Show Me the Evidence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Ron Haskins: “This book tells the story of how the Obama administration planned and enacted several initiatives to fund social programs based on rigorous evidence of success and thereby created a fundamental change in the role of evidence in federal policymaking.
Using interviews with the major players from the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, federal agencies, Congress, and the child advocacy community, the authors detail the development and implementation of six evidence-based social policy initiatives by the Obama administration.
The initiatives range widely over fundamental issues in the nation’s social policy including preschool and K-12 education, teen pregnancy, employment and training, health, and community-based programs. These initiatives constitute a revolution in the use of social science evidence to guide federal policymaking and the operation of federal grant programs.
A fascinating story for everyone interested in politics and policy, this book also provides a blueprint for policymakers worldwide who are interested in expanding the use of evidence in policy.

Read David Wessel’s review in the Wall Street Journal.”

E-Governance for Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Vinod Kumar, T. M. : “This book highlights the electronic governance in a smart city through case studies of cities located in many countries. “E-Government” refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing) that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. These technologies can serve a variety of different ends: better delivery of government services to citizens, improved interactions with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access to information, or more efficient government management. The resulting benefits are less corruption, increased transparency, greater convenience, revenue growth, and/or cost reductions.
The book is divided into three parts.
• E-Governance State of the Art Studies of many cities
• E-Governance Domains Studies
• E-Governance Tools and Issues”
Download Table of contents (pdf, 1.4 MB)

Smart citizens. How internet facilitates smart choices in city life

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Ericsson Consumer Lab: “The idea of smart cities is an intriguing concept. However, the future will partly be a story of how the architects defining the way our future cities operate are going to be citizens themselves. As the internet makes us more informed, we are in turn making better informed decisions.
We are becoming smart citizens and through our changing behaviors, efficient practices and smarter social norms are developing in our cities.”

Participatory sensing: enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New White Paper by the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (Australia): “Local government (such as the City of Melbourne) is accountable and responsible for establishment, execution and oversight of strategic objectives and resource management in the metropolis. Faced with a rising population, Council has in place a number of strategic plans to ensure it is able to deliver services that maintain (and ideally improve) the quality of life for its citizens (including residents, workers and visitors). This publication explores participatory sensing (PS) and issues associated with governance in the light of new information gathering capabilities that directly engage citizens in collecting data and providing contextual insight that has the potential to greatly enhance Council operations in managing these environments. Download: Participatory Sensing: Enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement (pdf: 2.3mb)“

CitySDK Cookbook: Harmonizing APIs across cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
WaagSociety: “CitySDK is a “service development kit” for cities and developers that aims at harmonizing application programming interfaces (APIs) across cities. CitySDK APIs enable new services and applications to be rapidly developed, scaled and reused through providing a range of tools and information for both cities and developers.
CitySDK has published a Cookbook that introduces the opportunities CitySDK APIs has to offer for cities and developers. It showcases the experiences Helsinki, Amsterdam and Lisbon have had with open harmonized APIs, giving examples of the use of the current CitySDK APIs. Last part of the toolkit focuses on step-by-step guidance for starting your journey with CitySDK or any other API.”
Get your cookbook now:
Low resolution CitySDK Cookbook for quick download
CitySDK Cookbook high resolution for printin
Project:
Smart CitySDK
Lab:
Future Internet Lab

What do businesses really look for in open data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Harvey Lewis in Computer Weekly:  “In 2015, the UK’s primary open data portal, www.data.gov.uk, will be six years old. The portal hosts approximately 20,000 official data sets from central government departments and their agencies, local authorities and other public sector bodies across the country. Just over half of these data sets are available as open data under the Open Government Licence (OGL). Data.gov.uk forms part of an international network of over three hundred open data efforts that have seen not just thousands but millions of data sets worldwide becoming freely available for personal or commercial use. [See http://datacatalogs.org and www.quandle.com].
…simply publishing open data does not guarantee that a business will use it…., if businesses are building new products or services, or relying on the data to inform their strategy, a number of characteristics other than just openness become critical in determining success:

  • Provenance – what is the source of the data and how it was collected? Is it authoritative?
  • Completeness and accuracy – are the examples and features of the data present and correct, and, if not, is the quality understood and documented?
  • Consistency – is the data published in a consistent, easy-to-access format and are any changes documented?
  • Timeliness – is the data available when it is needed for the time periods needed?
  • Richness – does the data contain a level of detail sufficient to answer our questions?
  • Guarantees of availability – will the data continue to be made available in the future?

