Guide to Building Data-Driven Organizations in the Public Sector

Information Blindness

Team 1

Duhigg Ch8 Charlotte Fludd data room

We are using data in ways that helps us gain an true understanding of industry specifics needs such as education, meals, maps, commuting, medical needs, health and so many other choices that affect our day. Our days revolve around these items that are constinetly using data to evolve and create more efficent ways of living, through data we are answering questions on how to live better and be more efficent, and we are also finding new qestions to ask that helps us use data in other ways.

What I like most about this chapter is seeing both sides of what data is doing. It is said that having all of this data around us should make our lives easier, we should be more aware of the right choices to make and how to be more aware of what those choices mean. In fact that is not necessarily the case. We are surrounded by so much data that using is becomes paralzying in ways and we cant associated it with using the data to then make the right decisions.

One of my take aways is truly thinking about the task at hand and staying away from information blindness. I think that as we continue to use data and process it that we will have a better understanding about how to use it effectively and not be overwhelmed by it.

Meirer Ch2- Big Data and Humanitarian Response

We have all noted that that little button on social media platforms asking us to share our location (Geo-tag). What does that button mean to crisis mapper? Simply put it means that your location at the time of a tweet post can be mapped AUTOMATICALLY. No digging needed. About according to Meier about 3% of the Twitter population chooses to “share” their location when tweeting. Remember that a Tweet is just like an SMS message on a cell phone. Moreover we see that geo-tagged tweets, correlate to the presence of electricity. Other platforms then Twitter are also discussed such as Whatsapp and Google+ all with the same concepts. In 2013 there were more mobile phone users in the world then there where people… so I imagine by now that number has tripled.

How much data is really exchanged through SMS? In early 2012 Filipinos send an average of 2 billion text messages every day. This breaks into 92% of the population in the Philippines. During Hurricane Sandy more than a million Instagram pictures and over 20 million tweets were posted within a 5 day period. So how do you find the needle in all the data? Heat Maps! By identifying the social media use through SMS you are latently identifying where the electricity in areas is and therefore can make more than a few impacts.

A few take a ways: • Information is just as important as food, water and shelter in today’s changing world. • Big Data is extremely useful in a Disaster situation as it comes in many formats, which boil down usually to SMS. • Disaster communities are also Digital communities.

Pentland Ch7 Organizational Change

It’s 2009 and you are part of a team that is competing the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Red Balloon Challenge. This is a $40,000 competition that challenges teams to locate 10 red balloons in undisclosed locations within the continental United States. A team from MIT won in a time of less than 7 hours, truly amazing for such a difficult task covering thousands of miles from coast to coast.

So how did the MIT team win? And how did they win in such a short amount of time? The team used a strategy of referrals. In short, if a person found a balloon, the MIT team would use $2000 of the prize money as a reward. But if somebody referred that person who found the balloon, then they would win $1,000. were there other factors used to motivate team members in this task other than money? Definitely. This multi-level social networking strategy worked well for them.

Deciphering if submissions of balloon locations proved to be vitally important. Trust was developed over time with frequent interactions between members of the team. The MIT team felt that building human capital, so to speak, through social networks was a key to winning. Perhaps, this is the biggest takeaway from this chapter… that trust amongst team members is just as important, if not more, than developing an intricate network of systems reliant on technology.

References