This competition is very related to the e-Participation field, as Ashoka considers it as linked with the fields of “Citizen participation” and “Journalism”.

Ashoka and Google are seeking innovations that will allow global citizens to have a voice and the information they need to make change. The competition welcomes solutions that work with any communication or information technologies—not just the Internet. The contest is open to solutions around the world: you ara allowed to present you entry in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Thai, Indonesian, Mandarin or Japanese.

Some of the benefits mentioned for participants are:

• Connect to a global online community that supports the impact you are making, or seeking to make, on the ground.
• Gain visibility with our community and our competition partner, Google.
• Position yourself as a candidate for an Ashoka Fellowship within our News & Knowledge program.

The prizes of the competition are:

• One of four US $5,000 cash prizes in unrestricted funding to boost your project.
• Consideration for an Ashoka Fellowship—complete with a three-year living stipend, international recognition, and access to a network of systems-changing social entrepreneurs.

Have a look at the webpage of Ashoka Changemakers for more details.

PS: By the way, there is an entry for our Kyopol System. We would be more that pleased if you’d like to give us any feedback about our proposal.

But there is another interesting angle on this whole issue. In his role as executive chair Mr Schmidt will be working on Government relations more heavily than before which might have a major impact on how the net is regulated and how Google interacts with government – which in turn could influence the field of eParticipation.

Taking this into account it makes sense to take a look at what Mr Schmidt said about his plans in terms of government relations. In the Q4 2010 Earnings Call he stated that he thinks that the problems Google had with governments in last few years (accidental collection of wifi data or the Streetview debate in Germany) might stem from the fact that “people don´t really understand what we really do and what we don´t do”. He follows up with the statement that the core strategy will be do communicate more intensely with regulators and government – “We are trying to be as transparent and collaborative as possible”. He also makes clear that Google thinks that regulators have an important job to do and that “they are there for a reason and we respect that”.

While Mr Schmidt makes clear that there is a need for more communication between government and the company he also says that he thinks that what Google does is “very pro competitive” – answering the complains that Google might behave anti-competitive in some areas like for example favouring their own products in search results.

In summary it looks like if Mr Schmidt will be more active in working with governments in the next years and I would argue that it is good for both the company and governments. Without a doubt he is a very knowledgeable and straight discussion partner for governments and from a citizen’s point of view his involvement might help to both improve internet regulations and speed up the process towards them.

Picture from Techcrunch.com

Google tries to improve the app situation for Android phones by introducing App Inventor, a tool that allows building Android apps simply by using a drag-and-drop interface. The video below shows how a very simple Android app is build and run on a phone using this web-based tool. As I am getting into App Inventor right now I can assure you it is much more capable than what you see in the video but it still illustrates the concepts.

This being an eParticipation blog I would like to point out two ways this kind of tool (maybe Apple could improve Xcode to also include beginner’s drag-and-drop functionalities) could be useful for our field:

1. Getting started with mobile participation: The pressure to offer ways of mobile participation is rising quickly and eParticipation projects and solution providers have to address this issue. However the barrier-to-entry into this field (multiple platforms, different languages etc.) is fairly high. A tool like App Inventor could be used to take first steps into apps and to learn how to bring a tool over into the mobile world with reasonable effort. Lessons learned here can than be used on other platforms or in a final version. One note of warning here: Even though App Inventor does generate real applications which can be fully used on the phone and other devices it does not put out human readable code. Therefore editing the finished code itself (without using the App Inventor tool) might be difficult or impossible (for the techies: App Inventor is based on the OpenBlocks java library).
2. Collaboratively developing software: In many projects future users need to be involved in developing a software solution. This process, which for example can take the shape of a Living Lab (aka user-centric open innovation), can be very difficult as software development is an abstract and complex process. In many cases non-functional mockups and lengthy descriptions are used to engage into discussion with future users. App Inventor (and OpenBlocks for that matter) could be used to make the process of co-developing more interactive. Users, designers and developers could directly collaborate to build first drafts of tools or rearrange existing ones. This again could be done either in persons or using eTools and online deliberation.

These are of course just first ideas and I would be happy to see more of them in the comments. I will take a closer look at the inner workings of App Inventor and report back with more information on how capable the tool really is.

PS: I got my App Inventor invite recently. And as far as I know I cannot forward additional ones.

