Walking the Talk: Philanthropy 'Does' Big Data

Bradford K. Smith, PhilanTopic, October 9, 2012

(Bradford K. Smith is president of the Foundation Center. In his last post, he took a closer look at the China Foundation Center's new Foundation Transparency Index.

With the modestly labeled "Reporting Commitment," fifteen of America's largest foundations are transforming the practice of philanthropy. From today on, information about their grants will be made available on a near-real-time basis, as entirely open data and coded to a common geographical standard, making it easy to see the communities, regions, and countries that benefit from those grants. The initiative's simple name should not deceive: this is big. The participants -- Annenberg, Carnegie, Gates, Getty, Hewlett, Packard, MacArthur, Mott, Robert Wood Johnson, and six others -- provide nearly 12 percent of the $46 billion in grants made by American foundations each year. To see the Reporting Commitment in action, take a quick look at Glasspockets, the transparency Web site of the Foundation Center, then read on.

What makes the Reporting Commitment so transformative? Let's break it down.

A Bold Idea -- Real-Time Reporting
The fifteen participating foundations have committed to electronically report their current grants data to the Foundation Center on at least a quarterly basis. As pragmatic as this may sound, it's a dramatic departure from the norm for the field. All the 76,000 private foundations in America file 990-PF tax returns in which they provide information on their grants. They have up to a year after the close of their fiscal year to file these returns, the Foundation Center eventually gets them from the IRS as image files and converts them into a more usable format, cleans and codes the data, and insures public access through databases and research reports. In a world where value is being created exponentially by analyzing enormous real-time data sets generated through search logs, consumer purchases, and Facebook "likes," philanthropy remains an industry with $640 billion in assets that relies on two-year old data to understand its own grant trends.

The Foundation Center has convinced more than seven hundred foundations to electronically submit their grants information through its eGrant Reporting Program, covering more than 20 percent of total foundation giving. Although this provides the field with current-year grants data, most participating foundations report on an annual basis. The Reporting Commitment takes this effort one important step forward by having participating foundations report at least quarterly -- with some reporting weekly, even daily.

A Radical Idea -- Open Data
By and large, foundations tend to think of open data and transparency as something they should fund rather than do. There are lots of reasons for this, including the private nature of foundations, the cultural legacy of keeping a low profile and "letting our good works speak for themselves," and sensitivity surrounding some of the issues addressed by foundation grants. Notwithstanding, the ability of foundations to not call attention to themselves is being steadily eroded by the ease of finding, displaying, and circulating information in a densely networked, digital age. Meanwhile, sectors and institutions with which foundations increasingly collaborate, such as the World Bank and foreign aid donors, are barreling ahead with initiatives like the Open Aid Partnership and Publish What You Fund.

The fifteen Reporting Commitment foundations have chosen to get ahead of the curve by taking the radical step of making their grants data entirely open. Under the agreement forged among them, they will either submit their data in machine-readable format or have the Foundation Center convert it so that it can be "harvested" by computers and used by developers to create apps, dashboards, visualizations, and things we haven't yet imagined. To make it easier, Glasspockets features a query builder that allows users to construct their own search and then "grab" the resulting data via an API.

A Strategic Idea -- GeoCoding
Some five years ago, when the Foundation Center started visualizing foundation grants data on interactive online maps, the most common reaction was, "You only show the location of the grantee organization, not the geographic focus of the grant." There was a reason for this: the vast majority of foundations, even those that electronically submit their data to the Foundation Center, do not include any coding for geographic area served. And even when there was a clue embedded in the grant description, there was no single standard that foundations used to describe the world; commonly used phrases such as "Deep South," "Middle East," and "developing countries" do not have agreed-upon definitions. That's why so many mapping visualizations (including our own) consign grants with insufficient or no geographic coding to big bubbles floating around in the ocean.

The Reporting Commitment foundations want to be able to compare their grants data with other participating foundations' data, from the community level all the way up to the continental level, to better identify gaps and areas of overlap and be more strategic about their giving. Thus they have agreed to use the GeoTree developed by the Foundation Center as an open geographic standard for use by philanthropy and the social sector. Geographic coding, or geocoding, as it is commonly known, requires a degree of specificity and decision making (i.e., how to handle grants that benefit multiple locations) that is something of a new discipline for most foundations. An interactive mapping tool on Glasspockets allows users to filter and search more than 3,800 grants by city/town, state/province, country, continent, or keyword. As participating foundations geocode more and more of their grants, the volume of data visualized on this map will expand.

A Mission-Critical Idea -- Transparency
When the Foundation Center was created in 1956 as a response to McCarthy-era hearings on philanthropy, transparency meant collecting printed reports from foundations and organizing them in file cabinets for public inspection. Today, it increasingly means open data. For an organization that has built a successful business model that relies on revenue from subscription databases to sustain an enormous volume of free information and services provided to more than nine million users, this may seem like risky business -- and it is. But the future of the Foundation Center requires disrupting its role as a data publisher. In the end, it is the Foundation Center's ability to analyze and combine multiple streams of information and analysis that adds value to data. And it is technology and networks that will allow the center to deliver knowledge into the hands of organizations and individuals who can leverage it to change the world.

Thanks to the vision, leadership, and hard work of the fifteen Reporting Commitment foundations, philanthropy has taken a crucial public step. Other foundations wishing to join the commitment can get started by contacting the Foundation Center. Later this year and again in 2013, the Foundation Center plans to release new and exciting forms of open data. While philanthropy may have been slow to get there, it is finally entering the era of Big Data.
-- Brad Smith

Big Data and Politics: Obama's data advantage

Lois Romano, Politico, June 9, 2012

CHICAGO — On the sixth floor of a sleek office building here, more than 150 techies are quietly peeling back the layers of your life. They know what you read and where you shop, what kind of work you do and who you count as friends. They also know who your mother voted for in the last election.

