Stefaan Verhulst
Chronicle of Higher Education: “Though higher education is constantly changing, commencement ceremonies have largely stayed the same. A graduating student at Stanford Law School is trying to change that.
Marta F. Belcher is crowdsourcing the speech she will give next month at the law school’s precommencement diploma ceremony, offering her classmates an opportunity to share in crafting that final message.
The point of a student commencement speaker, Ms. Belcher said, is to have someone who can speak to the student experience. But as she learned when she gave the student address at her undergraduate ceremony, it’s not easy for one person to represent hundreds, or even thousands, of classmates.
With all the online collaboration tools that are available today, Ms. Belcher saw the possibility of updating the tradition. So she competed to be the student speaker and invited classmates to contribute to her address.
“That was so clearly the right choice — for Stanford, especially, in the Silicon Valley at the cutting edge of innovation — that we should be the ones to sort of pioneer this new kind of way of writing a graduation speech,” she said.
After holding a number of meetings and fielding questions from skeptics, Ms. Belcher set up a wiki to gather ideas. The months-long effort was divided into three stages. First students would establish themes and ideas; next they would start contributing actual content for the speech; and finally, those pieces would be edited into a cohesive narrative during collaborative “edit-a-thons.”
Since the wiki went up, in February, 85 students have contributed to it….(More)”
“As part of its core mission, the GovLab has been engaged in a series of ongoing efforts to build awareness and gather evidence about the value, use, and impact of open data around the world – including the GovLab’s Open Data 500.
The GovLab is currently scoping a project with Omidyar Network to build a repository of in-depth, global case studies on existing examples of open data demand, use and impact. The goal of the project is to develop a more nuanced understanding of the various processes and factors underlying the value chain of open data.
As a part of our literature review in undertaking this scoping project, and in time for the 3rd International Open Data Conference, we first mapped several repositories of open data cases and examples that may serve as an empirical foundation for further case-studies.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of organizations that have compiled open data case study repositories in a complementary fashion.
LET US KNOW if you are aware of other compilations of open data examples and case studies we should include as to complete the below overview… by emailing Stefaan Verhulst (stefaan at thegovlab.org).
1. Open Data Case Study Repositories
2. Open Data Portal Repositories
3. Open Data Intermediary Repositories“
Sunlight Foundation: “As part of a new initiative, the Sunlight Foundation has begun amassing an inventory of public and privately-produced criminal justice data. The spreadsheet on this page is a work in progress but we’re publishing it now with hopes that people can use it for research or reporting and even contribute to it. Please go through the spreadsheet — so far we have an inventory started with information from 26 states and the federal government. When we’re done, we’ll have an inventory of data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. You can read more about this project, submit your own work and feedback below….(More) “
Book by Giovanni Livraga: “This book presents a comprehensive approach to protecting sensitive information when large data collections are released by their owners. It addresses three key requirements of data privacy: the protection of data explicitly released, the protection of information not explicitly released but potentially vulnerable due to a release of other data, and the enforcement of owner-defined access restrictions to the released data. It is also the first book with a complete examination of how to enforce dynamic read and write access authorizations on released data, applicable to the emerging data outsourcing and cloud computing situations. Private companies, public organizations and final users are releasing, sharing, and disseminating their data to take reciprocal advantage of the great benefits of making their data available to others. This book weighs these benefits against the potential privacy risks. A detailed analysis of recent techniques for privacy protection in data release and case studies illustrate crucial scenarios. Protecting Privacy in Data Release targets researchers, professionals and government employees working in security and privacy. Advanced-level students in computer science and electrical engineering will also find this book useful as a secondary text or reference….(More)”
New book on O’Reilly Media on “The “Six C’s”: Understanding the Health Data Terrain in the Era of Precision Medicine”: “Data-driven technologies are now being adopted, developed, funded, and deployed throughout the health care market at an unprecedented scale. But, as this O’Reilly report reveals, health care innovation contains more hurdles and requires more finesse than many tech startups expect. By paying attention to the lessons from the report’s findings, innovation teams can better anticipate what they’ll face, and plan accordingly.
Simply put, teams looking to apply collective intelligence and “big data” platforms to health and health care problems often don’t appreciate the messy details of using and making sense of data in the heavily regulated hospital IT environment. Download this report today and learn how it helps prepare startups in six areas:
- Complexity: An enormous domain with noisy data not designed for machine consumption
- Computing: Lack of standard, interoperable schema for documenting human health in a digital format
- Context: Lack of critical contextual metadata for interpreting health data
- Culture: Startup difficulties in hospital ecosystems: why innovation can be a two-edged sword
- Contracts: Navigating the IRB, HIPAA, and EULA frameworks
- Commerce: The problem of how digital health startups get paid
This report represents the initial findings of a study funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Subsequent reports will explore the results of three deep-dive projects the team pursued during the study. (More)”
Springwise: “We have seen a number of products — such as HUSH2 — which aim to provide short-term housing for the displaced or homeless in the wake of conflicts or natural disasters. These shelters are undoubtedly vital but they are essentially temporary, so New Story — a non profit based in Haiti — has another solution. New Story is a crowdfunding platform which enables families to raise the USD 6,000 necessary to finance building a new, long-term home.
