New paper by Saebi, Tina and Foss, Nicolai, available at SSRN: “Research on open innovation suggests that companies benefit differentially from adopting open innovation strategies; however, it is unclear why this is so. One possible explanation is that companies’ business models are not attuned to open strategies. Accordingly, we propose a contingency model of open business models by systematically linking open innovation strategies to core business model dimensions, notably the content, structure, governance of transactions. We further illustrate a continuum of open innovativeness, differentiating between four types of open business models. We contribute to the open innovation literature by specifying the conditions under which business models are conducive to the success of open innovation strategies.”
Stacking Up the Benefits of Openness
Jeanne Holm at Digital Gov: “Open government, open source, openness. These words are often used in talking about open data, but we sometimes forget that the root of all of this is an open community. Individuals working together to release government data and put it to use to help their neighbors and reach new personal goals.
This sense of community in the open data field shows up in many places. I see it when people volunteer at the National Day of Civic Hacking, crowdsource data integrity with MapGive, or mentor with Girls Who Code. And each day I see it on Open Data Stack Exchange, where people ask questions about open data issues, searches, or challenges, and strangers half a world away answer the question within an hour.
We launched the Open Data Stack Exchange in 2013 as a way of helping to build community and open up the knowledge in our emergent field. What started slowly, soon took off with 3,375 participants today having provided 1,592 answers to 721 questions. Anyone can ask a question. These have ranged from data requests (looking for specific hard-to-find data) to technical questions on parsing or visualizing data. More importantly, anyone can answer a question, too. You’ll notice from the numbers that most questions have more than one answer, with the asker being able to choose the best answer and everyone being able to vote the questions and answers up and down. The forum is loosely moderated (I’ve served as one of the moderators since inception), but predominantly self-governed. Google trusts this method and forum so much that within a few minutes of answering a question, it will pop to the top of the Google search results for that topic.
What are people asking on the Open Data Stack Exchange? One question is seeking applications being developed with open data, one is looking for a database of open databases and another seeks data about the Ebola outbreak. Answers, edits, comments, suggestions…all are part of the conversation and documentation of our collective open data knowledge. This type of community-vetted, open forum helps to evolve and preserve our collective wisdom into the future. I encourage people who ask questions of Data.gov to do so on Stack Exchange so that everyone can see the answer, and flag those for easy reference (OpenFDA does the same)…”
How Open Data Is Transforming City Life
Joel Gurin, The GovLab, at Techonomy: “Start a business. Manage your power use. Find cheap rents, or avoid crime-ridden neighborhoods. Cities and their citizens worldwide are discovering the power of “open data”—public data and information available from government and other sources that can help solve civic problems and create new business opportunities. By opening up data about transportation, education, health care, and more, municipal governments are helping app developers, civil society organizations, and others to find innovative ways to tackle urban problems. For any city that wants to promote entrepreneurship and economic development, open data can be a valuable new resource.
The urban open data movement has been growing for several years, with American cities including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington in the forefront. Now an increasing number of government officials, entrepreneurs, and civic hackers are recognizing the potential of open data. The results have included applications that can be used across many cities as well as those tailored to an individual city’s needs.
At first, the open data movement was driven by a commitment to transparency and accountability. City, state, and local governments have all released data about their finances and operations in the interest of good government and citizen participation. Now some tech companies are providing platforms to make this kind of city data more accessible, useful, and comparable. Companies like OpenGov and Govini make it possible for city managers and residents to examine finances, assess police department overtime, and monitor other factors that let them compare their city’s performance to neighboring municipalities.
Other new businesses are tapping city data to provide residents with useful, practical information. One of the best examples is NextBus, which uses metropolitan transportation data to tell commuters when to expect a bus along their route. Commuter apps like this have become common in cities in the U.S. and around the world. Another website, SpotCrime, collects, analyzes, and maps crime statistics to tell city dwellers which areas are safest or most dangerous and to offer crime alerts. And the Chicago-based Purple Binder helps people in need find city healthcare services. Many companies in the Open Data 500, the study of open data companies that I direct at the GovLab at NYU, use data from cities as well as other sources….
Some of the most ambitious uses of city data—with some of the greatest potential—focus on improving education. In Washington, the nonprofit Learn DC has made data about public schools available through a portal that state agencies, community organizations, and civic hackers can all use. They’re using it for collaborative research and action that, they say, has “empowered every DC parent to participate in shaping the future of the public education system.”…”
The Crypto-democracy and the Trustworthy
New Paper by Sebastien Gambs, Samuel Ranellucci, and Alain Tapp: “In the current architecture of the Internet, there is a strong asymmetry in terms of power between the entities that gather and process personal data (e.g., major Internet companies, telecom operators, cloud providers, …) and the individuals from which this personal data is issued. In particular, individuals have no choice but to blindly trust that these entities will respect their privacy and protect their personal data. In this position paper, we address this issue by proposing an utopian crypto-democracy model based on existing scientific achievements from the field of cryptography. More precisely, our main objective is to show that cryptographic primitives, including in particular secure multiparty computation, offer a practical solution to protect privacy while minimizing the trust assumptions. In the crypto-democracy envisioned, individuals do not have to trust a single physical entity with their personal data but rather their data is distributed among several institutions. Together these institutions form a virtual entity called the Trustworthy that is responsible for the storage of this data but which can also compute on it (provided first that all the institutions agree on this). Finally, we also propose a realistic proof-of-concept of the Trustworthy, in which the roles of institutions are played by universities. This proof-of-concept would have an important impact in demonstrating the possibilities offered by the crypto-democracy paradigm.”
Data + Design: A simple introduction to preparing and visualizing information
Open access book by By Trina Chiasson, Dyanna Gregory, and all of these people: “(Foreword) Data are all around us and always have been. Everything throughout history has always had the potential to be quantified: theoretically, one could count every human who has ever lived, every heartbeat that has ever beaten, every step that was ever taken, every star that has ever shone, every word that has ever been uttered or written. Each of these collective things can be represented by a number. But only recently have we had the technology to efficiently surface these hidden numbers, leading to greater insight into our human condition.
But what does this mean, exactly? What are the cultural effects of having easy access to data? It means, for one thing, that we all need to be more data literate. It also means we have to be more design literate. As the old adage goes, statistics lie. Well, data visualizations lie, too. How can we learn how to first, effectively read data visualizations; and second, author them in such a way that is ethical and clearly communicates the data’s inherent story?
At the intersection of art and algorithm, data visualization schematically abstracts information to bring about a deeper understanding of the data, wrapping it in an element of awe.
My favorite description of data visualization comes from the prolific blogger, Maria Popova, who said that data visualization is “at the intersection of art and algorithm.” To learn about the history of data visualization is to become an armchair cartographer, explorer, and statistician….”
Early visual explorations of data focused mostly on small snippets of data gleaned to expand humanity’s understanding of the geographical world, mainly through maps. Starting with the first recognized world maps of the 13th century, scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and sailors used math to visualize the invisible. Stars and suns were plotted, coastlines and shipping routes charted. Data visualization, in its native essence, drew the lines, points, and coordinates that gave form to the physical world and our place in it. It answered questions like “Where am I?”, “How do I get there?”, and “How far is it?”
Bridging the Knowledge Gap: In Search of Expertise
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”