The depth and breadth of the Obama campaign’s 2012 digital operation — from data mining to online organizing — reaches so far beyond anything politics has ever seen, experts maintain, that it could impact the outcome of a close presidential election. It makes the president’s much-heralded 2008 social media juggernaut — which raised half billion dollars and revolutionized politics — look like cavemen with stone tablets.

Mitt Romney indeed is ramping up his digital effort after a debilitating primary and, for sure, the notion that Democrats have a monopoly on cutting edge technology no longer holds water.

But it’s also not at all clear that Romney can come close to achieving the same level of technological sophistication and reach as his opponent. (The campaign was mercilessly ridiculed last month when it rolled out a new App misspelling America.)

“It’s all about the data this year and Obama has that. When a race is as close as this one promises to be, any small advantage could absolutely make the difference,” says Andrew Rasiej, a technology strategist and publisher of TechPresident. “More and more accurate data means more insight, more money, more message distribution, and more votes.”

Adds Nicco Mele, a Harvard professor and social media guru: “The fabric of our public and political space is shifting. If the Obama campaign can combine its data efforts with the way people now live their lives online, a new kind of political engagement — and political persuasion — is possible.”

Launched two weeks ago, Obama’s newest innovation is the much anticipated “Dashboard," a sophisticated and highly interactive platform that gives supporters a blueprint for organizing, and communicating with each other and the campaign.

In addition, by harnessing the growing power of Facebook and other online sources, the campaign is building what some see as an unprecedented data base to develop highly specific profiles of potential voters. This allows the campaign to tailor messages directly to them — depending on factors such as socio-economic level, age and interests.

The data also allows the campaign to micro-target a range of dollar solicitations online depending on the recipient. In 2008, the campaign was the first to maximize online giving — raising hundreds of millions of dollars from small donors. This time, they are constantly experimenting and testing to expand the donor base.

For example, they have found $3 to be a magic number: Asking supporters for that paltry donation to win a chance to attend a fundraiser with the president and George Clooney or Sarah Jessica Parker, has generated tens of thousands of responses — people from whom the campaign can collect highly valuable data and then go back to.

“They are way ahead of Romney micro-targeting and it’s a level of precision we haven’t seen before,” says Darrell M. West, a leading scholar on technology innovation at the Brookings Institution. “[The Obama campaign has] been able to work on it under the radar during the Republican primary season.”

Obama already this year has outspent Romney significantly (and outspent his own 2008 levels) for online advertising, according to several market analyses the numbers. The hope for the Obama team, says West, “is that his online reach will outweigh any Superpac funding advantage Romney might have for television advertising, by reaching deep into communities with targeted online advertising, grass-roots organizing and fundraising.”

The other hope, of course, is that Obama can replicate some of the online excitement that propelled him into office four years ago.

Romney campaign officials acknowledge that they have had neither the time, nor the resources to build a complex digital operation as they were fighting their way through the prolonged primary season. “It wasn’t something we were going to put resources into if he wasn’t the nominee,” said one adviser.

It is also apparent that the Romney campaign will stick closely to the traditional campaign model of heavy and expensive television spending — with the assist of wealthy conservative super PACs that have signaled a willingness to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat Obama.

While the campaign is beginning to increase staff in preparation for the general election, Romney digital director Zac Moffatt says they will do things differently than the Obama operation. For one, Moffatt says the Romney campaign will outsource much of their data management — instead of handling it in house, creating “customized solutions” to fit their needs.

“As a campaign we would not presume to know more than the collective intelligence and resources of the marketplace,” said Moffatt, who adds that they will target audience through “our partnership with an industry-leading data management platform.”

“In the end, what is most important is not how many people on any list or how many followers we have — but their engagement level. And our followers are engaged,” Moffitt said.

Harvard’s Mele, who at age 25 helped pioneer the use of social media technology on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, said that even with some obvious attrition to Obama’s 2008 database, Romney is trailing.

“I’m not going to say he can’t catch up because with enough money and intensity, it may be doable — but it seems very unlikely to me,” said Mele. “(Obama) used the powerful narrative of his 2008 campaign to build a digital infrastructure that remains formidable, both in terms of data and sheer know-how and expertise.”

The challenge facing both campaigns in 2012 is the changing consumer — and the endless ways they receive information. Four years ago, supporters might have been satisfied with just “friending” a candidate on Facebook, but today most users expect a more sophisticated way to actually engage –and on their terms.

While Obama campaign officials guard details about its digital operation as fiercely as Romney guards his tax returns, they were willing to share some advances since 2008:

• Created a holistic, totally in-house digital operation that is the largest department at campaign headquarters. In 2008, much of the social media and video was generated organically from supporters. As one campaign official put it, “digital is no longer a part of the campaign. It is the campaign.”

• Hired a number of nonpolitical tech innovators, software engineers and statisticians. “It has been incredibly freeing, because all election campaigns are a slave to history, and the history here is just nonexistent,” says Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. “So, we’ve been able to kind of reinvent it.”

