Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London.

This blog celebrates useful data on how people use new media or employing communications to support policy initiatives. But could research that is entirely qualitative contribute equally to these same goals? Our project, based at the Department of Anthropology, University College London and funded by the European Research Council, is aimed at exactly these goals.

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London.

This blog celebrates useful data on how people use new media or employing communications to support policy initiatives. But could research that is entirely qualitative contribute equally to these same goals? Our project, based at the Department of Anthropology, University College London and funded by the European Research Council, is aimed at exactly these goals.

But we don’t count things—so do we count? Our team consists of anthropologists. We have just begun eight simultaneous ethnographies, each of which will last 17 months. Two of our sites are in China, and we have one each in Brazil, India, Italy, Trinidad, Turkey and the UK. Every researcher, or participant, has taken up residence in a small town within that country. They will examine many forms of social media such as QQ, Google+ WhatApp and Facebook in contexts that range from religion and politics to parent-child relations. We will share certain foci across all regions, such as use by the elderly and impoverished, issues of privacy, diasporas, and the memorialisation of the dead. Each participant also has his or her own topic: One is looking at the world’s largest migration—rural workers to factory sites in China. Another is exploring how social media connects family and work in India, and a third participant is focused on the new middle class in Brazil.

The reason we don’t count things is that instead we hope to use ethnography—that is, living among people to gain unparalleled depth via countless stories and openness to entirely unexpected uses. It’s the sense of humanity and the poignancy of aspiration and frustration that means most to us. Much of the work is academic but we also want to create innovative forms of popular dissemination in local languages with strong visual elements. For example, my own volume, Tales from Facebook (Polity 2011), uses genres from short story writing to show the impact of social media on the lives of individuals.

At the same time, we feel such research can be just as valuable for practical and policy purposes. We were asked by a leading hospice near London to consider how they could improve their services to terminal cancer patients. Most of the hospice work is with people still living in their own homes so communications are a core issue. After a six-month investigation of both patients and staff we were able to identify many opportunities as well as bottlenecks. For example, we discovered that concerns about confidence had become a barrier to the exchange of medical information. The report and its twelve recommendations can be found here.

In the future we will look at other applied projects such as diabetes and e-education. Our project's blog is here, where you can see each of the contributors discussing their projects.

Jake Levitas is a civic designer, organizer, and activist based in San Francisco. Cross-posted from Medium.com.

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. — Jane Jacobs

Jake Levitas is a civic designer, organizer, and activist based in San Francisco. Cross-posted from Medium.com.

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. — Jane Jacobs

Cities are at their best when they change with their citizens; when, to quote Rebar principal Matthew Passmore, “a city’s evolution keeps pace with its own cultural evolution.” Unfortunately, cities are often preventing themselves from doing just that—from being responsive enough to their own changing dynamics to continue existing as accurate reflections of and platforms for their own cultures. Outdated permitting processes are keeping a large swath of promising projects in art, design, technology, and other modes of expression from ever becoming part of the urban landscape. Along the way, cities are missing opportunities to add economic and cultural value in a time of constrained resources.

In other words: cities can be more healthy, engaging, beautiful and productive if they make it easier for citizens to contribute to making them so.

Historically, projects that alter the public realm have been generally divided into two camps: those that play by the rules (city-sanctioned installations, community murals) and those that don’t (graffiti, vandalism). Recently, this dichotomy has been disrupted by projects that make practical and aesthetic improvements to public space—but don’t always ask for permission. This approach is driven by citizens with the passion to improve their cities and the impatience to not wait through the full public permitting process to take action. But what if that process weren’t so intimidating, time-consuming, and costly for the average city resident? Could we make cities better, faster?

Why Civic Design Policy is Like Rocket Science
In between powerful ideas and powerful change lies powerful bureaucracy.

Internally, city governments are tasked with ensuring that public infrastructure and funds are used safely and responsibly. Permits that utilize these funds or resources are, for good reason, a big part of this.

But from an outside perspective—for community members, designers, artists, architects, makers—the process of getting a project approved and permitted by city departments might as well be rocket science. The entire tactical urbanism movement exists largely as a band-aid solution for citizens who lack the resources, time, or patience to navigate this complex approval system, and prefer taking matters into their own hands to create local change. A key question moving forward is how this process can be opened up to look less like rocket science, and more like the DIY science kits that turn kids everywhere into excited, engaged brainstormers. How can we make the permitting process sexier to better engage the average citizen?

Let’s get into the details a little bit. Say you want to install an Urban Prototyping project like Urban Parasol in your city—attaching a modular shade structure to a light pole. In San Francisco, the light pole you’re attaching to is managed by SFPUC, the sidewalks people are standing on underneath your structure are managed by SFDPW, and the street thoroughfare your overhang stretches above is managed by SFMTA. You might need permits and approvals from all of these agencies before you even think of hitting the street—and often, existing permits aren’t set up to handle these types of ideas.