New Story has partnered with Mission of Hope, which sources families in need and helps them to launch a crowdfunding campaign via the platform. Potential donors can read the family’s story and see a breakdown of expenses — including materials and labor — before choosing to donate. All the money raised goes directly to each project, which is then carried out by local contractors in Haiti. The houses, which are three room block homes, are usually completed within two months, after which families post video updates for their donors….(More)”
Paper by Silvia Suteu: “Mechanisms of constitutional development have recently attracted significant attention, specifically, instances where popular involvement was central to the constitutional change. Examples include attempts by British Columbia, the Netherlands, and Ontario at electoral reform, in addition to the more sweeping reforms sought in Iceland and Ireland. Each of these countries’ attempts exemplifies varied innovative avenues to reform involving participatory and partially citizen-led processes aimed at revitalizing politics. The little legal scholarship on these developments has provided an insufficient analytical account of such novel approaches to constitution-making. This Essay seeks to build upon the current descriptive work on constitutional conventions by focusing on the cases of Iceland and Ireland. The Essay further aims to evaluate whether the means undertaken by each country translates into novelty at a more substantive level, namely, the quality of the process and legitimacy of the end product. The Essay proposes standards of direct democratic engagements that adequately fit these new developments and further identifies lessons for participatory constitution-making processes in the digital twenty-first century….(More)”
Ian Hardy at MobileSyrup: “Earlier this month, the Coderre Administration announced the Montreal Action Plan that includes 70 projects that will turn Montreal into a “smart city.”
The total allocated budget of $23 million is broken down into 6 sections — listed below with the official description — and is targeted for completion by the end of 2017. Apart from ensuring a fast fiber network, “unleashing municipal data,” and the rollout of “intelligent transport systems” that will bring your real-time info on your subway/bus/car service, the city plans to deploy free WiFi.
According to the statement, Montreal will be deploying wireless access points in 750 locations to have facilitate free public WiFi. The larger idea is to “enhance the experience of citizens, boost tourism and accelerate economic development of Montreal.”…
1. Wi-Fi public: Deploy APs to extend coverage in the area, creating a harmonized experience and provide uniform performance across the network to enhance the experience of citizens, boost tourism and accelerate the economic development of Montreal.
2. Very high speed network, multiservice: Adopt a telecommunications policy, create one-stop telecommunications and urban integrate the telecommunications component in the charter of all major urban projects, so that all players in the Montreal community have access a fiber network at high speed and multi-service, that meets their current and future needs.
3. Economic Niche smart city: Create an environment facilitating the emergence of companies in the smart city economic niche, multiply the sources of innovation for solving urban problems and simplify doing business with the City, so that Montreal becoming a leader in innovation as smart city and accelerate economic development.
4. Intelligent Mobility: Make available all data on mobility in real time, implement intelligent transport systems, intermodal and integrated deployment and support solutions designed to inform users to optimize mobility users in real time on the entire territory.
5. Participatory democracy: Unleashing municipal data, information management and governance and adapt the means of citizen participation to make them accessible online, to improve access to the democratic process and consolidate the culture of transparency and accountability.
6. Digital Public Services: Making a maximum of services available on a multitude of digital channels, involve citizens in the development of services and create opportunities for all, to become familiar with their use, to provide access to municipal services 24/7, across multiple platforms….(More)”
Zizi Papacharissi introducing the first issue of Social Media + Society: “I have never been a fan of the term “social media.” Not only had I not been a fan of the term but I had also expressed this distaste frequently and fervently, in public talks and in writing, academic and not. The reason why I dislike the term, as I regularly explain, is that all media are social. All media foster communication and by definition are social. This is not that groundbreaking a position anymore, although it has been my mantra ever since I started studying the social character of the Internet in the mid-1990s. In fact, it is a position held by many of our Editorial Board members who have contributed to this issue, and you will encounter variations of it as you read through this first issue.
To term some media social implies that there are other media that are perhaps anti-social, or even not social at all—asocial. It also invites comparisons between media based on how social each medium is. But each medium is social in its own unique way and invites particular social behaviors, its own form of sociality. Finally, the term identifies as social platforms that are no more, and perhaps less so, social than media not characterized by that moniker, such as the telephone.
But, whether I like it or not, “social media” has become mainstream, and I have come to terms with that. …
Social Media + Society is thus deeply committed to advancing beyond an understanding of social media that is temporally bound. …
To this end, I invited members of our Editorial Board to contribute short essays that would serve to outline the scope for Social Media + Society, in defining how we understand social media. ….The result is a magnificent set of essays presented in the democracy of alphabetical order, serving as our first issue, and a manifesto for our journal. I hope you enjoy reading them and are inspired by them as much as I have been. (More)”
Book by Sanjoy Mahajan: “…shows us that the way to master complexity is through insight rather than precision. Precision can overwhelm us with information, whereas insight connects seemingly disparate pieces of information into a simple picture. Unlike computers, humans depend on insight. Based on the author’s fifteen years of teaching at MIT, Cambridge University, and Olin College, The Art of Insight in Science and Engineering shows us how to build insight and find understanding, giving readers tools to help them solve any problem in science and engineering.
To master complexity, we can organize it or discard it. The Art of Insight in Science and Engineeringfirst teaches the tools for organizing complexity, then distinguishes the two paths for discarding complexity: with and without loss of information. Questions and problems throughout the text help readers master and apply these groups of tools. Armed with this three-part toolchest, and without complicated mathematics, readers can estimate the flight range of birds and planes and the strength of chemical bonds, understand the physics of pianos and xylophones, and explain why skies are blue and sunsets are red. (Public access version of the book).