• Invested mightily in cutting-edge technology that scales the website to fit the screen of any device. With nearly half of the U.S. population using smart phones, “responsive design” allows a user to give money and volunteer without bifocals. “More than 40 percent of all our donors are new, and a lot of them are coming in because of things like this,” says Messina. “Call up our website and try to donate on your phone and then do Romney’s. … Those things are important, because people are busy and people want to help us and they think about — ‘Oh, yeah, I saw the president on TV. I want to give them money. How hard is it?’ ”

• Developed a more complex symbiosis between the campaign and Facebook, which is 10 times bigger than it was four years go, and has far more personal information available to mine. “Facebook was just a site to see friends four year ago now it is part of people’s DNA,” notes a senior campaign adviser. Obama invites supporters to log on to the campaign through their Facebook accounts, which gives the campaign one more avenue for data.

• Opened the first all-volunteer. all-digital office in San Francisco where knowledgeable techies drop in for a few hours and strive to develop new software for the campaign under the supervision of paid staff.

• Staffed a full-time digital director in each of about a dozen battleground states to effectively run mini-general election campaigns in those states.

“Last time, we had two campaigns,” Messina said. “We had the on-the-ground, door-knocking, person-to-person campaign, and then we had the digital campaign. But most of the digital campaign was really organized by [supporters] — by themselves.”

This time, says Messina, it’s the campaign that’s driving and controlling most digital content. “The goal is to burst through the wall of those two things.”

Twitter was just gaining steam in 2008 when campaign used the platform largely to notify followers about events. The campaign had 118, 000 followers at election time and about 2.4 million Facebook followers.

Today, Obama has 16 million Twitter followers to Romney’s 500,000, and Michelle Obama has nearly 1 million to Ann Romney’s 45,000. On Facebook, Obama has nearly 27 million followers to Romney’s 1.8 million. (It’s hard to know how many of either man’s followers are non-American.)

“We are building content to a variety of different channels, because what has really changed is the channels are different, and so some people are going to get all of their stuff through Facebook, some people now do Twitter, some people are going to go directly to our website, some people like it on email, some people like it on text,” Messina said.

Less certain for Obama is whether his vast digital empire can recreate the movement and excitement of 2008. Messina makes it clear that some tried-and-true methods still apply. “It’s even more important this time than last time to run a real grass-roots campaign that’s built on turning out our voters, persuading undecided voters and making sure they’ll vote on Election Day,” he says, “and that is the kind of the organizing we’re doing.”

Why Google Isn't Making Us Stupid.or Smart

Chad Wellmon,  The Hedgehog Review: Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012)

Last year The Economist published a special report not on the global financial crisis or the polarization of the American electorate, but on the era of big data. Article after article cited one big number after another to bolster the claim that we live in an age of information superabundance. The data are impressive: 300 billion emails, 200 million tweets, and 2.5 billion text messages course through our digital networks every day, and, if these numbers were not staggering enough, scientists are reportedly awash in even more information. This past January astronomers surveying the sky with the Sloan telescope in New Mexico released over 49.5 terabytes of information—a mass of images and measurements—in one data drop. 

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), however, produces almost that much information per second. Last year alone, the world’s information base is estimated to have doubled every eleven hours. Just a decade ago, computer professionals spoke of kilobytes and megabytes. Today they talk of the terabyte, the petabyte, the exabyte, the zettabyte, and now the yottabyte, each a thousand times bigger than the last.

Some see this as information abundance, others as information overload. The advent of digital information and with it the era of big data allows geneticists to decode the human genome, humanists to search entire bodies of literature, and businesses to spot economic trends. But it is also creating for many the sense that we are being overwhelmed by information. How are we to manage it all? What are we to make, as Ann Blair asks, of a zettabyte of information—a one with 21 zeros after it?1 From a more embodied, human perspective, these tremendous scales of information are rather meaningless. We do not experience information as pure data, be it a byte or a yottabyte, but as filtered and framed through the keyboards, screens, and touchpads of our digital technologies. However impressive these astronomical scales of information may be, our contemporary awe and increasing worry about all this data obscures the ways in which we actually engage it and the world of which it and we are a part. All of the chatter about information superabundance and overload tends not only to marginalize human persons, but also to render technology just as abstract as a yottabyte. An email is reduced to yet another data point, the Web to an infinite complex of protocols and machinery, Google to a neutral machine for producing information. Our compulsive talk about information overload can isolate and abstract digital technology from society, human persons, and our broader culture. We have become distracted by all the data and inarticulate about our digital technologies.

The more pressing, if more complex, task of our digital age, then, lies not in figuring out what comes after the yottabyte, but in cultivating contact with an increasingly technologically formed world.2 In order to understand how our lives are already deeply formed by technology, we need to consider information not only in the abstract terms of terrabytes and zettabytes, but also in more cultural terms. How do the technologies that humans form to engage the world come in turn to form us? What do these technologies that are of our own making and irreducible elements of our own being do to us? The analytical task lies in identifying and embracing forms of human agency particular to our digital age, without reducing technology to a mere mechanical extension of the human, to a mere tool. In short, asking whether Google makes us stupid, as some cultural critics recently have, is the wrong question. It assumes sharp distinctions between humans and technology that are no longer, if they ever were, tenable.