If these characteristics cannot be guaranteed in open data or are unavailable except under a commercial licence then many businesses would prefer to pay to get them. While some public sector bodies – particularly the Trading Funds – have, over the years, established strong connections with business users of their data and understand their needs implicitly, the Open Data Institute is the first to cement these characteristics into a formal certification scheme for publishers of open data.
A campaign is needed to get publishers to adopt these certificates and to recognise that, economically at least, they are as important as Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s five-star scale for linked open data.  ….”

Special Issue on Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction by Mila Gascó to the Special Issue on Open Government in the Social Science Computer Review: “Public administrations around the world have embarked on open government initiatives and have worked to redefine their relationship with citizens and with each other. Researchers and academicians have recently also focused on studying what governments are implementing. Still, there are gaps and difficulties that both practitioners and academicians need to tackle. This special issue aims at contributing to the open government field in this respect.”

Mapping information economy business with big data: findings from the UK

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NESTA: “This paper uses innovative ‘big data’ resources to measure the size of the information economy in the UK.

Key Findings

  • Counts of information economy firms are 42 per cent larger than SIC-based estimates
  • Using ‘big data’ estimates, the research finds 225,800 information economy businesses in the UK
  • Information economy businesses are highly clustered across the country, with very high counts in the Greater South East, notably London (especially central and east London), as well as big cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol
  • Looking at local clusters, we find hotspots in Middlesbrough, Aberdeen, Brighton, Cambridge and Coventry, among others

Information and Communications Technologies – and the digital economy they support – are of enduring interest to researchers and policymakers. National and local government are particularly keen to understand the characteristics and growth potential of ‘their’ digital businesses.
Given the recent resurgence of interest in industrial policy across many developed countries, there is now substantial policy interest in developing stronger, more competitive digital economies. For example, the UK’s current industrial strategy combines horizontal interventions with support for seven key sectors, of which the ‘information economy’ is one.
The desire to grow high–tech clusters is often prominent in the policy mix – for instance, the UK’s Tech City UK initiative, Regional Innovation Clusters in the US and elements of ‘smart specialisation’ policies in the EU.
In this paper, NIESR and Growth Intelligence use novel ‘big data’ sources to improve our understanding of information economy businesses in the UK – that is, those involved in the production of ICTs. We use this experience to critically reflect on some of the opportunities and challenges presented by big data tools and analytics for economic research and policymaking.”
– See more at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/publications/mapping-information-economy-business-big-data-findings-uk-0#sthash.2ismEMr2.dpuf

Labcraft: How labs cultivate change through innovation and collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Labcraft: “The struggle to solve local and global issues often appears to pitch large corporations and governments against activists, artists, workers and ordinary citizens. But what happens when these entities consciously join forces and share resources to create social change?
It’s happening more than you might think—in a growing phenomenon known as social labs. And Labcraft offers an intimate picture of this new and evolving landscape—where seemingly disparate stakeholders network and align as learning communities who collaborate for positive change.
Social innovation labs do what we expect laboratories to do—invent and experiment. But their “test tubes” are real-world challenges. And as they explore new connections, new ideas, and new initiatives, they often generate new perspectives and promising solutions.”

Do-It-Yourself Democracy: The Rise of the Public Engagement Industry

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Caroline W. Lee: “Citizen participation has undergone a radical shift since anxieties about “bowling alone” seized the nation in the 1990s. Many pundits and observers have cheered America’s twenty-first century civic renaissance-an explosion of participatory innovations in public life. Invitations to “have your say!” and “join the discussion!” have proliferated. But has the widespread enthusiasm for maximizing citizen democracy led to real change?
In Do-It-Yourself Democracy, sociologist Caroline W. Lee examines how participatory innovations have reshaped American civic life over the past two decades. Lee looks at the public engagement industry that emerged to serve government, corporate, and nonprofit clients seeking to gain a handle on the increasingly noisy demands of their constituents and stakeholders. The beneficiaries of new forms of democratic empowerment are not only humble citizens, but also the engagement experts who host the forums. Does it matter if the folks deepening democracy are making money at it? How do they make sense of the contradictions inherent in their roles?
In investigating public engagement practitioners’ everyday anxieties and larger worldviews, we see reflected the strange meaning of power in contemporary institutions. New technologies and deliberative practices have democratized the ways in which organizations operate, but Lee argues that they have also been marketed and sold as tools to facilitate cost-cutting, profitability, and other management goals – and that public deliberation has burdened everyday people with new responsibilities without delivering on its promises of empowerment….”