Stefaan Verhulst
“It’s a common lament: Though the Internet provides us access to a nearly unlimited number of sources for news, most of us rarely venture beyond the same few sources or topics. And as news consumption shifts to our phones, people are using even fewer sources: On average, consumers access 1.52 trusted news sources on their phones, according to the 2015 Reuters Digital News Report, which studied news consumption across several countries.
To try and diversify people’s perspectives on the news, Jigsaw — the techincubator, formerly known as Google Ideas, that’s run by Google’s parentcompany Alphabet — this week launched Unfiltered.News, an experimentalsite that uses Google News data to show users what topics are beingunderreported or are popular in regions around the world.
Unfiltered.News’ main data visualization shows which topics are most reported in countries around the world. A column on the right side of the page highlights stories that are being reported widely elsewhere in the world, but aren’t in the top 100 stories on Google News in the selected country. In the United States yesterday, five of the top 10 underreported topics, unsurprisingly, dealt with soccer. In China, Barack Obama was the most undercovered topic….(More)”
Jay Nath and Jeremy M. Goldberg at the Aspen Journal of Ideas: “In 2014, an amazing thing happened in government: In just 16 weeks, a new system to help guide visually impaired travelers through San Francisco International Airport was developed, going from a rough idea to ready-to-go-status, through a city program that brings startups and agencies together. Yet two and half years later, a request for proposals to expand this ground-breaking, innovative technology is yet to be finalized.
For people in government, that’s an all-too-familiar scenario. While procurement serves an important role in ensuring that government is a responsible steward of taxpayer dollars, there’s tremendous opportunity to improve the way the public sector has traditionally bought goods and services. And the stakes are higher than simply dealing with red tape. By limiting the pool of partners to those who know how to work the system, taxpayers are missing out on low-cost, innovative solutions. Essentially, RFPs are a Do Not Enter sign for startups — the engine of innovation across nearly every industry except the public sector.
In San Francisco, under our Startup In Residence program, we’re experimenting with how to remove the friction associated with RFPs for both government staff and startups. For government staff, that means publishing an RFP in days, not months. For startups, it means responding to an RFP in hours not weeks.
So what did we learn from our experience with the airport? We combined 17 RFPs into one; utilized general “challenge statements” in place of highly detailed project specifications; leveraged modern technology; and created a simple guide to navigating the process. Here’s a look at how each of those innovations works:
The RFP bus: Today, most RFPs are like a single driver in a car — inefficient and resource-intensive. We should be looking at what might be thought of as mass-transit option, like a bus. By combining a number of RFPs for projects that have characteristics in common into a single procurement vehicle, we can spread the process costs over a number of RFPs.
Challenges, not prescriptions: Under the traditional procurement process, city staffers develop highly prescribed requirements that are often dozens of pages long, a practice that tends to favor existing approaches and established vendors. Shifting to brief challenge statements opens the door for residents, small businesses and entrepreneurs with new ideas. And it reduces the time required by government staff to develop an RFP from weeks or months to days.
Bourree Lam in The Atlantic: “…As more and more people are shopping online, calculating this index has gotten more difficult, because there haven’t been any great ways of recording prices from the sites disparate retailers.Data shared by retailers and compiled by the technology firm Adobe might help close this gap. The company is perhaps known best for its visual software,including Photoshop, but the company has also become a provider of software and analytics for online retailers. Adobe is now aggregating the sales data that flows through their software for its Digital Price Index (DPI) project, an initiative that’s meant to answer some of the questions that have been dogging researcher snow that e-commerce is such a big part of the economy.
The project, which tracks billions of online transactions and the prices of over a million products, was developed with the help of the economists Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors and a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and Peter Klenow, a professor at Stanford University. “We’ve been excited to help them setup various measures of the digital economy, and of prices, and also to see what the Adobe data can teach us about some of the questions that everybody’s had about the CPI,” says Goolsbee. “People are asking questions like ‘How price sensitive is online commerce?’ ‘How much is it growing?’ ‘How substitutable is itf or non-electronic commerce?’ A lot issues you can address with this in a way that we haven’t really been able to do before.” These are some questions that the DPI has the potential to answer.
…While this new trove of data will certainly be helpful to economists and analysts looking at inflation, it surely won’t replace the CPI. Currently, the government sends out hundreds of BLS employees to stores around the country to collect price data. Online pricing is a small part of the BLS calculation, which is incorporated into its methodology as people increasingly report shopping from retailers online, but there’s a significant time lag. While it’s unlikely that the BLS would incorporate private sources of data into its inflation calculations, as e-commerce grows they might look to improve the way they include online prices.Still, economists are optimistic about the potential of Adobe’s DPI. “I don’t think we know the digital economy as well as we should,” says Klenow, “and this data can help us eventually nail that better.”…(More)
Adam Vaughan at The Guardian: They’ve been driven from Trafalgar square for being a nuisance, derided as rats with wings and maligned as a risk to public health.
