Stefaan Verhulst

Announcing New U.S. Open Government Commitments on the Third Anniversary of the Open Government Partnership

Curated on September 24, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

US White House Fact Sheet: “Three years ago, President Obama joined with the leaders of seven other nations to launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international partnership between governments and civil society to promote transparency, fight corruption, energize civic engagement, and leverage new technologies to open up governments worldwide. The United States and other founding countries pledged to transform the way that governments serve their citizens in the 21^st century. Today, as heads of state of OGP participating countries gather at the UN General Assembly, this partnership has grown from 8 to 65 nations and hundreds of civil society organizations around the world. These countries are embracing the challenge by taking steps in partnership with civil society to increase the ability of citizens to engage their governments, access government data to fuel entrepreneurship and innovation, and promote accountability….
The United States is committed to continuing to lead by example in OGP. Since assuming office, President Obama has prioritized making government more open and accountable and has taken substantial steps to increase citizen participation, collaboration with civil society, and transparency in government. The United States will remain a global leader of international efforts to promote transparency, stem corruption and hold to account those who exploit the public’s trust for private gain. Yesterday, President Obama announced several steps the United States is taking to deepen our support for civil society globally.
Today, to mark the third anniversary of OGP, President Obama is announcing four new and expanded open government initiatives that will advance our efforts through the end of 2015.
1. Promote Open Education to Increase Awareness and Engagement
Open education is the open sharing of digital learning materials, tools, and practices that ensures free access to and legal adoption of learning resources. The United States is committed to open education and will:

Raise open education awareness and identify new partnerships. The U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy will jointly host a workshop on challenges and opportunities in open education internationally with stakeholders from academia, industry, and government.
Pilot new models for using open educational resources to support learning. The State Department will conduct three pilots overseas by December 2015 that use open educational resources to support learning in formal and informal learning contexts. The pilots’ results, including best practices, will be made publicly available for interested educators.
Launch an online skills academy. The Department of Labor (DOL), with cooperation from the Department of Education, will award $25 million through competitive grants to launch an online skills academy in 2015 that will offer open online courses of study, using technology to create high-quality, free, or low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, and other employer-recognized credentials.

2. Deliver Government Services More Effectively Through Information Technology
The Administration is committed to serving the American people more effectively and efficiently through smarter IT delivery. The newly launched U.S. Digital Service will work to remove barriers to digital service delivery and remake the experience that people and businesses have with their government. To improve delivery of Federal services, information, and benefits, the Administration will:

Expand digital service delivery expertise in government. Throughout 2015, the Administration will continue recruiting top digital talent from the private and public sectors to expand services across the government. These individuals —who have expertise in technology, procurement, human resources, and financing —will serve as digital professionals in a number of capacities in the Federal government, including the new U.S. Digital Service and 18F digital delivery team within the U.S. General Services Administration, as well as within Federal agencies. These teams will take best practices from the public and private sectors and scale them across agencies with a focus on the customer experience.
Build digital services in the open. The Administration will expand its efforts to build digital services in the open. This includes using open and transparent processes intended to better understand user needs, testing pilot digital projects, and designing and developing digital services at scale. In addition, building on the recently published Digital Services Playbook, the Administration will continue to openly publish best practices on collaborative websites that enable the public to suggest improvements.
Adopt an open source software policy. Using and contributing back to open source software can fuel innovation, lower costs, and benefit the public. No later than December 31, 2015, the Administration will work through the Federal agencies to develop an open source software policy that, together with the Digital Services Playbook, will support improved access to custom software code developed for the Federal government.

3. Increase Transparency in Spending
The Administration has made an increasing amount of Federal spending data publicly available and searchable, allowing nationwide stakeholders to perform analysis of Federal spending. The Administration will build on these efforts by committing to:

Improve USAspending.gov. In 2015, the Administration will launch a refreshed USAspending.gov website that will improve the site’s design and user experience, including better enabling users to explore the data using interactive maps and improving the search functionality and application programming interface.
Improve accessibility and reusability of Federal financial data. In 2015, as part of implementation of the DATA Act,[2] the Administration will work to improve the accessibility and reusability of Federal financial data by issuing data element definition standards and standards for exchanging financial data. The Administration, through the Office of Management and Budget, will leverage industry data exchange standards to the extent practicable to maximize the sharing and utilization of Federal financial data.
Explore options for visualization and publication of additional Federal financial data. The Administration, through the Treasury Department, will use small-scale pilots to help explore options for visualizing and publishing Federal financial data from across the government as required by the DATA Act.
Continue to engage stakeholders. The Administration will continue to engage with a broad group of stakeholders to seek input on Federal financial transparency initiatives including DATA Act implementation, by hosting town hall meetings, conducting interactive workshops, and seeking input via open innovation collaboration tools.

