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Berlin bike parking

The city of Berlin has recently asked to its inhabitants what they think about open data in an online poll. Voters were asked which open data they would prefer to have access to and what they would do with that (just read them, or spread the information to other people?) In a few weeks, the municipality has gathered around 1300 votes. The results are consistent with another poll, at a national level, realized by SAS on a representative sample. 92% of the Berlin sample would access open data, if possible, and half of the interviewed people declared that they would use the data, editing them for other people. Voters have shown to be more interested in data concerning the city planning, the administration and the environment. Few people have shown interest for pets, consumer counseling or family data (no matter what this means). The Berlin poll is probably skewed toward highly educated, affluent internet users. But is this the most efficient way of leveraging people awareness to improve the urban quality of life?

Such a poll will persuade the city administration to facilitate the access to data in such highly requested fields, hoping that this will have a positive impact on urban life style. However, there may be other overlooked fields whose impact on quality of life is even greater, and they do not emerge in a poll. A poll shows what people are more aware of in term of quality life. But what about their unawareness? As far as people are not concerned by public transportation, for example, they will underestimate its impact and will not ask to the municipality to know more about it. Why should a car heavy-driver bother about bus frequency, after all? But could we honestly affirm that his life quality is unaffected by trasportation policies?

So, polls are useful, of course. But asking people the answer sometimes is not enough: you have to provide sensors, let people produce data – even without knowing it -, collect opinions and finally analyze, analyze, analyze. You may get different, surprising results with respect to an opinion poll. Our ignorance is more relevant than our awareness.

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From the ESA AppCamp website:

Seize the opportunity to meet with like-minded people, create mobile applications using satellite data, and gain insight into ESA’s work. ESA provides access to satellite data for the development of mobile applications (Android and iOS) in four predefined categories. The goal is to come up with a concept for mobile apps using Earth monitoring data on smartphones, in particular by leveraging the possibilities offered by the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) programme. You don’t need any experience in integrating such data to take part in the App Camp. Participants will be able to choose their preferred category and will then be grouped accordingly into teams of four. The winning team – whose members will each receive the iPad3 – will be selected by a jury of ESA representatives on the final day of the App Camp.

Apply now! Registration is open from 6 April to 6 May 2012.

Read more on the ESA AppCamp website.

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Are they dangerous for the environment?

Timo Goeschl and Ole Juergens from Heidelberg University (Germany) have just published a provocative paper (paywalled, but a similar argument can be found here) about the impact of citizen science on the overall environmental quality. According to the abstract of their paper, they “show that improved citizen monitoring can even have adverse effects on environmental quality”.

Well, this seems quite a bad news for the growing community of professional and citizen scientists (such as everyAware) working on the subject: this movement hopes that turning citizens into environmental probes will create a greater pressure onto policy-makers and companies, forcing them to enforce environment-friendly policies and industrial activities. But is it right?

Goetschl and Juergens show by a simple game-theoretical model that if the reporting capability of citizen scientists increases, the cost for industries and regulators will increase too and the social welfare does not necessarily increase accordingly: in fact, substitution effects may lead regulators and industries to lose efficiency and the social welfare gain could be negative. The authors explain in the conclusions:

” (…) the overall welfare effects of enhancing citizens’ reporting capability can be positive, but also negative. The reason is that while citizen welfare unambiguously increases, expected inspection, investigation, and compliance  costs increase. The net impact can therefore be a social loss. The reasons for this are perfectly Coasean: Both citizen and firm fail to take into account the externalities of their behavioral adjustments on the welfare-maximizing regulator. Since the regulator moves last, he cannot perfectly offset the strategic incentives that the citizen faces and that lead him to exploit the possibility provided by improvements in the reporting capability to pass on some of the costs of harm reduction to the regulator and, hence, general welfare.”

However, this does not imply that citizens should stop monitoring their habitat. It only shows that a participated environmental policy-making is not just a matter of sensor hacking, but requires an ongoing dialogue between concerned communities and regulators. On one hand, regulators dealing with complex systems should take into account multiple interlinked aspects in order to extract the maximum welfare from citizens self-managed effort. On the other hand, citizens cannot bind themselves to monitor firms and react to their misbehaving: they should use an analogue  effort to monitor policy-makers and strengthen the pressure on them.

Timo Goeschl and Ole Jürgens, “Environmental quality and welfare effects of improving the reporting capability of citizen monitoring schemes”, Journal of Regulatory Economics, available online from March 28, 2012

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They find that there is a great potential for ICT-based applications, from many points of view. But one should always keep in mind that the access and the active participation to ICT infrastructures for health care is still quite uneven in society.
Therefore, one should not use social networks to detect illness outbreaks: the picture one would get would be quite different from the reality on the ground. Analogously, one should not rely on Twitter data to infer the rate of infected people in a population, or similar quantites. The usage of social networks is highly biased toward the upper class, and area characterized by a lesser income tend to be overlooked by user-generated maps and media. To produce reliable data, then, one should adopt the strict statistical criteria used by national statistical institutes. Otherwise, the impact of current ICTs on healthcare would anti-democratically focus on the 1% and forget the 99%. And we do not want that, do we?
But there is another subtler reason which has to be taken into account. The observer influence the observed object: if you spend a lot of time on social networks, you are more prone to anxiety. This may have a severe effect on health, especially for people suffering from asthma. If one adds the privacy concerns, it becomes apparent that healthcare systems will always integrate ICT methodologies at a slower pace than other sectors have done.

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