From Data Literacy to Co-design Environmental Monitoring Innovations and Civic Action

Funding Information: Acknowledgments. We would like to thank all the volunteers, partners, and authors who wrote and provided helpful comments for this publication writing process. We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Finnish Cultural Foundation for South Karelia Region and the PERCCOM programme. We also give our gratitude for South-East Finland – Russia CBC programme for supporting AWARE project, funded by the European Union, the Russian Federation and the Republic of Finland as the funding has made it possible for publishing this work and disseminate the knowledge. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).SENSEI is an environmental monitoring initiative run by Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT University) and the municipality of Lappeenranta in south-east Finland. The aim was to collaboratively innovate and co-design, develop and deploy civic technologies with local civics to monitor positive and negative issues. These are planned to improve local’s participation to social governance issues in hand. These issues can be e.g. waste related matters like illegal dumping of waste, small vandalism into city properties, alien plant species, but on the other hand nice places to visits too. This publication presents initiatives data literacy facet overview, which is aimed at creating equitable access to information from open data, which in turn is hoped for to increase participants motivation and entrepreneurship like attitude to work with the municipals and the system. This is done by curating environmental datasets to allow participatory sensemaking via exploration, games and reflection, allowing citizens to combine their collective knowledge about the town with the often-complex data. The ultimate aim of this data literacy process is to enhance collective civic actions for the good of the environment, to reduce the resource burden in the municipality level and help citizens to be part of sustainability and environmental monitoring innovation activities. For further research, we suggest follow up studies to consider on similar activities e.g. in specific age groups and to do comparisons on working with different stage holders to pin point most appropriate methods for any specific focus group towards collaborative innovation and co-design of civic technologies deployment.Peer reviewe

Reframing E-participation for Sustainable Development

Publisher Copyright: © 2021 ACM.The role of digital technologies in the public administration has grown significantly in the last five decades, with over 80% of United Nations Member States currently using technologies for public governance processes. This trend has contributed to the evolution of e-governance practices. E-participation in particular, has become a norm in policy and decision-making in a growing number of countries and a key enabler for achieving the United Nations' 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with governments and people developing crucial abilities to create, use and share digital resources that allow them to interact with one another in multiple ways. These practices are pervasive and evolve rapidly, especially in emergency situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This article introduces six sub-dimensions of e-participation, within the existing United Nations E-participation Index framework, that seek to capture the different levels of digital interactions between people and e-governments against the backdrop of the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. These sub-dimensions are based upon an array of sources, including academic literature, expert group meetings held by UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and cases reported by countries in the UN E-Government Surveys. This approach aims to deepen the understanding of how governments adapt to enhance people's ability and capacity to participate in digital governance, which is after all a fundamental aspect to building better, more effective and accountable institutions and constructing sustainable and inclusive societies-leaving no one behind.Peer reviewe

Data Theatre as an Entry Point to Data Literacy

Data literacy is a growing area of focus across multiple disciplines in higher education. The dominant forms of introduction focus on computational toolchains and statistical ways of knowing. As data driven decision-making becomes more central to democratic processes, a larger group of learners must be engaged in order to ensure they have a seat at the table in civic settings. This requires a rethinking to support many paths into data literacy. In this paper we introduce "data theatre," a set of activities designed for data novices that may have limited experience or comfort with spreadsheets, math, and other quantitative operations. Through iterative co-design over three workshops, we tested and produced two activity guides for educators, building on long-standing practices in participatory theatre that center social justice and liberation. Our initial findings provide very early evidence that this approach can help these learners overcome hesitations to working with information, begin building a critical perspective when viewing data, and create emotionally impactful data stories told through theatrical performance. This prototype work suggests to us that the concept of "Data theatre" warrants further study to build a more robust understanding of its affordances and limitations.Peer reviewe

The Design of Pseudo-Participation

Participation is key to building an equitable, realistic and democratic future. Yet a lack of agency in decision making and agenda-setting is a growing phenomenon in the design of digital public services. We call this pseudo-participation by and in design. The configuration of digital artifacts and/or processes can provide an illusion of participation but lack supportive processes and affordances to allow meaningful participation to happen. This exploratory paper examines the realm of pseudo-participation in the design of public digital services through two concepts: 1) pseudo-participation by design, digital interfaces, and tools that provide the illusion of participation to the people, 2) pseudo-participation in design, processes in which those affected by the design decisions are marginalized and not given any agency. We contribute to the re-imagination of participatory design in modern societies where the role of politics has become ubiquitous and is yet to be critically scrutinized by designers.Peer reviewe

Higher COVID-19 pneumonia risk associated with anti-IFN-α than with anti-IFN-ω auto-Abs in children

