Brooks Rainwater at Co-Exist: “As with a range of leading issues, cities are at the vanguard of this shifting environment. Through increased measurement, analysis, and engagement, open data will further solidify the centrality of cities.
In the Chicago, the voice of the mayor counts for a lot. And Mayor Emmanuel has been at the forefront in supporting and encouraging open data in the city, resulting in a strong open government community. The city has more than 600 datasets online, and has seen millions of page views on its data portal. The public benefits have accrued widely with civic initiatives like Chicagolobbyists.org, as well as with a myriad of other open data led endeavors.
Transparency is one of the great promises of open data. Petitioning the government is a fundamental tenet of democracy and many government relations’ professionals perform this task brilliantly. At the same time that transparency is good for the city, it’s good for citizens and democracy. Through the advent of Chicagolobbyists.org, anyone can now see how many lobbyists are in the city, how much they are spending, who they are talking to, and when it is happening.
Throughout the country, we are seeing data driven sites and apps like this that engage citizens, enhance services, and provide a rich understanding of government operations In Austin, a grassroots movement has formed with advocacy organization Open Austin. Through hackathons and other opportunities, citizens are getting involved, services are improving, and businesses are being built.
Data can even find your dog, reducing the number of stray animals being sheltered, with StrayMapper.com. The site has a simple map-based web portal where you can type in whether you are missing a dog or cat, when you lost them, and where. That information is then plugged into the data being collected by the city on stray animals. This project, developed by a Code for America brigade team, helps the city improve its rate of returning pets to owners.
It’s not only animals that get lost or at least can’t find the best way home. I’ve found myself in that situation too. Thanks to Ridescout, incubated in Washington, D.C., at 1776, I have been able to easily find the best way home. Through the use of open data available from both cities and the Department of Transportation, Ridescout created an app that is an intuitive mobility tool. By showing me all of the available options from transit to ridesharing to my own two feet, it frequently helps me get from place to place in the city. It looks like it wasn’t just me that found this app to be handy; Daimler recently acquired Ridescout as the auto giant continues its own expansion into the data driven mobility space.”
Mapping the Nation: Building a More Resilient Future
New book from Esri: “The fifth book in Esri’s Mapping the Nation series, Mapping the Nation: Building a More Resilient Future is a collection of geographic information system (GIS) maps that illustrate how federal government agencies rely on GIS analysis to build stronger, more resilient communities and help make the world a better place.
The print version of the book includes 118 full-color maps produced by more than 50 federal government agencies, including the US Forest Service, US Department of Defense, US Department of Education, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The digital version of Mapping the Nation offers enhanced and interactive maps and videos showcasing four start-up companies that are using ArcGIS technology in partnership with Esri and the government.
The maps depict how federal employees and officials use GIS to evaluate, plan, and respond to social, economic, and environmental concerns at local, regional, national, and global levels. Topics such as green government, economic recovery and sustainability, and climate protection show how government agencies use GIS to facilitate initiatives, improve transparency, and deliver strong business models…
Mapping and Apping the Nation 2015, an interactive digital adaptation of the printed map book, is available free of charge from the Esri Books app on Apple iTunes and the Google Play store.”
