Stefaan Verhulst

Brian Gill at Socrata: “…Thanks to sensor-based objects, big data is getting bigger, and that presents opportunities — and considerations — for government organizations.

Picture this: It’s a sunny summer’s day a few years from now, plants are in full bloom, and you’re strolling through a major city park. Unfortunately, your eyes are watering as the itchy beginnings of a pollen-induced allergy attack begin to compromise the experience.

Pulling out your phone, you consult a data visualization showing the park’s hour-by-hour pollen count densities. You then choose a new path, one with different vegetation and lighter pollen counts, and go about your way, barely noticing the egg-shaped nodes in the canopy monitoring everything from pollen to air quality to foot-traffic trends.

Welcome to the Internet of Everything, city edition.

….tapping into, and especially generating, IoT data streams is a natural fit for larger municipal governments who not only have the fiscal resources needed to put IoT data to work, they have an innate motivator: improving citizens’ lives.

Consider Chicago’s Array of Things project, an experimental network of modular sensor boxes installed around the city’s core. Think of it as an urban fitness-data tracker: The nodes collect real-time data on the city’s environment and infrastructure for research and public use, with the first units focusing on atmosphere, air quality, and environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and light.

From this data alone, the potential applications are exciting, such as using air, sound, and vibration data to monitor vehicle traffic, or infrared sensors to measure street temperature to guide salting responses during winter storms. The thinkers behind Array of Things can even envision a downtown where street lamp poles alert pedestrians to icy sidewalk patches and apps guide people to safe nocturnal walking routes.

This is all cool stuff, but “outcome” is the key word here, says McInnis, who recommends a bottom-up approach when assessing IoT opportunities. Instead of worrying whether you currently possess the technical infrastructure to harness IoT data, he says, first determine what you want to achieve, be it water quality monitoring or winter sidewalk safety, and then work from there — you may even already have IoT data streams that can be redeployed.

And as cities like Chicago are demonstrating, the Internet of Things not only has the potential to reshape how municipalities can harness a world of increasing object-driven data; it’s helping reshape how cities think about the nature of usable data.

In other words, all these new IoT data streams are actually like water, a natural resource. And just as water flows from many sources, government IoT data can also be collected, channeled, and processed like any utility — and serve as a powerful public good. …(More)”

Marie Sansom  at GovernmentNews: “…Crowdsourcing and policy making was the subject of a lecture by visiting academic Dr Tanja Aitamurto at Victoria’s Swinburne University of Technology earlier this month. Dr Aitamurto wrote “Crowdsourcing for Democracy: New Era in Policy-Making” and led the design and implementation of the Finnish Experiment, a pioneering case study in crowdsourcing policy making.

She spoke about how Scandinavian countries have used crowdsourcing to “tap into the collective intelligence of a large and diverse crowd” in an “open ended knowledge information search process” in an open call for anybody to participate online and complete a task.

It has already been used widely and effectively by companies  such as Proctor and Gamble who offer a financial reward for solutions to their R&D problems.

The Finnish government recently used crowdsourcing when it came to reform the country’s Traffic Act following a rash of complaints to the Minister of the Environment about it. The Act, which regulates issues such as off-road traffic, is an emotive issue in Finland where snow mobiles are used six months of the year and many people live in remote areas.

The idea was for people to submit problems and solutions online, covering areas such as safety, noise, environmental protection, the rights of snowmobile owners and landowners’ rights. Everyone could see what was written and could comment on it.

Dr Aitamurto said crowdsourcing had four stages:

• The problem mapping space, where people were asked to outline the issues that needed solving
• An appeal for solutions
• An expert panel evaluated the comments received based on the criteria of: effectiveness, cost efficiency, ease of implementation and fairness. The crowd also had the chance to evaluate and rank solutions online
• The findings were then handed over to the government for the law writing process

Dr Aitamurto said active participation seemed to create a strong sense of empowerment for those involved.

She said some people reported that it was the first time in their lives they felt they were really participating in democracy and influencing decision making in society. They said it felt much more real than voting in an election, which felt alien and remote.

“Participation becomes a channel for advocacy, not just for self-interest but a channel to hear what others are saying and then also to make yourself heard. People expected a compromise at the end,” Dr Aitamurto said.

Being able to participate online was ideal for people who lived remotely and turned crowdsourcing into a democratic innovation which brought citizens closer to policy and decision making between elections.

Other benefits included reaching out to tap into new pools of knowledge, rather than relying on a small group of homogenous experts to solve the problem.

“When we use crowdsourcing we actually extend our knowledge search to multiple, hundreds of thousands of distant neighbourhoods online and that can be the power of crowdsourcing: to find solutions and information that we wouldn’t find otherwise. We find also unexpected information because it’s a self-selecting crowd … people that we might not have in our networks already,” Dr Aitamurto said.

The process can increase transparency as people interact on online platforms and where the government keeps feedback loops going.