Two Narratives

The history of this mutual constitution of humans and technology has been obscured as of late by the crystallization of two competing narratives about how we experience all of this information. On the one hand, there are those who claim that the digitization efforts of Google, the social-networking power of Facebook, and the era of big data in general are finally realizing that ancient dream of unifying all knowledge. The digital world will become a “single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas,” a form of knowledge without distinctions or differences.3 Unlike other technological innovations, like print, which was limited to the educated elite, the internet is a network of “densely interlinked Web pages, blogs, news articles and Tweets [that] are all visible to anyone and everyone.”4 Our information age is unique not only in its scale, but in its inherently open and democratic arrangement of information. Information has finally been set free. Digital technologies, claim the most optimistic among us, will deliver a universal knowledge that will make us smarter and ultimately liberate us.5 These utopic claims are related to similar visions about a trans-humanist future in which technology will overcome what were once the historical limits of humanity: physical, intellectual, and psychological. The dream is of a post-human era.6

On the other hand, less sanguine observers interpret the advent of digitization and big data as portending an age of information overload. We are suffering under a deluge of data. Many worry that the Web’s hyperlinks that propel us from page to page, the blogs that reduce long articles to a more consumable line or two, and the tweets that condense thoughts to 140 characters have all created a culture of distraction. The very technologies that help us manage all of this information are undermining our ability to read with any depth or care. The Web, according to some, is a deeply flawed medium that facilitates a less intensive, more superficial form of reading. When we read online, we browse, we scan, we skim. The superabundance of information, such critics charge, however, is changing not only our reading habits, but also the way we think. As Nicholas Carr puts it, “what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles.”7 The constant distractions of the internet—think of all those hyperlinks and new message warnings that flash up on the screen—are degrading our ability “to pay sustained attention,” to read in depth, to reflect, to remember. For Carr and many others like him, true knowledge is deep, and its depth is proportional to the intensity of our attentiveness. In our digital world that encourages quantity over quality, Google is making us stupid.

Each of these narratives points to real changes in how technology impacts humans. Both the scale and the acceleration of information production and dissemination in our digital age are unique. Google, like every technology before it, may well be part of broader changes in the ways we think and experience the world. Both narratives, however, make two basic mistakes.

First, they imagine our information age to be unprecedented, but information explosions and the utopian and apocalyptic pronouncements that accompany them are an old concern. The emergence of every new information technology brings with it new methods and modes for storing and transmitting ever more information, and these technologies deeply impact the ways in which humans interact with the world. Both the optimism of technophiles who predict the emergence of a digital “liquid” intelligence and the pessimism of those who fear that Google is “making us stupid” echo historical hopes and complaints about large amounts of information.

Second, both narratives make a key conceptual error by isolating the causal effects of technology. Technologies, be it the printed book or Google, do not make us unboundedly free or unflaggingly stupid. Such a sharp dichotomy between humans and technology simplifies the complex, unpredictable, and thoroughly historical ways in which humans and technologies interact and form each other. Simple claims about the effects of technology obscure basic assumptions, for good or bad, about technology as an independent cause that eclipses causes of other kinds. They assume the effects of technology can be easily isolated and abstracted from their social and historical contexts.

Instead of thinking in such dichotomies or worrying about all of those impending yottabytes, we might consider a perhaps simple but oftentimes overlooked fact: we access, use, and engage information through technologies that help us select, filter, and delimit. Web browsers, hyperlinks, blogs, online newspapers, computational algorithms, rss feeds, Facebook, and Google help us turn all of those terrabytes of data into something more useful and particular, that is, something that can be remade and repurposed by an embodied human person. These now ubiquitous technologies help us filter the essential from the excess and search for the needle in the haystack, and in so doing they have become central mediums for our experience of the world.

In this sense, technology is neither an abstract flood of data nor a simple machine-like appendage subordinate to human intentions, but instead the very manner in which humans engage the world. To celebrate the Web, or any other technology, as inherently edifying or stultifying is to ignore its more human scale: our individual access to this imagined expanse of pure information is made possible by technologies that are constructed, designed, and constantly tweaked by human decisions and experiences. These technologies do not exist independently of the human persons who design and use them. Likewise, to suggest that Google is making us stupid is to ignore the historical fact that over time technologies have had an effect on how we think, but in ways that are much more complex and not at all reducible to simple statements like “Google is making us stupid.”

Think of it this way: the Web in its entirety—just like those terrabytes of information that we imagine weighing down upon us—is inaccessible to the ill-equipped person. Digital technologies make the Web accessible by making it seem much smaller and more manageable than we imagine it to be. The Web does not exist. In this sense, the history of information overload is instructive less for what it teaches us about the quantity of information than what it teaches us about how the technologies that we design to engage the world come in turn to shape us. The specific technologies developed to manage information can give us insight into how we organize, produce, and distribute knowledge—that is, the history of information overload is a history of how we know what we know. It is not only the history of data, books, and the tools used to cope with them. It is also a history of ourselves and of the environment within which we make and in turn are made by technologies.

In the following sections, I put our information age in historical context in an effort to demonstrate that technology’s impact on the human is both precedented and constitutive of new forms of life, new norms, and new cultures. The concluding sections focus on Google in particular and consider how it is impacting our very notion of what it is to be human in the digital age. Carr and other critics of the ways we have come to interact with our digital technologies have good reason to be concerned, but, as I hope to show, for rather different reasons than they might think. The core issue concerns not particular modes of accommodating new technologies—nifty advice on dealing with email or limiting screen time—but our very conception of the relationship between the human and technology.

FULL ARTICLE AT 

New MIT Book: Networked, The New Social Operating System

Rainie, Lee and Barry Wellman. Networked: The New Social Operating System. MIT Press, May 2012.

Daily life is connected life, its rhythms driven by endless email pings and responses, the chimes and beeps of continually arriving text messages, tweets and retweets, Facebook updates, pictures and videos to post and discuss. Our perpetual connectedness gives us endless opportunities to be part of the give-and-take of networking.

