practical differences into applying for government?

You can’t snap your fingers and chance policy tomorrow. Not everything could go through the collaborative policy. There was a private repository on a GSA account. The end-deliverable website was built (“the bucket”) and then the content was filled out as time went by. The hard part was to build the cultural technology. Instead of circulating a case study by email, you post it on the hub and let the discussion begin immediately. It’s the concept of doing things in the open—experimenting, capturing things.  You create a hub to solve a problem and working forward.

There are four key tenets: 1) Electronic; 2) Available; 3) Asynchronous (people don’t have to be in the same place at the same time doing the same thing); 4) Lock-free (don’t have to ask permission, experimentation encouraged). As new members came into the community they could quickly get up to speed and see where the editing had happened so far. Already there are a lot of good conversations going on from big issues to small ones. Biggest deliverable is the conversation around a shared problem.

What kind of feedback have you received so far on the project?

Well, there are 44 suggested corrections already. 5 are adding new resources, 10 are minor fixes and corrections, 6 are open questions, 2 are pretty huge adjustments. Someone has already retooled the site and reformatted it completely, something we didn’t have the resources to do on our own.

One of the more exciting features is Kickstart, which lists existing Open Data sets and gives people an opportunity to give input on future priorities. How would you like to see that tool develop? Where do you see the biggest opportunities to open government data?

A big priority was decentralization, so this was designed to crawl all the different existing datasets. Now that it’s listed, the conversation can begin and we can get feedback on the data itself and what data’s not out there. We want to open source the process itself, giving the public opportunities for feedback. It’s tough to tell what datasets are going to make an impact in government, and this gives a new way to gauge it.

What will it take to move this effort to the next level? This resource creates a lot of opportunities, but what to agencies need to do to take advantage?

Agencies are going to feel growing pains in implementation. The litmus test will be how they approach it. Do they implement the policy the way they normally do, a closed and opaque process with traditional contracting methods? Or will they find new mechanisms? For example, can agencies find an open source way to set up APIs to pump out their data? A lot of these processes are similar despite the different data sets. There will be distinctions, but there should be many repeatable lessons. Most of all, you don’t want people to go it alone.

From a policy perspective, the case studies are an essential inclusion, allowing agencies to develop best practices. Are there some key points you’ve been able to distill from your work on the issue thus far?

The easy part is technology—the hard part is culture. The policy memo itself is the typical “thou shalt” declaration of how we’re pushing government. The second half is the technology issues—technical requirements—how you meet the parameters of the policy. The toughest part is what you can’t quite put down on paper. It’s the culture of realizing that the public is not the enemy, and that doing things publicly can work to your advantage. If people have problems with this, I hope they go to the site and begin a discussion on how we can improve. Because that’s the idea: Opening up an issue, finding out what shared things are going on, and working together. The cultural technology will be a real challenge. Time will tell.

About the Author

Zachary Bastian is an Early Career Scholar with the Commons Lab and the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center, a member of the New York State Bar Association and a graduate of George Washington University Law School. He previously worked in the United States Senate studying policy and supporting the work of personal and subcommittee offices. His interests include intellectual property, communications and leveraging technology to support better government.

FCC Visualization of Low Power FM Availability, built on open data and explained on GitHub.

Today, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy jointly released a new Open Data Policy directing agencies to implement specific structural reforms. In conjunction with an Executive Order prioritizing open and machine readable government information, these adjustments are forward looking and exciting. They speak to a general understanding that a deliberate approach to the way that data are processed and released can exponentially enhance their value.

We’ve seen several examples of the drive towards open data and innovation, and today’s releases should augment previous improvements. Philosophically, the Open Data Policy commands agencies to view information as an asset, building an approach that will allow people inside and outside of government to leverage its potential. The Policy’s requirements look at the life cycle of data in practical terms, envisioning a process where accessibility is the norm. This includes using machine-readable and open formats, following data standards, using open licenses and choosing common core and extensible metadata. The Policy directs that information systems support interoperability and information accessibility, and strengthening data security to protect privacy and confidentiality.