The data prediction API is a service that is able to categorize random text based on how it has been trained with known categorized data. For example: If the service was trained that “This is an english sentence” is “English” and that “La idioma mas fina” is “Spanish” it will be able to determine that “Qué Hay De Nuevo” is also “Spanish”. Of course this is a very simple example but the service is potentially able to categorize complex texts based on the training it has received with known data. Details about the process can be found in the developers guide (warning technical content).

In the field of eParticipation this API could be used to categorize arguments and contributions made by participants. The service could for example be trained with 1.000 text based contributions in several participation efforts related to urban planning which are categorized for being “positive” or “negative” in their tone and position to the issue at hand. If a new participation effort in urban planning is started all its contribution then can be automatically categorized as being “positive” or “negative” based on the data used for training the API.

Of course this vision is not without its problems: Even if the data prediction API works really well (and has been trained with enough and well categorized data) there is still the need for a human to facilitate a discussion and to decide on edge cases. Nonetheless this kind of automatic analysis could be a valuable support for moderation.

However good or bad Google´s particular try of automatic data analysis might be, the need to further advance on this field seems obvious especially in the age of distributed discussions in social networks and the social web in general. I will keep an eye on the development of this service and give it a try as soon at is available to a wider audience.

Google published all requests for data and removal of content by governments in the second half 2009 on a website . The screenshot below shows the map on that site zoomed to Europe but there is data available for many other countries in the world.

Click to enlarge

Some example numbers: In Germany there where 458 requests for private data and 188 request for removal of content in the second half of 2009. Ten of the removal requests where aimed that the Blogger service and 70 at Youtube. Interestingly Google also publishes the rate of compliance with these requests – which in this case is 94.1%. In other countries there were much more requests: Brazil leads the chart with 3663. For China however no data is available – or as Google says: “Chinese officials consider censorship demands as state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time.“

This shows that there are other sides to government transparency than one might think about immediately. I hope other companies also publish this kind of data in such an accessible way so that we can hold our governments to task for extensive use of laws and power.

Google services, which can be integrated into third party websites, like search, the single-sign-on mechanism friend connect, or Google Maps have shown to be very useful if integrated into eParticipation platforms, while consumer facing products like Google Buzz or Wave have flopped with the general audience.

In November 2009, shortly after the launch of Google Wave I tried to summaries its potential uses for eParticipation as discussed by many eParticipation experts making use of the tool itself. Since then there was little to no activity on that specific Wave and a look at the Google Wave development blog indicates that the development of the tool has slowed down considerably. There are still many new Waves published each day but many of those are still related to testing the tool or have almost no activity in them. Google Buzz launched to major buzz (pun intended) earlier this year but has more or less developed into a place for forwarded Twitter posts.

Google Services aimed at programmers or for integration into third party sites however are not only widely used but have also been implemented as useful additions to eParticipation sites. Google Maps is the go-to provider for geo-data and has been used in countless eParticipation projects. Some projects have been completely built on Google Sites and Google custom search is a powerful way to implement search tools on websites. Furthermore some projects have started to look into Google Appengine to host their sites or are even involved in the Google Summer of Code effort. The company also provides many great APIs and little helper tools which are useful for many eParticipation sites (An example would be the SocialGraph API).

After this short overview of the topic the question remains: Could it be that Google is great at building infrastructures which others can use to build great sites and webapps and just fails in consumer facing products? Of course there are examples like Gmail or the Android OS which show that the big G is capable of building great user experiences but there seems to be something to this assessment.

A Social Graph includes all the websites and relationships between websites related to any particular web user. The Social Graph for me would for example state that I am an author on the PEP-NET weblog, my Twitter account is twitter.com/bengtfeil, my Facebook name is bengtfeil and so own. The Social Graph also includes information on the people related to me as friends on the different sites. Of course only publicly viewable information can by included into the graph.

Using the information of the Social Graph can be used to relate the different statements of persons about a topic to each other and help to draw a much clearer picture of the distributed opinion on the web.

So how is it even possible to produce such a Social Graph for a particular person? In recent years hyperlinks have started to be improved by adding meta-information about the link. Two types of meta-data are most important here:

• The „me“-link: If a hyperlink for example from the PEP-NET site contains a link to my Twitter account contains this information it is clear that Bengt Feil on Twitter has something to do with Bengt Feil on PEP-NET.

• The „friend“-link: A link from my Twitter Account to friendfeed.com/somed containing the friend information would mean that Bengt Feil on Twitter has some kind of relationship to Rolf Luehrs (somed) on Friendfeed.