Some worry that this new environment makes us isolated and lonely. But in Networked, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman show how the large, loosely knit social circles of networked individuals expand opportunities for learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction. The new social operating system of “networked individualism” liberates us from the restrictions of tightly knit groups; it also requires us to develop networking skills and strategies, work on maintaining ties, and balance multiple overlapping networks.

Rainie and Wellman outline the “triple revolution” that has brought on this transformation: the rise of social networking, the capacity of the Internet to empower individuals, and the always-on connectivity of mobile devices. Drawing on extensive evidence, they examine how the move to networked individualism has expanded personal relationships beyond households and neighborhoods; transformed work into less hierarchical, more team-driven enterprises; encouraged individuals to create and share content; and changed the way people obtain information. Rainie and Wellman guide us through the challenges and opportunities of living in the evolving world of networked individuals.

About the Authors

Lee Rainie is Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and former managing editor of U.S. News and World Report.

Barry Wellman is the S. D. Clark Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, where he directs NetLab.

Reviews

“It’s easy to find rigorous science, and it’s easy to find topical stuff, but it’s not easy to find both at the same time!”
—Shankar Vedantam, NPR Science

       

Endorsements

"Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman have combined forces to become the new Marshall McLuhan! They draw on years of observation to weave the threads of the online and offline worlds into a deeply colored tapestry. We can see emergent social norms arising from their moving stories and insightful analyses."
—Vint Cerf, Internet Pioneer

“Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman have woven three enormous changes in the ways we connect--the spread of the internet, mobile tools, and social media--into a single clarifying story of our present and future life in the 21st century.”
—Clay Shirky, author of Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody

“Just as I would not let my child loose in traffic before I taught her to look both ways, if it were up to me, nobody would be let loose online until they read Networked. From the stories of real people whose lives have been changed, often for the better, by their interactions with contemporary online social networks, to the sociological and psychological theories that explain how life is really changing in the age of ‘networked individualism,’ this is a must-read manual for life online today.”
—Howard Rheingold, critic and author of Net Smart, Tools for Thought, The Virtual Community, and Smart Mobs

       

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Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers

John Markoff, The New York Times, May 21, 2012

PALO ALTO, Calif. — When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists. 

At least that is how the system is supposed to work. But lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. 

It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers’ privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud. 

The issue came to a boil last month at a scientific conference in Lyon, France, when three scientists from Google and the University of Cambridge declined to release data they had compiled for a paper on the popularity of YouTube videos in different countries. 

The chairman of the conference panel — Bernardo A. Huberman, a physicist who directs the social computing group at HP Labs here — responded angrily. In the future, he said, the conference should not accept papers from authors who did not make their data public. He was greeted by applause from the audience. 

In February, Dr. Huberman had published a letter in the journal Nature warning that privately held data was threatening the very basis of scientific research. “If another set of data does not validate results obtained with private data,” he asked, “how do we know if it is because they are not universal or the authors made a mistake?” 

He added that corporate control of data could give preferential access to an elite group of scientists at the largest corporations. “If this trend continues,” he wrote, “we’ll see a small group of scientists with access to private data repositories enjoy an unfair amount of attention in the community at the expense of equally talented researchers whose only flaw is the lack of right ‘connections’ to private data.” 

Facebook and Microsoft declined to comment on the issue. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, said he sympathized with the idea of open data but added that the privacy issues were significant. 

“This is one of the reasons the general pattern at Google is to try to release data to everyone or no one,” he said. “I have been working to get companies to release more data about their industries. The idea is that you can provide proprietary data aggregated in a way that poses no threats to privacy.” 

The debate will only intensify as large companies with deep pockets do more research about their users. “In the Internet era,” said Andreas Weigend, a physicist and former chief scientist at Amazon, “research has moved out of the universities to the Googles, Amazons and Facebooks of the world.” 

But while social and data scientists agree on the importance of replicating experimental results, there is less consensus on what should be done and how to deal with concerns about privacy. 

At leading social science journals, there are few clear guidelines on data sharing. “The American Journal of Sociology does not at present have a formal position on proprietary data,” its editor, Andrew Abbott, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, wrote in an e-mail. “Nor does it at present have formal policies enforcing the sharing of data.” 

The problem is not limited to the social sciences. A recent review found that 44 of 50 leading scientific journals instructed their authors on sharing data but that fewer than 30 percent of the papers they published fully adhered to the instructions. A 2008 review of sharing requirements for genetics data found that 40 of 70 journals surveyed had policies, and that 17 of those were “weak.” 

The data-sharing policy of the journal Science says, “All data necessary to understand, assess and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science.” But in the case of a 2010 article based on data from cellphone patterns, a legal agreement with the data provider prevented the researchers from even disclosing the country of origin. 

Ginger Pinholster, a spokeswoman for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal, acknowledged that on “rare occasions” Science does allow exceptions to its publication guidelines to protect privacy. “Information about movements in particular locations” could provide personal information, she said, “and the authors also had to promise privacy in order to get the information from the phone company.”

The journal did not note the policy exception when it published the article. 

Similarly, an April 2011 article in the journal PLoS One stated that the research was “based on the records of 72.4 million calls and 17.1 million text messages accumulated over a one-month period,” but did not identify the provider of the information. 

A founder of PLoS, Michael Eisen, a cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a a forceful advocate for “open science,” sounded rueful about that paper in an e-mail message. “It’s antithetical to the basic norms of science to make claims that cannot be validated because the necessary data are proprietary,” he wrote. 

The issue was foreshadowed in a 2009 essay in Science whose authors included Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist at Northeastern University who was also an author of the controversial papers in Science and PLoS One. 

