Stefaan Verhulst

Miguel Paz at IJNET: “It’s time to transform open data from a trendy concept among policy wonks and news nerds into something tangible to everyday life for citizens, businesses and grassroots organizations. Here are some ideas to help us get there:
1. Improve access to data
Craig Hammer from the World Bank has tackled this issue, stating that “Open Data could be the game changer when it comes to eradicating global poverty”, but only if governments make available online data that become actionable intelligence: a launch pad for investigation, analysis, triangulation, and improved decision making at all levels.
2. Create open data for the end user
As Hammer wrote in a blog post for the Harvard Business Review, while the “opening” has generated excitement from development experts, donors, several government champions, and the increasingly mighty geek community, the hard reality is that much of the public has been left behind, or tacked on as an afterthought. Let`s get out of the building and start working for the end user.
3. Show, don’t tell
Regular folks don’t know what “open data” means. Actually, they probably don’t care what we call it and don’t know if they need it. Apple’s Steve Jobs said that a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. We need to stop telling them they need it and start showing them why they need it, through actionable user experience.
4. Make it relevant to people’s daily lives, not just to NGOs and policymakers’ priorities
A study of the use of open data and transparency in Chile showed the top 10 uses were for things that affect their lives directly for better or for worse: data on government subsidies and support, legal certificates, information services, paperwork. If the data doesn’t speak to priorities at the household or individual level, we’ve lost the value of both the “opening” of data, and the data itself.
5. Invite the public into the sandbox
We need to give people “better tools to not only consume, but to create and manipulate data,” says my colleague Alvaro Graves, Poderopedia’s semantic web developer and researcher. This is what Code for America does, and it’s also what happened with the advent of Web 2.0, when the availability of better tools, such as blogging platforms, helped people create and share content.
6. Realize that open data are like QR codes
Everyone talks about open data the way they used to talk about QR codes–as something ground breaking. But as with QR Codes, open data only succeeds with the proper context to satisfy the needs of citizens. Context is the most important thing to funnel use and success of open data as a tool for global change.
7. Make open data sexy and pop, like Jess3.com
Geeks became popular because they made useful and cool things that could be embraced by end users. Open data geeks need to stick with that program.
8. Help journalists embrace open data
Jorge Lanata, a famous Argentinian journalist who is now being targeted by the Cristina Fernández administration due to his unfolding of government corruption scandals, once said that 50 percent of the success of a story or newspaper is assured if journalists like it.
That’s true of open data as well. If journalists understand its value for the public interest and learn how to use it, so will the public. And if they do, the winds of change will blow. Governments and the private sector will be forced to provide better, more up-to-date and standardized data. Open data will be understood not as a concept but as a public information source as relevant as any other. We need to teach Latin American journalists to be part of this.
9. News nerds can help you put your open data to good use
In order to boost the use of open data by journalists we need news nerds, teams of lightweight and tech-heavy armored journalist-programmers who can teach colleagues how open data through brings us high-impact storytelling that can change public policies and hold authorities accountable.
News nerds can also help us with “institutionalizing data literacy across societies” as Hammer puts it. ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellow and digital strategist Justin Arenstein calls these folks “mass mobilizers” of information. Alex Howard “points to these groups because they can help demystify data, to make it understandable by populations and not just statisticians.”
I call them News Ninja Nerds, accelerator taskforces that can foster innovationsin news, data and transparency in a speedy way, saving governments and organizations time and a lot of money. Projects like ProPublica’s Dollars For Docs are great examples of what can be achieved if you mix FOIA, open data and the will to provide news in the public interest.
10. Rename open data
Part of the reasons people don’t embrace concepts such as open data is because it is part of a lingo that has nothing to do with them. No empathy involved. Let’s start talking about people’s right to know and use the data generated by governments. As Tim O’Reilly puts it: “Government as a Platform for Greatness,” with examples we can relate to, instead of dead .PDF’s and dirty databases.
11. Don’t expect open data to substitute for thinking or reporting
Investigative Reporting can benefit from it. But “but there is no substitute for the kind of street-level digging, personal interviews, and detective work” great journalism projects entailed, says David Kaplan in a great post entitled, Why Open Data is Not Enough.”

