Last week, NBC shuttered the hyperlocal news portal EveryBlock.com, and laid off its few full-time staffers. The decision was a poor one, and a blow for civic activists all over. It's a shame, given how many examples of great civic science there are.
I got interested in the topic after spending some time talking to several activists who showed me the power of some very simple tools, and who are using a range of technology to get more citizens engaged in their communities.
Civic science means many things, but one definition that I like is: The willingness to collaborate and invent open-source and other low-cost solutions using publicly released data to solve challenges relevant to our cities.
Some of this involves actual programming, but a lot doesn't necessarily need it. For example, many years ago I put together the first email list for my synagogue, a list that is still in use today to communicate events and news of interest to the membership. I have started numerous neighborhood email lists since then, and some have been successful, some have become tools of the list owner, and some have died off because people change their email addresses frequently and it's hard to keep up with them.
An email list is a great way to get the word out quickly, and to build a sense of community. One list that I currently subscribe to covers bicycle-related issues in St. Louis. I use a bike for transportation as well as recreation, and I have often heard about closed routes or better routes through this list. I've also met people on the list who share my interests.
A step up the tech food chain is a hyperlocal blog. When I first moved to St. Louis, I wanted to get connected with the community, and spent a lot of time reading blogs by citizen activists. These activists have done some good work in the past several years, revealing secret development plans or showing noteworthy buildings that were in danger of being demolished. A great example is our "flying saucer," which was saved and repurposed, thanks to the efforts of Alex Ihnen's NextSTL blog, among others.
These are things that anyone with basic tech knowledge can do, and I never really thought about them as civic science, but they are. The next step up does require some programming, but not a lot.
Let's look at the efforts of a group of Brooklynites who were part of the Public Laboratory's Grassroots Mapping program. This group put together a collection of maps of the area around the Gowanus Canal by flying kites and weather balloons with cheap digital cameras looking towards earth and snapping pictures. They were able to detect pollutants coming from a construction site (ironically for a new Whole Foods building), and got state regulators on the case.
Go Fly a Kite
Using a weather balloon to map the effluent in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY.
(Credit: Liz Barry, Gowanus Conservancy.)
The photos were so well documented that many of them ended up being included in the Google Earth collection, the first time that citizen-generated aerial photos were included.
This, to me, shows the value of citizen science. There was some significant effort to produce this photo collection: For example, people had had to modify the camera firmware controls and assemble things in just the right way to get good pictures.
Citizen mapping projects are happening all over the world, and some are leveraging open-map software, while others are taking "official maps" from state and local governments and augmenting them with additional layers to illustrate crime patterns or local resources.
I talked with one of the mapping experts in St. Louis County last week, who told me that they specifically remove information about drug and prostitution arrest locations, mainly because people were using this information to obtain these services. You can now find crime maps in many major cities.
And while not citizen-based, one nifty effort is that Google Maps now shows real-time transit information in many cities, so we know how long the wait for the next bus will be.
Empowered Together
A map of the electric supply densities available in Kibera, Kenya, collected by local citizens.
Perhaps my favorite mapping story concerns a downtrodden area near Nairobi called Kibera. It was a blank spot on many maps just a few years ago, until citizens got together and mapped their own community with open-source software. Now, the maps reflect a vibrant collection of all sorts of resources.
And more recently, a group of coders got together over a long weekend to produce tourism-related apps for Super Bowl visitors in New Orleans, with one app helping people find available tables at restaurants. (New Orleans is, of course, all about the food!)
Carrying things a step further, HackForChange.org is promoting a National Weekend of Civic Hacking in early June; you can get information from its website on the more than 40 cities that have signed up to support various events.
As you can see, civic science is a rich and varied vein to be mined, and you don't always need to be a nerd to take advantage of it.
— David Strom is a world-known expert on networking and communications technologies. He has worked extensively in the IT end-user computing industry, and has managed editorial operations for trade publications in the network computing, electronics components, computer enthusiast, reseller channel, and security markets.
I am sure someone will find a way to monetize it over time and keep it going.