“Perhaps the thorniest challenges exist on the data side, with respect to access and privacy,” they wrote. They warned that even anonymizing data sets could be imperfect, and they called for new models for collaboration between industry and academia to aid research and safeguard privacy. 

Last year the National Science Foundation said that researchers who receive its funds would be “expected” to share data with other researchers. 

Many scientists agree that this is as it should be. 

 e access to data,” said Alex Pentland, director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at M.I.T. “That is beginning to happen as governments and industry realize that they need to better understand the promise and limits of big data; for instance, we will be announcing a huge, multicountry release of phone data soon.”

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Big Data: What could revolutionize health care? This database.

Sarah Kliff,  The Washington Post, May 21, 2012

 

Think of it as a health policy wonk’s dream: Football stadium after bigstockphoto One insurance company’s data could fill 60 million of these. football stadium packed to the brim with...health insurance claims data.

An odd dream, to be sure. But health insurance data is crucial to understand how health care dollars get spent. It shows how people use health care, what’s changing and, in some cases, why. Health insurers, however, have tended to keep that data private, as it could tip competitors off to how they handle business. 

That all, however, changes today. This morning a new nonprofit called the Health Care Cost Institute will roll out a database of 5 billion health insurance claims (all stripped of the individual health plan’s identity, to address privacy concerns). 

Researchers will be able to access that data, largely using it to probe a critical question: What makes health care so expensive?

The Health Care Cost Institute database is massive. With data voluntarily supplied by Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth and Kaiser Permanente, it covers 33 million Americans with employer-sponsored health insurance. In order to store just one of those insurers’ data in paper form, you would need 60 million four-foot filing cabinets. 

“It’s the first time that this data has ever been assembled like this,” says Martin Gaynor, who chairs the Health Cost Care Institute Board, adding that the non-profit’s data people “have been working like crazy to make this happen.”

The database has been in the works for about two years. “At various junctures, it would look like this wasn’t going happen,” says Gaynor, who is also a professor of economics and health policy at Carnegie Mellon University. “There was a lot of effort to make all the data line up.”

Now that all the data is in one place, researchers can start to tackle questions like: Where is health care expensive? Are certain procedures driving up prices? Is health care becoming more costly because of higher prices or volume? 

HCCI’s own economists have tackled that last question, in a report out today, the first to use the new database.

It finds that higher prices charged by hospitals and other prices have driven health care cost growth during the recession, rather than Americans using more medicine. Medical prices grew three times faster than the Consumer Price Index, a measure of price inflation, between 2009 and 2010.

This confirms similar trends seen in the National Health Expenditures report as well as in Medicare data, both of which show people using less health care as the economy slowed.

The HCCI database allows researchers to dig even deeper beyond that general explanation, to reveal that it’s very specific types of medicine that are getting expensive fast. The cost of an emergency room visit went up 11 percent between 2009 and 2010, while the price of a trip to a skilled nursing facility actually fell by 3.2 percent over the same time period. 

Researchers have usually relied on Medicare data to answer these questions. The Dartmouth Atlas, which has spearheaded much of the country’s health cost research, relies on that data, largely because the federal government makes it available. And while the 30 million Medicare patients make for a large dataset, they do have the distinct statistical disadvantage of all being elderly.

With the HCCI database, researchers can understand better what’s happening to the 87 percent of the population under 65. Preliminary research suggests that there are indeed different things happening in each age group: While health care costs grew 4.5 percent for the under-18 population between 2009 and 2010, the rate of change was half that for older adults between 45 and 54. 

This is the first study to use the HCCI data, although more are in the works. Gaynor has been inundated with about 130 requests from health policy researchers to use the database. While his team sifts through those, three approved studies are already tackling big health policy questions. 

Researchers at Northwestern University are using the data to probe the effect of business cycles on health insurance. That could get at one big question in health policy right now, as to whether the recession is responsible for a slowdown in health care costs. Carnegie Mellon-based economists are teaming up with researchers at the London School of Economics to look at variations in hospital pricing, which may provide data similar to that of the well-respected Dartmouth Atlas, except for the non-Medicare population. 

“There is immense interest in gaining access,” says HCCI executive director David Newman. “We’re having trouble keeping up with that.”

© The Washington Post Company

Federal Facebook could outdo conferences, former CIO says

Aliya Sternstein,  Next Gov,  May 7, 2012

The federal government needs social networks -- not more conferences -- to connect colleagues in far-flung places, former federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said Monday at a conference hosted by Nextgov’s parent organization Government Executive Media Group.

“Why is it that you don’t have an employee social network?” pondered the recent hire at cloud services firm Salesforce.com. “This notion of creating an employee social network is so important.”

Kundra suggested that agencies -- many of which are “multinational” with foreign offices -- establish online communities where U.S.-based staff, overseas co-workers and their customers can informally connect anytime, anywhere.

“I would argue that it’s better than a point-in-time conference to build up these social networks because they persist across time,” he said. “It’s going to destroy this notion of distance.”

During the past month, government conferences organized by the General Services Administration and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have garnered charges of costly extravagance.

Kundra’s new job as Salesforce’s executive vice president of emerging markets involves applying social tools to make governments more efficient, transparent and collaborative. But big data generated by the increasing use of social technologies and the Internet can overload people’s circuit breakers if it’s not analyzed properly, he noted.

Big data -- the huge of amount information now available for fact-finding and analysis -- has changed the meaning of the term sensors, Kundra said. People usually think of sensors as motion and speed detectors on streets that discern traffic patterns. “But what we haven’t really talked a lot about yet is people in their everyday lives are instrumenting the entire planet” by taking photos on their mobile phones or Tweeting about the weather, he said.

