Big Data Quality: a Roadmap for Open Data


Paper by Paolo Ciancarini, Francesco Poggi and Daniel Russo: “Open Data (OD) is one of the most discussed issue of Big Data which raised the joint interest of public institutions, citizens and private companies since 2009. In addition to transparency in public administrations, another key objective of these initiatives is to allow the development of innovative services for solving real world problems, creating value in some positive and constructive way. However, the massive amount of freely available data has not yet brought the expected effects: as of today, there is no application that has exploited the potential provided by large and distributed information sources in a non-trivial way, nor any service has substantially changed for the better the lives of people. The era of a new generation applications based on open data is far to come. In this context, we observe that OD quality is one of the major threats to achieving the goals of the OD movement. The starting point of this study is the quality of the OD released by the five Constitutional offices of Italy. W3C standards about OD are widely known accepted in Italy by the Italian Digital Agency (AgID). According to the most recent Italian Laws the Public Administration may release OD according to the AgID standards. Our exploratory study aims to assess the quality of such releases and the real implementations of OD. The outcome suggests the need of a drastic improvement in OD quality. Finally we highlight some key quality principles for OD, and propose a roadmap for further research….(more)”

The Perils of Experimentation


Paper by Michael A. Livermore: “More than eighty years after Justice Brandeis coined the phrase “laboratories of democracy,” the concept of policy experimentation retains its currency as a leading justification for decentralized governance. This Article examines the downsides of experimentation, and in particular the potential for decentralization to lead to the production of information that exacerbates public choice failures. Standard accounts of experimentation and policy learning focus on information concerning the social welfare effects of alternative policies. But learning can also occur along a political dimension as information about ideological preferences, campaign techniques, and electoral incentives is revealed. Both types of information can be put to use in the policy arena by a host of individual and institutional actors that have a wide range of motives, from public-spirited concern for the general welfare to a desire to maximize personal financial returns. In this complex environment, there is no guarantee that the information that is generated by experimentation will lead to social benefits. This Article applies this insight to prior models of federalism developed in the legal and political science literature to show that decentralization can lead to the over-production of socially harmful information. As a consequence, policy makers undertaking a decentralization calculation should seek a level of decentralization that best balances the costs and benefits of information production. To illustrate the legal and policy implications of the arguments developed here, this Article examines two contemporary environmental rulemakings of substantial political, legal, and economic significance: a rule to define the jurisdictional reach of the Clean Water Act; and a rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity generating sector….(More)”.

 

Why Didn’t E-Gov Live Up To Its Promise?


Excerpt from the report Delivering on Digital: The Innovators and Technologies that are Transforming Government” by William Eggers: “Digital is becoming the new normal. Digital technologies have quietly and quickly pervaded every facet of our daily lives, transforming how we eat, shop, work, play and think.

An aging population, millennials assuming managerial positions, budget shortfalls and ballooning entitlement spending all will significantly impact the way government delivers services in the coming decade, but no single factor will alter citizens’ experience of government more than the pure power of digital technologies.

Ultimately, digital transformation means reimagining virtually every facet of what government does, from headquarters to the field, from health and human services to transportation and defense.

By now, some of you readers with long memories can’t be blamed for feeling a sense of déjà vu.

After all, technology was supposed to transform government 15 years ago; an “era of electronic government” was poised to make government faster, smaller, digitized and increasingly transparent.

Many analysts (including yours truly, in a book called “Government 2.0”) predicted that by 2016, digital government would already long be a reality. In practice, the “e-gov revolution” has been an exceedingly slow-moving one. Sure, technology has improved some processes, and scores of public services have moved online, but the public sector has hardly been transformed.

What initial e-gov efforts managed was to construct pretty storefronts—in the form of websites—as the entrance to government systems stubbornly built for the industrial age. Few fundamental changes altered the structures, systems and processes of government behind those websites.

With such halfhearted implementation, the promise of cost savings from information technology failed to materialize, instead disappearing into the black hole of individual agency and division budgets. Government websites mirrored departments’ short-term orientation rather than citizens’ long-term needs. In short, government became wired—but not transformed.