The code may be open, but local journalism isn't done without human journalists... so the business model of employing many humans to use this code might not be feasible? Local journalism is a tricky business to support nowadays.... Groupon is in a bit of trouble, and that might've been a way to fund hyperlocal news via a novel advertising model (maybe it still can be?).
I am sure someone will find a way to monetize it over time and keep it going. The commercial opensource business model is really getting serious adoption with companies like Redhat & liferay so opencode does not mean lack of ability to monetize a product.
Aha. Thanks for digging up the background info, Alison!
Since the code is still free, I guess anyone who wants to can still try to develop an EveryBlock clone.... but I guess there's a business model challenge in there?
I looked it up, @mhh, and you're right: EveryBlock received a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant in 2007. Looks as though MSNBC acquired EveryBlock in 2009 -- but the code remained free. After the grant ended, EveryBlock's founder was free to do what he wanted with the company--remain independent, sell it, close its doors, merge... anything, according to the blog I linked to by Gary Kebbel, Knight Foundation's Journalism program director.
I thought EveryBlock won a Knight News Challenge Grant... so I hope future winners are picked with the consideration that big media companies won't be able to shut down these innovative news tools (and that the technology will be open sourced for others to try out or improve upon)...
We have a society of people who are overeducated, underemployed and underfunded.
The institutions and large organizations cannot and will not absorb them and will not allow for independent reserach or thought. Whether it's Big Media, Big Energy or Big Science, each of those spends as more time suppressing individual research than fostering it.
Would it not be more powerful to let people work on their own as part of a University of the Internet (which many now do)?
I think this whole area - which I also didn't realize had a name - is one of the most exciting aspects of social media, the Internet, and the decreasing cost of technologies. More and more people can afford to investigate those areas that interest them, from the comfort of their home or by virtually traveling half a world away, and share their thoughts and experiences with fellow afficionados. No matter your interest, the odds are good that you'll find someone who shares your hobby. Maybe there are more Renaissance Men and Women today than during the Renaissance, thanks to this civic engineering trend?
That's a smart use of social media since things like barking dogs, a neighbor's bbq smoke, or other annoying non-emergencies tend to get escalated when one or two cop cars come squealing into a neighborhood! And if the neighbor happens to see the complaint, then maybe the issue gets resolved without any official intervention at all -- even better for everyone involved. This must save us, the tax payers, a fair amount of change and improve customer satisfaction, as well as safety. Kudos to your PD.
Here in Kent, WA, USA the police started a Facebook page, and when I've posted complaints they have been responsive. Since they don't want us to use the 911 phone for anything other than emergencies it's a better place to post some things like complaining about a neighbor's barbeque smoke, since it's hard to know what can be done legally anyway. I found out they have a Neighborhood Mediation service that will come and get people together for those types of issues where the law is unclear or if all that is needed is to have all parties be aware of a possible friction.
I guess I have been a civic scientist all my life then! I only have a BS in Biology, so never made it officially into academia, but I believe I do research through reading and observation and have even published some hypotheses in my blogs and comments. And I consistently track, investigate and monitor issues in the sciences and technology and report findings. I believe in the past this was what a scientist was...the Victorian Gentleman who had some leisure time to do activities like rock hunting!
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These days, 3D printers seem to be everywhere. You can build your own, go to one of the TechShops around the country, and maybe even find a pop-up store like the one that came to midtown Manhattan in December and offered dozens of objects for sale, along with the opportunity to watch several printers in action creating them.
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Over the holiday break, my wife and I had two memorable experiences when we went to Morton's and the Olive Garden for dinner. These chain restaurants sit at different ends of the market, and we had very different experiences -- but not in the way you might expect.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
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Marissa Mayer at Yahoo has come out with her strategy on turning the company around: culture, company, calibration, and compensation. But Yahoo needs to have a technical approach to the mobile cloud opportunity, not a management theory lesson.
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Elizabeth Pizzinato, SVP of marketing and communications at Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, calls content marketing "the new black" and explains how her brand engages its target audience.
Some say that exposure to violence in gaming, online video, etc., is creating a violent culture. Tom says it's not that straightforward. Rather than regulate violence, we should understand it better.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
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Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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