All the transactions are happening in milliseconds so parsing them in real time could yield immediate insights, unlike monthly or even daily reports. “The problem of separating noise from signal is critical” when sensors are everywhere, Kundra added.

"Big Data" U.S. Congressional Staff Briefing

May 02, 2012 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM ET | U.S. Capitol Washington, DC

Industry experts will discuss the innovations and benefits derived from data collection and analysis and provide insight into what the term “Big Data” means.

FEATURING OPENING REMARKS BY:
FARNAM JAHANIAN , Assistant Director, National Science Foundation

AND A DISTINGUISHED PANEL OF INDUSTRY EXPERTS:

• Nuala O'Connor, Senior Counsel, Information Governance and Chief Privacy Leader, General Electric Co.

• Bill Perlowitz, CTO,Science Technology & Engineering Group, WYLE

• Caron Kogan , Strategic Planning Director, Lockheed Martin

• Nick Combs, Federal CTO, EMC

• Flavio Villanustre, VP of Technology, LexisNexis Risk Solutions

Location: Capitol Visitor’s Center (SVC-209)

Collaborative Innovation Not Optional In Today's Economy

Dan Keldsen, InformationWeek,  May 01, 2012

 

Given the global economic changes that began in 2008, we've been forced into a new way of working. Is your company burying its head in the sand, or taking the best that people have to give?

 

There are times when you, as a manager or executive, can take the time to architect a change-management process, much as I described in my previous column. Often, change management, even when intended to make changes easy to understand and transition, is bungled. And other times, change simply happens to us, and the test of our mettle comes with how we react to that change. Bury our heads in the sand and hope it blows over? Or figure out how we're going to survive it, then embrace it and move forward? 

My firm is wrapping up research on collaborative innovation, and we highlighted our findings in a recent webinar. I led that webinar with the context that we're now almost four years after the "econolypse" that smashed the world economy, an economy that's slowly being rebuilt--sometimes successfully, sometimes not. 

The new reality is that there are fewer people in the workplace and there's far more work to be done. (Fear of over-hiring is a serious problem.) Companies with employees who worked ONLY as standalone, departmentalized "cube workers" can no longer afford to work that way.

But as someone who has been involved in both Enterprise 2.0 and innovation management since well before 2008, I've been amazed at how many companies I work with that have seen this massive economic shock as a wakeup call. 
 

One glass-half-empty commenter on our survey sees the econolypse creating a two-fold effect: "First, there are fewer people to source or to do sourcing [for collaborative innovation]. Second, the elimination of jobs has reduced morale and forced all employees to work even harder. The focus now is on things with direct results, which makes less direct things like brainstorming [or collaboration] a tough sell."

Another survey respondent's more positive comment better sums up the attitude of most of my clients: "Pre-2008, [collaborative innovation] was not on my personal radar. Now I have the opportunity to observe how team members work together in an environment that is outside of their normal work routines. This creates stronger organizational bonds across departments and functions. In sum, it builds a stronger and more resilient firm. Ultimately, I have stronger and better managers and teams to rely on."

Creating a "stronger and more resilient firm" is a necessity, as there are no guarantees that the economic shockwaves have stopped.

As you head into the rest of 2012 and the years to follow, consider how you worked pre-2008 versus post-2008, and where you are now. Have you changed enough to weather the next storm? Are you actually getting the best you can out of your workforce?

This isn't just about better collaboration and knowledge-management tools. Another survey respondent summed things up well: "The industry is more accepting now of collaboration and shared intelligence. Tools are better, but so, too, are attitudes."

I've held many technology roles over the years, and much of my work involves finding appropriate technologies to drive collaborative innovation at scale. But if you're waiting for the "perfect" or "best available" technology to power your company out of the econolypse, I'll let another respondent have the final word on collaborative innovation: "If you don't work this way, you miss the best people have to give."

Slideshow: 10 Cool Social Media Monitoring Tools

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference brings together industry thought leaders to explore the latest innovations in enterprise social software, analytics, and big data tools and technologies. Learn how your business can harness these tools to improve internal business processes and create operational efficiencies. It happens in Boston, June 18-21. Register today!

Big Data: Hospitals mine patient records in search of customers

Phil Galewitz, Kaiser Health News, January 18, 2012

By Brett T. Roseman, for USA TODAY

Steven Boyd of Joliet, Ill., and wife Karol received a direct mailing from their local hospital offering lung scans.

Boyd, 59, of Joliet, Ill., had smoked for decades, as had his wife, Karol.
Provena didn't send the mailing to everyone who lived near the hospital, just those who had a stronger likelihood of having smoked based on their age, income, insurance status and other demographic criteria.

The non-profit facility is one of a growing number of hospitals using their patients' health and financial records to help pitch their most lucrative services, such as cancer, heart and orthopedic care. As part of these direct mail campaigns, they are also buying detailed information about local residents compiled by consumer marketing firms — everything from age, income and marital status to shopping habits and whether residents have children or pets at home.

Hospitals say they are promoting needed services, such as cancer screenings and cholesterol tests, but they often use the data to target patients with private health insurance, which typically pay higher rates than government coverage. At an industry conference last year, Provena Health marketing executive Lisa Lagger said such efforts had helped attract higher-paying patients, including those covered by "profitable Blue Cross and less Medicare."

While the strategies are increasing revenues, they are drawing fire from patient advocates and privacy groups who criticize the hospitals for using private medical records to pursue profits.

Doug Heller, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, a California-based consumer advocacy group, says he is bothered by efforts to "cherry pick" the best-paying patients.