But now pigeons could play a small part in helping Londoners overcome one of the capital’s biggest health problems – its illegal levels of air pollution blamed for thousands of deaths a year.
On Monday, a flock of half a dozen racing pigeons were set loose from a rooftop in Brick Lane by pigeon fancier, Brian Woodhouse, with one strapped with a pollution sensor to its back and one with a GPS tracker.
But while the 25g sensor records the nitrogen dioxide produced by the city’s diesel cars, buses, and trucks and tweets it at anyone who asks for a reading, its real purpose – and the use of the pigeons – is to raise awareness.
“It is a scandal. It is a health and environmental scandal for humans – and pigeons. We’re making the invisible visible,” said Pierre Duquesnoy, who won a London Design Festival award for the idea last year.
“Most of the time when we talk about pollution people think about Beijing or other places, but there are some days in the year when pollution was higher and more toxic in London than Beijing, that’s the reality.”
He said he was inspired by the use of pigeons in the first and second world wars to deliver information and save lives, but they were also a practical way of taking mobile air quality readings and beating London’s congested roads. They fly relatively low, at 100-150ft, and fast, at speeds up to 80mph.
“There’s something about taking what is seen as a flying rat and reversing that into something quite positive,” said Duquesnoy, who is creative director at marketing agency DigitasLBI.
Gary Fuller, an air quality expert at King’s College London, said it was the first time he had heard of urban animals being put to such use.
“It’s great that unemployed pigeons from Trafalgar Square are being put to work. Around 15 years ago tests were done on around 150 stray dogs in Mexico City, showing the ways in which air pollution was affecting lungs and heart health. But this is the first time that I’ve heard of urban wild animals being used to carry sensors to give us a picture of the air pollution over our heads.”
The release of the pigeons for three days this week, dubbed the Pigeon Air Patrol, came as moderate to high pollution affected much of the city, with Battersea recording ‘very high’, the top of the scale.
Elsewhere in the UK, Stockton-on-tees and Middlesbrough recorded high pollution readings and the forecast is for moderate and possibly high pollution in urban areas in northern England and Scotland on Tuesday. Other areas will have low pollution levels….(More).
Stephen Larrick at Sunlight: “The open government community has long envisioned a future where all public policy is collaboratively drafted online and in the open — a future in which we (the people) don’t just have a say in who writes and votes on the rules that govern our society, but are empowered in a substantive way to participate, annotating or even crafting those rules ourselves. If that future seems far away, it’s because we’ve seen few successful instances of this approach in the United States. But an increasing amount of open and collaborative online approaches to drafting legislation — a set of practices the NYU GovLab and others have called “crowdlaw” — seem to have found their niche in open data policy.
This trend has taken hold at the local level, where multiple cities have employed crowdlaw techniques to draft or revise the regulations which establish and govern open data initiatives. But what explains this trend and the apparent connection between crowdlaw and the proactive release of government information online? Is it simply that both are “open government” practices? Or is there something more fundamental at play here?…
Since 2012, several high-profile U.S. cities have utilized collaborative tools such as Google Docs,GitHub, and Madison to open up the process of open data policymaking. The below chronology of notable instances of open data policy drafted using crowdlaw techniques gives the distinct impression of a good idea spreading in American cities:….