So why did the reality of e-gov fail to live up to the promise?

For one thing, we weren’t yet living in a digitized economy—our homes, cars and workplaces were still mostly analog—and the technology wasn’t as far along as we thought; without the innovations of cloud computing and open-source software, for instance, the process of upgrading giant, decades-old legacy systems proved costly, time-consuming and incredibly complex.

And not surprisingly, most governments—and private firms, for that matter—lacked deep expertise in managing digital services. What we now call “agile development”—an iterative development model that allows for constant evolution through recurrent testing and evaluation—was not yet mainstreamed.

Finally, most governments explicitly decided to focus first on the Hollywood storefront and postpone the bigger and tougher issues of reengineering underlying processes and systems. When budgets nosedived—even before the recession—staying solvent and providing basic services took precedence over digital transformation.

The result: Agencies automated some processes but failed to transform them; services were put online, but rarely were they focused logically and intelligently around the citizen.

Given this history, it’s natural to be skeptical after years of hype about government’s amazing digital future. But conditions on the ground (and in the cloud) are finally in place for change, and citizens are not only ready for digital government—many are demanding it.

Digital-native millennials are now consumers of public services, and millions of them work in and around government; they won’t tolerate balky and poorly designed systems, and they’ll let the world know through social media. Gen Xers and baby boomers, too, have become far more savvy consumers of digital products and services….(More)”

Soon Your City Will Know Everything About You


Currently, the biggest users of these sensor arrays are in cities, where city governments use them to collect large amounts of policy-relevant data. In Los Angeles, the crowdsourced traffic and navigation app Waze collects data that helps residents navigate the city’s choked highway networks. In Chicago, an ambitious program makes public data available to startups eager to build apps for residents. The city’s 49th ward has been experimenting with participatory budgeting and online votingto take the pulse of the community on policy issues. Chicago has also been developing the “Array of Things,” a network of sensors that track, among other things, the urban conditions that affect bronchitis.

Edmonton uses the cloud to track the condition of playground equipment. And a growing number of countries have purpose-built smart cities, like South Korea’s high tech utopia city of Songdo, where pervasive sensor networks and ubiquitous computing generate immense amounts of civic data for public services.

The drive for smart cities isn’t restricted to the developed world. Rio de Janeiro coordinates the information flows of 30 different city agencies. In Beijing and Da Nang (Vietnam), mobile phone data is actively tracked in the name of real-time traffic management. Urban sensor networks, in other words, are also developing in countries with few legal protections governing the usage of data.

These services are promising and useful. But you don’t have to look far to see why the Internet of Things has serious privacy implications. Public data is used for “predictive policing” in at least 75 cities across the U.S., including New York City, where critics maintain that using social media or traffic data to help officers evaluate probable cause is a form of digital stop-and-frisk. In Los Angeles, the security firm Palantir scoops up publicly generated data on car movements, merges it with license plate information collected by the city’s traffic cameras, and sells analytics back to the city so that police officers can decide whether or not to search a car. In Chicago, concern is growing about discriminatory profiling because so much information is collected and managed by the police department — an agency with a poor reputation for handling data in consistent and sensitive ways. In 2015, video surveillance of the police shooting Laquan McDonald outside a Burger King was erased by a police employee who ironically did not know his activities were being digitally recorded by cameras inside the restaurant.

Since most national governments have bungled privacy policy, cities — which have a reputation for being better with administrative innovations — will need to fill this gap. A few countries, such as Canada and the U.K., have independent “privacy commissioners” who are responsible for advocating for the public when bureaucracies must decide how to use or give out data. It is pretty clear that cities need such advocates too.

What would Urban Privacy Commissioners do? They would teach the public — and other government staff — about how policy algorithms work. They would evaluate the political context in which city agencies make big data investments. They would help a city negotiate contracts that protect residents’ privacy while providing effective analysis to policy makers and ensuring that open data is consistently serving the public good….(more)”.

