Article by Zuiderwijk , Anneke and Janssen , Marijn in Information Polity: “The disclosure of open government data is a complex activity that may create public value yet might also encounter risks, such as the misinterpretation and misuse of data. While politicians support data release and assume that the positive value of open data will dominate, many governmental organizations are reluctant to open their data, as they are afraid of the dark side. The objective of this paper is to provide a decision-making model that assists in trade-offs between the pros and cons of open data. Data disclosure is dependent on the type of data (e.g. its sensitivity, structure and quality) and the context (e.g. organizational policies, legislation and the political influences). Based on the literature and fifteen in-depth interviews with public sector officials and data archivists, this paper identifies contextual and dataset-related variables which influence a trade-off. A decision-making model is presented capturing trade-offs, and in this way providing guidance for weighing the creation of public value and the risks. The model can be used for decision-making to open or not to open data. It is likely that the decision regarding which data should be opened or closed will shift over time….(More)”
(US) Administration Announces New “Smart Cities” Initiative to Help Communities Tackle Local Challenges and Improve City Services
Factsheet from the White House: “Today, the Administration is announcing a new “Smart Cities” Initiative that will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage more than 25 new technology collaborations to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services. The new initiative is part of this Administration’s overall commitment to target federal resources to meet local needs and support community-led solutions.
Over the past six years, the Administration has pursued a place-based approach to working with communities as they tackle a wide range of challenges, from investing in infrastructure and filling open technology jobs to bolstering community policing. Advances in science and technology have the potential to accelerate these efforts. An emerging community of civic leaders, data scientists, technologists, and companies are joining forces to build “Smart Cities” – communities that are building an infrastructure to continuously improve the collection, aggregation, and use of data to improve the life of their residents – by harnessing the growing data revolution, low-cost sensors, and research collaborations, and doing so securely to protect safety and privacy.
As part of the initiative, the Administration is announcing:
- More than $35 million in new grants and over $10 million in proposed investments to build a research infrastructure for Smart Cities by the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology.
- Nearly $70 million in new spending and over $45 million in proposed investments to unlock new solutions in safety, energy, climate preparedness, transportation, health and more, by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
- More than 20 cities participating in major new multi-city collaborations that will help city leaders effectively collaborate with universities and industry.
Today, the Administration is also hosting a White House Smart Cities Forum, coinciding with Smart Cities Week hosted by the Smart Cities Council, to highlight new steps and brainstorm additional ways that science and technology can support municipal efforts.
The Administration’s Smart Cities Initiative will begin with a focus on key strategies:
- Creating test beds for “Internet of Things” applications and developing new multi-sector collaborative models: Technological advancements and the diminishing cost of IT infrastructure have created the potential for an “Internet of Things,” a ubiquitous network of connected devices, smart sensors, and big data analytics. The United States has the opportunity to be a global leader in this field, and cities represent strong potential test beds for development and deployment of Internet of Things applications. Successfully deploying these and other new approaches often depends on new regional collaborations among a diverse array of public and private actors, including industry, academia, and various public entities.
- Collaborating with the civic tech movement and forging intercity collaborations: There is a growing community of individuals, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits interested in harnessing IT to tackle local problems and work directly with city governments. These efforts can help cities leverage their data to develop new capabilities. Collaborations across communities are likewise indispensable for replicating what works in new places.
- Leveraging existing Federal activity: From research on sensor networks and cybersecurity to investments in broadband infrastructure and intelligent transportation systems, the Federal government has an existing portfolio of activities that can provide a strong foundation for a Smart Cities effort.
- Pursuing international collaboration: Fifty-four percent of the world’s population live in urban areas. Continued population growth and urbanization will add 2.5 billion people to the world’s urban population by 2050. The associated climate and resource challenges demand innovative approaches. Products and services associated with this market present a significant export opportunity for the U.S., since almost 90 percent of this increase will occur in Africa and Asia.
Complementing this effort, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is examining how a variety of technologies can enhance the future of cities and the quality of life for urban residents. The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program is also announcing the release of a new framework to help coordinate Federal agency investments and outside collaborations that will guide foundational research and accelerate the transition into scalable and replicable Smart City approaches. Finally, the Administration’s growing work in this area is reflected in the Science and Technology Priorities Memo, issued by the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Science and Technology Policy in preparation for the President’s 2017 budget proposal, which includes a focus on cyber-physical systems and Smart Cities….(More)”
Democratic Rulemaking
New paper by de Figueiredo, John M. and Stiglitz, Edward for the Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics, Forthcoming: “To what extent is agency rulemaking democratic? This paper examines the soundness and empirical support for the leading theories that purport to endow the administrative state with democratic legitimacy. We study the theories in light of two normative benchmarks: a “democratic” benchmark based on voter preferences, and a “republican” benchmark based on the preferences of elected representatives. We conclude that all of the proposed theories lack empirical support and many have substantial conceptual flaws; we point to directions for possible future research….(More)”
Community-based Participatory Science is Changing the Way Research Happens—and What Happens Next
Judy Robinson at The Equation: “…Whereas in the past the public seemed content to hear about scientific progress from lab-coat-clad researchers on private crusades to advance their field, now people want science to improve their lives directly. They want progress faster, and a more democratic, participatory role in deciding what needs to change and which research questions will fuel a movement for those changes….
