Open Data for economic growth: the latest evidence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Stott at the Worldbank OpenData Blog: “One of the key policy drivers for Open Data has been to drive economic growth and business innovation. There’s a growing amount of evidence and analysis not only for the total potential economic benefit but also for some of the ways in which this is coming about. This evidence is summarised and reviewed in a new World Bank paper published today.
There’s a range of studies that suggest that the potential prize from Open Data could be enormous – including an estimate of $3-5 trillion a year globally from McKinsey Global Institute and an estimate of $13 trillion cumulative over the next 5 years in the G20 countries.  There are supporting studies of the value of Open Data to certain sectors in certain countries – for instance $20 billion a year to Agriculture in the US – and of the value of key datasets such as geospatial data.  All these support the conclusion that the economic potential is at least significant – although with a range from “significant” to “extremely significant”!
At least some of this benefit is already being realised by new companies that have sprung up to deliver new, innovative, data-rich services and by older companies improving their efficiency by using open data to optimise their operations. Five main business archetypes have been identified – suppliers, aggregators, enrichers, application developers and enablers. What’s more there are at least four companies which did not exist ten years ago, which are driven by Open Data, and which are each now valued at around $1 billion or more. Somewhat surprisingly the drive to exploit Open Data is coming from outside the traditional “ICT sector” – although the ICT sector is supplying many of the tools required.
It’s also becoming clear that if countries want to maximise their gain from Open Data the role of government needs to go beyond simply publishing some data on a website. Governments need to be:

  • Suppliers – of the data that business need
  • Leaders – making sure that municipalities, state owned enterprises and public services operated by the private sector also release important data
  • Catalysts – nurturing a thriving ecosystem of data users, coders and application developers and incubating new, data-driven businesses
  • Users – using Open Data themselves to overcome the barriers to using data within government and innovating new ways to use the data they collect to improve public services and government efficiency.

Nevertheless, most of the evidence for big economic benefits for Open Data comes from the developed world. So on Wednesday the World Bank is holding an open seminar to examine critically “Can Open Data Boost Economic Growth and Prosperity” in developing countries. Please join us and join the debate!
Learn more:

Demos for Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The GovLab presents Demos for Democracy, an ongoing series of live, interactive online demos featuring designers and builders of the latest innovative governance platforms, tools or methods to foster greater openness and collaboration to how we govern.
Who: remesh, founded by PhD students Andrew Konya and Aaron Slodov, is an online public platform that offers a community, group, nation or planet of people the ability to speak with one voice that represents the collective thinking of all people within the group. remesh was prototyped at a HacKSU hackathon early in 2013 and has been under development over the past year.
What: Join us for a live demonstration of how remesh works before their official public launch. Participants will be given a link to test the platform during the live Google hangout.  More information on what remesh does can be found here.
When: July 29, 2014, 2:00 – 2:30 PM EST
Where: Online via Google Hangouts on Air. To RSVP and join, go to the Hangout Link. This event will be live tweeted at #democracydemos.
Bios:
Andrew Konya (CEO/Founder) is a PhD student in computational/theoretical physics at Kent State University. With extensive experience developing and implementing mathematical models for natural and man-made systems, Andrew brings a creative yet and versatile technical toolbox. This expertise, in concert with his passion for linguistics, led him to develop the first mathematical framework for collective speech. His goal is the completion of a conversation platform, built on this framework, which can make conversations between countries in conflict a viable alternative to war.
Aaron Slodov (COO/Founder) is a current power systems engineering PhD student at Case Western Reserve University. A previous engineer at both Google and Meetup.com, Aaron is experienced in the tech landscape, and understands many of the current problems in the space. By enabling remesh technology he hopes to bring significant paradigm-shifting change to the way we communicate and interact with our world.
RSVP and JOIN
We hope to see you on Tuesday! If you have any questions, email us at [email protected].