With this information and the fact that these kinds of connections can also be made using indirect connections a Social Graph can be drawn. The graphic below (by Google) illustrates this process:

As only public information can be used to produce a Social Graph and search engines are trying their best to crawl all public information on the net, it makes sense that Google offeres a Social Graph API which can be used as a tool to draw and analyse these relationship networks. The following video explains how it works:

To get a better understanding of the concept of the Social Graph and to see your own I suggest taking a look at the example applications using the Social Graph API.

Augmented reality on iPhone (Wikipedia)

Locations and places play in very important role in many eParticipation processes. As a matter of fact eParticipation in urban planning is one of the most successful areas eParticipation to day. In the case of participation processes which are linked to a certain place mobile participation is a very promising trend in general and in this article I would like to take a look at two specific new technologies and what their use in mobile location focussed participation may be: Augmented reality and automated image recognition.

Augmented reality

In a nutshell the term augmented reality describes the enhancement of a live picture provided by camera (mostly on phones) with additional data (commonly gathered from the internet). The data shown is located in space so that the viewer only sees the data he or she is close to. The picture above for example is an example using the Wikitude world browser on the iPhone. Here the live view is enhanced with data from Wikipedia. This kind of technology is available on most location aware smart phones today and is very easy to use.

This video shows this augmented reality app in action:

In an eParticipation process linked to a location this technology can be used in different ways:

1. To amend different places in the actual area in discussion with information.
   This way participants can for example visit a planning area and directly see all necessary information presented in the actual contexts it is relevant in.
2. To show and add comments and discussion points directly to the relevant places and objects.
   A more advance use would be to allow participants to directly add comments and remarks to actual places in objects and show comments from other participants where they matter. If for example the discussion includes the question whether a set of trees should be cut or not the comments and remarks make much more sense if the location of the trees is attached to them.

This kind of technology use does not exclude participants who would rather use a normal website to get involved. Any comment made in the augmented reality can be displayed in on website either with the location shown on a map or as text information. On the other hand any information enter into a website and amended with geo-data can be used in an augmented reality application.

Overall the augmented reality approach is very promising but the technological hurdles still limit the potential user to a small number. This however might change over the course of 2010 which might be year of location aware devices and software.

Automated image recognition

In late 2009 Google introduced a new service called Google Goggles which allows smart phone users to snap a picture of a landmark, book cover or company logo and get search results based on whatever is shown on the picture. Of course the Goggles is only one implementation of automated image recognition but it shows how fare this technology has developed. The following video explains the tool:

This kind of technology is still in its infant state but I would like to suggest a few ideas how it might be interesting in an eParticipation context:

1. It might be used to provide information on places or objects in a specific area. In this case it is similar to the first use of an augmented reality application.
2. Discussion about non-stationary or multiple objects. The advantage of this technology is that it can be used on moveable objects which do not have an absolute location as it does not depend on the geo-data but recognizes the object itself. An example would be if a participant takes a picture of a taxi, the system recognizes the object as a taxi and the comment is then recorded as a comment on “taxis”.

Both technologies presented here have potential to enhance eParticipation processes and are signifiers for the two major trends of universal internet access and location awareness. Maybe the suggested uses for eParticipation will not be mainstream any time soon but the overall trends will affect the field in some shape or form very soon.

I for one welcome these possibilities and challenges.

According PoliticsOnline, Peter Greenberger and his team have played a key role in enhancing transparency and democracy in the United States, which significantly change the worldview of politics among citizens.

A presentation to see in video: [To watch the video]

Real-time or instant communication

In a nutshell the instant updating is achieved by setting up a hub-server which acts as an intermediate and keeps track of all updates on RSS-feeds and quickly informs all subscribers. A quick introduction to the technical basis is given in the following presentation:

In summary the very simple implementation of this standard would allow all kinds of websites to exchange various sorts of content instantly. It is like changing setting up phone lines between different islands instant of using ships transporting paper mail. Consequently pubsubhubbub (despite having a rather silly name) could be a major building block of the real-time web.

The next generation of eParticipation tools which make use of the real-time web and its underlining technologies could be more distributed and can engage the participants where ever they are on the web without being totally depended on third party platforms like Facebook etc.. One example could be to integrate discussions on Twitter etc. on a given topic to an eParticipation site and to use instant updating RSS to have both discussions linked to one another.

To get more information about this project or to try out what can be done with it I would suggest taking a look at the project page or this short tutorial of how to implement it.