Author: Stefaan Verhulst

Towards Timely Public Health Decisions to Tackle Seasonal Diseases With Open Government Data

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Paper by Vandana Srivastava and Biplav Srivastava for the Workshops at the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence : “Improving public health is a major responsibility of any government, and is of major interest to citizens and scientific communities around the world. Here, one sees two extremes. On one hand, tremendous progress has been made in recent years in the understanding of causes, spread and remedies of common and regularly occurring diseases like Dengue, Malaria and Japanese Encephalistis (JE). On the other hand, public agencies treat these diseases in an ad hoc manner without learning from the experiences of previous years. Specifically, they would get alerted once reported cases have already arisen substantially in the known disease season, reactively initiate a few actions and then document the disease impact (cases, deaths) for that period, only to forget this learning in the next season. However, they miss the opportunity to reduce preventable deaths and sickness, and their corresponding economic impact, which scientific progress could have enabled. The gap is universal but very prominent in developing countries like India.
In this paper, we show that if public agencies provide historical disease impact information openly, it can be analyzed with statistical and machine learning techniques, correlated with best emerging practices in disease control, and simulated in a setting to optimize social benefits to provide timely guidance for new disease seasons and regions. We illustrate using open data for mosquito-borne communicable diseases; published results in public health on efficacy of Dengue control methods and apply it on a simulated typical city for maximal benefits with available resources. The exercise helps us further suggest strategies for new regions that may be anywhere in the world, how data could be better recorded by city agencies and what prevention methods should medical community focus on for wider impact.
Full Text: PDF“

The Innovators

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Kirkus Review of “The innovators. How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution” by Walter Isaacson: “Innovation occurs when ripe seeds fall on fertile ground,” Aspen Institute CEO Isaacson (Steve Jobs, 2011, etc.) writes in this sweeping, thrilling tale of three radical innovations that gave rise to the digital age. First was the evolution of the computer, which Isaacson traces from its 19th-century beginnings in Ada Lovelace’s “poetical” mathematics and Charles Babbage’s dream of an “Analytical Engine” to the creation of silicon chips with circuits printed on them. The second was “the invention of a corporate culture and management style that was the antithesis of the hierarchical organization of East Coast companies.” In the rarefied neighborhood dubbed Silicon Valley, new businesses aimed for a cooperative, nonauthoritarian model that nurtured cross-fertilization of ideas. The third innovation was the creation of demand for personal devices: the pocket radio; the calculator, marketing brainchild of Texas Instruments; video games; and finally, the holy grail of inventions: the personal computer. Throughout his action-packed story, Isaacson reiterates one theme: Innovation results from both “creative inventors” and “an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together.” Who invented the microchip? Or the Internet? Mostly, Isaacson writes, these emerged from “a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas….Innovation is not a loner’s endeavor.” Isaacson offers vivid portraits—many based on firsthand interviews—of mathematicians, scientists, technicians and hackers (a term that used to mean anyone who fooled around with computers), including the elegant, “intellectually intimidating,” Hungarian-born John von Neumann; impatient, egotistical William Shockley; Grace Hopper, who joined the Army to pursue a career in mathematics; “laconic yet oddly charming” J.C.R. Licklider, one father of the Internet; Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and scores of others.
Isaacson weaves prodigious research and deftly crafted anecdotes into a vigorous, gripping narrative about the visionaries whose imaginations and zeal continue to transform our lives.”

A Different Idea of Our Declaration

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Gordon S. Wood reviews Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen in the New York Review of Books: “If we read the Declaration of Independence slowly and carefully, Danielle Allen believes, then the document can become a basic primer for our democracy. It can be something that all of us—not just scholars and educated elites but common ordinary people—can participate in, and should participate in if we want to be good democratic citizens.
Allen, who is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, came to this extraordinary conclusion when she was teaching for a decade at the University of Chicago. But it was not the young bright-eyed undergraduates whom she taught by day who inspired her. Instead, it was the much older, life-tested adults whom she taught by night who created “the single most transformative experience” of her teaching career.
As she slowly worked her way through the 1,337 words of the Declaration of Independence with her night students, many of whom had no job or were working two jobs or were stuck in dead-end part-time jobs, Allen discovered that the document had meaning for them and that it was accessible to any reader or hearer of its words. By teaching the document to these adult students in the way that she did, she experienced “a personal metamorphosis.” For the first time in her life she came to realize that the Declaration makes a coherent philosophical argument about equality, an argument that could be made comprehensible to ordinary people who had no special training…”