Recent progress in Open Data production and consumption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Examples from a Governmental institute (SMHI) and a collaborative EU research project (SWITCH-ON) by Arheimer, Berit; and Falkenroth, Esa: “The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) has a long tradition both in producing and consuming open data on a national, European and global scale. It is also promoting community building among water scientists in Europe by participating in and initiating collaborative projects. This presentation will exemplify the contemporary European movement imposed by the INSPIRE directive and the Open Data Strategy, by showing the progress in openness and shift in attitudes during the last decade when handling Research Data and Public Sector Information at a national European institute. Moreover, the presentation will inform about a recently started collaborative project (EU FP7 project No 603587) coordinated by SMHI and called SWITCH-ON http://water-switch-on.eu/. The project addresses water concerns and currently untapped potential of open data for improved water management across the EU. The overall goal of the project is to make use of open data, and add value to society by repurposing and refining data from various sources. SWITCH-ON will establish new forms of water research and facilitate the development of new products and services based on principles of sharing and community building in the water society. The SWITCH-ON objectives are to use open data for implementing: 1) an innovative spatial information platform with open data tailored for direct water assessments, 2) an entirely new form of collaborative research for water-related sciences, 3) fourteen new operational products and services dedicated to appointed end-users, 4) new business and knowledge to inform individual and collective decisions in line with the Europe’s smart growth and environmental objectives. The presentation will discuss challenges, progress and opportunities with the open data strategy, based on the experiences from working both at a Governmental institute and being part of the global research community.”

What ‘urban physics’ could tell us about how cities work

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ruth Graham at Boston Globe: “What does a city look like? If you’re walking down the street, perhaps it looks like people and storefronts. Viewed from higher up, patterns begin to emerge: A three-dimensional grid of buildings divided by alleys, streets, and sidewalks, nearly flat in some places and scraping the sky in others. Pull back far enough, and the city starts to look like something else entirely: a cluster of molecules.

At least, that’s what it looks like to Franz-Josef Ulm, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ulm has built a career as an expert on the properties, patterns, and environmental potential of concrete. Taking a coffee break at MIT’s Stata Center late one afternoon, he and a colleague were looking at a large aerial photograph of a city when they had a “eureka” moment: “Hey, doesn’t that look like a molecular structure?”
With colleagues, Ulm began analyzing cities the way you’d analyze a material, looking at factors such as the arrangement of buildings, each building’s center of mass, and how they’re ordered around each other. They concluded that cities could be grouped into categories: Boston’s structure, for example, looks a lot like an “amorphous liquid.” Seattle is another liquid, and so is Los Angeles. Chicago, which was designed on a grid, looks like glass, he says; New York resembles a highly ordered crystal.
So far Ulm and his fellow researchers have presented their work at conferences, but it has not yet been published in a scientific journal. If the analogy does hold up, Ulm hopes it will give planners a new tool to understand a city’s structure, its energy use, and possibly even its resilience to climate change.
Ulm calls his new work “urban physics,” and it places him among a number of scientists now using the tools of physics to analyze the practically infinite amount of data that cities produce in the 21st century, from population density to the number of patents produced to energy bill charges. Physicist Marta González, Ulm’s colleague at MIT, recently used cellphone data to analyze traffic patterns in Boston with unprecedented complexity, for example. In 2012, a theoretical physicist was named founding director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, whose research is devoted to “urban informatics”; one of its first projects is helping to create the country’s first “quantified community” on the West Side of Manhattan.
In Ulm’s case, he and his colleagues have used freely available data, including street layouts and building coordinates, to plot the structures of 12 cities and analogize them to existing complex materials. In physics, an “order parameter” is a number between 0 and 1 that describes how atoms are arranged in relationship to other atoms nearby; Ulm applies this idea to city layouts. Boston, he says, has an “order parameter” of .52, equivalent to that of a liquid like water. This means its structure is notably disordered, which may have something to do with how it developed. “Boston has grown organically,” he said. “The city, in the way its buildings are organized today, carries that information from its historical evolution.”…

