Month: February 2014

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Zooniverse: The Next Wikipedia?

Nearly everyone who uses the Internet has heard of Wikipedia and likely used it at least once.  Wikipedia has often been held up as the poster child for the way that the Internet enables people all over the globe to collaborate with each other and produce an incredibly valuable result.

While Wikipedia itself has had some growing pains – or is it maturity pains? – there have been other more recent examples of virtual collaboration.

One of my favorites – and a potential successor to Wikipedia as the poster child for virtual collaboration – is Zooniverse (https://www.zooniverse.org/ ).  Recently, Zooniverse passed the 1,000,000 mark – that is more than a million people have registered to help out.

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This is a large number that is even more impressive when you consider that Zooniverse is not a fan site or a fantasy sports site, but is all about the participation of “everyday people” in science.

Their projects range from analyzing data collected in space to biology, nature and the environment.  They even have room for what might be considered scientific analyses applied to the humanities.

Unlike Wikipedia whose users vastly outnumber its contributors and whose rules specifically exclude original research, Zooniverse is intended to make everyone a volunteer and to create new science.

It’s a very ambitious goal, one that seems to be working well under the leadership of the Citizens Science Alliance (CSA).  CSA describes itself as:

“a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators who collectively develop, manage and utilise internet-based citizen science projects in order to further science itself, and the public understanding of both science and of the scientific process. These projects use the time, abilities and energies of a distributed community of citizen scientists who are our collaborators.”

It’s exactly this kind of project that provides hope for the positive value of the Internet as an unprecedented tool of the knowledge age. 

And it also should raise the awareness of public officials about their citizens’ thirst for participation of all kinds.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Is There A Rural Imperative?

As readers of this blog know, I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years helping cities figure out the impact of new technologies and broadband on their future role in people’s lives and also helping mayors figure out ways of using those technologies to create new kinds of urban experiences and reasons for people to live in their cities. 

Cities were the winners out of the industrial age and attracted vast numbers of people from the countryside.  You can see that pattern repeating itself today in the newly successful industrial countries, like China, or those areas that are just starting to industrialize, like Africa.

In the already developed countries, even though the change from the industrial to the knowledge economy has been wrenching for many cities, urban areas are still ahead of the game by comparison with rural areas and are better positioned to take advantage of these changes.

In theory, though, the global Internet and the increased availability of inexpensive technology should have had an even greater impact on rural areas.  For if it were really true that people can work anywhere and quality of life becomes the key factor in where they choose to live, then many people would choose to live in the countryside and not in the more metropolitan regions.

It hasn’t happened that way.  As you can read from my post last week which, among other trends, noted that telecommuting has increased dramatically among urban residents, but not for those in exurbia.

There are many reasons why the countryside hasn’t realized its potential.  Partly, this is a residue of the industrial age – it is not yet true for everyone that they can take their work with them.  For many without college educations, making a living requires a commute to a manufacturing plant or a service location or a farm.

As has been true for declining urban areas, in some rural communities a social pathology sets in that reinforces decline and is evidenced in the increased use of drugs and other forms societal breakdown.  Even though it wouldn’t be called a pathology, the out-migration of many of their young adults has also been a concern of the remaining residents of rural areas.

Another part of the story is that many rural communities have not yet become fully connected to the global economy.  In his recent rural strategy announcements, President Obama pointed out that there is a 15% gap in broadband between urban and rural households.  Many technology providers have ignored rural communities.  That should change. 

While cities will still be attractive, they are not for everyone all the time.  Many people would indeed prefer to live in the countryside if they had economic opportunity, decent health care, a means to learn and in other ways overcome the sense of isolation that has historically been the downside of rural living. 

Many countries have come to realize that they cannot just move all of their rural residents into cities.  As India has learned, there is not enough economic opportunity in their cities and the urban infrastructure cannot support the migrants who have already moved there.   The New York Times recently reported that, even the Chinese, with a relentless urban focus, have started to worry that their nation’s traditional culture and identity is getting lost in the process.  Indeed, there has been a reverse migration from the cities to the Chinese countryside.

None of this is a surprise to those who live in rural communities.  What may be better news is that there is now an imperative to bring technology and global connectivity to the countryside – and to help them build those communities into attractive and sustainable places for people to stay and to return to.

We’ve seen this in President Obama’s rural broadband program and in the recently announced Canadian rural broadband investment of $305 million.

With this background, the Intelligent Community Forum started its Rural Imperative program last year.  It will apply to the world’s rural areas its unique, global perspective on how broadband and technology can be mutually reinforcing with community development and growth.  This is an important step in helping the new connected countryside go from potential possibility to a reality.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/77176290055/is-there-a-rural-imperative]

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Where Is Telecommuting Going?

Where Is Telecommuting Going?

A week ago, there was an interesting article by Yonah Freemark on the Atlantic Cities website, “Why Telecommuting Really Matters, in 6 Charts”.