UK: Open standards for sharing and viewing government documents announced

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Digital by Default news: “The open standards selected for sharing and viewing government documents have been announced by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude.
The standards set out the document file formats that are expected to be used across all government bodies. Government will begin using open formats that will ensure that citizens and people working in government can use the applications that best meet their needs when they are viewing or working on documents together.
When departments have adopted these open standards:

  • citizens, businesses and voluntary organisations will no longer need specialist software to open or work with government documents
  • people working in government will be able to share and work with documents in the same format, reducing problems when they move between formats
  • government organisations will be able to choose the most suitable and cost effective applications, knowing their documents will work for people inside and outside of government

The selected standards, which are compatible with commonly used document applications, are:

  • PDF/A or HTML for viewing government documents
  • Open Document Format (ODF) for sharing or collaborating on government documents

The move supports the government’s policy to create a level playing field for suppliers of all sizes, with its digital by default agenda on track to make cumulative savings of £1.2 billion in this Parliament for citizens, businesses and taxpayers….”

Sharing Data Is a Form of Corporate Philanthropy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Stempeck in HBR Blog:  “Ever since the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters was signed in 1999, satellite companies like DMC International Imaging have had a clear protocol with which to provide valuable imagery to public actors in times of crisis. In a single week this February, DMCii tasked its fleet of satellites on flooding in the United Kingdom, fires in India, floods in Zimbabwe, and snow in South Korea. Official crisis response departments and relevant UN departments can request on-demand access to the visuals captured by these “eyes in the sky” to better assess damage and coordinate relief efforts.

DMCii is a private company, yet it provides enormous value to the public and social sectors simply by periodically sharing its data.
Back on Earth, companies create, collect, and mine data in their day-to-day business. This data has quickly emerged as one of this century’s most vital assets. Public sector and social good organizations may not have access to the same amount, quality, or frequency of data. This imbalance has inspired a new category of corporate giving foreshadowed by the 1999 Space Charter: data philanthropy.
The satellite imagery example is an area of obvious societal value, but data philanthropy holds even stronger potential closer to home, where a wide range of private companies could give back in meaningful ways by contributing data to public actors. Consider two promising contexts for data philanthropy: responsive cities and academic research.
The centralized institutions of the 20th century allowed for the most sophisticated economic and urban planning to date. But in recent decades, the information revolution has helped the private sector speed ahead in data aggregation, analysis, and applications. It’s well known that there’s enormous value in real-time usage of data in the private sector, but there are similarly huge gains to be won in the application of real-time data to mitigate common challenges.
What if sharing economy companies shared their real-time housing, transit, and economic data with city governments or public interest groups? For example, Uber maintains a “God’s Eye view” of every driver on the road in a city:
stempeck2
Imagine combining this single data feed with an entire portfolio of real-time information. An early leader in this space is the City of Chicago’s urban data dashboard, WindyGrid. The dashboard aggregates an ever-growing variety of public datasets to allow for more intelligent urban management.
stempeck3
Over time, we could design responsive cities that react to this data. A responsive city is one where services, infrastructure, and even policies can flexibly respond to the rhythms of its denizens in real-time. Private sector data contributions could greatly accelerate these nascent efforts.
Data philanthropy could similarly benefit academia. Access to data remains an unfortunate barrier to entry for many researchers. The result is that only researchers with access to certain data, such as full-volume social media streams, can analyze and produce knowledge from this compelling information. Twitter, for example, sells access to a range of real-time APIs to marketing platforms, but the price point often exceeds researchers’ budgets. To accelerate the pursuit of knowledge, Twitter has piloted a program called Data Grants offering access to segments of their real-time global trove to select groups of researchers. With this program, academics and other researchers can apply to receive access to relevant bulk data downloads, such as an period of time before and after an election, or a certain geographic area.
Humanitarian response, urban planning, and academia are just three sectors within which private data can be donated to improve the public condition. There are many more possible applications possible, but few examples to date. For companies looking to expand their corporate social responsibility initiatives, sharing data should be part of the conversation…
Companies considering data philanthropy can take the following steps:

  • Inventory the information your company produces, collects, and analyzes. Consider which data would be easy to share and which data will require long-term effort.
  • Think who could benefit from this information. Who in your community doesn’t have access to this information?
  • Who could be harmed by the release of this data? If the datasets are about people, have they consented to its release? (i.e. don’t pull a Facebook emotional manipulation experiment).
  • Begin conversations with relevant public agencies and nonprofit partners to get a sense of the sort of information they might find valuable and their capacity to work with the formats you might eventually make available.
  • If you expect an onslaught of interest, an application process can help qualify partnership opportunities to maximize positive impact relative to time invested in the program.
  • Consider how you’ll handle distribution of the data to partners. Even if you don’t have the resources to set up an API, regular releases of bulk data could still provide enormous value to organizations used to relying on less-frequently updated government indices.
  • Consider your needs regarding privacy and anonymization. Strip the data of anything remotely resembling personally identifiable information (here are some guidelines).
  • If you’re making data available to researchers, plan to allow researchers to publish their results without obstruction. You might also require them to share the findings with the world under Open Access terms….”