Coming Clean is a network of community, state, national and technical organizations focused on environmental health and justice. Often we’ve been at the forefront of community-based participatory science efforts to support healthier environments, less toxic products, and a more just and equitable society: all issues that deeply matter to the non-expert public.
….For instance, with environmental justice advocacy organizations in the lead, residents of low-income, minority communities collected products at neighborhood dollar stores to see what unnecessary and dangerous chemical exposures could occur as a result of product purchases. In laboratory results we found over 80% of the products tested contained toxic chemicals at potentially hazardous levels (as documented in our report; “A Day Late and a Dollar Short”). That information, along with their organizing around it, has since attracted over 146,700 people to support the nationalCampaign for Healthier Solutions. That’s local science at work.
Documented in Coming Clean’s report; “Warning Signs: Toxic Pollution Identified at Oil and Gas Development Sites” and in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health, 38% of the samples collected by community volunteers contained concentrations of volatile compounds exceeding federal standards for health risks, some at levels thousands of times higher than what federal health and environmental agencies consider to be “safe.” Seven air samples from Wyoming contained hydrogen sulfide at levels between two and 660 times the concentration that is immediately dangerous to human life. Beyond the astonishing numbers, the research helped educate and engage the public on the problem and solutions communities seek, filled critical gaps in our understanding of the threat oil and gas development poses to public health, and was among the reasons cited in Governor Cuomo’s decision to ban fracking in New York State.
For Coming Clean and others across the country, this kind of community-based participatory science is changing the way science is conducted and, most importantly, what comes after the data collection and analysis is complete. In both the dollar store research and the oil and gas science, the effect of the science was to strengthen existing organizing campaigns for community-based solutions. The “good old days” when we waited for scientific proof to change the world are over, if they ever existed. Now science and citizen organizing together are changing the rules of the game, the outcome, and who gets to play….(More)”
Syria refugees tap in to legal advice by text
Hannah Kuchler in the Financial Times: “Syrian refugees can now access free legal advice by text message after a Palestinian start-up launched a service in Turkey, which it hopes to expand to reach refugees across Europe.
Refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria can receive legal guidance via their mobile phones on everything from whether they have the right to work to education services available for their children, after Souktel, a small start-up partnered with the American Bar Association.
The 30-person start-up employs both former humanitarian workers from Oxfam and USAID, who understand the problems faced by refugees, and software engineers who tackle the challenge of sorting, tagging and translating enquiries which are then sent to a team of Turkish lawyers.
Jacob Korenblum, president and chief executive of Souktel, said more than 10,000 individuals have used the service since it launched less than three weeks ago, with lawyers busy answering a steady stream of questions.
“Given the strength and rapid interest in this service and the uptake since its launch, we want to scale into Greece and other European countries to meet the same need,” he said. “This is very much becoming a pan-European problem at the very least.”…
The American Bar Association approached Souktel and asked them to build a service that could offer remote legal support and uses funds from international donors to pay the company….
Smartphones — or even basic mobile phones — have fast become one of the easiest ways of communicating for the poor or dispossessed. Even when basic infrastructure has failed, people are able to access information and connect with relatives abroad via their devices.
Mr Korenblum, a Canadian former aid worker, helped found Souktel after he saw young people in Palestine relying on their mobile devices when working there 10 years ago. The company has built similar services on behalf of humanitarian organisations working in other areas — including the UK’s department for international development in Gaza, Iraq and Somalia, among other places…(More)”
Civic Jazz in the New Maker Cities
Peter Hirshberg at Techonomy: “Our civic innovation movement is about 6 years old. It began when cities started opening up data to citizens, journalists, public-sector companies, non-profits, and government agencies. Open data is an invitation: it’s something to go to work on— both to innovate and to create a more transparent environment about what works and what doesn’t. I remember when we first opened data in SF and began holding conferences and hackathons. In short order we saw a community emerge with remarkable capacity to contribute to, tinker with, hack, explore and improve the city.
Early on this took the form of visualizing data, like crime patterns in Oakland. This was followed by engagement: “Look, the police are skating by and not enforcing prostitution laws. Lets call them on it!” Civic hackathons brought together journalists, software developers, hardware people, and urbanists. I recall when artists teamed with the Arup engineering firm to build noise sensors and deployed them in the Tenderloin neighborhood (with absolutely no permission from anybody). Noise was an issue. How could you understand the problem unless you measured it?