Carl Haggerty in The Guardian: “The landscape of digital is constantly changing and being redefined with every new development, technology breakthrough, success and failure. We need digital public sector leaders who can properly navigate this environment, and follow these three guidelines.
1. Champion open data
We need leaders who can ensure that information and data is open by default, and secure when absolutely required. Too often councils commission digital programmes only to find the data generated does not easily integrate with other systems, or that data is not council-owned and can only be accessed at further cost.
2. Don’t get distracted by flashy products
Leaders must adopt an agnostic approach to technology, and not get seduced by the ever-increasing number of digital technologies and lose sight of real user and business needs.
3. Learn from research
Tales of misplaced IT investments plague the public sector, and senior leaders are understandably hesitant when considering future investments. To avoid causing even more disruption, we should learn from research findings such as those of the New Local Government Network’s recent digital roundtables on what works.
Making the decision to properly invest in digital leadership will not just improve decision making about digital solutions and strategies. It will also bring in the knowledge needed to navigate the complex security requirements that surround public-sector IT. And it will ensure that practices honed in the digital environment become embedded in the council more generally.
In Devon, for example, we are making sure all the services we offer online are based on the experience and behaviour of users. This has led service teams to refocus on the needs of citizens rather than those of the organisation. And our experiences of future proofing, agility and responsiveness are informing service design throughout the council.
What’s holding us back?
Across local government there is still a fragmented approach to collaboration. In central government, the Government Digital Service is charged with providing the right environment for change across all government departments. However, in local government, digital leaders often work alone without a unifying strategy across the sector. It is important to understand and recognise that the Government Digital Service is more than just a team pushing and promoting digital in central government: they are the future of central government, attempting to transform everything.
Initiatives such as LocalGov Digital, (O2’s Local Government Digital Fund), Forum (the DCLG’s local digital alliance) and the Guardian’s many public sector forums and networks are all helping to push forward debate, spread good practice and build a sense of urgent optimism around the local government digital agenda. But at present there is no equivalent to the unified force of the Government Digital Service.”

The Open Data Institute, which received support from the Government of Canada in this week’s budget, will work with governments, academic institutions and the private sector to solve challenges facing “open government” efforts and realize the full potential of “open data.”
According to a statement, partners will work on development of common standards, the integration of data from different levels of government and the commercialization of data, “allowing Canadians to derive greater economic benefit from datasets that are made available by all levels of government.”
The Open Data Institute is a public-private partnership. Founding partners will contribute $3 million in cash and in-kind contributions over three years to establish the institute, a figure that has been matched by the Government of Canada.
“This is a strategic investment in Canada’s ability to lead the digital economy,” said Kevin Tuer, Managing Director of CDMN. “Similar to how a common system of telephone exchanges allowed world-wide communication, the Open Data Institute will help create a common platform to share and access datasets.”
“This will allow the development of new applications and products, creating new business opportunities and jobs across the country,” he added.
“The Institute will serve as a common forum for government, academia and the private sector to collaborate on Open Government initiatives with the goal of fueling Canadian tech innovation,” noted OpenText President and CEO Mark J. Barrenechea
“The Open Data Institute has the potential to strengthen the regional economy and increase our innovative capacity,” added Feridun Hamdullahpur, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo.

Ken Doctor at Nieman Journalism Lab: “Hello there! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood Tweet Button. What if you could tap me and unlock a brand new source of funding for startup news sources of all kinds? What if, even better, you the reader could tap that money loose with a single click?
That’s the delightfully simple conceit behind a little widget, Impaq.me, you may have seen popping up as you traverse the news web. It’s social. It’s viral. It uses OPM (Other People’s Money) — and maybe a little bit of your own. It makes a new case to funders and maybe commercial sponsors. And it spits out metrics around the clock. It aims to be a convergence widget, acting on that now-aging idea that our attention is as important as our wallet. Consider it a new digital Swiss Army knife for the attention economy. TWEET
It’s impossible to tell how much of an impact Impaq.me may have. It’s still in its second round of testing at six of the U.S.’s most successful independent nonprofit startups — MinnPost, Center for Investigative Reporting, The Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego, ProPublica, and the Center for Public Integrity — but as in all things digital, timing is everything. And that timing seems right.
First, let’s consider that spate of new news sites that have sprouted with the winter rains — Bill Keller’s and Neil Barsky’s Marshall Project being only the latest. It’s been quite a run — from Ezra Klein’s Project X to Pierre Omidyar’s First Look (and just launched The Intercept) to the reimagining of FiveThirtyEight. While they encompass a broad range of business models and goals (“The newsonomics of why everyone seems to be starting a news site”), they all need two things: money and engagement. Or, maybe better ordered, engagement and money. The dance between the two is still in the early stages of Internet choreography. Get the sequences right and you win.
Second, and related, is the big question of “social” and how our sharing of news is changing the old publishing dynamic of editors deciding what we’re going to read. Just this week, two pieces here at the Lab — one on Upworthy’s influence and one on the social/search tango — highlighted the still-being-understood role of social in our news-reading lives.
Third, funders of news sites, especially Knight and other lead foundations, are looking for harder evidence of the value generated by their early grants. Millions have been poured into creating new news sites. Now they’re asking: What has our funding really done? Within that big question, Impaq.me is only one of several new attempts to demonstrably measure real impact in new ways. We’ll take a brief look at those impact initiatives below….
If Impaq.me is all about impact and money, then it’s got good company. There are at least two other noteworthy impact-measuring projects going on.