How Three Startups Are Using Data to Renew Public Trust In Government

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Mark Hall: “Chances are that when you think about the word government, it is with a negative connotation.Your less-than-stellar opinion of government may be caused by everything from Washington’s dirty politics to the long lines at your local DMV.Regardless of the reason, local, state and national politics have frequently garnered a bad reputation. People feel like governments aren’t working for them.We have limited information, visibility and insight into what’s going on and why. Yes, the data is public information but it’s difficult to access and sift through.
Good news. Things are changing fast.
Innovative startups are emerging and they are changing the way we access government information at all levels.
Here are three tech startups that are taking a unique approach to opening up government data:
1. OpenGov is a Mountain View-based software company that enables government officials and local residents to easily parse through the city’s financial data.
Founded by a team with extensive technology and finance experience, this startup has already racked up some of the largest cities to join the movement, including the City of Los Angeles.OpenGov’s approach pairs data with good design in a manner that makes it easy to use.Historically, information like expenditures of public funds existed in a silo within the mayor’s office or city manager, diminishing  the accountability of public employees.Imagine you are a citizen who is interested in seeing how much your city spent on a particular matter?
Now you can find out within just a few clicks.
This data is always of great importance but could also become increasingly critical during events like local elections.This level of openness and accessibility to data will be game-changing.
2. FiscalNote is a one-year old startup that uses analytical signals and intelligent government data to map legislation and predict an outcome.
Headquartered in Washington D.C., the company has developed a search layer and unique algorithm that makes tracking legislative data extremely easy. If you are an organization that has vested interests in specific legislative bills, tools by FiscalNote can give you insights into its progress and likelihood of being passed or held up. Want to know if your local representative favors a bill that could hurt your industry? Find out early and take the steps necessary to minimize the impact. Large corporations and special interest groups have traditionally held lobbying power with elected officials. This technology is important because small businesses, nonprofits and organizations now have an additional tool to see a changing legislative landscape in ways that were previously unimaginable.
3. Civic Industries is a San Francisco startup that allows citizens and local government officials to easily access data that previously required you to drive down to city hall. Building permits, code enforcements, upcoming government projects and construction data is now openly available within a few clicks.
Civic Insight maps various projects in your community and enables you to see all the projects with the corresponding start and completion dates, along with department contacts.
Accountability of public planning is no longer concealed to the city workers in the back-office. Responsibility is made clear. The startup also pushes underutilized city resources like empty storefronts and abandoned buildings to the forefront in an effort to drive action, either by residents or government officials.
So What’s Next?
While these three startups using data to push government transparency in the right direction, more work is needed…”

'Big Data' Will Change How You Play, See the Doctor, Even Eat

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We’re entering an age of personal big data, and its impact on our lives will surpass that of the Internet. Data will answer questions we could never before answer with certainty—everyday questions like whether that dress actually makes you look fat, or profound questions about precisely how long you will live.

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Every 20 years or so, a powerful technology moves from the realm of backroom expertise and into the hands of the masses. In the late-1970s, computing made that transition—from mainframes in glass-enclosed rooms to personal computers on desks. In the late 1990s, the first web browsers made networks, which had been for science labs and the military, accessible to any of us, giving birth to the modern Internet.

Each transition touched off an explosion of innovation and reshaped work and leisure. In 1975, 50,000 PCs were in use worldwide. Twenty years later: 225 million. The number of Internet users in 1995 hit 16 million. Today it’s more than 3 billion. In much of the world, it’s hard to imagine life without constant access to both computing and networks.

The 2010s will be the coming-out party for data. Gathering, accessing and gleaning insights from vast and deep data has been a capability locked inside enterprises long enough. Cloud computing and mobile devices now make it possible to stand in a bathroom line at a baseball game while tapping into massive computing power and databases. On the other end, connected devices such as the Nest thermostat or Fitbit health monitor and apps on smartphones increasingly collect new kinds of information about everyday personal actions and habits, turning it into data about ourselves.

More than 80 percent of data today is unstructured: tangles of YouTube videos, news stories, academic papers, social network comments. Unstructured data has been almost impossible to search for, analyze and mix with other data. A new generation of computers—cognitive computing systems that learn from data—will read tweets or e-books or watch video, and comprehend its content. Somewhat like brains, these systems can link diverse bits of data to come up with real answers, not just search results.