"When marketing is picking and choosing based on people's financial status, it is inherently discriminating against patients who have every right and need for medical information," Heller says. Deven McGraw, director of the health privacy project at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, says federal law allows hospitals to use confidential medical records to keep patients informed about services that may help them.

"You want health providers to communicate to patients about health options that may be beneficial," McGraw says. "But sometimes this is about generating business for a new piece of equipment that the hospital just bought."

Using such information for marketing "creeps closer to the line" between what is legal and what is not, she says.

Hospital officials such as Denise Beaudoin of Detroit's Henry Ford Health System say what they do is legal and that the sophisticated targeting approach — called "customer relationship marketing" — simply helps them deliver information to those most likely to use it.

They say hospitals are adopting strategies used for decades by the retail, travel and communications industries, which have flourished with the growth of online companies such as Amazon and Google. For example: Buy a book on Amazon and it will suggest a title with a similar subject. Search for information on Alaskan vacations on Google, and an ad pops up for a cruise line.

At a time when government and private insurers are tightening reimbursements, more hospitals are turning to similar approaches to drive admissions. An estimated 20% now use the strategy, including large academic medical centers and large chains, such as HCA, based in Nashville, and Trinity Health, based in Novi, Mich. The trend is expected to accelerate as more hospitals adopt electronic health records, says Guy Miller, a Chicago health care consultant.

Putting patient data to work
Tess Niehaus, vice president of marketing at St. Anthony's Medical Center in St. Louis, makes no apologies for going after the most lucrative business.
"We are here to serve everybody, but we market for good-paying patients because it preserves our ability to serve everyone," she says.

St. Anthony's marketers use patient data to personalize mailings with an individual's name and a picture of someone of similar age or gender. It is more expensive, but the strategy results in better response rates, she says. From October 2010 through July 2011, St. Anthony's spent $25,000 on a targeted mailing to 40,000 women for mammogram screenings. The letters led 1,000 women to get the test, which generated $530,000 in revenue from screenings, biopsies and other related services, she says.

To help devise such campaigns, St. Anthony's and other hospitals share patient data with marketing staff and outside consultants. Anyone with access to patient records is required by federal law to sign non-disclosure agreements.

While the practice is legal, most people would be shocked to know their records may be shared with non-medical personnel and outside firms to help hospitals attract business, says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, an advocacy group based in California.

"I am really bothered by the overabundance of information that is flowing that is unnecessary and risky," she says.

Screenings lead to more tests
While hospitals may profit from offering cholesterol tests and mammograms, the big payoff is in what those screenings may lead to — additional tests and procedures, including surgery.

"The old adage in business is that it's easier to sell an existing customer new services rather than find a new customer," says Patrick Kane, senior vice president of marketing at Cape Cod Healthcare in Massachusetts who used such approaches at Wellmont Health System in Kingsport, Tenn.

Provena's six hospitals in Illinois embraced targeted marketing in 2010, mailing information about screenings and educational events to 293,000 people. The mailings led to more than 50,000 patient visits — a 17% response rate, several times that typically seen in direct mail efforts, according to the industry presentation to hospital officials last year in Orlando. After accounting for marketing costs, those visits netted the system $595,000.
Provena's Lagger says the approach boosted the system's bottom line so it could serve people regardless of insurance status. "This is a means to an end," she says.

One of the biggest pluses for hospital executives is that they can track a campaign's success by comparing the amount of services used by targeted consumers with a control group with the same demographic and economic characteristics but who are not sent mailings.

Mailings get results
When the Henry Ford Health System promoted mammograms last year in mailings to 30,000 women aged 40 or older, more than 5,700 responded — 304 more than in the control group. The mailings generated $268,000 more in profit than the control group — a return of more than four to one on the cost of the campaign, says Beaudoin, vice president of customer engagement.
"Some doctors used to be leery about the effectiveness of these marketing campaigns, but not when we can show them data like this," she says.

Mercy Health Partners in western Michigan, part of the 47-hospital non-profit Trinity Health system, sent a targeted cardiac screening mailing last year to 7,450 people. That resulted in 1,729 patient visits, or 7% more than in a control group. The campaign generated about $1 million in revenue and about $50,000 in profit.

"It's a much more efficient use of marketing dollars," says Preston Gee, Trinity's senior vice president of strategic planning. "People like having information tailored to their own needs."

Much of the expertise for such campaigns is provided by three consulting firms — CPM Marketing of Madison, Wis., Medseek of Birmingham, Ala., and New York-based Thomson Reuters. They typically charge hospitals $100,000 a year or more.

CPM, which merged in November with Denver-based HealthGrades, a health-ratings firm, added 100 new hospitals last year to give it a total of 400. Medseek works with more than 250 hospitals and Thomson Reuters with 150.
"There are a lot of very rich data in health care beyond just age and gender that help steer or guide people to health services," says John Hallick, president of CPM.

Loss of privacy
Boyd, the Joliet home inspector, was not upset that Provena Health used information about him and his wife — both former patients — to pitch screening tests. "We lost our privacy long ago, and I don't like to think about all the information that's out there about us."

Provena marketing manager Richard Matula would not say why the Boyds were included in the mailing, citing patient privacy laws. Patients' smoking status was not used in the criteria, he said.

The targeting worked in the case of Boyd, who called the number on the back and scheduled the CT scan a few days later. The $169 test showed his lungs were clear, but found potential blockages in coronary arteries that his Provena-affiliated doctor is monitoring.

"In hindsight, I'm glad I had the test," he says.

Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit, non-partisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.