Crowdsourcing a Constitution

Alana Maurushat with David Lee

When I worked at the University of Hong Kong, I had the privilege of engaging in many conversations with the world-renowned constitution-writer and scholar Professor Yash Gai. Professor Gai led constitutional reviews in Kenya and Fiji, and was asked to assist with Constitutions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over many casual lunches with colleagues in Hong Kong, I can still recall how passionate Professor Gai was for constitutional writing that was “right” for the people of the country in question. He was a staunch believer of the idea that extensive discussion and consultation among all communities of a nation was essential for building a strong constitution that would stand the test of time: constitution writing by consensus. These constitutional reviews often involved Professor Gai and his committees to lead meetings throughout urban and remote areas of a nation. These consultations often lasted years, in order to ensure that small ethnic minorities were not neglected. The process was epic.

Given that a constitution is construed as one of the pillars of a nation’s identity, one might ask the question – why not ask the citizens to draft the constitution? With the rise in online user input platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, collaborative innovation has never been easier. It should come as no surprise that Facebook alone is used by nearly 12 million people just in Australia.

This increasing popularity of social media is exactly what the Nordic European nation of Iceland needed. Following collapse of its economy and outcry from its citizens, the Icelandic government has decided to take advantage of this method. The government introduced a process in 2011 involving a unique democratic approach of using social media such as Facebook and Twitter to identify ideas, recommendations, and provisions to be included in the new constitution. The social feedback will not be binding to the Parliament of Iceland, but it will most likely have significant influence on politicians.  Because the proposals are drafted by the public, it will be impossible for politicians to "sweep popular proposals under the carpet". Icelandic citizens are welcoming this idea too – 66% of the voters agreed in a referendum to use the resulting document as a framework for the nation’s new constitution. This unique drafting method adopted by Iceland is a prime example of "crowdsourcing".

First coined by Jeff Howe in an article posted on The Wired, the term "crowdsourcing" refers to a similar concept to outsourcing. Outsourcing involves an identified and selected individual or group of individuals developing a concept or performing work duties. Crowdsourcing is a much bigger idea – it brings in the public and involves the crowd in a creative, collaborative process. Many businesses have taken advantage of this method from as early as 2001. iStockPhoto was created as a marketplace for bloggers and web-designers to purchase stock images from a gallery of photos contributed by amateur photographers. The collaborative input provided by thousands of contributors allowed these images to be sold at very low prices, often undercutting professional photographers by as much as 99%. Other notable businesses benefiting from crowdsourcing include Reddit, Youtube and Innocentive.

Crowdsourcing through social media creates exciting opportunities, as it empowers people to participate in a true democratic process. Evidently, this method has been utilised mainly by businesses for financial gains. As such, Iceland must be commended for taking the unprecedented approach of employing crowdsourcing in politics, in an effort to produce a constitution that is “right” for its citizens. Other nations will undoubtedly take note; it won’t be long before other governments follow the unique path created by Iceland. It is arguable that the constitutions of other nations are long over-due for a reformulation, with netizen contribution.

For example, the Australian Constitution was drafted by the delegates of the States in the late 19th Century, and the only input provided by the people was voting for its adoption. However, this is a debate for another time.

    Image by James Cridland, made available by creative commons license via Flickr.

Holding a portal to the Cloud

Lester Miller

I've just received my shiny, new, brushed steel and polished glass smartphone. I'll admit now: I'm in love with it. Before this day came, I'd talked frequently about how amazing life would be after it arrived and, now that it's here, I spend a lot of my spare time bathing in its visual modern beauty and trying to fully realise what I'm convinced are life-enriching possibilities.

One of the important features of this smartphone is the loudly-touted easy access to a cloud on which data can be stored and complex calculations can be made.

In 1950, Herb Grosch, a Canadian-born astrophysicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, envisioned a future where the whole world would run using a cloud system of computing, operated by individual local terminals but served by only 15 data centres.

Today, there are about 50,000 data centres just in Australia – certainly more than 15 worldwide – but they are getting larger in size and smaller in number.

Arguably the largest data centre in the world, the Lakeside Technology Center, is 10 hectares (24 acres) in size. It's the nerve centre for Chicago's commodity markets and requires about 100MW of power to operate.

The architecture of computers means they can't presently solve certain kinds of equations, but what they can do is break a model down into millions of tiny parts and approximate the solution to governing algorithms by iterative methods. The smaller the parts the problem is broken into, the greater the precision and accuracy of the solution, but the more calculations required.

My final year project for my Engineering degree, an aeon (or ten years) ago, was to design an efficient shape for a solar-powered car, hypothetically to be built and raced in the World Solar Challenge. It involved modelling the movement of air across the surface of the car, a problem governed by partial differential equations, unsolvable directly but susceptible to a good approximation. My team would go into the computer rooms on campus, enter the surface geometry of a car we thought would slip through the air cleanly, and then leave the post-processor to think about the problem, which would take about a day. The graphic visualisation part of the problem would also take hours. We would return, review the results, think about how shape could be improved and do it again.

How much quicker would the process have been an aeon later? With the accessibility of clouds now, computational fluid dynamics packages and so many other data analysis packages for professionals from structure designers and advertisers to baseball scouts can be operated remotely, by our smartphones or tablets, which need only have the power to display the interface between the calculator and the user: a "dumb" terminal.

