Big Data for Social Innovation (SSIR)

Voici un article publié il y a déjà 6 ans, mais qui garde toute sa pertinence aujourd'hui. Il offre un tour d'horizon des défis et enjeux, mais aussi de l'immense potentiel de l'utilisation des données massives pour le secteur social sans jamais tomber ni une technophobie stérile, ni dans un technosolutionnisme aveuglé. L'article soulève pour terminer l'importance des plateformes d'expérimentation virtuelle et en fait une description qui ne manque pas de faire penser à...Passerelles!

Extraits :

"Nonprofits and other social change organizations are lagging their counterparts in the scientific and business communities in collecting and analyzing the vast amounts of data that are being generated by digital technology. Four steps need to be taken to improve the use of big data for social innovation."

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" Social problems are often what are called “wicked” problems. Not only are they messier than their technical counterparts, they are also more dynamic and complex because of the number of stakeholders involved and the numerous feedback loops among inter-related components. Numerous government agencies and nonprofits are involved in tackling these problems, with limited cooperation and data sharing among them. Most of these organizations have inadequate information technology resources, compared to their counterparts in the hard sciences who work on technical problems or in business who have ready access to financial, product, and customer information.

Beyond the infrastructural impediments that social sector users of big data face, data itself can be a problem. Oftentimes, data are missing and incomplete, or stored in silos or in forms that are inaccessible to automated processing. Then there are policy and regulatory challenges that need to be faced, such as building data-sharing agreements, ensuring privacy and confidentiality of data, and creating collaboration protocols among various stakeholders tackling the same type of problem.

Whereas there is no doubt that nonprofits, government, and other organizations will continue to invest in big data technologies and programs, questions still remain about how beneficial those investments will turn out to be. The value proposition of big data is clear for tackling complex technical and business problems, but the jury is still out on how well big data can tackle complex social problems. "

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There are multiple dimensions to big data, which are encapsulated in the handy set of seven “V”s that follow.

Volume: considers the amount of data generated and collected.

Velocity: refers to the speed at which data are analyzed.

Variety: indicates the diversity of the types of data that are collected.

Viscosity: measures the resistance to flow of data.

Variability: measures the unpredictable rate of flow and types.

Veracity: measures the biases, noise, abnormality, and reliability in datasets.

Volatility: indicates how long data are valid and should be stored.

When considering big data in the context of social problems, we arrive at a humbling conclusion : For the most part there is no big data! When it comes to social problems, data are still highly unstructured and largely limited to numbers, rather than other types of data.

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Barriers to Creating and Using Big Data

There are four principal reasons for the relative lack of structured big data for social problems:

• Data are buried in administrative systems,
• data governance standards are lacking,
• data are often unreliable,
• and data can cause unintended consequences.

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Steps to Increase Use of Big Data

Big data has enormous potential to inform decision-making to help solve the world’s toughest social problems. But for this to happen, issues relating to data collection, organization, and analysis must first be resolved. The following four recommendations have the potential to create datasets useful for evidence-based decision-making.

• Building global data banks on critical issues
• Engaging citizens and citizen science
• Build a cadre of data curators and analysts
• Promoting virtual experimentation platforms

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/big_data_for_social_innovation#