While many cities may not be ready to take their hands off of the wheel and trust the public to help engage in meaningful decisions about public policy, it’s encouraging to see some giving it a try when it comes to open data policy. Even for cities still feeling skeptical, this approach can be applied internally; it allows other departments impacted by changes that come about through an open data policy to weigh in, too. Cities can open up varying degrees of the process, retaining as much autonomy as they feel comfortable with. In the end, utilizing the crowdlaw process with open data legislation can increase its effectiveness and accountability by engaging the public directly — a win-win for governments and their citizens alike….(More)”
Two new books on Participatory Budgeting:
Participatory Budgeting in Europe: Democracy and public governance by Yves Sintomer, Anja Röcke, and Carsten Herzberg: “Can participatory budgeting help make public services really work for the public? Incorporating a range of experiments in ten different countries, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of participatory budgeting in Europe and the effect it has had on democracy, the modernization of local government, social justice, gender mainstreaming and sustainable development. By focussing on the first decade of European participatory budgeting and analysing the results and the challenges affecting the agenda today it provides a critical appraisal of the participatory model. Detailed comparisons of European cases expose similarities and differences between political cultures and offer a strong empirical basis to discuss the theories of deliberative and participatory democracy and reveal contradictory tendencies between political systems, public administrations and democratic practices. (More)”
Participatory Budgeting in the United States: A Guide for Local Governments by Victoria Gordon, Jeffery L. Osgood, Jr., and Daniel Boden : “Although citizen engagement is a core public service value, few public administrators receive training on how to share leadership with people outside the government. Participatory Budgeting in the United States serves as a primer for those looking to understand a classic example of participatory governance, engaging local citizens in examining budgetary constraints and priorities before making recommendations to local government. Utilizing case studies and an original set of interviews with community members, elected officials, and city employees, this book provides a rare window onto the participatory budgeting process through the words and experiences of the very individuals involved. The central themes that emerge from these fascinating and detailed cases focus on three core areas: creating the participatory budgeting infrastructure; increasing citizen participation in participatory budgeting; and assessing and increasing the impact of participatory budgeting. This book provides students, local government elected officials, practitioners, and citizens with a comprehensive understanding of participatory budgeting and straightforward guidelines to enhance the process of civic engagement and democratic values in local communities….(More)
Book edited by Staci M. Zavattaro and Thomas A. Bryer: “Social media is playing a growing role within public administration, and with it, there is an increasing need to understand the connection between social media research and what actually takes place in government agencies. Most of the existing books on the topic are scholarly in nature, often leaving out the vital theory-practice connection. This book joins theory with practice within the public sector, and explains how the effectiveness of social media can be maximized. The chapters are written by leading practitioners and span topics like how to manage employee use of social media sites, how emergency managers reach the public during a crisis situation, applying public record management methods to social media efforts, how to create a social media brand, how social media can help meet government objectives such as transparency while juggling privacy laws, and much more. For each topic, a collection of practitioner insights regarding the best practices and tools they have discovered are included. Social Media for Government responds to calls within the overall public administration discipline to enhance the theory-practice connection, giving practitioners space to tell academics what is happening in the field in order to encourage further meaningful research into social media use within government….(More)
Paper by Mark Kleinman: “Developments in digital innovation and the availability of large-scale data sets create opportunities for new economic activities and new ways of delivering city services while raising concerns about privacy. This paper defines the terms Big Data, Open Data, Open Government, and Smart Cities and uses two case studies – London (U.K.) and Toronto – to examine questions about using data to drive economic growth, improve the accountability of government to citizens, and offer more digitally enabled services. The paper notes that London has been one of a handful of cities at the forefront of the Open Data movement and has been successful in developing its high-tech sector, although it has so far been less innovative in the use of “smart city” technology to improve services and lower costs. Toronto has also made efforts to harness data, although it is behind London in promoting Open Data. Moreover, although Toronto has many assets that could contribute to innovation and economic growth, including a growing high-technology sector, world-class universities and research base, and its role as a leading financial centre, it lacks a clear narrative about how these assets could be used to promote the city. The paper draws some general conclusions about the links between data innovation and economic growth, and between open data and open government, as well as ways to use big data and technological innovation to ensure greater efficiency in the provision of city services…(More)“
Martin Lundqvist and PeterBraad Olesen at McKinsey: “Government agencies around the world are under internal and external pressure to become more efficient by incorporating digital technologies and processes into their day-to-day operations. For a lot of public-sector organizations, however, the digital transformation has been bumpy. In many cases, agencies are trying to streamline and automate workflow and processes using antiquated systems-development approaches. Such methods make direct connections between citizens and governments over the Internet more difficult. They also prevent IT organizations from quickly adapting to ever-changing systems requirements or easily combining information from disparate systems. Despite the emergence, over the past decade, of a number of productivity-enhancing technologies, many government institutions continue to cling to old, familiar ways of developing new processes and systems. Nonetheless, a few have been able to change mind-sets internally, shed outdated approaches to improving processes and developing systems, and build new ones. Critically, they have embraced newer techniques, such as agile development, and succeeded in accelerating the digital transformation in core areas of their operations. The Danish Business Authority is one of those organizations.…(More)”
Springwise: “MyShake is an app that enables anyone to contribute to a worldwide seismic network and help people prepare for earthquakes.
The sheer number of smartphones on the planet make them excellent tools for collecting scientific data. We have already seen citizen scientists use their devices to help crowdsource big data about jellyfish and pollution.Now, MyShake is an Android app from Berkeley University, which enables anyone to contribute to a worldwide seismic network and help reduce the effects of earthquakes.
To begin, users download the app and enable it to run silently in the background of their smartphone. The app monitors for movement that fits the vibrational profile of an earthquake and sends anonymous information to a central system whenever relevant. The crowdsourced data enables the system to confirm an impending quake and estimate its origin time, location and magnitude. Then, the app can send warnings to those in the network who are likely to be affected by the earthquake. MyShake makes use of on the fact that the average smartphone can record earthquakes larger than magnitude five and within 10 km.
MyShake is free to download and the team hopes to launch an iPhone version in the future….(More)”