Such systems can work in natural language. The progenitor is the IBM Watson computer that won on Jeopardy in 2011. Next-generation Watsons will work like a super-powered Google. (Google today is a data-searching wimp compared with what’s coming.)

Sports offers a glimpse into the data age. Last season the NBA installed in every arena technology that can “watch” a game and record, in 48 minutes of action, more than 4 million data points about every movement and shot. That alone could yield new insights for NBA coaches, such as which group of five players most efficiently passes the ball around….

Think again about life before personal computing and the Internet. Even if someone told you that you’d eventually carry a computer in your pocket that was always connected to global networks, you would’ve had a hard time imagining what that meant—imagining WhatsApp, Siri, Pandora, Uber, Evernote, Tinder.

As data about everything becomes ubiquitous and democratized, layered on top of computing and networks, it will touch off the most spectacular technology explosion yet. We can see the early stages now. “Big data” doesn’t even begin to describe the enormity of what’s coming next.”

How Thousands Of Dutch Civil Servants Built A Virtual 'Government Square' For Online Collaboration

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Federico Guerrini at Forbes: “Democracy needs a reboot, or as the founders of Democracy Os, an open source platform for political debate say, “a serious upgrade”. They are not alone in trying to change the way citizens and governments communicate with each other. Not long ago, I covered on this blog a Greek platform, VouliWatch, which aims at boosting civic engagement following the model of other similar initiatives in countries like Germany, France and Austria, all running thanks to a software called Parliament Watch.
Other decision making tools, used by activists and organizations that try to reduce the distance between the people and their representatives include Liquid Feedback, and Airesis. But the quest for disintermediation doesn’t regard only the relationship between governments and citizens: it’s changing the way public organisations work internally as well. Civil servants are starting to develop and use their internal “social networks”, to exchange ideas, discussing issues and collaborate on projects.
One such thing is happening in the Netherlands: thousands of civil servants belonging to all government organizations have built their own “intranet” using Pleio (“government square”, in Dutch) a platform that runs on the open source networking engine Elgg.
It all started in 2010, thanks to the work of a group of four founders, Davied van Berlo, Harrie Custers, Wim Essers and Marcel Ziemerink. Growth has been steady and now Pleio can count on some 75.000 users spread in about 800 subsites. The nice thing about the platform, in fact, is that it is modular: subscribers can collaborate on a group and then start a sub group to get in more depth with a smaller team. To learn a little more about this unique experience, I reached out for van Berlo, who kindly answered a few questions. Check the interview below.
pleio
Where did the Pleio idea come from?Were you inspired by other experiences?
The idea came mainly from the developments around us: the whole web 2.0 movement at the time. This has shown us the power of platforms to connect people, bring them together and let them cooperate. I noticed that civil servants were looking for ways of collaborating across organisational borders and many were using the new online tools. That’s why I started the Civil Servant 2.0 network, so they could exchange ideas and experiences in this new way of working.
However, these tools are not always the ideal solution. They’re commercial for one, which can get in the way of the public goals we work for. They’re often American, where other laws and practices apply. You can’t change them or add to them. Usually you have to get another tool (and login) for different functionalities. And they were outright forbidden by some government agencies. I noticed there was a need for a platform where different tools were integrated, where people from different organisations and outside government could work together and where all information would remain in the Netherlands and in the hands of the original owner. Since there was no such platform we started one of our own….”