4. Use Big Data to Support Greater Openness and Accountability
President Obama has recognized the growing importance of “big data” technologies for our economy and the advancement of public good in areas such as education, energy conservation, and healthcare. The Administration is taking action to ensure responsible uses of big data to promote greater openness and accountability across a range of areas and sectors. As part of the work it is doing in this area, the Administration has committed to:

Enhance sharing of best practices on data privacy for state and local law enforcement. Federal agencies with expertise in law enforcement, privacy, and data practices will seek to enhance collaboration and information sharing about privacy best practices among state and local law enforcement agencies receiving Federal grants.
Ensure privacy protection for big data analyses in health. Big data introduces new opportunities to advance medicine and science, improve health care, and support better public health. To ensure that individual privacy is protected while capitalizing on new technologies and data, the Administration, led by the Department of Health and Human Services, will: (1) consult with stakeholders to assess how Federal laws and regulations can best accommodate big data analyses that promise to advance medical science and reduce health care costs; and (2) develop recommendations for ways to promote and facilitate research through access to data while safeguarding patient privacy and autonomy.
Expand technical expertise in government to stop discrimination. U.S. Government departments and agencies will work to expand their technical expertise to identify outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that may have a discriminatory impact on protected classes. …”

Data Visualization: Principles and Practice (Second Edition)

Curated on September 24, 2014October 30, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Alexandru C. Telea : “This book explores the study of processing and visually representing data sets. Data visualization is closely related to information graphics, information visualization, scientific visualization, and statistical graphics. This second edition presents a better treatment of the relationship between traditional scientific visualization and information visualization, a description of the emerging field of visual analytics, and updated techniques using the GPU and new generations of software tools and packages. This edition is also enhanced with exercises and downloadable code and data sets. See also Supplemental Material.

Plenario

Curated on September 24, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

About Plenario: “Plenario makes it possible to rethink the way we use open data. Instead of being constrained by the data that is accessible and usable, let’s start by formulating our questions and then find the data to answer them. Plenario makes this easy by tying together all datasets on one map and one timeline—because in the real world, everything affects everything else…
The problem
Over the past few years, levels of government from the federal administration to individual municipalities like the City of Chicago have begun embracing open data, releasing datasets publicly for free. This movement has vastly increased the amount of data available, but existing platforms and technologies are designed mainly to view and access individual datasets one at a time. This restriction contradicts decades of research contending that no aspect of the urban landscape is truly isolated; in today’s cities, everything is connected to everything else.
Furthermore, researchers are often limited in the questions they can ask by the data available to answer them. It is not uncommon to spend 75% of one’s time locating, downloading, cleaning, and standardizing the relevant datasets—leaving precious little resources for the important work.
What we do
Plenario is designed to take us from “spreadsheets on the web”¹ to truly smart open data. This rests on two fundamental breakthroughs:

1) Allow users to assemble and download data from multiple, independent data sources, such as two different municipal data portals, or the federal government and a privately curated dataset.
2) Unite all datasets along a single spatial and temporal index, making it possible to do complex aggregations with one query.

With these advances, Plenario allows users to study regions over specified time periods using all relevant data, regardless of original source, and represent the data as a single time series. By providing a single, centralized hub for open data, the Plenario platform enables urban scientists to ask the right questions with as few constraints as possible….
being implemented by the Urban Center for Computation and Data and DataMade“

Ello

Curated on September 24, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

What is Ello?

“Ello is a simple, beautiful, and ad-free social network created by a small group of artists and designers.
We originally built Ello as a private social network. Over time, so many people wanted to join Ello that we built a public version of Ello for everyone to use.

Ad Free

Ello doesn’t sell ads. Nor do we sell data about you to third parties.
Virtually every other social network is run by advertisers. Behind the scenes they employ armies of ad salesmen and data miners to record every move you make. Data about you is then auctioned off to advertisers and data brokers. You’re the product that’s being bought and sold.
Collecting and selling your personal data, reading your posts to your friends, and mapping your social connections for profit is both creepy and unethical. Under the guise of offering a “free” service, users pay a high price in intrusive advertising and lack of privacy.
We also think ads are tacky, that they insult our intelligence and that we’re better without them.
Read more about our no-ad policy here.