• The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Impact Tracker effort impact-tracking initiative launched last fall. The big idea: getting beyond the traditional metrics like unique visitors and pageviews to track the value of investigative and enterprise work. To that end, CIR has hired Lindsay Green-Barber, a CUNY-trained social scientist, and given her a perhaps first-ever title: media impact analyst.We can see the fruits of the work around CIR’s impressive Returning Home to Battle veterans series. On that series, CIR is tracking such impacts as change and rise in the public discourse around veterans’ issues and related allocation of government resources. The notion of good journalism intended to shine a light in dark places has been embedded in the CIR DNA for a long time; this new effort is intended to provide data — and words — to describe progress toward solutions. CIR is working with The Seattle Times on the impact of that paper’s education reporting, and CIR may soon look at more partnerships as well. Related: CIR is holding two “Dissection” events in New York and Washington in April, bringing together journalists, funders, and social scientists to widen the media impact movement.
• Chalkbeat, a growing national education news site, too, is moving on impact analysis. It’s called MORI (Measures of our Reporting’s Influence), and it’s a WordPress plugin. Says Chalkbeat cofounder Elizabeth Green: “We built MORI to solve for a problem that I guess you could call ‘impact loss.’ We knew that our stories were having all kinds of impacts, but we had no way of keeping track of these impacts or making sense of them. That meant that we couldn’t easily compile what we had done in the last year to share with the outside world (board, donors, foundations, readers, our moms) but also — just as important — we couldn’t look back on what we’d done and learn from it.”Sound familiar?
  After much inquiry, Chalkbeat settled on technology. “Within each story’s back end,” Green said, “we can enter inputs — qualitative data about the type of story, topic, and target audience — as well as outcomes — impacts on policy and practice (what we call ‘informed action’) as well as impacts on what we call ‘civic deliberation.’”

New paper by Martin Lodge and Kai Wegrich in Regulation and Governance: “Much has been said about the appeal of digital government devices to enhance consultation on rulemaking. This paper explores the most ambitious attempt by the UK central government so far to draw on “crowdsourcing” to consult and act on regulatory reform, the “Red Tape Challenge.” We find that the results of this exercise do not represent any major change to traditional challenges to consultation processes. Instead, we suggest that the extensive institutional arrangements for crowdsourcing were hardly significant in informing actual policy responses: neither the tone of the crowdsourced comments, the direction of the majority views, nor specific comments were seen to matter. Instead, it was processes within the executive that shaped the overall governmental responses to this initiative. The findings, therefore, provoke wider debates about the use of social media in rulemaking and consultation exercises.”

Some local authorities seek to monetise access to this API while others see it as a mechanism for encouraging the development of new products and services that are of value to the state but which have been developed without direct additional investment by the state thereby generating public good from the public task of collecting and storing data.
This concept of city as platform integrated by local authorities appears at first glance to be a logical, linear and achievable goal but in my view completely misunderstands a number of key factors;
1. The evolution of the open data/big data market
2. Commercial and Technical realities
3. Governance and bureaucracy
I’ll explore these below…”

New book edited  by Matt Ratto and Megan Boler :”Today, DIY–do-it-yourself–describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways (as in Egypt’s “Twitter revolution” of 2011) and to repurpose corporate content (or create new user-generated content) in order to offer political counternarratives. This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and “critical making” that have emerged in recent years. The authors and artists in this collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging and video production to knitting and the creation of community gardens.
Contributors examine DIY activism, describing new modes of civic engagement that include Harry Potter fan activism and the activities of the Yes Men. They consider DIY making in learning, culture, hacking, and the arts, including do-it-yourself media production and collaborative documentary making. They discuss DIY and design and how citizens can unlock the black box of technological infrastructures to engage and innovate open and participatory critical making. And they explore DIY and media, describing activists’ efforts to remake and reimagine media and the public sphere. As these chapters make clear, DIY is characterized by its emphasis on “doing” and making rather than passive consumption. DIY citizens assume active roles as interventionists, makers, hackers, modders, and tinkerers, in pursuit of new forms of engaged and participatory democracy.”