While you’re at it, you might want to talk to someone in the SF Arts Commission, City Administrator’s Office, Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, or your local Community Benefit District about gaining local support for the project. Then you’ll need to make sure it doesn’t make the area less beautiful, more dangerous, or more prone to attract noisy late-night revelry in the eyes of the neighbors nearby. And finally, you’ll also need a way to pay for the material costs, and find a way to get your work paid for if you’re not planning to donate your time as a civic volunteer. All of this work is on top of the citizens’ principal focus of creating the best public art piece, design intervention, or interactive installation they possibly can—which is a huge job in itself.

Understandably, it’s hard for most citizens who want to contribute to know where to begin. The process isn’t made easier by the fact that most government websites are difficult to navigate (though there are exceptions!), and most departments don’t have a liaison dedicated to making this process easy and accessible for the community.

Better permits will allow artists and designers to focus more on what they’re good at—creating great civic projects—while allowing city planners to focus on their own invaluable strengths—navigating the crucial regulatory nuances of City Hall that can make these projects a reality.

Why It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
Cities want to help, and the barriers aren’t as big as they seem.

Here’s the good news: the obstacles to getting public design projects approved, built, and installed are actually not as complicated as they seem—and they’re pretty much exactly what you would think they are. In speaking with city officials in several San Francisco agencies recently, they all outlined the same five barriers as the root causes of bureaucratic slowness and difficulty. I’ve listed these below, along with some basic steps toward getting around them:

  1. Liability + injury potential: Perhaps the biggest obstacle from a legal perspective is determining who is responsible if someone is injured or otherwise harmed directly or indirectly by a project. Most projects need someone to cover liability associated with them, which sometimes means working out a deal with the city or a local business owner who already has a policy in place. This can be tricky but certainly isn’t impossible, and could be streamlined by the city to make it even easier—for example, by creating a guide that helps citizens understand the liability process and their options for getting approved.
  2. Citizen complaints: Many projects can be derailed due to concerns from locals over issues like noise, aesthetics, traffic, or safety. Working with the community and conducting preliminary testing and meetings before a full installation can go a long way toward easing the public’s mind and garnering support for a project
  3. Funding + procurement: Procurement requirements—standards for the entities and people that can provide services to and receive funding from the city—can be a barrier for individual citizens and smaller organizations to create real projects that take advantage of city improvement funds and other public funding. There are a few easy ways to help remedy this: designers and artists can work through nonprofits and firms that are already city vendors; the city can make it easier for citizens to both become vendors and/or connect with existing vendors; and the city can also fast-track projects with external funding (from grants, individuals, or crowd funding) to increase the value they are able to capture from outside City Hall.
  4. Lack of interagency dialog: Every city has a web of responsibilities that is often spread across a complicated web of departments and individuals. However, most cities lack an interagency review board or task force to streamline the process of approving public design projects. Others make it difficult for departments to simply talk to each other, making it harder to find the creative regulatory solutions sometimes necessary to bring projects to life. We’ve started forming an Urban Prototyping Task Force in San Francisco to help get the ball rolling on these issues, and a culture of dialog can also be taken much further when it is promoted from the top by a visionary mayor or planning director.
  5. Lack of a good public interface: As mentioned above, there’s generally no central government touch point for citizens who want to design for the public realm. Ideally this touch point should be a combination of 1) well-designed and accessible informational resources and 2) dedicated staff members to support them and interface with the public directly. In San Francisco, we’re fortunate to have the SF Better Streets initiative—a simply fantastic effort that gets closer to this interface than anything else I’ve personally seen.

Finally, most city staff members I’ve met with are just as frustrated with the typical regulatory process as we on the outside are—and they’re actively looking for great new citizen-led projects and the means to take them forward. This may be somewhat unique to San Francisco, birthplace of the parklet, but my sense from speaking with officials in other cities is that the broader culture is changing—the permits themselves just haven’t been able to catch up yet.

Where We Go From Here
We know the problems—so let’s start tackling them together.

If the good news is that barriers to permitting civic design projects are well-known and surmountable, the better news is that many cities are already heading in the right direction. San Francisco’s groundbreaking work creating the parklet permit has been well-documented, and Boston’s City Hall to Go program is another great example of making city services and processes more accessible to the general public. Even more importantly, the conversations between City Hall insiders and outsiders—those in need of city approvals and those providing them—have become much more frequent and robust in recent years—a welcome change from the sometimes stereotypical bureaucratic Iron Curtain. Technology and new forms of engagement are only making these interactions easier.

To be clear, “hacking” the permitting process—rethinking it to make it more efficient, effective, and attractive—isn’t necessarily going to be easy, fast, or fun. It took about five years to formally establish the parklet permitting process in San Francisco. If we’re going to hack city policy successfully, our best tool is the continued dialog between citizens and government. Understanding each others’ needs and contexts is the first step to change, and it’s already starting to happen today.

Every citizen can be a part of this change by tracking down supportive officials in the right departments, sharing successful project examples, and organizing open discussions (like this one) to promote understanding and (most importantly) action. Together, we can ensure that better permits will create better cities.