Computing is rapidly becoming a service business. Want to store your precious data? Don't keep it where moth and rust destroy.  Leave it all with us for a monthly fee, or for free if you promise to notice our constant but subtly-placed advertising banners.

Need a complex problem solved? It was not unusual, until recently, for a seat with a data consultant to be up to tens of thousands of dollars. The barriers to entry are now lower for modelling and data manipulation consultants, such that all it takes is a short lease contract for software and the computer power on which to run it (and soon, your sexy smartphone).

The challenge for data centres is business continuity delivered in an efficient way. The global ICT industry was estimated in 2007 to be producing 2% of the world's carbon emissions and data centres 14% of that, the latter of which appears to be growing. Google keeps the server hallways in its centre at 27 degrees celsius to reduce airconditioning loads. Other centres are being built near proposed tidal power generation sites, such as one near the Pentland Firth in Scotland.

The technology can be used across the entire spectrum from trivial to world-changing problems. There are, for example, teams of people involved in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. The SETI@home project used hundreds of thousands of idle home computers to review reams of data from a radio telescope array for faraway signals that couldn't be dismissed as noise. Last year, Amazon donated a part of their cloud so that SETI could continue their efforts with even greater power for the next six years.

It's frustrating but also amazing that the problems we want to solve seem to become more complex the more we learn. The cloud will no doubt become the way that we will relate to and get closer to solutions to the most tricky and long-standing unknowns.

Image by Karin Dalziel, made available by Creative Commons licence via Flickr.

Gamers boldly go where no scientist has gone before

Sarah Lux

Mothers and girlfriends worldwide have long yelled at errant sons and partners for being overly fixated on a video game.

This week, however, a group of gamers and scientists demonstrated that proficiency in World of Warcraft may be worth more than the geek cred it achieves.

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology has published an advance online copy of a paper that explains how enjoyment of and technical skills in playing video games can be harnessed to achieve remarkable outcomes in scientific research.

The scientists, hailing from the US, Poland and the Czech Republic, challenged players of the competitive protein folding game Foldit to produce accurate models of the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease. Scientists researching antiretroviral AIDS medication had tried and failed for years to map the protein with the requisite level of detail using more conventional scientific means. These particular scientists thought the Foldit gamers might have more success.

The experiment worked. In just three weeks, the gamers succeeded in generating models of sufficient quality to meet the scientists' needs. The result is incredible, and may lead to a significant advancement in AIDS research.

More broadly, considerable attention should be paid to the importance and ingenuity of this collaborative model for research, which harnesses skills possessed by ordinary humans to empower their meaningful contribution to the scientific process.

Foldit, the game in question, describes itself as "a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research". Understanding the structure of a protein is central to working out how to target it with drugs. This process is difficult and elusive, as the Foldit website explains:

The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical... Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans' puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

The program builds on the concept behind a predecessor, Stanford University's folding@home, which networks participants' computers to create a supercomputer which works through possible folding patterns. Foldit adds to this concept the intuition and puzzle-solving abilities of human gamers to speed up and improve the results. When directed at particular scientific problems, this amalgamation of human and computer capabilities can achieve significant results, as demonstrated by the AIDS study.

This remarkable use of technology corresponds to a broader trend that has accompanied the increasing dominance of the internet in our lives and interactions. Unprecedented access to information, thanks to the internet, has substantially addressed the information asymmetry that used to mean ordinary people needed access expensive experts to make decisions and achieve certain goals. Almost all of us go to Google as our first port of call on almost every day-to-day question, and what we find includes the opinions, recommendations and warnings of an enormous unnamed audience who can help us solve our problem.

Examples of the trend are infinite. Travel review websites like TripAdvisor let you ask questions of a million strangers you never even knew had travelled to your intended location. Flickr, now with an in-built Creative Commons licensing system, connects you with talented photographers who will licence incredible works for your personal or professional use. And although the countless websites and forums containing basic medical information certainly do not replace the role of physicians, they do make for well informed patients who no longer have to defer all control over their health decisions to clinical experts.

Outsourcing tasks and questions to the millions of people connected to the internet is increasingly acknowledged as a legitimate problem-solving model. Crowdsourcing, the outsourcing of a task to an undefined group of people through an open call, can be arranged informally (for example, by a call for assistance over Facebook) or through companies like InnoCentive, which connect those with a problem (Seekers) with those who have solutions (Solvers), who are rewarded with cash prizes for proposing the right fix. Currently on InnoCentive, a novel idea for the development of glucose-responsive insulin may win you US$100,000, while a photo reflecting "the World in 2012" may result in the award of a $1000 prize. Crowdsourcing provides access to an entire world's worth of experts and eliminates costs of participation. As it is developed and refined as a model for various types of projects, it can only grow in popularity and impact.

Foldit is one of those refinements. Rather than issuing a completely open call, the scientists (essentially, Seekers) identified a particular group (Solvers) possessing skills the scientists lacked, and turned the project into a competitive game to make participation attractive.

While technology is so often lamented and lambasted for harming our relationships – lovers text rather than talk, friends chat online instead of meeting, kids engage in multi-player online role-play rather than kicking around a ball – the internet has a powerful ability to connect people, with substantial personal, professional, societal and now scientific implications.

And just think – if gamers can actually help to cure AIDS, what might be the value of your voice in the crowd?


This article was originally published here on The Punch.