Dr Aitamurto is also a pains to highlight what crowdsourcing is not and cannot be, because participants are self-selecting and not statistically representative.

“The crowd doesn’t make decisions, it provides information. It’s not a method or tool for direct democracy and it’s not a public opinion poll either”.

Crowdsourcing has fed into policy in other countries too, for example, during Iceland’s constitutional reform and in the United States where the federal Emergency Management Agency overhauled its strategy after a string of natural disasters.

Australian government has been getting in on the act using cloud-based software Citizen Space to gain input into a huge range of topics. While much of it is technically consultation, rather than feeding into actual policy design, it is certainly a step towards more open government.

British company Delib, which is behind the software, bills it as “managing, publicising and archiving all of your organisation’s consultation activity”.

One council who has used Citizens Space is Wyong Shire on the NSW Central Coast. The council has used the consultation hub to elicit ratepayers’ views on a number of topics, including a special rate variation, community precinct forums, strategic plans and planning decisions.

One of Citizen Space’s most valuable features is the section ‘we asked, you said, we did’….(More)”

Mark Boonshoft at The Junto: “Data. Before postmodernism, or environmental history, or the cultural turn, or the geographic turn, and even before the character on the old Star Trek series, historians began to gather and analyze quantitative evidence to understand the past. As computers became common during the 1970s and 1980s, scholars responded by painstakingly compiling and analyzing datasets, using that evidence to propose powerful new historical interpretations. Today, much of that information (as well as data compiled since) is in danger of disappearing. For that and other reasons, we have developed a website designed to preserve and share the datasets permanently (or at least until aliens destroy our planet). We appeal to all early American historians (not only the mature ones from earlier decades) to take the time both to preserve and to share their statistical evidence with present and future scholars. It will not only be a legacy to the profession but also will encourage historians to share their data more openly and to provide a foundation on which scholars can build.

In coordination with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and specialists at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, in addition to bepress, we have established the Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD), available athttp://repository.upenn.edu/mead/. We’d love to have your datasets, your huddled 1’s and 0’s (and other numbers and letters) yearning to be free.  The best would be in either .csv or, if you have commas in your data, .txt, because both of those are non-proprietary and somewhat close to universal.  However, if the data is in other forms, like Access Excel or SPSS, that will do fine as well. Ultimately, we should be able to convert files to a more permanent database and to preserve those files in perpetuity.  In addition, we are asking scholars, out of the goodness of their heart and commitment to the profession, to load a separate document as a codebook explaining the meaning of the variables.  The files will all be available to any scholar regardless of their academic affiliation.

How will a free, open centralized data center benefit Early American Historians and why should you participate in using and sharing data? Let us count just a few ways. In our experience, most historians of early America are extremely generous in sharing not only their expertise but also their evidence with other scholars. However, that generally occurs on an individual, case-by-case basis in a somewhat serendipitous fashion. A centralized website would permit scholars quickly to investigate rather quantitative evidence was available on which they might begin to construct their own research. Ideally, scholars setting out on a new topic might be guided somewhat the existence and availability of data. Moreover, it would set a precedent that future historians might follows—routinely sharing their evidence, either before or after their publications analyzing the data have appeared in print or online….(More)”

Web Foundation: “….data intermediaries are undertaking a wide range of functions.  As well as connecting data providers (for example, governments) with those who can benefit by using data or data-driven products, intermediaries are helping to articulate demand for data, creating and repackaging data, and creating novel applications. In Nepal for instance, intermediaries play a range of roles, from running the government open data portal, to translating complex data sets into formats that are easily understood by a population that is largely offline and suffers from low literacy levels.

How are intermediaries connecting data providers to end-users?

To answer this question, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s social model, in particular his concept of species of capital, was used as a lens. According to Bourdieu, capital is not only economic or material. We use other symbolic forms of capital like social capital (e.g. friends and memberships) or cultural capital (e.g. competencies and qualifications) in our social interactions.

Unsurprisingly, the study found that most open data intermediaries use their technical capital to connect to data providers (97%). However, to fulfil their role of not only connecting to data providers but of facilitating the use of open data, open data intermediaries require multiple forms of capital. And because no single intermediary necessarily has all the types of capital to link effectively to users, multiple intermediaries with complementary configurations of capital are more likely to connect data providers and users.

A model of layers of intermediaries connecting a data source with users  

….Of the 32 intermediaries studied, 72% can be described as not-for profit and, as a consequence, rely on donor funding to sustain their operations. This has significant implications for future sustainability.

What are some of the key conclusions and implications of the study?