Derek Slater is a Policy Manager at Google.

Last year, we hired a respected consultancy, Communications Chambers, to produce an international dataset of retail broadband Internet connectivity prices. The dataset can be used to make international comparisons and evaluate the efficacy of particular public policies—e.g., direct regulation and oversight of Internet peering and termination charges—on consumer prices.

Derek Slater is a Policy Manager at Google.

Last year, we hired a respected consultancy, Communications Chambers, to produce an international dataset of retail broadband Internet connectivity prices. The dataset can be used to make international comparisons and evaluate the efficacy of particular public policies—e.g., direct regulation and oversight of Internet peering and termination charges—on consumer prices.

We received a lot of positive feedback and suggestions—thank you!—and have now made available an updated dataset.

  • A Fusion Table containing the price observations for 1,523 fixed broadband plans can be found here.
  • A Fusion Table containing 2,167 mobile broadband prices can be found here.
  • Explanatory notes here, and ancillary data is here.

Steven Weber is a professor in the School of Information and Political Science department at UC Berkeley.

It's commonly said that most people overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, and underestimate its impact over the longer term.

Steven Weber is a professor in the School of Information and Political Science department at UC Berkeley.

It's commonly said that most people overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, and underestimate its impact over the longer term.

Where is Big Data in 2013? Starting to get very real, in our view, and right on the cusp of underestimation in the long term. The short term hype cycle is (thankfully) burning itself out, and the profound changes that data science can and will bring to human life are just now coming into focus. It may be that Data Science is right now about where the Internet itself was in 1993 or so. That's roughly when it became clear that the World Wide Web was a wind that would blow across just about every sector of the modern economy while transforming foundational things we thought were locked in about human relationships, politics, and social change. It's becoming a reasonable bet that Data Science is set to do the same—again, and perhaps even more profoundly—over the next decade. Just possibly, more quickly than that.

There are important differences which have equally come into focus. Let's face it: Data Science is just plain hard to do, in a way that the Web was not. Data is technically harder, from a hardware and a software perspective. It's intellectually harder, because the expertise and disciplines needed to work with this kind of data span (at a minimum) computer science, statistics, mathematics, and—controversially—domain expertise in the area of application. And it will be harder to manage issues of ethics, privacy, and access, precisely because the data revolution is, well, really a revolution.

Can data, no matter how big, change the world for the better? It may be the case that in some fields of human endeavor and behavior, the scientific analysis of big data by itself will create such powerful insights that change will simply have to happen, that businesses will deftly re-organize, that health care will remake itself for efficiency and better outcomes, that people will adopt new behaviors that make them happier, healthier, more prosperous and peaceful. Maybe. But almost everything we know about technology and society across human history argues that it won't be so straightforward.

Data Science is becoming mature enough to grapple confidently and creatively with humans, with organizations, with the power of archaic conventions that societies are stuck following. The field is broadening to a place where data science is becoming as much a social scientific endeavor as a technical one. The next generation of world class data scientists will need the technical skills to work with huge amounts of data, the analytical skills to understand how it is embedded in business and society, and the design and storytelling skills to pull these insights together and use them to motivate change.

What skills, knowledge, and experience do you and your organization need to thrive in a data-intensive economy? Come join senior industry and academic leaders at DataEDGE at UC Berkeley on May 30-31 to engage in what will be a lively and important conversation aimed at answering today's questions about the data science revolution—and formulating tomorrow's.

Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis has released an incredible map-based visualization of global tweets, called TweetMap ALPHA (via Information Aesthetics). From the project site:

TweetMap is an instance of MapD, a massively parallel database platform being developed through a collaboration between Todd Mostak, (currently a researcher at MIT), and the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA).

The tweet database presented here starts on 12/10/2012 and ends 12/31/2012. Currently 95 million tweets are available to be queried by time, space, and keyword. This could increase to billions and we are working on real time streaming from tweet-tweeted to tweet-on-the-map in under a second.

MapD is a general purpose SQL database that can be used to provide real-time visualization and analysis of just about any very large data set. MapD makes use of commodity Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to parallelize hard compute jobs such as that of querying and rendering very large data sets on-the-fly.

Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis has released an incredible map-based visualization of global tweets, called TweetMap ALPHA (via Information Aesthetics). From the project site:

TweetMap is an instance of MapD, a massively parallel database platform being developed through a collaboration between Todd Mostak, (currently a researcher at MIT), and the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA).

The tweet database presented here starts on 12/10/2012 and ends 12/31/2012. Currently 95 million tweets are available to be queried by time, space, and keyword. This could increase to billions and we are working on real time streaming from tweet-tweeted to tweet-on-the-map in under a second.

MapD is a general purpose SQL database that can be used to provide real-time visualization and analysis of just about any very large data set. MapD makes use of commodity Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to parallelize hard compute jobs such as that of querying and rendering very large data sets on-the-fly.