Something as wonky as an API invited people in, at which point a sense of civic possibility and wonder set in. Suddenly whole swaths of the city were working on the city. During the SF elections four years ago Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (which I chair) led a project with candidates, bureaucrats, and hundreds of volunteers for a summer-long set of hackathons and projects. We were stunned so many people would come together and collaborate so broadly. It was a movement, fueled by a sense of agency and informed by social media. Today cities are competing on innovation. It has become a movement.
All this has been accelerated by startups, incubators, and the economy’s whole open innovation conversation. Remarkably, we now see capital from flowing in to support urban and social ventures where we saw none just a few years ago. The accelerator Tumml in SF is a premier example, but there are similar efforts in many cities.
This initial civic innovation movement was focused on apps and data, a relatively easy place to start. With such an approach you’re not contending for real estate or creating something that might gentrify neighborhoods. Today this movement is at work on how we design the city itself. As millennials pour in and cities are where most of us live, enormous experimentation is at play. Ours is a highly interdisciplinary age, mixing new forms of software code and various physical materials, using all sorts of new manufacturing techniques.
Brooklyn is a great example. A few weeks ago I met with Bob Bland, CEO of Manufacture New York. This ambitious 160,000 square foot public/private partnership is reimagining the New York fashion business. In one place it co-locates contract manufacturers, emerging fashion brands and advanced fashion research. Think wearables, sensors, smart fabrics, and the application of advanced manufacturing to fashion. By bringing all these elements under one roof, the supply chain can be compressed, sped-up, and products made more innovative.
New York City’s Economic Development office envisions a local urban supply chain that can offer a scalable alternative to the giant extended global one. In fashion it makes more and more sense for brands to be located near their suppliers. Social media speeds up fashion cycles, so we’re moving beyond predictable seasons and looks specified ahead of time. Manufacturers want to place smaller orders more frequently, so they can take less inventory risk and keep current with trends.
When you put so much talent in one space, creativity flourishes. In fashion, unlike tech, there isn’t a lot of IP protection. So designers can riff off each other’s idea and incorporate influences as artists do. What might be called stealing ideas in the software business is seen in fashion as jazz and a way to create a more interesting work environment.
A few blocks away is the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a mammoth facility at the center of New York’s emerging maker economy. …In San Francisco this urban innovation movement is working on the form of the city itself. Our main boulevard, Market Street, is to be reimagined, repaved, and made greener with far fewer private vehicles over the next two years. Our planning department, in concert with art organizations here, has made citizen-led urban prototyping the centerpiece of the planning process….(More)”
ProPublica’s ‘Get Involved’ Aims to Spur More Crowd-Powered News
Amanda Zamora at ProPublica: “…As journalists, our role is to gather the news and report it as objectively and artfully as possible. But anyone watching knows our journalism isn’t limited to the pages we produce each day. Our readers are grateful for the work we do, but they want to know what can be done to make things better. They’re clamoring for action.
One way we facilitate action is by asking people to tell us what we don’t know. These “callouts” are a standing feature of Get Involved, which offers our readers the opportunity to share stories, and to connect with us and with each other. With more than 10,300 contributions since 2009, our callouts have become a growing resource for our reporters and the backbone of our community-building efforts. We hear regularly from people thanking us for simply taking an interest in them. People who want to get their stories out. People who want to see change.
Which leaves us asking ourselves: How can we do better by those who entrust their stories to us? How can we channel their passions and perspectives into meaningful action? And how can we connect readers not only to each other, but also to our colleagues in newsrooms across the country?
I’m excited to say these are questions we’ll be tackling over the next year with the support of Knight Foundation. One of our first areas of focus will be revamping Get Involved to better serve our partners in journalism. We’re not the only ones enlisting the help of audiences to tell important stories. The Guardian’s crowd-sourced police shootings project, The Counted, is just one recent example. There are many collaborative journalism efforts in the United States and around the world that we hope to both learn from and share with our community. We’ll be open-sourcing even more resources from our own investigations, but also facilitating outreach among fellow journalists using digital tools to tell stories with and for their communities.
We’re starting today with the creation of the Crowd-Powered News Network, a forum for journalists and others proactively engaging communities in storytelling to share ideas, practical support and best practices….(More)”
Public service coding: the BBC as an open software developer
Juan Mateos-Garcia at NESTA: “On Monday, the BBC published British, Bold, Creative, a paper where it put forward a vision for its future based on openness and collaboration with its audiences and the UK’s wider creative industries.
In this blog post, we focus on an area where the BBC is already using an open and collaborative model for innovation: software development.