An exciting manifestation of this Policy is Project Open Data. Provided via the dynamic coding community GitHub, Project Open Data could be a rich resource for agencies working to implement this Policy and citizens looking to learn more. It is designed as “an online repository of tools, best practices and schema to help agencies adopt the framework presented in this guidance.” Envisioning it as a “community resource,” it will include definitions, explanations, code, checklists and case studies. This type of educational and collaborative hub has helped facilitate thriving technology communities. Project Open Data could go a long way towards providing agencies the tools they need to get the job done.

We’ll continue to track these developments as they arise. Today’s releases show an encouraging emphasis on the nuts and bolts of making open government data the status quo, not an exception.

View the Commons Lab’s case study on the National Broadband Map as government open innovation here.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

The release continues:

“With this project, Fordham CLIP is trying to help the people and organizations assisting in the location of missing persons recognize and deal with critical privacy issues by providing a range of options to address the legal and policy concerns,” said Joel R. Reidenberg, the academic director of Fordham CLIP and a co-author of the report.  Robert Gellman, a privacy expert and co-author of the report, added, “Missing persons services are essential following natural disasters, but they can raise questions about how privacy laws apply to emergency humanitarian responses. The report suggests ways to resolve those questions.”

The project is part of an international effort led by the Missing Persons Community of Interest (MPCI) that is seeking to harmonize a wide array of databases and technologies to enhance searches for missing persons following natural disasters. MPCI, which emerged in response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake, includes participants from local disaster management, international humanitarian relief organizations, private sector technology companies, non-profits, and digital volunteer communities.

Tim Schwartz, the chair of MPCI, said the report “gives us for the first time a thorough analysis of how missing persons technologies impact individual privacy and provides us with a valuable framework that will help us refine these critical and complex systems.” Lea Shanley, director of the Commons Lab at the Wilson Center, added, “Response organizations and volunteer groups must work to find an appropriate balance between protecting privacy and safety, and facilitating critical information sharing about affected populations and missing persons during and after disasters. This research will inform the development of privacy guidelines and best practices.”

The report examined privacy issues created by missing persons activities following several recent natural disasters, such as the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand in February 2011 and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in August 2005.  The report identified New Zealand as a leader in addressing the privacy issues that follow natural disasters and in prompting the world’s data protection authorities to pay more attention to those issues. The report discusses the New Zealand response and shows what other data protection authorities can do to provide clarity in applying privacy rules to missing persons activities.

 Joining Reidenberg on the team that created the report are Gellman, a privacy and information policy consultant who previously served as chief counsel to the U.S. House of Representative Government Operations Committee and served as a member of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics at the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, Jamela Debelak, CLIP’s executive director, and CLIP student researchers Adam Elewa and Nancy Liu.

 The project was supported by the Wilson Center and a gift made by Fordham University alumnus and trustee Ed Stroz and his digital risk management company, Stroz Friedberg.

Check it out! Other Commons Lab reports can be found here.

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.

Of course, investigations are rarely a straight line. It’s not uncommon for someone to be identified as a ‘person of interest’ and later cleared after better information becomes available. But the implications are very different when this takes place within law enforcement. The process of being cleared of suspicion may be stressful but there will usually be some degree of confidentiality. The free flowing and difficult to control nature of the crowd means that inaccurate information can spread rapidly, placing the safety and privacy of innocent people at risk. This highlights the ethical issues and practical problems of crowdsourced intelligence.

Proven crowd platforms were used in the aftermath of the tragedy quite well. The Red Cross’s Safe and Well service and Google’s  Person Finder helped panicked friends and family share information about loved ones as cell networks struggled to meet call demand. As more incidents occur where the crowd is deployed, it will be important to regularly engage in ethical analysis to understand where and how the crowd is most helpful.

“Strategic foresight is not futurist forecasting, nor is it the sole purvey of Popular Science magazine, the World Future Society, or the Jetson Family,” the blog says. “It is about having the imagination to be prepared for what may come, regardless of which scenario occurs – it’s a mindset, not a process.” The post suggest the need for greater cross-agency work on foresight, emphasizing the need to show the value of foresight to policymakers (including the costs of not being prepared).

The post also references Leon Fuerth’s recent report on the subject, Anticipatory Governance. Fuerth visited the Wilson Center late last year to discuss the report, while the Science & Technology Innovation Program in January held a launch event for the Global Futures Intelligence System and the 2012 State of the Future report.