New paper by Beth Simone Noveck, The GovLab, for Democracy: “In the early 2000s, the Air Force struggled with a problem: Pilots and civilians were dying because of unusual soil and dirt conditions in Afghanistan. The soil was getting into the rotors of the Sikorsky UH-60 helicopters and obscuring the view of its pilots—what the military calls a “brownout.” According to the Air Force’s senior design scientist, the manager tasked with solving the problem didn’t know where to turn quickly to get help. As it turns out, the man practically sitting across from him had nine years of experience flying these Black Hawk helicopters in the field, but the manager had no way of knowing that. Civil service titles such as director and assistant director reveal little about skills or experience.
In the fall of 2008, the Air Force sought to fill in these kinds of knowledge gaps. The Air Force Research Laboratory unveiled Aristotle, a searchable internal directory that integrated people’s credentials and experience from existing personnel systems, public databases, and users themselves, thus making it easy to discover quickly who knew and had done what. Near-term budgetary constraints killed Aristotle in 2013, but the project underscored a glaring need in the bureaucracy.
Aristotle was an attempt to solve a challenge faced by every agency and organization: quickly locating expertise to solve a problem. Prior to Aristotle, the DOD had no coordinated mechanism for identifying expertise across 200,000 of its employees. Dr. Alok Das, the senior scientist for design innovation tasked with implementing the system, explained, “We don’t know what we know.”
This is a common situation. The government currently has no systematic way of getting help from all those with relevant expertise, experience, and passion. For every success on Challenge.gov—the federal government’s platform where agencies post open calls to solve problems for a prize—there are a dozen open-call projects that never get seen by those who might have the insight or experience to help. This kind of crowdsourcing is still too ad hoc, infrequent, and unpredictable—in short, too unreliable—for the purposes of policy-making.
Which is why technologies like Aristotle are so exciting. Smart, searchable expert networks offer the potential to lower the costs and speed up the process of finding relevant expertise. Aristotle never reached this stage, but an ideal expert network is a directory capable of including not just experts within the government, but also outside citizens with specialized knowledge. This leads to a dual benefit: accelerating the path to innovative and effective solutions to hard problems while at the same time fostering greater citizen engagement.
Could such an expert-network platform revitalize the regulatory-review process? We might find out soon enough, thanks to the Food and Drug Administration…”
How Local Governments Can Use Instameets to Promote Citizen Engagement
Chris Shattuck at Arc3Communications: “With more than 200 million active monthly users, Instagram reports that it shares more than 20 million photos every day with a combined average of 1.6 billion likes.
Instagram engagement is also more than 15 times that of Facebook with a user base that is predominately young, female and affluent, according to a recent report by L2, a think tank for digital innovation.
Therefore, it’s no wonder that 92 percent of prestige brands prominently incorporate Instagram into their social media strategies, according to the same report.
However, many local governments have been slow to adopt this rapidly maturing platform, even though many of their constituents are already actively using it.
So how can local governments utilize the power of Instagram to promote citizen engagement that is still organic and social?
Creating Instameets to promote local government events, parks, civic landmarks and institutional buildings may be part of that answer.
Once an Instagram meetup community is created for a city any user can suggest a “meet-up” where members get together at a set place, date and time to snap away at a landmark, festival, or other event of note – preferably with a unique hashtag so that photos can be easily shared.
For example, where other marketing efforts to brand the City of Atlanta failed, #weloveatl has become a popular, organic hashtag that crosses cultural and economic boundaries for photographers looking to share their favorite things about Atlanta and benefit the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
And in May, users were able to combine that energy with a worldwide Instameet campaign to photograph Streets Alive Atlanta, a major initiative by the Atlanta Bicycle Coalition.
This organic collaboration provides a unique example for local governments seeking to promote their cities and use Instameets….”
EU: GLOW (Global Legislative Openness Week)
GLOW is a celebration of open, participatory legislative processes around the world as well as an opportunity for diverse stakeholders to collaborate with one another and make progress toward adopting and implementing open-government commitments. The week is being led by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership, which is co-anchored by the National Democratic Institute and the Congress of Chile.
The campaign kicks off with the International Day of Democracy on September 15, and throughout the 10 days you are invited to share your ideas and experiences, kickstart new transparency tools and engage members of your community in dialogue. Learn more about the global open government movement at OGP, and stay tuned into GLOW events by following this site and #OpenParl2014.
Where will GLOW be happening?
GLOW will connect a range of legislative openness activities, organized independently by civil society organizations and parliaments around the world. You can follow the action on Twitter by using the hashtag #OpenParl2014. We hope the GLOW campaign will inspire you to design and organize your own event or activity during this week. If you’d like to share your event and collaborate with others during GLOW, please send us a note.