The Values of Public Library in Promoting an Open Government Environment


Djoko Sigit Sayogo et al in the Proceedings of the 17th International Digital Government Research Conference on Digital Government Research: “Public participation has been less than ideal in many government-implemented ICT initiatives. Extant studies highlight the importance of public libraries as an intermediary between citizens and government. This study evaluates the role of public libraries as mediating the relationship between citizens and government in support of an open government environment. Using data from a national survey of “Library and Technology Use” conducted by PEW Internet in 2015, we test whether a citizen’s perception of public values provided by public libraries influence the likelihood of the citizen’s engagement within open-government environment contexts. The results signify a significant relationship between certain public values provided by public libraries with the propensity of citizens engaging government in an online environment. Our findings further indicate that varying public values generate different results in regard to the way citizens are stimulated to use public libraries to engage with government online. These findings imply that programs designed and developed to take into account a variety of values are more likely to effectively induce citizen engagement in an open government environment through the mediation of public libraries….(More)”

Big Crisis Data: Social Media in Disasters and Time-Critical Situations


Book by Carlos Castillo: “Social media is an invaluable source of time-critical information during a crisis. However, emergency response and humanitarian relief organizations that would like to use this information struggle with an avalanche of social media messages that exceeds human capacity to process. Emergency managers, decision makers, and affected communities can make sense of social media through a combination of machine computation and human compassion – expressed by thousands of digital volunteers who publish, process, and summarize potentially life-saving information. This book brings together computational methods from many disciplines: natural language processing, semantic technologies, data mining, machine learning, network analysis, human-computer interaction, and information visualization, focusing on methods that are commonly used for processing social media messages under time-critical constraints, and offering more than 500 references to in-depth information…(More)”

Enhancing Public Innovation by Transforming Public Governance


Book edited by Jacob Torfing and Peter Triantafillou: “Rising and changing citizen expectations, dire fiscal constraints, unfulfilled political aspirations, high professional ambitions, and a growing number of stubborn societal problems have generated an increasing demand for innovation of public policies and services. Drawing on the latest research, this book examines how current systems of public governance can be transformed in order to enhance public innovation. It scrutinizes the need for new roles and public sector reforms, and analyzes how the gradual transition towards New Public Governance can stimulate the exploration and exploitation of new and bold ideas in the public sector. It argues that the key to public innovation lies in combining and balancing elements from Classic Public Administration, New Public Management and New Public Governance, and theorizes how it can be enhanced by multi-actor collaboration for the benefit of public officials, private stakeholders, citizens, and society at large.

  • Examines the relationship between different styles of public governance and public innovation
  • Provides case studies and evidence-based mappings of the innovation outputs of concrete public projects, initiatives and steering mechanisms
  • Analyses the specific role of key actor groups in and around the public sector for spurring public innovation
  • Explores the diversity of public innovation in different countries around the world…(More)”

What Algorithmic Injustice Looks Like in Real Life


Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu & Lauren Kirchner at Pacific Standard: “Courtrooms across the nation are using computer programs to predict who will be a future criminal. The programs help inform decisions on everything from bail to sentencing. They are meant to make the criminal justice system fairer — and to weed out human biases.

ProPublica tested one such program and found that it’s often wrong — and biased against blacks.

We looked at the risk scores the program spit out for more than 7,000 people arrested in Broward County, Florida, in 2013 and 2014. We checked to see how many defendants were charged with new crimes over the next two years — the same benchmark used by the creators of the algorithm. Our analysis showed:

  • The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants.
  • White defendants were mislabeled as low risk more often than black defendants.

What does that look like in real life? Here are five comparisons of defendants — one black and one white — who were charged with similar offenses but got very different scores.

Two Shoplifting Arrests

James Rivelli, 53: In August 2014, Rivelli allegedly shoplifted seven boxes of Crest Whitestrips from a CVS. An employee called the police. When the cops found Rivelli and pulled him over, they found the Whitestrips as well as heroin and drug paraphernalia in his car. He was charged with two felony counts and four misdemeanors for grand theft, drug possession, and driving with a suspended license and expired tags.

Past offenses: He had been charged with felony aggravated assault for domestic violence in 1996, felony grand theft also in 1996, and a misdemeanor theft in 1998. He also says that he was incarcerated in Massachusetts for felony drug trafficking.

