New Paper by Muriel Foulonneau, Sébastien Martin, Slim Turki: “The Open Data movement has mainly been a data provision movement. The release of Open Data is usually motivated by (i) government transparency (citizen access to government data), (ii) the development of services by third parties for the benefit for citizens and companies (typically smart city approach), or (iii) the development of new services that stimulate the economy. The success of the Open Data movement and its return on investment should therefore be assessed among other criteria by the number and impact of the services created based on those data. In this paper, we study the development of services based on open data and means to make the data opening process more effective.”
The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator
New book by Ken Banks: “Despite the tens of billions spent each year in international aid, some of the most promising and exciting social innovations and businesses have come about by chance. Many of the people behind them didn’t consciously set out to solve anything, but they did. Welcome to the world of the ‘reluctant innovator’…
This book provides a welcome challenge to conventional wisdom in social entrepreneurship. It highlights the personal stories of ten social innovators from around the world. Ten social innovators – ordinary people – who randomly stumbled across problems, injustices and wrongs and, armed with little more than determination and belief, decided not to turn their backs but to dedicate their lives to solving them. Here are their stories….
Watching yet another Spanish movie in his friend’s apartment to avoid writing up his doctoral dissertation, Brij Kothari makes a throwaway comment about subtitles, which plants the seed of an idea and spawns a literacy initiative that has had, in Bill Clinton’s words, “a staggering impact on people’s lives”.
Worried about the political turmoil in Kenya, and concerned at the lack of information that is forthcoming from his adoptive country, Erik Hersman mobilises his own five-strong army to conceive, create and launch a web-based facility that revolutionises how breaking news is disseminated worldwide.
Parachuted into the middle of sub-Saharan Africa with a brief to collect public health data, and confronted with a laborious, environmentally wasteful paper-based system, paediatrician Joel Selanikio finds the perfect outlet for the skills he acquired as a Wall Street computer consultant.
Intending to ground himself in the realities of global health during his internship in rural Malawi, Josh Nesbit discovers that it is hard to sit on the sidelines and soon finds himself proposing a solution to overcome the difficulty of connecting patients, community health workers and hospitals.
After watching local doctors and midwives struggle to treat critically ill pregnant women in near-total darkness on a Nigerian maternity ward, where an untimely power cut can mean the difference between life and death, obstetrician Laura Stachel delivers a solar-based solution that enhances survival prospects.
Observing how well the autistic son of a close friend responds to the therapeutic effects of a Chinese massage technique that she has advocated using, Louisa Silva is convinced that the treatment has the potential to benefit thousands of others, but she needs to prove it.
Haunted by the memory of being separated from her older sister during a childhood spent in foster care, and horrified that other siblings are continuing to suffer the same fate, Lynn Price resolves to devise a way to bring such people back together.
An unexpected conversation over dinner leads Priti Radhakrishnan to build an innovative new organisation with a mission to fight for the rights of people denied access to life saving medicines.
Until a visit to the dermatologist turns her world upside down, Sharon Terry has never heard of pseudanthoma elasticum (PXE), but when she discovers that research into the disease afflicting her children is hidebound by scientific protocol, she sets about changing the system with characteristic zeal.
Encounters and conversations with leftover people occupying leftover spaces and using leftover materials, at home and abroad, led architecture professor Wes Janz to view them as urban pioneers, not victims, and teach him a valuable lesson: think small and listen to those at the sharp end.
See http://www.reluctantinnovation.com/”
Where next for citizen science? Innovative uses for crowd sourcing
VIDEO: “Thanks to new technologies , citizen science has seen huge growth over the past decade, opening up important scientific research to the masses and harnessing the power of the crowd. Ranging from classifying new galaxies to monitoring wildlife in the Serengeti, the Zooniverse stable of citizen science projects led by Dr Chris Lintott has seen incredible success. But what does the future hold for citizen science — does it have the power to help in real life situations such as disaster zones? And what are the implications when dealing with huge amounts of potentially sensitive data in real time?
This seminar is part of the Oxford Martin School Hilary Term seminar series: Blurring the lines: the changing dynamics between man and machine…www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk”
Give the Data to the People
Harlan Krumholz in the New York Times: “LAST week, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has hired my group, Yale University Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review.
This is an extraordinary donation to society, and a reversal of the industry’s traditional tendency to treat data as an asset that would lose value if exposed to public scrutiny.
Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all. The unreported results, not surprisingly, are often those in which a drug failed to perform better than a placebo. As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence. One of the most troubling implications is that full information on a drug’s effects may never be discovered or released.
Even when studies are published, the actual data are usually not made available. End users of research — patients, doctors and policy makers — are implicitly told by a single group of researchers to “take our word for it.” They are often forced to accept the report without the prospect of other independent scientists’ reproducing the findings — a violation of a central tenet of the scientific method.
To be fair, the decision to share data is not easy. Companies worry that their competitors will benefit, that lawyers will take advantage, that incompetent scientists will misconstrue the data and come to mistaken conclusions. Researchers feel ownership of the data and may be reluctant to have others use it. So Johnson & Johnson, as well as companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Medtronic that have made more cautious moves toward transparency, deserve much credit. The more we share data, however, the more we find that many of these problems fail to materialize….
This program doesn’t mean that just anyone can gain access to the data without disclosing how they intend to use it. We require those who want the data to submit a proposal and identify their research team, funding and any conflicts of interest. They have to complete a short course on responsible conduct and sign an agreement that restricts them to their proposed research question. Most important, they must agree to share whatever they find. And we exclude applicants who seek data for commercial or legal purposes. Our intent is not to be tough gatekeepers, but to ensure that the data are used in a transparent way and contribute to overall scientific knowledge.
There are many benefits to this kind of sharing. It honors the contributions of the subjects and scientists who participated in the research. It is proof that an organization, whether it is part of industry or academia, wants to play a role as a good global citizen. It demonstrates that the organization has nothing to hide. And it enables scientists to use the data to learn new ways to help patients. Such an approach can even teach a company like Johnson & Johnson something it didn’t know about its own products.
For the good of society, this is a breakthrough that should be replicated throughout the research world.”
Why SayIt is (partly) a statement about the future of Open Data
Tom Steinberg from MySociety: “This is where SayIt comes in, as an example of a relatively low-cost approach to making sure that the next generation of government IT systems do produce Open Data.
SayIt is a newly launched open source tool for publishing transcripts of trials, debates, interviews and so on. It publishes them online in a way that matches modern expectations about how stuff should work on the web – responsive, searchable and so on. It’s being built as a Poplus Component, which means it’s part of an international network of groups collaborating on shared technologies. Here’s JK Rowling being interviewed, published via SayIt.
But how does this little tool relate to the business of getting governments to release more Open Data? Well, SayIt isn’t just about publishing data, it’s about making it too – in a few months we’ll be sharing an authoring interface for making new transcripts from whatever source a user has access to.
We hope that having iterated and improved this authoring interface, SayIt can become the tool of choice for public sector transcribers, replacing whatever tool they use today (almost certainly Word). Then, if they use SayIt to make a transcript, instead of Word, then it will produce new, instantly-online Open Data every time they use it….
But we can’t expect the public sector to use a tool like SayIt to make new Open Data unless it is cheaper, better and less burdensome than whatever they’re using now. We can’t – quite simply – expect to sell government procurement officers a new product mainly on the virtues of Open Data. This means the tough task of persuading government employees that there is a new tool that is head-and-shoulders better than Excel or Word for certain purposes: formidable, familiar products that are much better than their critics like to let on.
So in order for SayIt to replace the current tools used by any current transcriber, it’s going to have to be really, really good. And really trustworthy. And it’s going to have to be well marketed. And that’s why we’ve chosen to build SayIt as an international, open source collaboration – as a Poplus Component. Because we think that without the billions of dollars it takes to compete with Microsoft, our best hope is to develop very narrow tools that do 0.01% of what Word does, but which do that one thing really really well. And our key strategic advantage, other than the trust that comes with Open Source and Open Standards, is the energy of the global civic hacking and government IT reform sector. SayIt is far more likely to succeed if it has ideas and inputs from contributors from around the world.
Regardless of whether or not SayIt ever succeeds in penetrating inside governments, this post is about an idea that such an approach represents. The idea is that people can advance the Open Data agenda not just by lobbying, but also by building and popularising tools that mean that data is born open in the first place. I hope this post will encourage more people to work on such tools, either on your own, or via collaborations like Poplus.”
Increasing the evidence base for what does (and doesn’t) work
Dan Corry, CEO of NPC at the Alliance for Useful Evidence: “At NPC, we’re passionate about supporting organisations to measure their impact. By measuring impact, we can see if the all the passion and good intentions of the charity sector are translating into real outcomes for the people we are trying to help. However, even when charities believe in this mission, many still struggle to get far with their measurement.