Doing Social Network Research: Network-based Research Design for Social Scientists
New book by Garry Robins: “Are you struggling to design your social network research? Are you looking for a book that covers more than social network analysis? If so, this is the book for you! With straight-forward guidance on research design and data collection, as well as social network analysis, this book takes you start to finish through the whole process of doing network research. Open the book and you’ll find practical, ‘how to’ advice and worked examples relevant to PhD students and researchers from across the social and behavioural sciences. The book covers:
- Fundamental network concepts and theories
- Research questions and study design
- Social systems and data structures
- Network observation and measurement
- Methods for data collection
- Ethical issues for social network research
- Network visualization
- Methods for social network analysis
- Drawing conclusions from social network results
This is a perfect guide for all students and researchers looking to do empirical social network research…(More)”
Nudging and Choice Architecture: Ethical Considerations
New paper by Cass Sunstein at Yale Journal on Regulation (via SSRN): “Is nudging unethical? Is choice architecture a problem for a free society? This essay defends seven propositions: (1) It is pointless to object to choice architecture or nudging as such. Choice architecture cannot be avoided. Nature itself nudges; so does the weather; so do customs and traditions; so do spontaneous orders and invisible hands. The private sector inevitably nudges, as does the government. It is reasonable to worry about nudges by government and to object to particular nudges, but not to nudging in general. (2) In this context, ethical abstractions (for example, about autonomy, dignity, manipulation, and democratic self-government) can create serious confusion. To make progress, those abstractions must be brought into contact with concrete practices. Nudging and choice architecture take highly diverse forms, and the force of an ethical objection depends on the specific form. (3) If welfare is our guide, much nudging is actually required on ethical grounds, even if it comes from government. (4) If autonomy is our guide, much nudging is also required on ethical grounds, in part because some nudges actually promote autonomy, in part because some nudges enable people to devote their limited time and attention to their most important concerns. (5) Choice architecture should not, and need not, compromise either dignity or self-government, but it is important to see that imaginable forms could do both. It follows that when they come from government, choice architecture and nudges should not be immune from a burden of justification, which they might not be able to overcome. (6) Some nudges are objectionable because the choice architect has illicit ends. When the ends are legitimate, and when nudges are fully transparent and subject to public scrutiny, a convincing ethical objection is less likely to be available. (7) There is ample room for ethical objections in the case of well-motivated but manipulative interventions, certainly if people have not consented to them; such nudges can undermine autonomy and dignity. It follows that both the concept and the practice of manipulation deserve careful attention. The concept of manipulation has a core and a periphery; some interventions fit within the core, others within the periphery, and others outside of both….(More)”
The downside of Open Data
Joshua Chambers at FutureGov: “…Inaccurate public datasets can cause big problems, because apps that feed off of them could be giving out false information. I was struck by this when we reported on an app in Australia that was issuing alerts for forest fires that didn’t exist. The data was coming from public emergency calls, but wasn’t verified before being displayed. This meant that app users would be alerted of all possible fires, but also could be caused unnecessarily panic. The government takes the view that more alerts are better than slower verified ones, but there is the potential for people to become less likely to trust all alerts on the app.
No-one wants to publish inaccurate data, but accuracy takes time and costs money. So we come to a central tension in discussions about open data: is it better to publish more data, with the risk of inaccuracy, or limit publication to datasets which are accurate?
The United Kingdom takes the view that more data is best. I interviewed the UK’s lead official on open data, Paul Maltby, a couple of years ago, and he told me that: “There’s a misnomer here that everything has to be perfect before you can put it out,” adding that “what we’re finding is that, actually, some of the datasets are a bit messy. We try to keep them as high-quality as we can; but other organisations then clean up the data and sell it on”.
Indeed, he noted that some officials use data accuracy as an excuse to not publish information that could hold their departments to account. “There’s sometimes a reluctance to get data out from the civil service; and whilst we see many examples of people understanding the reasons why data has been put to use, I’d say the general default is still not pro-release”.
Other countries take a different view, however. Singapore, for example, publishes much less data than Britain, but has more of a push on making its data accurate to assist startups and app builders….(More)”
Social Sensing and Crowdsourcing: the future of connected sensors
Conference Paper by C. Geijer, M. Larsson, M. Stigelid: “Social sensing is becoming an alternative to static sensors. It is a way to crowdsource data collection where sensors can be placed on frequently used objects, such as mobile phones or cars, to gather important information. Increasing availability in technology, such as cheap sensors being added in cell phones, creates an opportunity to build bigger sensor networks that are capable of collecting a larger quantity and more complex data. The purpose of this paper is to highlight problems in the field, as well as their solutions. The focus lies on the use of physical sensors and not on the use of social media to collect data. Research papers were reviewed based on implemented or suggested implementations of social sensing. The discovered problems are contrasted with possible solutions, and used to reflect upon the future of the field. We found issues such as privacy, noise and trustworthiness to be problems when using a distributed network of sensors. Furthermore, we discovered models for determining the accuracy as well as truthfulness of gathered data that can effectively combat these problems. The topic of privacy remains an open-ended problem, since it is based upon ethical considerations that may differ from person to person, but there exists methods for addressing this as well. The reviewed research suggests that social sensing will become more and more useful in the future….(More).”
The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?
Jill Lepore in The New Yorker: “….The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. ….Web pages don’t have to be deliberately deleted to disappear. Sites hosted by corporations tend to die with their hosts. When MySpace, GeoCities, and Friendster were reconfigured or sold, millions of accounts vanished. …
The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,” and it’s more pernicious than an error message, because it’s impossible to tell that what you’re seeing isn’t what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand.