Support Ello

Ello is completely free to use.
We occasionally offer special features to our users. If we create a special feature that you really like, you may choose to support Ello by paying a very small amount of money to add that feature to your Ello account.
You never have to pay anything, and you can keep using Ello forever, for free. By choosing to buy a feature now and then for a very small amount of money you support our work and help us make Ello better and better….
Read the manifesto“

Happy Birthday, We the People! Marking Three Years of Online Petitions

Curated on September 24, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ezra Mechaber at the White House Blog: “We the People, the Obama administration’s online petitions platform, turned 3 yesterday.

On September 22, 2011, we launched We the People to give Americans a new way to petition their government around issues they care about. It works like this: Start a petition, get enough signatures, and the Obama administration will work with policy experts to issue an official response.
It’s three years later, and We the People remains incredibly popular: More than 15 million users have participated, collecting more than 22 million signatures on more than 360,000 petitions. To date, we’ve issued nearly 250 responses to petitions on a wide range of topics, including maintaining an open and innovative internet, reducing student loan debt, improving our economy, and even building a “Death Star.”
The We the People platform has led directly to policy changes and provided new opportunities for dialogue between citizens and their government. That’s part of the reason why, over the course of 2014, an average of response surveys showed a majority of signers thought it was “helpful to hear the Administration’s response,” even if they didn’t agree. Nearly 80 percent said they would use We the People again.
To celebrate We the People’s third birthday, the White House will host the first-ever social meetup for We the People users and petition creators right here at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It will be an exciting chance for users to meet with policy experts and connect with each other in person.
Meanwhile, we continue to work to make We the People even more accessible so that people — no matter where they are on the internet — can use the platform to reach the White House. Beginning in October, third-party websites can submit signatures to We the People on behalf of their own signers, using our soon-to-be-released Write API (which is currently in beta). It’s the result of months of hard work, and we can’t wait to share it with the public.
Check out the infographic below, and take a look at some of the platform’s highlights over the last three years…”

OSHA Will Put Workplace Safety Data Online as 'Nudge' to Employers

Curated on September 24, 2014November 27, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Josh Eidelson at Bloomberg BusinessWeek: “Starting in January, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration will require employers to notify the government within 24 hours every time someone loses an eye, suffers an amputation, or gets admitted to the hospital with an injury sustained at work. The agency estimates that tens of thousands of injuries go unreported. “Workplace injuries and fatalities are absolutely preventable,” Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said in early September. “These new requirements will help OSHA focus its resources and hold employers accountable for preventing them.”

The rule replaces regulations that require companies to report only incidents that result in three or more hospitalizations—“catastrophes,” in agency parlance. (Workplace deaths will still have to be reported within 8 hours.) OSHA head David Michaels, an assistant secretary in the Department of Labor, announced on Sept. 11 that the injury data will be made public on OSHA’s website.
The site already includes information on worker fatalities and catastrophes….
OSHA is one of several federal agencies taking the name-and-shame approach. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is considering a plan to begin online posting of first-person narratives culled from consumer complaints about banks, credit card companies, and payday lenders. Other agencies already put recall and complaint information online, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. OSHA’s smaller sibling agency, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, lists on its website workplace incidents like fires that could have harmed someone but didn’t.
The idea is that people increasingly accustomed to looking up product reviews on Amazon.com and restaurant reviews on Yelp might do the same when they choose an employer, car, or credit card company. “Exposing problems early can help other consumers avoid similar problems before they become victims, too,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said in July. “The market could react to problems as they occur, not years later.”…”

Social Collective Intelligence

Curated on September 23, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Daniele Miorandi, Vincenzo Maltese, Michael Rovatsos, Anton Nijholt, and James Stewart: “The book focuses on Social Collective Intelligence, a term used to denote a class of socio-technical systems that combine, in a coordinated way, the strengths of humans, machines and collectives in terms of competences, knowledge and problem solving capabilities with the communication, computing and storage capabilities of advanced ICT.
Social Collective Intelligence opens a number of challenges for researchers in both computer science and social sciences; at the same time it provides an innovative approach to solve challenges in diverse application domains, ranging from health to education and organization of work.
The book will provide a cohesive and holistic treatment of Social Collective Intelligence, including challenges emerging in various disciplines (computer science, sociology, ethics) and opportunities for innovating in various application areas.
By going through the book the reader will gauge insight and knowledge into the challenges and opportunities provided by this new, exciting, field of investigation. Benefits for scientists will be in terms of accessing a comprehensive treatment of the open research challenges in a multidisciplinary perspective. Benefits for practitioners and applied researchers will be in terms of access to novel approaches to tackle relevant problems in their field. Benefits for policy-makers and public bodies representatives will be in terms of understanding how technological advances can support them in supporting the progress of society and economy…”