COMPAS score: 3 — low

Subsequent offense: In April 2015, he was charged with two felony counts of grand theft in the 3rd degree for shoplifting about $1,000 worth of tools from a Home Depot.

He says: Rivelli says his crimes were fueled by drug use and he is now sober. “I’m surprised [my risk score] is so low,” Rivelli said in an interview in his mother’s apartment in April. “I spent five years in state prison in Massachusetts.”…(More)

While governments talk about smart cities, it’s citizens who create them


Carlo Ratti at the Conversation: “The Australian government recently released an ambitious Smart Cities Plan, which suggests that cities should be first and foremost for people:

If our cities are to continue to meet their residents’ needs, it is essential for people to engage and participate in planning and policy decisions that have an impact on their lives.

Such statements are a good starting point – and should probably become central to Australia’s implementation efforts. A lot of knowledge has been collected over the past decade from successful and failed smart cities experiments all over the world; reflecting on them could provide useful information for the Australian government as it launches its national plan.

What is a smart city?

But, before embarking on such review, it would help to start from a definition of “smart city”.

The term has been used and abused in recent years, so much so that today it has lost meaning. It is often used to encompass disparate applications: we hear people talk and write about “smart city” when they refer to anything from citizen engagement to Zipcar, from open data to Airbnb, from smart biking to broadband.

Where to start with a definition? It is a truism to say the internet has transformed our lives over the past 20 years. Everything in the way we work, meet, mate and so on is very different today than it was just a few decades ago, thanks to a network of connectivity that now encompasses most people on the planet.

In a similar way, we are today at the beginning of a new technological revolution: the internet is entering physical space – the very space of our cities – and is becoming the Internet of Things; it is opening the door to a new world of applications that, as with the first wave of the internet, can incorporate many domains….

What should governments do?

In the above technological context, what should governments do? Over the past few years, the first wave of smart city applications followed technological excitement.

For instance, some of Korea’s early experiments such as Songdo City were engineered by the likes of Cisco, with technology deployment assisted by top-down policy directives.

In a similar way, in 2010, Rio de Janeiro launched the Integrated Centre of Command and Control, engineered by IBM. It’s a large control room for the city, which collects real-time information from cameras and myriad sensors suffused in the urban fabric.

Such approaches revealed many shortcomings, most notably the lack of civic engagement. It is as if they thought of the city simply as a “computer in open air”. These approaches led to several backlashes in the research and academic community.

A more interesting lesson can come from the US, where the focus is more on developing a rich Internet of Things innovation ecosystem. There are many initiatives fostering spaces – digital and physical – for people to come together and collaborate on urban and civic innovations….

That isn’t to say that governments should take a completely hands-off approach to urban development. Governments certainly have an important role to play. This includes supporting academic research and promoting applications in fields that might be less appealing to venture capital – unglamorous but nonetheless crucial domains such as municipal waste or water services.

The public sector can also promote the use of open platforms and standards in such projects, which would speed up adoption in cities worldwide.

Still, the overarching goal should always be to focus on citizens. They are in the best position to determine how to transform their cities and to make decisions that will have – as the Australian Smart Cities Plan puts it – “an impact on their lives”….(more)”

Combatting Police Discrimination in the Age of Big Data


Paper by Sharad Goel, Maya Perelman, Ravi Shroff and David Alan Sklansky: “The exponential growth of available information about routine police activities offers new opportunities to improve the fairness and effectiveness of police practices. We illustrate the point by showing how a particular kind of calculation made possible by modern, large-scale datasets — determining the likelihood that stopping and frisking a particular pedestrian will result in the discovery of contraband or other evidence of criminal activity — could be used to reduce the racially disparate impact of pedestrian searches and to increase their effectiveness. For tools of this kind to achieve their full potential in improving policing, though, the legal system will need to adapt. One important change would be to understand police tactics such as investigatory stops of pedestrians or motorists as programs, not as isolated occurrences. Beyond that, the judiciary will need to grow more comfortable with statistical proof of discriminatory policing, and the police will need to be more receptive to the assistance that algorithms can provide in reducing bias….(More)”