The week’s festivities will be anchored by two Working Group meetings of civil society and parliamentary members. Beginning on the International Day of Democracy, September 15, the Working Group will host a regional meeting on expanding civic engagement through parliamentary openness in Podgorica, Montenegro, hosted in partnership with the Parliament of Montenegro. The week will conclude with the Working Group’s annual meeting in Chile, on September 25 and 26, 2014, where members will discuss progress made in the year since the Working Group’s launch. This meeting coincides with the 11th Plenary Assembly of ParlAmericas, an independent network composed of the national legislatures of the 35 independent states of the Americas, which will also consider issues of legislative openness as part of its meeting….” (More)
The Public and Decision-making Process: Who and Why Needs Citizen Participation?
Article by O. Bychkova in Voprosy Economiki: “The participation of the public in the decision-making and policy discussion is expected to allow the officials to re-valuate the proposed decisions, save money on their implementation and restore public trust in government. However, from the point of view of bureaucrats, direct participation is often unproductive: you are required to spend work time and energy on discussions with non-experts and have no means to predict the effectiveness and efficiency of these debates. The article considers theories and empirical studies that can explain a new fashion trend of openness and transparency in world’s public policy and problems with its implementation. The article also evaluates the applicability of republican tradition to modern policy-making and analyzes alternative mode of public involvement.”
Participatory Budgeting: Ten Actions to Engage Citizens via Social Media
New report by Victoria Gordon for the IBM Center for the Business of Government: “Participatory budgeting is an innovation in direct citizen participation in government decision-making that began 25 years ago in a town in Brazil. It has since spread to 1,000 other cities worldwide and is gaining interest in U.S. cities as well.
Dr. Gordon’s report offers an overview of the state of participatory budgeting, and the potential value of integrating the use of social media into the participatory process design. Her report details three case studies of U.S. communities that have undertaken participatory budgeting initiatives. While these cases are relatively small in scope, they provide insights into what potential users need to consider if they wanted to develop their own initiatives.
Based on her research and observations, Dr. Gordon recommends ten actions community leaders can take to create the right participatory budgeting infrastructure to increase citizen participation and assess its impact. A key element in her recommendations is to proactively incorporate social media strategies”
Bridging Distant Worlds: Innovation in the Civic Space
A digital white paper by Public Innovation: “In an increasingly complex world, today’s challenges are interconnected. Many have argued that our civic institutions are not equipped to respond with the same velocity at which technology is advancing other sectors of the economy. While this may, in fact, be a fair criticism of our electoral, fiscal, and policy structures, a new mindset is emerging at government’s service delivery layer.
Civic innovation offers a new approach to solving community problems that is emergent, generative, resilient, participatory, human-centered, and driven by a process of validated learning where core assumptions are tested quickly and iteratively – and lead to better solutions that are both impactful and durable. And perhaps most surprisingly, new markets are being created that enable creative problem solvers to sustain their social impact through activities that don’t rely on traditional models of grant funding.
While the Sacramento region is making significant progress in this space, our civic innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem has yet to reach its full potential. The purpose of this white paper is to make the case for why now is the time for a Regional Civic Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Agenda.
The paper concludes with a set of recommendations for collective action among the region’s public, private, nonprofit organizations, and, of course, our fellow citizens. Appendix A articulates this agenda in the form of a resolution to be adopted by as many cities and counties the region as possible.
A recurring theme in this paper is that technology is fundamentally changing the way humans interact with organizations and each other. In order for regional leaders and residents to be honest with ourselves, we must consciously choose whether or not we are going to raise our expectations and co-create a new civic experience.
Because the future is now and the opportunities are infinite…”
Agency Liability Stemming from Citizen-Generated Data
Paper by Bailey Smith for The Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program: “New ways to gather data are on the rise. One of these ways is through citizen science. According to a new paper by Bailey Smith, JD, federal agencies can feel confident about using citizen science for a few reasons. First, the legal system provides significant protection from liability through the Federal Torts Claim Act (FTCA) and Administrative Procedures Act (APA). Second, training and technological innovation has made it easier for the non-scientist to collect high quality data.”
When Big Data Maps Your Safest, Shortest Walk Home
Sarah Laskow at NextCity: “Boston University and University of Pittsburgh researchers are trying to do the same thing that got the creators of the app SketchFactor into so much trouble over the summer. They’re trying to show people how to avoid dangerous spots on city streets while walking from one place to another.
“What we are interested in is finding paths that offer trade-offs between safety and distance,” Esther Galbrun, a postdoc at Boston University, recently said in New York at the 3rd International Workshop on Urban Computing, held in conjunction with KDD2014.
She was presenting, “Safe Navigation in Urban Environments,” which describes a set of algorithms that would give a person walking through a city options for getting from one place to another — the shortest path, the safest path and a number of alternatives that balanced between both factors. The paper takes existing algorithms, well defined in theory — nothing new or fancy, Galbrun says — and applies them to a problem that people face everyday.
Imagine, she suggests, that a person is standing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and he wants to walk home, to his place on Wharton Street. (Galbrun and her colleagues looked at Philadelphia and Chicago because those cities have made their crime data openly available.) The walk is about three miles away, and one option would be to take the shortest path back. But maybe he’s worried about safety. Maybe he’s willing to take a little bit of a longer walk if it means he has to worry less about crime. What route should he take then?