He points out that:

Over the past 30 years, at the same time the percentage of commuters driving has flatlined, the share of people working from home has exploded, almost doubling since 1980

[C]ontrasting urban density and the percentage of people with long commutes to work (in large counties across the U.S.), suggests that, at least on average, there’s no relationship between those variables and the choice to telecommute

Given current limitations on funding for transportation infrastructure, planners and politicians have a responsibility to take the rise of telecommuting and the potential for further declines in peak-hour traffic

The argument that telecommuting affects traffic patterns has been clear to telecommuters, if not urban planners and traffic planners in the past.  Indeed, traffic patterns are also changing because of the shift to online purchases which means more shipments to residences, rather than stores.  

All in all, the gradual dispersion of economic activities and their spread over a longer day than 9-5 means that transportation planning needs something better than the traditional rush-hour-to-downtown model.  Yet, there is still much talk among public officials about the need for significant road and mass transit investments to bring people downtown. 

Freemark also notes:

Two other variables, on the other hand, appear to correlate relatively closely with working from home, at least at the county level. Counties with a higher share of people holding a bachelor’s degree or higher are likelier to telecommute, and those with a higher percentage of “professional” workers

[C]ontrary to what we might expect, are people in less dense, exurban communities more likely to work from home than people living in center cities with plenty of jobs nearby.

If you think about the nature of their work – which often results in intangible services or digital products – it is not too surprising that professional workers can easily do their work anywhere. 

Given their generally higher incomes, which affords greater housing choices, it is also not too surprising that these same people don’t live far out on the exurban fringes of metropolitan areas.  

However, today, we are still in the early stages of telecommuting technology.   For most telecommuters, most of the day, they do email, handle documents and maybe text chat from time to time.  That is not yet close to the kind of experience they would have in an office, which offers much more visual interaction with other human beings.

But that will change in the coming years and telecommuters will be able to have something very much like the office experience.   When that happens, will they ask themselves whether they want to move “further out”?  Some will do so.

Let’s take this thinking one more step.  Perhaps the question of where people will live is misleading.  In an age of enhanced telecommuting, professional workers won’t need to live in one place.  Even now, I know many professionals who identify their home in an urban area.  But, in reality, they are there for an average of only 2-4 days a week.  The other days they are somewhere else, maybe a country home.  

The rise in telecommuting also means that we need to get used to the idea that an individual could be both urban and rural because they can work anywhere and not in the same place all the time.

So here’s a concluding question: Is the like the wrenching mind shift that was required of physicists as they moved from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics?  If so, it’s going to be quite a while before public officials and planners accept and respond to the implications of telecommuting.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Do Good Ideas Bubble Up From The Crowd?

Almost five years ago, President Obama launched an open government website that asked for average citizens to suggest the most pressing public policy issues and then vote on the relative importance of those issues.  In the words of IdeaScale, the company that has developed the software platform for these kinds of crowdsourcing activities, these efforts at Internet-based collaboration are intended to bubble up the best ideas.

So it was with some embarrassment on the part of the White House that the subject of the legalization of marijuana came out as one of the top issues in 2009.  The opponents of the President took him to task about letting a tiny fringe minority dominate his Open Government efforts.  As reported in an article “Clay Shirky: online crowds aren’t always wise”, this resulted even in one of the leading scholars and advocates of crowdsourcing discussing checks and balances on full national scale popular engagement on public policy.

Various explanations were given and there was lots of hand-wringing by the digerati and open government advocates, including this one in Wired and this one on the Personal Democracy Forum blog.  The White House ultimately responded only to those important issues it thought politically acceptable to respond to – not including marijuana.

Then all this passed into arcane history.  But I was reminded of this history when Colorado and Washington legalized marijuana in the elections last year, various governors announced their reduction in enforcement of anti-marijuana laws or even effective decriminalization and, indeed, even the Obama Administration has softened its stance.

Whatever you might think of these decisions as matters of public policy, it seems that the rush to negative judgment about the marijuana issue “bubbling up” in 2009 was perhaps inappropriate.  It may well be that these crowdsourcing efforts, while not perfect and potentially manipulated, can act as a kind of leading indicator of public opinion.  Clearly the supporters were a bit more than a tiny, fringe minority. 

For now, we see that public opinion on marijuana laws is the opposite of what the media commentators would have had us believe in 2009.  For example, there have been two stories this past year about the survey work of the respected and non-partisan Pew Research folks:

In 2009, this was apparently still not a majority but on its way to becoming one.  That is perhaps one reason that the organizations who use crowdsourcing also have found it to be a valuable means of developing innovative ideas and solutions – which are not yet, but will be, conventional wisdom in a few years.

So we do indeed need to get smarter about open government efforts, which is not the same thing as saying they don’t work.  As leaders represent ever larger constituencies and thus have more difficulty understanding what’s on the minds of those constituents, crowdsourcing can be a useful instrument. 

It is also something that voters will very much appreciate as a promising countervailing tendency to the disengagement from civic affairs that many have felt in recent years. 

On top of that, leaders may also realize how much wisdom there is “out there” and look smart for adopting it early.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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