Announcing Project Open Data from Cloudant Labs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yuriy Dybskiy from Cloudant: “There has been an emerging pattern over the last few years of more and more government datasets becoming available for public access. Earlier this year, the White House announced official policy on such data – Project Open Data.

Available resources

Here are four resources on the topic:

  1. Tim Berners-Lee: Open, Linked Data for a Global Community – [10 min video]
  2. Rufus Pollock: Open Data – How We Got Here and Where We’re Going – [24 min video]
  3. Open Knowledge Foundation Datasets – http://data.okfn.org/data
  4. Max Ogden: Project dat – collaborative data – [github repo]

One of the main challenges is access to the datasets. If only there were a database that had easy access to its data baked right in it.
Luckily, there is CouchDB and Cloudant, which share the same APIs to access data via HTTP. This makes for a really great option to store interesting datasets.

Cloudant Open Data

Today we are happy to announce a Cloudant Labs project – Cloudant Open Data!
Several datasets are available at the moment, for example, businesses_sf – data regarding businesses registered in San Francisco and sf_pd_incidents – a collection of incident reports (criminal and non-criminal) made by the San Francisco Police Department.
We’ll add more, but if you have one you’d like us to add faster – drop us a line at open-data@cloudant.com
Create an account and play with these datasets yourself”

Improved Governance? Exploring the Results of Peru's Participatory Budgeting Process

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stephanie McNulty for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Aug. 29-Sept. 1, 2013): “Can a nationally mandated participatory budget process change the nature of local governance? Passed in 2003 to mandate participatory budgeting in all districts and regions of Peru, Peru’s National PB Law has garnered international attention from proponents of participatory governance. However, to date, the results of the process have not been widely documented. Presenting data that have been gathered through fieldwork, online databases, and primary documents, this paper explores the results of Peru’s PB after ten years of implementation. The paper finds that results are limited. While there are a significant number of actors engaged in the process, the PB is still dominated by elite actors that do not represent the diversity of the civil society sector in Peru. Participants approve important “pro-poor” projects, but they are not always executed. Finally, two important indicators of governance, sub-national conflict and trust in local institutions, have not improved over time. Until Peruvian politicians make a concerted effort to move beyond politics as usual, results will continue to be limited” 

OpenCounter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Code for America: “OpenCounter’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs and foster local economic development by simplifying the process of registering a business.
Economic development happens in many forms, from projects like the revitalization of the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Hudson Rail Yards in New York City, to campaigns to encourage residents to shop at local merchants. While the majority of headlines will focus on a City’s effort to secure a major new employer (think Apple’s 1,000,000 square foot expansion in Austin, Texas), most economic development and job creation happens on a much smaller scale, as individuals stake their financial futures on creating a new product, store, service or firm.
But these new businesses aren’t in a position to accept tax breaks on capital equipment or enter into complex development and disposition agreements to build new offices or stores. Many new businesses can’t even meet the underwriting criteria of  SBA backed revolving-loan programs. Competition for local grants for facade improvements or signage assistance can be fierce….
Despite many cities’ genuine efforts to be “business-friendly,” their default user interface consists of florescent-lit formica, waiting lines, and stacks of forms. Online resources often remind one of a phone book, with little interactivity or specialization based on either the businesses’ function or location within a jurisdiction.
That’s why we built OpenCounter….See what we’re up to at opencounter.us or visit a live version of our software at http://opencounter.cityofsantacruz.com.”

From Machinery to Mobility: Government and Democracy in a Participative Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
From Machinery to Mobility

New book by Jeffrey Roy: “The Westminster-stylized model of Parliamentary democratic politics and public service accountability is increasingly out of step with the realities of today’s digitally and socially networked era. This book explores the reconfiguration of democratic and managerial governance within democratic societies due to the advent of technological mobility. More specifically, the traditional public sector prism of organizational and accountability – denoted as ‘machinery of government’, is increasingly strained in an era characterized by smart devices, social media, and cloud computing. This book examines the roots and implications of the tensions between machinery and mobility and the sorts of investments and initiatives that have been undertaken by governments around the world as well as their appropriateness and relative impacts. This book also examines the prospects for holistic adaptation of democratic and managerial systems going forward, identifying the most crucial directions and determinants for improving public sector performance in terms of outcomes, accountability, and agility. Accordingly, the ultimate aim of this initiative is to contribute to the formation of intellectual foundations for more systemic reforms of public sector governance in Canada and elsewhere, and to offer forward-looking trajectories for government adaptation in shifting from a traditional prism of ‘machinery’ to new organizational and institutional arrangements better suited for an era of ‘mobility’.”