Chief Executive of Nesta on the Future of Government Innovation

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Interview between Rahim Kanani and Geoff Mulgan, CEO of NESTA and member of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance: “Our aspiration is to become a global center of expertise on all kinds of innovation, from how to back creative business start-ups and how to shape innovations tools such as challenge prizes, to helping governments act as catalysts for new solutions,” explained Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation. In an interview with Mulgan, we discussed their new report, published in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, which highlights 20 of the world’s top innovation teams in government. Mulgan and I also discussed the founding and evolution of Nesta over the past few years, and leadership lessons from his time inside and outside government.
Rahim Kanani: When we talk about ‘innovations in government’, isn’t that an oxymoron?
Geoff Mulgan: Governments have always innovated. The Internet and World Wide Web both originated in public organizations, and governments are constantly developing new ideas, from public health systems to carbon trading schemes, online tax filing to high speed rail networks.  But they’re much less systematic at innovation than the best in business and science.  There are very few job roles, especially at senior levels, few budgets, and few teams or units.  So although there are plenty of creative individuals in the public sector, they succeed despite, not because of the systems around them. Risk-taking is punished not rewarded.   Over the last century, by contrast, the best businesses have learned how to run R&D departments, product development teams, open innovation processes and reasonably sophisticated ways of tracking investments and returns.
Kanani: This new report, published in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, highlights 20 of the world’s most effective innovation teams in government working to address a range of issues, from reducing murder rates to promoting economic growth. Before I get to the results, how did this project come about, and why is it so important?
Mulgan: If you fail to generate new ideas, test them and scale the ones that work, it’s inevitable that productivity will stagnate and governments will fail to keep up with public expectations, particularly when waves of new technology—from smart phones and the cloud to big data—are opening up dramatic new possibilities.  Mayor Bloomberg has been a leading advocate for innovation in the public sector, and in New York he showed the virtues of energetic experiment, combined with rigorous measurement of results.  In the UK, organizations like Nesta have approached innovation in a very similar way, so it seemed timely to collaborate on a study of the state of the field, particularly since we were regularly being approached by governments wanting to set up new teams and asking for guidance.
Kanani: Where are some of the most effective innovation teams working on these issues, and how did you find them?
Mulgan: In our own work at Nesta, we’ve regularly sought out the best innovation teams that we could learn from and this study made it possible to do that more systematically, focusing in particular on the teams within national and city governments.  They vary greatly, but all the best ones are achieving impact with relatively slim resources.  Some are based in central governments, like Mindlab in Denmark, which has pioneered the use of design methods to reshape government services, from small business licensing to welfare.  SITRA in Finland has been going for decades as a public technology agency, and more recently has switched its attention to innovation in public services. For example, providing mobile tools to help patients manage their own healthcare.   In the city of Seoul, the Mayor set up an innovation team to accelerate the adoption of ‘sharing’ tools, so that people could share things like cars, freeing money for other things.  In south Australia the government set up an innovation agency that has been pioneering radical ways of helping troubled families, mobilizing families to help other families.
Kanani: What surprised you the most about the outcomes of this research?
Mulgan: Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the speed with which this idea is spreading.  Since we started the research, we’ve come across new teams being created in dozens of countries, from Canada and New Zealand to Cambodia and Chile.  China has set up a mobile technology lab for city governments.  Mexico City and many others have set up labs focused on creative uses of open data.  A batch of cities across the US supported by Bloomberg Philanthropy—from Memphis and New Orleans to Boston and Philadelphia—are now showing impressive results and persuading others to copy them.
 

Open Data for economic growth: the latest evidence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Stott at the Worldbank OpenData Blog: “One of the key policy drivers for Open Data has been to drive economic growth and business innovation. There’s a growing amount of evidence and analysis not only for the total potential economic benefit but also for some of the ways in which this is coming about. This evidence is summarised and reviewed in a new World Bank paper published today.
There’s a range of studies that suggest that the potential prize from Open Data could be enormous – including an estimate of $3-5 trillion a year globally from McKinsey Global Institute and an estimate of $13 trillion cumulative over the next 5 years in the G20 countries.  There are supporting studies of the value of Open Data to certain sectors in certain countries – for instance $20 billion a year to Agriculture in the US – and of the value of key datasets such as geospatial data.  All these support the conclusion that the economic potential is at least significant – although with a range from “significant” to “extremely significant”!
At least some of this benefit is already being realised by new companies that have sprung up to deliver new, innovative, data-rich services and by older companies improving their efficiency by using open data to optimise their operations. Five main business archetypes have been identified – suppliers, aggregators, enrichers, application developers and enablers. What’s more there are at least four companies which did not exist ten years ago, which are driven by Open Data, and which are each now valued at around $1 billion or more. Somewhat surprisingly the drive to exploit Open Data is coming from outside the traditional “ICT sector” – although the ICT sector is supplying many of the tools required.
It’s also becoming clear that if countries want to maximise their gain from Open Data the role of government needs to go beyond simply publishing some data on a website. Governments need to be:

  • Suppliers – of the data that business need
  • Leaders – making sure that municipalities, state owned enterprises and public services operated by the private sector also release important data
  • Catalysts – nurturing a thriving ecosystem of data users, coders and application developers and incubating new, data-driven businesses
  • Users – using Open Data themselves to overcome the barriers to using data within government and innovating new ways to use the data they collect to improve public services and government efficiency.

Nevertheless, most of the evidence for big economic benefits for Open Data comes from the developed world. So on Wednesday the World Bank is holding an open seminar to examine critically “Can Open Data Boost Economic Growth and Prosperity” in developing countries. Please join us and join the debate!
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