Helsinki Challenge 2014

DESCRIBE YOUR IDEA

←--#: . Hieno hakemus! Hankala aihe mutta varsin konkreettinen ja innostava teksti tästä tuli. --Jouni Tuomisto (keskustelu) 16. lokakuuta 2014 kello 19.54 (UTC) (type: truth; paradigms: science: defence)

----#: . Toistaiseksi vain pientä teknistä viilausta, mutta yritän heittää jotain noihin loppupään avoimiin kohtiin, erityisesti Collaboration. --Jouni Tuomisto (keskustelu) 16. lokakuuta 2014 kello 19.54 (UTC) (type: truth; paradigms: science: comment)

NAME OF THE COMPETITION ENTRY

Coherent Climate Action: Case Helsinki

(Other ideas:)

• From dead documents to optimized deliberation
• From dead documents to live action plans
• From strategic plans and other dead documents to interactive implementation
• From partial to global optimization in organizational strategic planning
• Dead Documents meet Semantic Poets and Open Society
• Helsinki Climate Change Strategy in Practice
• From Strategy to Practical Climate Measures: Case Helsinki
• From Strategy to Practical Climate Action

WHAT IS THE CHALLENGE YOU ARE TAKING ON IN THE FORM OF A QUESTION

(max 150-200 characters)

Consistency-guaranteed construction, communication and evidence based optimization of organizational strategies through open collaborative process: Case Helsinki City Climate Change Strategy.

BACKGROUND OF YOUR CHALLENGE?

Describe its significance and scientific background. Include specific data points as appropriate. (max 1500 characters)

Decision makers’ eternal dilemma is to get better tools rendering the big strategic picture clearer. For instance, existence of raw information is often not a problem when constructing and implementing a strategy for an organization. It is Coherent Information (CI) which is not abundant. CI is information in a form, from which obvious inconsistencies have been purged and which can be queried against different hypotheses. In addition to the information being incoherent, it is usually published in formats that make its re-use awkward.

To ensure a smooth implementation of the strategic objectives, the strategy also needs to be communicated to the members of the organization. This task would benefit greatly if there was a common ‘language’ and a way for all players to understand their role in what the organization is trying to do.

In this project, we try to solve the above mentioned challenges and apply the general methods to the implementation of the City of Helsinki’s climate change strategy. Our scientific toolbox draws from Knowledge Practices (knowledge representation, aggregation, social networks and collaboration), Operations Research (normative decision making, risk-benefit analysis, strategic maps), Computer Science (ontology, semantic enrichment, inference) and Process Engineering & Applied Math (derivation of requirements, large scale resource optimization). In general, we apply the principles of Open Science to our own work flow and the documentation of the solutions.

YOUR SOLUTION IN ONE SENTENCE

(max 150-200 characters)

We present a general method and tools for deriving and communicating a coherent action plan whose implementation is energy efficient and enables deliberation and comparison of various options.

DESCRIBE YOUR SOLUTION IDEA AND HOW IT ACTUALLY WORKS?

(max 1500 characters)

We construct a robust method and tools for large organizations to derive and optimize consistent action plans from possibly incoherent collection of inputs, e.g. strategy plans deviced by different departments at different times. The construction process identifies internally conflicting objectives and ‘hard’ boundary conditions (budget cap, maximum CO2 footprint etc.). The outcome will be a consistent action plan that can be easily communicated to all parties implementing the plan. Moreover, the same tool can be utilized in optimizing resource allocation (money, working time, emission quota etc.) and producing strategies from scratch in deliberative manner.

First, all the inputs will be collected and transformed into machine readable form. Next, the material will be semantically enriched utilizing crowdsourcing, i.e. a group of people will go through the material and identify and link actionable text passages. For example, a reader can tell the computer that a document contains proposition N on page X which contradicts proposition M on page Y. We will demonstrate that no excessive supervision or domain specific knowledge is required in the enrichment process making it scalable as a work form. Owing to the semantic information added (by human computing) it becomes possible (by machine computing) to obtain answers to interesting questions, e.g. has a certain high level objective sufficient resources or which documents contain the most contradictory objectives.

EXPLAIN SPECIFICALLY WHAT ELEMENTS ARE NEW AND INNOVATIVE ABOUT YOUR IDEA?

(max 1500 characters)

First, documents such as reports, strategy papers etc. are usually considered to be the end result of some process (research project, strategy construction). They are typically published in non-machine readable format which makes their re-use, later corrections, combination etc. very difficult. In contrast, we treat these information sources as a starting point and transform them into a re-usable form allowing the formation of the big picture (in this case for strategic situation) which combines information from various sources.

As for social innovations and development of digitally enabled work forms, we demonstrate that the process by which the transformation and semantic enrichment is done, is suitable for crowdsourcing and can be sufficiently easily done on existing virtual platforms. As the world is full of ‘old-fashioned’ documentation produced in the manner described above, there is plenty of need for human cognitive capacities which are not likely to be surpassed by AI in the near future. In fact, both can co-exist in this work scheme.

Finally, we will demonstrate that multi-million dollar investments in the computing infrastructure or expensive training programs for production of more experts are NOT necessary, but substantial cost-savings by high-quality plans and improved understanding of the big picture can be achieved very cost-effectively using existing infrastructure and new work methods. The results are generally applicable.

TEAM

WHY IS YOUR TEAM EXCELLENT TO SOLVE YOUR CHALLENGE?

