RunCoCo

The new budget was launched this week and, as expected, cuts are called for in many areas. Also called for, although not in the budget as such,  is public engagement in issues related to the budget.

The Spending Challenge

In a novel approach, the government is turning to the public for ideas on how to save money. The Spending Challenge public engagement campaign started yesterday (June 24), asking civil servants and public sector workers ‘How can we rethink services to deliver more for less?’ Over 8,000 suggestions were received in the first day, showing the interest, engagement and creativity found in the community.

“Each idea is being reviewed by a cross-government team, and a team of ‘ideas champions’ will send the most promising suggestions to departments and Treasury spending teams to be worked up.”
(DirectGov website)

More answers can be submitted until July 8, not on a post-card but via ‘The Spending Challenge’ website.

Cutswatch

Another public engagement exercise related to the budget is Cutswatch, run by the Guardian and Observer newspapers. Rather than asking how to save, Cutswatch invites reports about how the cuts affect people and communities.

“…the ongoing story is how these decisions taken in Westminster will impact on local public services and the people who rely on them.”

Motives?

Is it is genuine interest in the power of the crowd and a will to engage that are bringing about these kinds of initiatives, or are they are implemented as a way to save money by getting the public to take over more and more, from budgeting to investigative journalism? Will the public motivation to contribute be exhausted or increase as we see more crowdsourcing opportunities? Much depends on what happens now – what is the effect of us embracing the budget challenge? Will we make a difference?

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has launched a new digitisation program to help members who want to have material transcribed and encoded, (as reported in the JISC Digitisation blog).

Through the AccessTEI program, members can submit documents in different formats, from modern print to manuscript and in western and non-western character sets, and get these transcribed and encoded with TEI Tite markup at a discounted price. High costs may normally make such a service unavailable to many projects, or less feasible for smaller jobs, but this program may be a way to get round that. From the project website:

By pooling digitization projects from the TEI community together and taking advantage of the economies of scale presented by their use of a common encoding system, AccessTEI is able to offer TEI members the cost, quality benefits, and support usually reserved for larger individual projects.
http://www.tei-c.org/AccessTEI/

Rather than paying to outsource manuscript transcription, some projects encourage voluntary participation (or crowdsourcing) using the TEI, like Transcribe Bentham – (you may read a blog post about their use of the TEI).

However TEI is such a special case. It must be very difficult to get a community to encode using the TEI unless they are very well trained, so replacing the AccessTEI program with a community effort may not be feasible. Also, ‘normal’ community transcription projects probably wouldn’t use TEI, so the AccessTEI service is of less interest to such ventures (and they may not be able to afford the membership fee anyway).

For further insight into collaborative manuscript transcription you may like to read Ben Brumfield’s blog and this post in Melissa Terras’s blog.

That question was asked on Wednesday by Dr Mark Sheehan, Oxford BRC Ethics Fellow at the Ethox Centre and a James Martin Research Fellow in the Program of Ethics of the New Biosciences, in a talk at the James Martin 21^st Century School at Oxford.

Sheehan discussed how patient and public involvement (PPI) is becoming a requirement in many research contexts and how some researchers may struggle to see why and how this should be achieved for their projects. He pointed out that organisations such as INVOLVE (national advisory group, funded by the National Institute for Health Research) can offer advice on how to involve members of the public in research. What is less available, he argues, is a “sustained philosophical analysis of the ethical reasons for such involvement”.

From the abstract for his talk:

“The fundamental issue involves the nature of the ‘stake’ that society has in research done under its auspices: why should society be involved or have a say? On face of it, there are a number of candidate reasons for society’s involvement: (i) society pays and (ii) society has an obligation to its members to ensure that research effective and positively impacts their welfare. Neither of these reasons fully captures our intuitions about the importance of society’s voice: (i) Society doesn’t always pay and even when it doesn’t, we still may think that the involvement of society is important; and (ii), it is far from clear that PPI always makes research better or more effective.”

Sheehan suggests that with an answer to this question it is possible to move on to talk about the form of involvement – who should be involved and when and how? – and then develop “a meaningful picture of the kinds of justifications for various levels of involvement and across a range of forms of research”.

This talk was part of the James Martin Advanced Research Seminar Series and was also advertised via a Facebook group ‘Interesting Talks Oxford’  . The group has been set up to help people who, as it says in the group profile, “are rather frustrated at not knowing about all manner of interesting talks going on in and around Oxford”. After about three months, the group has almost 3,000 members and lists a wide range of talks and events. The group is looking at other ways to engage with the community, within and outside Facebook. RunCoCo is following the development with interest.

The Bodleian Library online resource the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera was talked about on Radio 4’s Saturday Review (12 June 2010 from 21.00-30.00 mins through the programme). This will be available online on the BBC i-Player for a few days and to download as a podcast from the Saturday Review website. As well as the fascinating collection, the website itself and the mechanics of the search engine were talked-up – however the reviewers suggest that the website needs ‘a greatest hits’, which misses slightly the point of the curators’ choices blog and other essays. RunCoCo is on the board for another John Johnson Collection project, Mapping Crime, which we’ve blogged briefly about before.

AddressingHistory is an interesting example of how a project can use good, digitised material and community engagement to produce new resources.

The project, run by Edina in partnership with the National Library of Scotland, is creating an online tool for linking digitised data from Scottish Post Office Directories with historical maps.

From a recent conference contribution:
“The AddressingHistory geo-coding web tool will allow users to plot the location on a map of any address, street name, advert, or listing from the directories onto an appropriate map thus enhancing both mapping and directory data and allowing opportunity for original research that utilises the rich contextual perspective the tool will draw out of the combined resources. ” (http://ciser.cornell.edu/IASSIST/poster/ps3.shtm)

The project is running from April to September 2010 and will be using a range of crowd-sourcing methods to  encourage interested users to contribute. For this stage, the focus will be on Edinburg data from three eras (1784-5; 1865; 1905-6). It will, however, be possible to use the same technology for a larger project covering the whole of Scotland.

More information:

• A recent conference poster offers a good introduction to the project.  http://addressinghistory.blogs.edina.ac.uk/files/2010/06/AHposter.pdf
• AddressingHistory project blog (http://addressinghistory.blogs.edina.ac.uk/)
• Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/AddressingHistory/114317218608533).
• Twitter (http://twitter/AddressHistory)

AddressingHistory is funded by JISC and is being run by EDINA, working in partnership with the National Library of Scotland.