The challenge:
One problem is that measuring outcomes often requires tracking beneficiaries over time to see what happened to them after their interaction with the charity, and doing this can be complex, costly and sometimes just impractical.
Yet often the government holds this data, and the problem is that charities can’t access it in a simple way. NPC therefore recently recommended that the Ministry of Justice use the data the government and its agencies hold in relation to reoffending to help charities working in this area. The MoJ responded positively, implementing the Justice Data Lab, a service which enables charities that work with offenders/ex-offenders to track the reoffending rate of the people they have worked with some years later. Furthermore they can compare the reoffending rate of those they worked with to a matched sample of offenders/ex-offenders.
Eight months into the one year pilot of the JDL, here are some of our lessons learnt….”
Can we equate computing with art?
Extract from ‘Geek Sublime: Writing Fiction, Coding Software’ by Vikram Chandra: “A geek hunched over a laptop tapping frantically at the keyboard, neon-bright lines of green code sliding up the screen – the programmer at work is now a familiar staple of popular entertainment. The clipped shorthand and digits of programming languages are familiar even to civilians, if only as runic incantations charged with world-changing power.
Computing has transformed all our lives but the processes and cultures that produce software remain largely opaque, alien, unknown. This is certainly true within my own professional community of fiction writers; whenever I tell one of my fellow authors that I supported myself through the writing of my first novel by working as a programmer and a computer consultant, I evoke a response that mixes bemusement, bafflement, and a touch of awe, as if I had just said that I could levitate.
Most of the artists I know – painters, film-makers, actors, poets – seem to regard programming as an esoteric scientific discipline; they are keenly aware of its cultural mystique, envious of its potential profitability and eager to extract metaphors, imagery, and dramatic possibility from its history, but coding may as well be nuclear physics as far as relevance to their own daily practice is concerned.
Many programmers, on the other hand, regard themselves as artists. Since programmers create complex objects, and care not just about function but also about beauty, they are just like painters and sculptors. The best-known assertion of this notion is the 2003 essay “Hackers and Painters” by programmer and venture capitalist Paul Graham. “Of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike,” writes Graham. “What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things.”
According to Graham, the iterative processes of programming – write, debug (discover and remove bugs, which are coding errors), rewrite, experiment, debug, rewrite – exactly duplicate the methods of artists. “The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way,” he writes. “You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.”
Attention to detail further marks good hackers with artist-like passion, he argues. “All those unseen details [in a Leonardo da Vinci painting] combine to produce something that’s just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune. Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.”
This desire to equate art and programming has a lengthy pedigree. In 1972, famed computer scientist Butler Lampson published an editorial titled “Programmers as Authors” that began: “Creative endeavour varies greatly in the amount of overhead (ie money, manpower and organisation) associated with a project which calls for a given amount of creative work. At one extreme is the activity of an aircraft designer, at the other that of a poet. The art of programming currently falls much closer to the former than the latter. I believe, however, that this situation is likely to change considerably in the next decade.”
A Task-Fit Model of Crowdsourcing: Finding the Right Crowdsourcing Approach to Fit the Task
New paper by RT Nakatsu, EB Grossman, CL Iacovou: “We develop a framework for classifying crowdsourcing approaches in terms of the types of tasks for which they are best suited. The method we used to develop our task-fit taxonomy followed an iterative approach that considered over 100 well-known examples crowdsourcing. Our taxonomy considers three dimensions of task complexity: (1) task structure–is the task well-defined, or does it require a more open-ended solution;(2) task interdependence–can the task be solved by an individual or does it require a community of problem solvers; and (3) task commitment—what level of commitment is expected from crowd members? Based on our taxonomy, we identify seven categories of crowdsourcing, and discuss prototypical examples of each approach. Furnished with such an understanding, one should be able to determine which crowdsourcing approach is most suitable for a particular task situation.”
Boston's Building a Synergy Between City Hall & Startups
Gillis Bernard at BostInno: “Boston’s local government and startup scene want to do more than peacefully co-exist. They want to co-create. The people perhaps credited for contributing the most buzz to this trend are those behind relatively new parking ticket app TicketZen. Cort Johnson, along with a few others from Terrible Labs, a Web and mobile app design consultancy in Chinatown, came up with the idea for the app after spotting a tweet from one of Boston’s trademark entrepreneurs. A few months back, ex-KAYAK CTO (and Blade co-founder) Paul English sent out a 140-character message calling for an easy, instantaneous payment solution for parking tickets, Johnson told BostInno.