New report by by Nicholas Diakopoulos: “The past three years have seen a small profusion of websites, perhaps as many as 80, spring up to capitalize on the high interest that mug shot photos generate online.1 Mug shots are public record, artifacts of an arrest, and these websites collect, organize, and optimize the photos so that they’re found more easily online. Proponents of such sites argue that the public has a right to know if their neighbor, romantic date, or colleague has an arrest record. Still, mug shots are not proof of conviction; they don’t signal guilt.
Having one online is likely to result in a reputational blemish; having that photo ranked as the first result when someone searches for your name on Google turns that blemish into a garish reputational wound, festering in facile accessibility. Some of these websites are exploiting this, charging peo- ple to remove their photo from the site so that it doesn’t appear in online searches. It’s reputational blackmail. And remember, these people aren’t necessarily guilty of anything.
To crack down on the practice, states like Oregon, Georgia, and Utah have passed laws requiring these sites to take down the photos if the person’s record has been cleared. Some credit card companies have stopped processing payments for the seediest of the sites. Clearly both legal and market forces can help curtail this activity, but there’s another way to deal with the issue too: algorithms. Indeed, Google recently launched updates to its ranking algorithm that down-weight results from mug shot websites, basically treating them more as spam than as legitimate information sources.2 With a single knock of the algorithmic gavel, Google declared such sites illegitimate.
At the turn of the millennium, 14 years ago, Lawrence Lessig taught us that “code is law”—that the architecture of systems, and the code and algorithms that run them, can be powerful influences on liberty.3 We’re living in a world now where algorithms adjudicate more and more consequential decisions in our lives. It’s not just search engines either; it’s everything from online review systems to educational evaluations, the operation of markets to how political campaigns are run, and even how social services like welfare and public safety are managed. Algorithms, driven by vast troves of data, are the new power brokers in society.
As the mug shots example suggests, algorithmic power isn’t necessarily detrimental to people; it can also act as a positive force. The intent here is not to demonize algorithms, but to recognize that they operate with biases like the rest of us.4 And they can make mistakes. What we generally lack as a public is clarity about how algorithms exercise their power over us. With that clarity comes an increased ability to publicly debate and dialogue the merits of any particular algorithmic power. While legal codes are available for us to read, algorithmic codes are more opaque, hidden behind layers of technical complexity. How can we characterize the power that various algorithms may exert on us? And how can we better understand when algo- rithms might be wronging us? What should be the role of journalists in holding that power to account?
In the next section I discuss what algorithms are and how they encode power. I then describe the idea of algorithmic accountability, first examining how algorithms problematize and sometimes stand in tension with transparency. Next, I describe how reverse engineering can provide an alternative way to characterize algorithmic power by delineating a conceptual model that captures different investigative scenarios based on reverse engineering algorithms’ input-output relationships. I then provide a number of illustrative cases and methodological details on how algorithmic accountability reporting might be realized in practice. I conclude with a discussion about broader issues of human resources, legality, ethics, and transparency.”