• Intermediaries are playing a critical role in making data truly useful.
• The presence of multiple intermediaries in an ecosystem may increase the probability of use (and impact) because no single intermediary is likely to possess all the types of capital required to unlock the full value of the transaction between the provider and the end user.
• Working either alone or in collaboration with others, intermediaries must go beyond technical capital to unlock the benefits of open data – using social, political or economic capital too.
• Governments would do well to engage with a broad spectrum of intermediaries, and not simply focus on intermediaries who possess only the technical capital required to interpret and repackage open government data.
• Given that intermediaries are presently largely donor funded, in the short term, funders should ask whether possible grantees possess all the types of capital required not only to re-use open data but to connect open data to specific user groups in order to ensure the use and impact of open data.
• In the medium term, different funding models for intermediaries may need to be explored, or the sustainability of civically-minded open data initiatives could be at risk….

ACCESS THE FULL REPORT:

Open Data Intermediaries in Developing Countries

By François van Schalkwyk, Michael Caňares, Sumandro Chattapadhyay & Alexander Andrason

“Life around the world is changing rapidly – here you find the data visualizations that show you how. Poverty, violence, health, education, the environment and much more. Our World In Data covers a wide range of topics and visualizes the empirical evidence of how living standards changed over the last decades, centuries, and millennia. A web publication authored by Max Roser. (work in progress)”

Jason Shueh at GovTech: “Remember the 1990s visions of the future? Those first incantations of the sweeping “smart city,” so technologically utopian and Tomorrowland-ish in design? The concept and solutions were pitched by tech titans like IBM and Cisco, cost obscene amounts of money, and promised equally outlandish levels of innovation.

It was a drive — as idealistic as it was expedient — to spark a new industry that infused cities with data, analytics, sensors and clean energy. Two-and-a-half decades later, the smart city market has evolved. Its solutions are more pragmatic and its benefits more potent. Evidence brims inSingapore, where officials boast that they can predict traffic congestion an hour in advance with 90 percent accuracy. Similarly, in Chicago, the city has embraced analytics to estimate rodent infestations and prioritizerestaurant inspections. These of course are a few standouts, but as many know, the movement is highly diverse and runs its fingers through cities and across continents.

And yet what’s not as well-known is what’s happened in the last few years. The industry appears to be undergoing another metamorphosis, one that takes the ingenuity inspired by its beginnings and reimagines it with the help of do-it-yourself entrepreneurs….

Asked for a definition, Abrahamson centered his interpretation on tech that enhances quality of life. With the possible exception of health care, finance and education — systems large enough to merit their own categories, Abrahamson explains smart cities by highlighting investment areas at Urban.us. Specific areas are packaged as follows:

Mobility and Logistics: How cities move people and things to, from and within cities.

Built Environment: The public and private spaces in which citizens work and live.

Utilities: Critical resources including water, waste and energy.

Service Delivery: How local governments provide services ranging from public works to law enforcement….

Who’s Investing?

….Here is a sampling of a few types, with examples of their startup investments.

General Venture Capitalists

a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) – Mapillary and Moovit

Specialty Venture Capitalists

Fontinalis – Lyft, ParkMe, LocoMobi

Black Coral Capital – Digital Lumens, Clean Energy Collective, newterra

Govtech Fund – AmigoCloud, Mark43, MindMixer

Corporate Venture Capitalists

Google Ventures – Uber, Skycatch, Nest

Motorola Solutions Venture Capital – CyPhy Works and SceneDoc

BMW i Ventures – Life360 and ChargePoint

Impact/Social Investors

Omidyar Network – SeeClickFix and Nationbuilder

Knight Foundation – Public Stuff, Captricity

Kapor Capital – Uber, Via, Blocpower

1776 – Radiator Labs, Water Lens… (More)

New book by E.H. Klijn and J. Koppenjan: “Governance Networks in the Public Sector presents a comprehensive study of governance networks and the management of complexities in network settings. Public, private and non-profit organizations are increasingly faced with complex, wicked problems when making decisions, developing policies or delivering services in the public sector. These activities take place in networks of interdependent actors guided by diverging and sometimes conflicting perceptions and strategies. As a result these networks are dominated by cognitive, strategic and institutional complexities. Dealing with these complexities requires sophisticated forms of coordination: network governance.

This book presents the most recent theoretical and empirical insights into governance networks. It provides a conceptual framework and analytical tools to study the complexities involved in handling wicked problems in governance networks in the public sector. The book also discusses strategies and management recommendations for governments, business and third sector organisations operating in and governing networks….(More)”

Paper by J. Attard, F. Orlandi, S. Scerri, and S. Auer in Government Information Quarterly: “We conduct a systematic survey with the aim of assessing open government data initiatives, that is; any attempt, by a government or otherwise, to open data that is produced by a governmental entity. We describe the open government data life-cycle and we focus our discussion on publishing and consuming processes required within open government data initiatives. We cover current approaches undertaken for such initiatives, and classify them. A number of evaluations found within related literature are discussed, and from them we extract challenges and issues that hinder open government initiatives from reaching their full potential. In a bid to overcome these challenges, we also extract guidelines for publishing data and provide an integrated overview. This will enable stakeholders to start with a firm foot in a new open government data initiative. We also identify the impacts on the stakeholders involved in such initiatives….(More)”