When Technologies Combine, Amazing Innovation Happens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

FastCoexist: “Innovation occurs both within fields, and in combinations of fields. It’s perhaps the latter that ends up being most groundbreaking. When people of disparate expertise, mindset and ideas work together, new possibilities pop up.
In a new report, the Institute for the Future argues that “technological change is increasingly driven by the combination and recombination of foundational elements.” So, when we think about the future, we need to consider not just fundamental advances (say, in computing, materials, bioscience) but also at the intersection of these technologies.
The report uses combination-analysis in the form of a map. IFTF selects 13 “territories”–what it calls “frontiers of innovation”–and then examines the linkages and overlaps. The result is 20 “combinational forecasts.” “These are the big stories, hot spots that will shape the landscape of technology in the coming decade,” the report explains. “Each combinatorial forecast emerges from the intersection of multiple territories.”…

Quantified Experiences

Advances in brain-imaging techniques will make bring new transparency to our thoughts and feelings. “Assigning precise measurements to feelings like pain through neurofeedback and other techniques could allow for comparison, modulation, and manipulation of these feelings,” the report says. “Direct measurement of our once-private thoughts and feelings can help us understand other people’s experience but will also present challenges regarding privacy and definition of norms.”…

Code Is The Law

The law enforcement of the future may increasingly rely on sensors and programmable devices. “Governance is shifting from reliance on individual responsibility and human policing toward a system of embedded protocols and automatic rule enforcement,” the report says. That in turn means greater power for programmers who are effectively laying down the parameters of the new relationship between government and governed….”

Generative Emergence: A New Discipline of Organizational, Entrepreneurial, and Social Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Benyamin Lichtenstein: “Culminating more than 30 years of research into evolution, complexity science, organizing and entrepreneurship, this book provides insights to scholars who are increasingly using emergence to explain social phenomena. In addition to providing the first comprehensive definition and framework for understanding emergence, it is the first publication of data from a year-long experimental study of emergence in high-potential ventures—a week-by-week longitudinal analysis of their processes based on over 750 interviews and 1000 hours of on-site observation.  These data, combined with reports from over a dozen other studies, confirm the dynamics of the five phase model in multiple contexts…

Key insights from the book include:

  • Findings which show a major difference between an aspiration that generates a purposive drive for generative emergence, versus a performance-driven crisis that sparks organizational change and transformation.  This difference has important implications for studies of entrepreneurship, innovation, and social change.
  • A definition of emergence based on 100+ years of work in philosophy and philosophy of science, evolutionary studies, sociology, and organization science.
  • The most inclusive review of complexity science published, to help reinvigorate and legitimize those methods in the social sciences.
  • The Dynamic States Model—a new approach for understanding the non-linear growth and development of new ventures.
  • In-depth examinations of more than twenty well-known emergence studies, to reveal their shared dynamics and underlying drivers.
  • Proposals for applying the five-phase model—as a logic of emergence—to social innovation, organizational leadership, and entrepreneurial development.”

Privacy-Invading Technologies and Privacy by Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Demetrius Klitou: “Challenged by rapidly developing privacy-invading technologies (PITs), this book provides a convincing set of potential policy recommendations and practical solutions for safeguarding both privacy and security. It shows that benefits such as public security do not necessarily come at the expense of privacy and liberty overall.
Backed up by comprehensive study of four specific PITs – Body scanners; Public space CCTV microphones; Public space CCTV loudspeakers; and Human-implantable microchips (RFID implants/GPS implants) – the author shows how laws that regulate the design and development of PITs may more effectively protect privacy than laws that only regulate data controllers and the use of such technologies. New rules and regulations should therefore incorporate fundamental privacy principles through what is known as ‘Privacy by Design’.
The numerous sources explored by the author provide a workable overview of the positions of academia, industry, government and relevant international organizations and NGOs.