The idea was that in the time it takes for Boston’s enforcement office to process a parking ticket, its recipient has already forgotten his or her frustration or misplaced the bright orange slip, thus creating a situation in which both parties lose: the local government’s collection process is held up and the recipient is forced to pay a larger fine for the delay.
With the problem posed and the spark lit, the Terrible Labs team took to building TicketZen, an app which allows people to scan their tickets and immediately send validation to City Hall to kick off the process.
“When we first came up with the prototype, [City Hall was] really excited and worked to get it launched in Boston first,” said Johnson. “But we have built a bunch of integrations for major cities where most of the parking tickets are issued, which will launch early this year.”
But in order to even get the app up-and-running, Terrible Labs needed to work with some local government representatives – namely, Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics….
Since its inception in 2010, the City Hall off-shoot has worked with all kinds of Boston citizens to create civic-facing innovations that would be helpful to the city at large.
For example, a group of mothers with children at Boston Public Schools approached New Urban Mechanics to create an app that shares when the school bus will arrive, similar to that of the MBTA’s, which shows upcoming train times. The nonprofit then arranged a partnership with Vermonster LLC, a software application development firm in Downtown Boston to create the Where’s My School Bus app.
“There’s a whole host of different backgrounds, from undergrad students to parents, who would never consider themselves to be entrepreneurs or innovators originally … There are just so many talented, driven and motivated folks that would likely have a similar interest in doing work in the civic space. The challenge is to scale that beyond what’s currently out there,” shared Osgood. “We’re asking, ‘How can City Hall do a better job to support innovators?’”
Of course, District Hall was created for this very purpose – supporting creatives and entrepreneurs by providing them a perpetually open door and an event space. Additionally, there have been a number of events geared toward civic innovation within the past few months targeting both entrepreneurs and government.
The former mayor Thomas Menino led the charge in opening the Office of Business Development, which features a sleek new website and focuses on providing entrepreneurs and existing businesses with access to financial and technical resources. Further, a number of organizations collaborated in early December 2013 to host a free-to-register event dubbed MassDOT Visualizing Transportation Hackathon to help generate ideas for improving public transit from the next generation’s entrepreneurs; just this month, the Venture Café and the Cambridge Innovation Center hosted Innovation and the City, a conference uniting leading architects, urban planners, educators and business leaders from different cities around the U.S. to speak to the changing landscape of civic development.”
Civic Tech Forecast: 2014
Laura Dyson from Code for America: “Last year was a big year for civic technology and government innovation, and if last week’s Municipal Innovation discussion was any indication, 2014 promises to be even bigger. More than sixty civic innovators from both inside and outside of government gathered to hear three leading civic tech experts share their “Top Five” list of civic tech trends from 2013m, and predictions for what’s to come in 2014. From responsive web design to overcoming leadership change, guest speakers Luke Fretwell, Juan Pablo Velez, and Alissa Black covered both challenges and opportunities. And the audience had a few predictions of their own. Highlights included:
Mark Leech, Application Development Manager, City of Albuquerque: “Regionalization will allow smaller communities to participate and act as a force multiplier for them.”
Rebecca Williams, Policy Analyst, Sunlight Foundation: “Open data policy (law and implementation) will become more connected to traditional forms of governance, like public records and town hall meetings.”
Rick Dietz, IT Director, City of Bloomington, Ind.: “I think governments will need to collaborate directly more on open source development, particularly on enterprise scale software systems — not just civic apps.”
Kristina Ng, Office of Financial Empowerment, City and County of San Francisco: “I’m excited about the growing community of innovative government workers.”
Hillary Hartley, Presidential Innovation Fellow: “We’ll need to address sustainability and revenue opportunities. Consulting work can only go so far; we must figure out how to empower civic tech companies to actually make money.”
An informal poll of the audience showed that roughly 96 percent of the group was feeling optimistic about the coming year for civic innovation. What’s your civic tech forecast for 2014? Read on to hear what guest speakers Luke Fretwell, Juan Pablo Velez, and Alissa Black had to say, and then let us know how you’re feeling about 2014 by tweeting at @codeforamerica.”