The value of software
Although less visible to the public than its TV, radio and online content programming, the BBC’s software development activities may create value and drive innovation beyond the BBC, providing an example of how the corporation can put its “technology and digital capabilities at the service of the wider industry.”
Software is an important form of innovation investment that helps the BBC deliver new products and services, and become more efficient. One might expect that much of the software developed by the BBC would also be of value to other media and digital organisations. Such beneficial “spillovers” are encouraged by the BBC’s use of open source licensing, which enables other organisations to download its software for free, change it as they see fit, and share the results.
Current debates about the future of the BBC – including the questions about its role in influencing the future technology landscape in the Government’s Charter Review Consultation – need to be informed by robust evidence about how it develops software, and the impact that this has.
In this blog post, we use data from the world’s biggest collaborative software development platform, GitHub, to study the BBC as an open software developer.
GitHub gives organisations and individuals hosting space to store their projects (referred to as “repos”), and tools to coordinate development. This includes the option to “fork” (copy) other users’ software, change it and redistribute the improvements. Our key questions are:
- How active is the BBC on GitHub?
- How has its presence on GitHub changed over time?
- What is the level of adoption (forking) of BBC projects on GitHub?
- What types of open source projects is the BBC developing?
- Where in the UK and in the rest of the world are the people interested in BBC projects based?
But before tackling these questions, it is important to address a question often raised in relation to open source software:
Why might an organisation like the BBC want to share its valuable code on a platform like GitHub?
There are several possible reasons:
- Quality: Opening up a software project attracts help from other developers, making it better
- Adoption: Releasing software openly can help turn it into a widely adopted standard
- Signalling: It signals the organisation as an interesting place to work and partner with
- Public value: Some organisations release their code openly with the explicit goal of creating public value
The webpage introducing TAL (Television Application Layer), a BBC project on GitHub, is a case in point: “Sharing TAL should make building applications on TV easier for others, helping to drive the uptake of this nascent technology. The BBC has a history of doing this and we are always looking at new ways to reach our audience.”…(More)“
Three ways to reframe a problem to find an innovative solution
Stephanie Vozza at FastCompany: “Everything really comes down to solving problems. To be successful and a leader in your field, you not only have to come up with good solutions; you need to be innovative. And that can feel like waiting for lightning to strike.
Tina Seelig, author of Insight Out: Get Ideas Out of Your Head And Into the World, has been teaching classes on creativity and innovation at Stanford University School of Engineering for 16 years, and she says most people don’t have a clear understanding of what those things really are.
“Imagination is envisioning things that don’t exist,” says Seelig. “Creativity is applying imagination to address a challenge. Innovation is applying creativity to generate unique solutions. And entrepreneurship is applying innovations, scaling the ideas, by inspiring others’ imagination.”…Reframing a problem helps you see it as an opportunity, and Seelig offers three techniques for finding innovative solutions:
1. RETHINK THE QUESTION
Start by questioning the question you’re asking in the first place, says Seelig. “Your answer is baked into your question,” she says.
Before you start brainstorming, Seelig suggests you start “frame-storming”: brainstorming around the question you will pose to find solutions. For example, if you’re asking, “How should we plan a birthday party for David?” you’re assuming it’s a party. If you change your question to, “How can we make David’s day memorable?” or “How can we make David’s day special?” you will find different sets of solutions.
….
2. BRAINSTORM BAD IDEAS
When an individual or group is tasked with being creative, often there’s pressure to only come up with good ideas. Seelig likes to challenge teams to only think of bad ideas.
“Stupid or ridiculous ideas open up the frame by allowing you to push past obvious solutions,” she says. “There is no pressure to come up with ‘good’ ideas. Then, those terrible ideas can be re-evaluated, often turning them into something unique and brilliant.”…
3. UNPACK YOUR ASSUMPTIONS
Another way to reframe a problem is to challenge its perceived limitations or rules. Ask, “What are all of the assumptions of the industry?” Make a list and turn them upside down by thinking about what would happen if you did the opposite….(More)”
Census Business Builder
Census: “Are you looking for data to help you start or grow a business?…The U.S. Census Bureau today released Census Business Builder: Small Business Edition, a new Web tool that allows business owners and entrepreneurs to easily navigate and use key demographic and economic data to help guide their research into opening a new business or adding to an existing one. The Census Business Builder was developed with user-centered design at its core and incorporated feedback from customers and stakeholders, including small business owners, trade associations and other government agencies. The tool combines data from the American Community Survey, the economic census, County Business Patterns and other economic surveys to provide a complete business profile of an area. Business statistics include the number of establishments, employment, payroll and sales. American Community Survey statistics include population characteristics, economic characteristics and housing characteristics. The new tool also combines third-party consumer spending data with the Census Bureau economic and demographic data.