#OpenGovNow: Open Government and how it benefits you

Curated on September 22, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

#OpenGovNow: “Open Governments are built on two things: information and participation. A government that is open, actively discloses information about what it does with its money and resources in a way that all citizens can understand. Equally important, an Open Government is one that actively involves all citizens to be participants in government decision-making. This two-way relationship between citizens and governments, in which governments and citizens share information with one another and work together, is the foundation of Open Government….

Why should I care?

The water that you drink, the public schools that children go to, the roads that you use every day: governments make those a reality. Governments and what they do affect each and every one of us. How governments operate and how they spend scarce public resources have a direct impact on our everyday lives and the future of our communities. For instance, it is estimated that $9.5 trillion US dollars are spent by governments all over the world through contracts — therefore you have a role to play in making sure that your share in that public money is not lost, stolen, or misused….
The Global Opening Government Survey was conducted as a response to the growing demand to better understand citizens’ views on the current state and the potential impact of openness. Using the innovative “random domain intercept technology,” the survey was based on a brief questionnaire and collected complete responses from over 65,000 web-enabled individuals in the first 61 member countries of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) plus India. The survey methodology, as any other, has its advantages and its limitations. More details about the methodology can be found in the Additional Resources section of this page..

Can We Build a Safer Internet?

Curated on September 22, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Anna North in the New York Times: “We often take it as a given that the Internet is a cruel place, a natural haven for those who seek to harass and threaten others. But to some people, social networks are not mere conduits for our worst impulses. They’re structures whose design can influence how we behave, for good as well as for ill.

Right now, having a social media account can mean facing down a torrent of harassment — including, for some, attacks that are misogynist, racist or both. “Just as you create a space for people to use something in innovative, creative ways, there are also people who will use it for other means,” Moya Bailey, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University who writes about race, gender and media, told Op-Talk. She mentioned Anita Sarkeesian, the video game critic who has faced harassment for critiquing the portrayal of women in games.

“Because she is doing that work, she becomes a target of a lot of violence and hate,” said Ms. Bailey. The rise of online communication is “a gift and a curse always. It’s always both/and.”

And the way we behave online may depend on which site we’re using. Ms. Bailey cites Tumblr as an example. “I think there’s something about Tumblr that is really attractive to social-justice folks, and the kinds of conversations that people have on Tumblr are very different from what’s possible on Facebook,” she explained. “The platforms themselves help shape the kind of content that people post to those different sites.”

The design of those platforms can also determine who sees what we post. Kate Losse, a writer on technology and culture and a former product manager at Facebook, told Op-Talk that Facebook has widened the scope of some of our conversations.

“Pre-Facebook there would be all these different kinds of interactions you might have socially,” she said. “You might talk to one person, you might talk to three people, you might talk to a hundred people. But Facebook’s interesting because you’re always talking to a hundred people when you post, or more.”

“You have to look at something like Facebook as structuring social interactions,” she added. And interacting via what Ms. Losse called “large-scale announcements” can introduce problems. “The Internet is the classic case of tragedy of the commons,” she said. “If something that’s important to me gets viewed by someone across the world, who has no attachment to me, doesn’t care about me at all, doesn’t have any reason to know me or have empathy for me, it’s much easier for that person to do something hateful with the content than to be respectful of it.”

But if platforms can structure our interactions, can they steer us toward kindness rather than toward bile? Batya Friedman, a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School who studies the relationship between technology and human priorities, thinks it’s possible. “Any time people talk to each other,” she told Op-Talk, “we have all kinds of social norms that check how we say things to each other. We give each other social cues, we tell each other when somebody’s starting to go too far.”

The question for designers of online communities, she said, is “how do we either create virtual norms that are comparable, or how do we represent those things so that people are getting those cues, so they modulate their behavior?”…”