Defense Against National Vulnerabilities in Public Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

DOD/DARPA Notice (See also Foreign Policy article): “OBJECTIVE: Investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources. Based on principles of data science, develop tools to characterize and assess the nature, persistence, and quality of the data. Develop tools for the rapid anonymization and de-anonymization of data sources. Develop framework and tools to measure the national security impact of public data and to defend against the malicious use of public data against national interests.
DESCRIPTION: The vulnerabilities to individuals from a data compromise are well known and documented now as “identity theft.” These include regular stories published in the news and research journals documenting the loss of personally identifiable information by corporations and governments around the world. Current trends in social media and commerce, with voluntary disclosure of personal information, create other potential vulnerabilities for individuals participating heavily in the digital world. The Netflix Challenge in 2009 was launched with the goal of creating better customer pick prediction algorithms for the movie service [1]. An unintended consequence of the Netflix Challenge was the discovery that it was possible to de-anonymize the entire contest data set with very little additional data. This de-anonymization led to a federal lawsuit and the cancellation of the sequel challenge [2]. The purpose of this topic is to understand the national level vulnerabilities that may be exploited through the use of public data available in the open or for purchase.
Could a modestly funded group deliver nation-state type effects using only public data?…”
The official link for this solicitation is: www.acq.osd.mil/osbp/sbir/solicitations/sbir20133.
 

Smartphones As Weather Surveillance Systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Simonite in MIT Technology Review: “You probably never think about the temperature of your smartphone’s battery, but it turns out to provide an interesting method for tracking outdoor air temperature. It’s a discovery that adds to other evidence that mobile apps could provide a new way to measure what’s happening in the atmosphere and improve weather forecasting.
Startup OpenSignal, whose app crowdsources data on cellphone reception, first noticed in 2012 that changes in battery temperature correlated with those outdoors. On Tuesday, they published a scientific paper on that technique in a geophysics journal and announced that the technique will be used to interpret data from a weather crowdsourcing app. OpenSignal originally started collecting data on battery temperatures to try and understand the connections between signal strength and how quickly a device chews through its battery.
OpenSignal’s crowdsourced weather-tracking effort joins another accidentally enabled by smartphones. A project called PressureNET that collects air pressure data by taking advantage of the fact many Android phones have a barometer inside to aid their GPS function (see “App Feeds Scientists Atmospheric Data From Thousands of Smartphones”). Cliff Mass, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, is working to incorporate PressureNET data into weather models that usually rely on data from weather stations. He believes that smartphones could provide valuable data from places where there are no weather stations, if enough people start sharing data using apps like PressureNET.
Other research suggests that logging changes in cell network signal strength perceived by smartphones could provide yet more weather data. In February researchers in the Netherlands produced detailed maps of rainfall compiled by monitoring fluctuations in the signal strength measured by cellular network masts, caused by water droplets in the atmosphere.”

Internet Governance is Our Shared Responsibility

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Vint Cerf, Patrick Ryan and Max Senges Senges: “This essay looks at the the different roles that multistakeholder institutions play in the Internet governance ecosystem. We propose a model for thinking of Internet governance within the context of the Internet’s layered model. We use the example of the negotiations in Dubai in 2102 at the World Conference on International Telecommunications as an illustration for why it is important for different institutions within the governance system to focus on their respective areas of expertise (e.g., the ITU, ICANN, and IGF). Several areas of conflict (a “tussle”) are reviewed, such as the desire to promote more broadband infrastructure, a topic that is in the remit of the International Telecommunications Union, but also the recurring desire of countries like Russia and China to use the ITU to regulate content and restrict free expression on the Internet through onerous cybersecurity and spam provisions. We conclude that it is folly to try and regulate all these areas through an international treaty, and encourage further development of mechanisms for global debate like the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).”

How the Internet Can Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Ben Rooney in the Wall Street Journal: “Given the response to previous attempts at opening up democracy, maybe his distrust in participatory democracy isn’t unreasonable. On coming to power in 2010 the coalition government launched a website to ask the public to nominate what laws it wanted repealed. But there was no promise that its choices would be enacted. Perhaps as a consequence there was a campaign to demand the overturning of the second law of thermodynamics. The website has since closed….

There is a precedent for this, according to Beth Noveck, who led President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. Speaking to an audience in Edinburgh recently, she pointed to the invention of the jury system by Henry II, a king of England in the 12th century.
This was a “powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power from government to citizens. Today we have the opportunity, and we have the imperative, to create thousands of new ways of interconnecting between networks and institutions, thousands of new kinds of juries…we are just beginning to invent the models by which we can cocreate the process of governance.”

We the People Update

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Washington Post: “The White House launched the We The People petition site in 2011 as a way for Americans to get their government to respond to their calls for action. On the digital platform, people can create and sign petitions seeking specific action on an issue from the federal government. In theory, once a petition has garnered a certain number of signatures within a certain time frame, it is reviewed by White House staff and receives an official response.
But that’s not always what happens.
Now a new site, www.whpetitions.info, takes its own tally and highlights petitions that have received enough signatures but have not received responses. By its count, the White House has responded to 87 percent of petitions that have met their signature thresholds with an average response time of 61 days. But the average waiting time so far for the 30 unanswered petitions is 240 days. And six of them have been waiting for over a year.”

Listen to Wikipedia

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Listen to Wikipedia‘s recent changes feed. The sounds indicate addition to (bells) or subtraction from (strings) a Wikipedia articles, and the pitch changes according to the size of the edit. Green circles show edits from unregistered contributors, and purple circles mark edits performed by automated bots. You may see announcements for new users as they join the site — you can welcome him or her by adding a note on their talk page.
This project is built using D3 and HowlerJS. It is based on Listen to Bitcoin by Maximillian Laumeister. Our source is available on GitHub, and you can read more about this project.
Built by Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi.”