The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?… (More)”.
New Journal: Citizen Science: Theory and Practice
“Citizen Science: Theory and Practice is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by Ubiquity Press on behalf of the Citizen Science Association. It focuses on advancing the field of citizen science by providing a venue for citizen science researchers and practitioners – scientists, information technologists, conservation biologists, community health organizers, educators, evaluators, urban planners, and more – to share best practices in conceiving, developing, implementing, evaluating, and sustaining projects that facilitate public participation in scientific endeavors in any discipline.”
Would Athenian-style democracy work in the UK today?
Paul Cartledge at the BBC, in the context of BBC Democracy Day: “…The -kratia component of demo-kratia was derived from kratos, which meant unambiguously and unambivalently power or strength. Demos, the other component, meant “people” – but which people, precisely?
At one extreme it could be taken to mean all the people – that is, all the politically empowered people, the adult male citizenry as a whole. At the other ideological pole, it referred to only a section of the citizen people, the largest, namely the majority of poor citizens – those who had to work for a living and might be in greater or less penury.
Against these masses were counterposed the elite citizens – the (more or less) wealthy Few. For them, and it may well have been they who coined the word demokratia, the demos in the class sense meant the great unwashed, the stupid, ignorant, uneducated majority.
So, depending where you stood on the social spectrum, demokratia was either Abe Lincoln’s government of, by and for the people, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. This complicates, at least, any thought-experiment such as the one I’m about to conduct here.
However, what really stands in the way is a more symbolic than pragmatic objection – education, education, education.
For all that we have a formal and universally compulsory educational system, we are not educated either formally or informally to be citizens in the strong, active and participatory senses. The ancient Athenians lacked any sort of formal educational system whatsoever – though somehow or other most of them learned to read and write and count.
On the other hand, what they did possess in spades was an abundance of communal institutions, both formal and informal, both peaceful and warlike, both sacred and secular, whereby ideas of democratic citizenship could be disseminated, inculcated, internalised, and above all practised universally.
Annual, monthly and daily religious festivals. Annual drama festivals that were also themselves religious. Multiple experiences of direct participation in politics at both the local (village, parish, ward) and the “national” levels. And fighting as and for the Athenians both on land and at sea, against enemies both Greek and non-Greek (especially Persian).
Formal Athenian democratic politics, moreover, drew no such modern distinctions between the executive, legislative and judicial branches or functions of government as are enshrined in modern democratic constitutions. One ruled, as a democratic citizen, in all relevant branches equally. A trial for alleged impiety was properly speaking a political trial, as Socrates discovered to his cost.
In short, ancient Athenian democracy was very far from our liberal democracy. I don’t think I need to bang on about its conscientious exclusion of the female half of the citizenry, or its basis in a radical form of dehumanised personal slavery.
So why should we even think of wanting to apply any lesson or precedent drawn from it to our democracy today or in the future? One very good reason is the so-called “democratic deficit”, the attenuation or etiolation of what it means to be, or function fully as, a democratic citizen….(More)”
New Evidence that Citizen Engagement Increases Tax Revenues
Tiago Peixoto at DemocracySpot: “…A new working paper published by Diether Beuermann and Maria Amelina present the results of a randomized experiment in Russia, described in the abstract below:
This paper provides the first experimental evaluation of the participatory budgeting model showing that it increased public participation in the process of public decision making, increased local tax revenues collection, channeled larger fractions of public budgets to services stated as top priorities by citizens, and increased satisfaction levels with public services. These effects, however, were found only when the model was implemented in already-mature administratively and politically decentralized local governments. The findings highlight the importance of initial conditions with respect to the decentralization context for the success of participatory governance.
In my opinion, this paper is important for a number of reasons, some of which are worth highlighting here. First, it adds substantive support to the evidence on the positive relationship between citizen engagement and tax revenues. Second, in contrast to studies suggesting that participatory innovations are most likely to work when they are “organic”, or “bottom-up”, this paper shows how external actors can induce the implementation of successful participatory experiences. Third, I could not help but notice that two commonplace explanations for the success of citizen engagement initiatives, “strong civil society” and “political will”, do not feature in the study as prominent success factors. Last, but not least, the paper draws attention to how institutional settings matter (i.e. decentralization). Here, the jack-of-all-trades (yet not very useful) “context matters”, could easily be replaced by “institutions matter”….(More). You can read the full paper here [PDF].”