Services like Google Maps have excelled at finding the shortest, most direct routes from Point A to Point B. But, increasingly, urban computing is looking to capture other aspects of moving about a place. “Fast is only one option,” says co-author Konstantinos Pelechrinis. “There are noble objectives beyond the surface path that you can put inside this navigation problem.” You might look for the path that will burn the most calories; a Yahoo! lab has considered how to send people along the most scenic route.
But working on routes that do more than give simple directions can have its pitfalls. The SketchFactor app relies both on crime data, when it’s available, and crowdsourced comments to reveal potential trouble spots to users. When it was released this summer, tech reporters and other critics immediately started talking about how it could easily become a conduit for racism. (“Sketchy” is, after all, a very subjective measure.)
So far, though, the problem with the SketchFactor app is less that it offers racially skewed perspectives than that the information it does offer is pretty useless — if entertaining. A pinpoint marked “very sketchy” is just as likely to flag an incident like a Jewish man eating pork products or hipster kids making too much noise as it is to flag a mugging.
Here, then, is a clear example of how Big Data has an advantage over Big Anecdata. The SafePath set-up measures risk more objectively and elegantly. It pulls in openly available crime data and considers simple data like time, location and types of crime. While a crime occurs at a discrete point, the researchers wanted to estimate the risk of a crime on every street, at every point. So they use a mathematical tool that smooths out the crime data over the space of the city and allows them to measure the relative risk of witnessing a crime on every street segment in a city….”
What Is Big Data?
datascience@berkeley Blog: ““Big Data.” It seems like the phrase is everywhere. The term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013 
, appeared in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary by 2014 , and Gartner’s just-released 2014 Hype Cycle shows “Big Data” passing the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and on its way down into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” Big Data is all the rage. But what does it actually mean?
A commonly repeated definition cites the three Vs: volume, velocity, and variety. But others argue that it’s not the size of data that counts, but the tools being used, or the insights that can be drawn from a dataset.
To settle the question once and for all, we asked 40+ thought leaders in publishing, fashion, food, automobiles, medicine, marketing and every industry in between how exactly they would define the phrase “Big Data.” Their answers might surprise you! Take a look below to find out what big data is:
- John Akred, Founder and CTO, Silicon Valley Data Science
- Philip Ashlock, Chief Architect of Data.gov
- Jon Bruner, Editor-at-Large, O’Reilly Media
- Reid Bryant, Data Scientist, Brooks Bell
- Mike Cavaretta, Data Scientist and Manager, Ford Motor Company
- Drew Conway, Head of Data, Project Florida
- Rohan Deuskar, CEO and Co-Founder, Stylitics
- Amy Escobar, Data Scientist, 2U
- Josh Ferguson, Chief Technology Officer, Mode Analytics
- John Foreman, Chief Data Scientist, MailChimp
- …
FULL LIST at datascience@berkeley Blog”
Data Mining Reveals How Social Coding Succeeds (And Fails)
Emerging Technology From the arXiv : “Collaborative software development can be hugely successful or fail spectacularly. An analysis of the metadata associated with these projects is teasing apart the difference….
The process of developing software has undergone huge transformation in the last decade or so. One of the key changes has been the evolution of social coding websites, such as GitHub and BitBucket.
These allow anyone to start a collaborative software project that other developers can contribute to on a voluntary basis. Millions of people have used these sites to build software, sometimes with extraordinary success.
Of course, some projects are more successful than others. And that raises an interesting question: what are the differences between successful and unsuccessful projects on these sites?
Today, we get an answer from Yuya Yoshikawa at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan and a couple of pals at the NTT Laboratories, also in Japan. These guys have analysed the characteristics of over 300,000 collaborative software projects on GitHub to tease apart the factors that contribute to success. Their results provide the first insights into social coding success from this kind of data mining.
A social coding project begins when a group of developers outline a project and begin work on it. These are the “internal developers” and have the power to update the software in a process known as a “commit”. The number of commits is a measure of the activity on the project.
External developers can follow the progress of the project by “starring” it, a form of bookmarking on GitHub. The number of stars is a measure of the project’s popularity. These external developers can also request changes, such as additional features and so on, in a process known as a pull request.
Yoshikawa and co begin by downloading the data associated with over 300,000 projects from the GitHub website. This includes the number of internal developers, the number of stars a project receives over time and the number of pull requests it gets.
The team then analyse the effectiveness of the project by calculating factors such as the number of commits per internal team member, the popularity of the project over time, the number of pull requests that are fulfilled and so on.
The results provide a fascinating insight into the nature of social coding. Yoshikawa and co say the number of internal developers on a project plays a significant role in its success. “Projects with larger numbers of internal members have higher activity, popularity and sociality,” they say….
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1408.6012 : Collaboration on Social Media: Analyzing Successful Projects on Social Coding”