Describe team strengths and uniqueness (max 1000 characters)

Several of the team members have a long history in crowdsourced participatory projects. The team members also have good connections and working knowledge of semantic methods. Collectively the team possesses dozens of years of research experience in methods and fields such as cost-benefit analysis, collaborative virtual work spaces, statistical and optimization methods, environmental sciences and knowledge practices.

The team includes members of the City of Helsinki, who are familiar with documentation and the operations of the city. Therefore, access to relevant data and materials to be utilized in assessing the priorities of the action items is guaranteed. Moreover, the team has already practiced many of the necessary steps in two smaller projects related to the crowd-sourced production of the roadmap for future (Ministry of Traffic and Communications) as well as the semantic enrichment project of the governmental strategic documents (Prime Minister’s Office).

ENVISION THE IMPACT

OBJECTIVES OF YOUR PROJECT?

(max 1000 characters)

Specifically,

• give the City of Helsinki a tool that enables the finding the of most cost-effective and coherent measures in climate change battle.

Generally,

• demonstrate new work forms via which various academic disciplines can come together and collaborate to make a greater impact on decision making
• Improve the visibility of existing virtual collaborative platforms and their usage in decision making
• create new communication culture in government agencies/firms in relation to strategic planning. Using the tools to be developed in this project, the implementation of strategic actions can be planned from the coarsest down to the most fine-grained level: Individuals will know better how their work tasks are related to the higher level objectives in the organization. On the other hand, the management will get a better understanding of the big picture and can communicate with the other hierarchy level operators in building different alternatives e.g. for resource allocation

VISION OF THE IMPACT?

What is the impact in the long run? (max 1000 characters)

The culture of open participatory world view is currently advancing fast. Better policies and strategic steering becomes possible when we learn to produce information in re-usable form and learn to see beyond our immediate neighborhood’s local optima. We expect that in the mechanical sense, our methodology is more easily to adopt. As the culture changes only in longer term, the long term impacts will have to do more with the change in the way people and organizations start seeing themselves and their actions and action plans as part of the bigger whole. Global optimization in resource planning and impact analysis are necessities if the human race is going to keep planet Earth habitable and cities can act as powerful units in this attempt, being not too big or too small to have impact on GHG emissions, for example. On shorter time scale it is expected that the participatory planning concepts and methods will gain many more users than currently.

HOW DOES YOUR CONCEPT PROMOTE WELL BEING?

(max 1000 characters)

Our solution promotes well being directly and has a potential of doing so indirectly. The direct impacts result from the improved working atmosphere in organizations that are willing to change their communication and planning cultures to more open and participatory mode. This increases the ownership of the participants in the decision making and therefore also fault tolerance. Also, cognitively, it is to be expected that when individuals have a better understanding of their meaning and role in relation to the rest of the organization, the feel more empowered.

Secondly, diminishing green house gas emissions through a cost-effective action plan is in everybody’s physical health interests. The indirect benefits have a potential of emerging through the savings resulting from the more effective use of tax payers' money with the aid of a coherent climate action plan that contains as few internal conflicts as possible.

COLLABORATION AND PLAN

DESCRIBE COLLABORATION

Local and global? With whom? How? Potential partners? (max 1500 characters)

The team itself is multidisciplinary as described above. Senior researcher, docent, M.D. Jouni Tuomisto is an expert in decision analysis and open assessment, and he has developed open web-workspaces for decision support. He is an environmental health scientist and also has expertise in health impacts of climate change and climate policies. Ph.D. Mikko Pohjola is a visiting researcher in THL and the key developer of open assessment and open policy practice.

The team will also have close contacts to experts in fields that are necessary for evaluating climate strategies. Adjunct Lecturer Gregory Norris from Harvard University is an expert in life cycle assessment, which is a key method when climate impacts of city-level actions are estimated. Indeed, life cycle assessment is used to quantitatively explore the climate actions in different strategy papers of Helsinki. This brings us one step further from semantic enrichment to quantitative enrichment. This is still far away from a full quantitative assessment of all relevant climate, health, cost, and other impacts. In any case, it enables a rational and critical discussion about the planned actions and their relations to climate objectives.

This project has connections to the practical climate policy work in Helsinki. The Helsinki Environment Center onkohan nimi oikein? is currently developing a climate mitigation roadmap, and this work will be used as a testbed for the practices described in this application.

Open Government Partnership (OGP) is an international movement lead in Finland by the Ministry of Finance. This application will produce practices that also promote the objectives of OGP, especially "Government as an enabler" (hallinto mahdollistajana). The project will work closely with OGP to exchange ideas and promote practices within the Government.

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IDENTIFY SUPPORT NEEDS

What kind of sparring, resources, contacts etc. you need in developing the idea and team during the Helsinki Challenge process? (max 1000 characters)

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HOW WOULD YOU USE THE PRIZE MONEY?

Sketch out your implementation plan, timeline and its key phases (max 2000-2500 characters)

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SUMMARY

Summarize your idea, articulate the challenge, the solution and how your idea will create change (max 2500 characters)'

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OTHER

INCLUDE AT LEAST ONE ATTACHMENT

Required attachment is power point presentation where you introduce your idea in short. Kindly find the power point template http://challenge.helsinki.fi/blog/pitch-template

Smxb hoitaa kalvon tekemisen kun materiaali kasssa.