Max Martin in SciDev: “Wikipedia is probably the best example of a website that allows users to share and edit information in real time. But several other sites based on the ‘wiki’ model provide a sharing platform specifically for technologies that could help improve lives in the developing world.
One such site, Appropedia, is aimed at collaborative solutions in sustainability, appropriate technology and poverty reduction. Appropedia has had 50 million hits since its 2006 inception and is getting a facelift that will allow it to reach more people.
Such a one-stop information point offers tremendous scope for informing people on the move about green, low-cost and locally owned technologies. A website like Appropedia could function as a clearing house for information on technologies that could make life easier for migrants who are forced to travel and live rough in poor settings — as long as the information is reliable.
For example, displaced people building new homes after a disaster has struck face many choices over the materials they use, as I’ve written previously. The wiki site could be a place for them to swap experiences and learn what has worked for others in different settings.
It could also host advice for people on the move about affordable transport, healthcare and humanitarian aid locations, plus tips for staying safe while travelling in unfamiliar territory and what to pack when camping out in the open.
It could also help channel relevant innovations from other settings to migrants. For example, some villagers in flood-prone areas of Bangladesh grow crops on ‘floating gardens’ made using bamboo-pole rafts lined with soil water hyacinths and cow dung. [1] A local group in India’s frequently flooded Bihar state has shown how to make a life jacket using just plastic bottles, sticky tape, fast-drying cotton and thread. [2] Both of these concepts could be useful for other peoples affected by floods and a dedicated wiki could help disseminate know-how and review the technologies’ safety, reliability and suitability for different locations.
Of course, an information wiki for migrants must offer reliable information. This could be achieved by involving a specialist agency or a consortium of humanitarian groups who could invite experts and local practitioners to review and edit posts.”

Anne Bowser for Commons Lab (Wilson Center):”A new bill in the House is raising some key questions about how crowdsourcing is understood by scientists, government agencies, policymakers and the public at large.
Robin Bravender’s recent article in Environment & Energy Daily, “House Republicans Push Crowdsourcing on Agency Science,” (subscription required) neatly summarizes the debate around H.R. 4012, a bill introduced to the House of Representatives earlier this month. The House Science, Space and Technology Committe earlier this week held a hearing on the bill, which could see a committee vote as early as next month.
Dubbed the “Secret Science Reform Act of 2014,” the bill prohibits the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from “proposing, finalizing, or disseminating regulations or assessments based upon science that is not transparent or reproducible.” If the bill is passed, EPA would be unable to base assessments or regulations on any information not “publicly available in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis.” This would include all information published in scholarly journals based on data that is not available as open source.
The bill is based on the premise that forcing EPA to use public data will inspire greater transparency by allowing “the crowd” to conduct independent analysis and interpretation. While the premise of involving the public in scientific research is sound, this characterization of crowdsourcing as a process separate from traditional scientific research is deeply problematic.
This division contrasts the current practices of many researchers, who use crowdsourcing to directly involve the public in scientific processes. Galaxy Zoo, for example, enlists digital volunteers (called “citizen scientists”) help classify more than 40 million photographs of galaxies taken by the Hubble Telescope. These crowdsourced morphological classifications are a powerful form of data analysis, a key aspect of the scientific process. Galaxy Zoo then publishes a catalogue of these classifications as an open-source data set. And the data reduction techniques and measures of confidence and bias for the data catalogue are documented in MNRAS, a peer-reviewed journal. A recent Google Scholar search shows that the data set published in MNRAS has been cited a remarkable 121 times.
As this example illustrates, crowdsourcing is often embedded in the process of formal scientific research. But prior to being published in a scientific journal, the crowdsourced contributions of non-professional volunteers are subject to the scrutiny of professional scientists through the rigorous process of peer review. Because peer review was designed as an institution to ensure objective and unbiased research, peer-reviewed scientific work is widely accepted as the best source of information for any science-based decision.
Separating crowdsourcing from the peer review process, as this legislation intends, means that there will be no formal filters in place to ensure that open data will not be abused by special interests. Ellen Silbergeld, a professor at John Hopkins University who testified at the hearing this week, made exactly this point when she pointed to data manipulation commonly practiced by tobacco lobbyists in the United States.
Contributing to scientific research is one goal of crowdsourcing for science. Involving the public in scientific research also increases volunteer understanding of research topics and the scientific process and inspires heightened community engagement. These goals are supported by President Obama’s Second Open Government National Action Plan, which calls for “increased crowdsourcing and citizen science programs” to support “an informed and active citizenry.” But H.R. 4012 does not support these goals. Rather, this legislation could further degrade the public’s understanding of science by encouraging the public to distrust professional scientists rather than collaborate with them.
Crowdsourcing benefits organizations by bringing in the unique expertise held by external volunteers, which can augment and enhance the traditional scientific process. In return, these volunteers benefit from exposure to new and exciting processes, such as scientific research. This mutually beneficial relationship depends on collaboration, not opposition. Supporting an antagonistic relationship between science-based organizations like the EPA and members of “the crowd” will benefit neither institutions, nor volunteers, nor the country as a whole.“