We found that 19 (10.4%) of 183 unvaccinated children hospitalized for COVID-19 pneumonia had autoantibodies (auto-Abs) neutralizing type I IFNs (IFN-alpha 2 in 10 patients: IFN-alpha 2 only in three, IFN-alpha 2 plus IFN-omega in five, and IFN-alpha 2, IFN-omega plus IFN-beta in two; IFN-omega only in nine patients). Seven children (3.8%) had Abs neutralizing at least 10 ng/ml of one IFN, whereas the other 12 (6.6%) had Abs neutralizing only 100 pg/ml. The auto-Abs neutralized both unglycosylated and glycosylated IFNs. We also detected auto-Abs neutralizing 100 pg/ml IFN-alpha 2 in 4 of 2,267 uninfected children (0.2%) and auto-Abs neutralizing IFN-omega in 45 children (2%). The odds ratios (ORs) for life-threatening COVID-19 pneumonia were, therefore, higher for auto-Abs neutralizing IFN-alpha 2 only (OR [95% CI] = 67.6 [5.7-9,196.6]) than for auto-Abs neutralizing IFN-. only (OR [95% CI] = 2.6 [1.2-5.3]). ORs were also higher for auto-Abs neutralizing high concentrations (OR [95% CI] = 12.9 [4.6-35.9]) than for those neutralizing low concentrations (OR [95% CI] = 5.5 [3.1-9.6]) of IFN-omega and/or IFN-alpha 2

Software engineering in civic tech a case study about code for Ireland

Civic grassroots have proven their ability to create useful and scalable software that addresses pressing social needs. Although software engineering plays a fundamental role in the process of creating civic technology, academic literature that analyses the software development processes of civic tech grassroots is scarce. This paper aims to advance the understanding of how civic grassroots tackle the different activities in their software development processes. In this study, we followed the formation of two projects in a civic tech group (Code for Ireland) seeking to understand how their development processes evolved over time, and how the group carried out their work in creating new technology. Our preliminary findings show that such groups are capable of setting up systematic software engineering processes that address software specification, development, validation, and evolution. While they were able to deliver software according to self-specified quality standards, the group has challenges in requirements specification, stakeholder engagement, and reorienting from development to product delivery. Software engineering methods and tools can effectively support the future of civic technologies and potentially improve their management, quality, and durability

Taxonomy of Data Quality Metrics in Digital Citizen Science

Funding Information: Acknowledgements Authors thank European Regional Development Funds and Regional Council of South Karelia for funding MINT project supporting experience collection and also AWARE and CroBoDITT CBC projects funded by the European Union, supporting manuscript finalization. Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.Data quality is key in the success of a citizen science project. Valid datasets serve as evidence for scientific research. Numerous projects have highlighted the ways in which participatory data collection can cause data quality issues due to human day-to-day practices and biases. Also, these projects have used and reported a myriad of techniques to improve data quality in different contexts. Yet, there is a lack of systematic analyses of these experiences to guide the design and of digital citizen science projects. We mapped 35 data quality issues of 16 digital citizen science projects and proposed a taxonomy with 64 mechanisms to address data quality issues before, during and after the data collection in digital citizen science projects. This taxonomy is built upon the analysis of literature reports (N = 144), two urban experiments (participants = 280), and expert interviews (N = 11). Thus, we contribute to advance the development of systematic methods to improve the data quality in digital citizen science projects.Peer reviewe

Local renin angiotensin system and sperm DNA fragmentation.

[EN] The renin angiotensin system (RAS) appears to influence male fertility at multiple levels. In this work, we analyzed the relationship between the RAS and DNA integrity. Fifty male volunteers were divided into two groups (25 each): control (DNA fragmentation ≤20%) and pathological (DNA fragmentation >20%) cases. Activities of five peptidases controlling RAS were measured fluorometrically: prolyl endopeptidase (which converts angiotensin [A] I and A II to A 1-7), neutral endopeptidase (NEP/CD10: A I to A 1-7), aminopeptidase N (APN/CD13: A III to A IV), aminopeptidase A (A II to A III) and aminopeptidase B (A III to A IV). Angiotensin-converting enzyme (A I to A II), APN/CD13 and NEP/CD10 were also assessed by semiquantitative cytometry and quantitative flow cytometry assays, as were the receptors of all RAS components: A II receptor type 1 (AT1R), A II receptor type 2 (AT2R), A IV receptor (AT4R or insulin-regulated aminopeptidase [IRAP]), (pro)renin receptor (PRR) and A 1-7 receptor or Mas receptor (MasR) None of the enzymes that regulate levels of RAS components, except for APN/CD13 (decrease in fragmented cells), showed significant differences between both groups. Micrographs of RAS receptors revealed no significant differences in immunolabeling patterns between normozoospermic and fragmented cells. Labeling of AT1R (94.3% normozoospermic vs 84.1% fragmented), AT4R (96.2% vs 95.3%) and MasR (97.4% vs 87.2%) was similar between the groups. AT2R (87.4% normozoospermic vs 63.1% fragmented) and PRR (96.4% vs 48.2%) were higher in non-fragmented spermatozoa. These findings suggest that fragmented DNA spermatozoa have a lower capacity to respond to bioactive RAS peptides.This work was supported by grants from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU GIU 17/19) and the Gangoiti Barrera Foundation (Basque Country)