  • Explores a relatively novel approach of protecting privacy
  • Offers a convincing set of potential policy recommendations and practical solutions
  • Provides a workable overview of the positions of academia, industry, government and relevant international organizations and NGOs”

Crowd-Sourced Augmented Realities: Social Media and the Power of Digital Representation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pre-publication version of a chapter by Matthew Zook, Mark Graham and  Andrew Boulton  in S. Mains, J. Cupples, and C. Lukinbeal. Mediated Geographies/Geographies of Media. Springer Science International Handbooks in Human Geography, (Forthcoming): “A key and distinguishing feature of society today is that its increasingly documented by crowd-sourced social media discourse about public experiences. Much of this social media content is geo-referenced and exists in layers of information draped over the physical world, invisible to the naked eye but accessible to range of digital (and often) mobile devices. When we access these information layers, they mediate the mundane practices of everyday life, (e.g., What or who is nearby? How do I move from point A to B) through the creation of augmented realities, i.e., unstable, context dependent representations of places brought temporary into being by combining the space of material and virtual experience.
These augmented realities, as particular representations of locations, places and events, are vigorously promoted or contested and thus become important spots in which power is exercised, much in the same way that maps have long had power to reinforce or challenge the status quo. However, because many of the processes and practices behind the creation of augmented realities are unseen, its power is often overlooked in the process of representation or place-making. This paper highlights the points at which power acts and demonstrate that all representations of place – including augmented realities derived from social media – are products of and productive of, social relationships and associated power relations.”
Building upon a case study of Abbottabad, Pakistan after the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound we construct a four-part typology of the power relations emerging from social practices that enact augmented realities. These include: Distributed power, the complex and socially/spatially distributed authorship of user-generated geospatial content; Communication power, the ways in which particular representations gain prominence; language is a particularly key variable; Code power, the autonomy of software code to regulate actions, or mediate content, or ordering representations in particular ways; and Timeless power, the ways in which digital representations of place reconfigure temporal relationships, particularly sequence and duration, between people and events.

Business Models That Take Advantage of Open Data Opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Mark Boyd at the Programmeableweb: “At last week’s OKFestival in Berlin, Kat Borlongan and Chloé Bonnet from Parisian open data startup Five By Five moderated an interactive speed-geek session to examine how startups are building viability using open data and open data APIs. The picture that emerged revealed a variety of composite approaches being used, with all those presenting having just one thing in common: a commitment to fostering ecosystems that will allow other startups to build alongside them.
The OKFestival—hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation—brought together more than 1,000 participants from around the globe working on various aspects of the open data agenda: the use of corporate data, open science research, government open data and crowdsourced data projects.
In a session held on the first day of the event, Borlongan facilitated an interactive workshop to help would-be entrepreneurs understand how startups are building business models that take advantage of open data opportunities to create sustainable, employment-generating businesses.
Citing research from the McKinsey Institute that calculates the value of open data to be worth $3 trillion globally, Borlongan said: “So the understanding of the open data process is usually: We throw open data over the wall, then we hold a hackathon, and then people will start making products off it, and then we make the $3 trillion.”
Borlongan argued that it is actually a “blurry identity to be an open data startup” and encouraged participants to unpack, with each of the startups presenting exactly how income can be generated and a viable business built in this space.
Jeni Tennison, from the U.K.’s Open Data Institute (which supports 15 businesses in its Startup Programme) categorizes two types of business models:

  1. Businesses that publish (but do not sell) open data.
  2. Businesses built on top of using open data.

Businesses That Publish but Do Not Sell Open Data

At the Open Data Institute, Tennison is investigating the possibility of an open address database that would provide street address data for every property in the U.K. She describes three types of business models that could be created by projects that generated and published such data:
Freemium: In this model, the bulk data of open addresses could be made available freely, “but if you want an API service, then you would pay for it.” Tennison pointed to lots of opportunities also to degrade the freemium-level data—for example, having it available in bulk but not at a particularly granular level (unless you pay for it), or by provisioning reuse on a share-only basis, but you would pay if you wanted the data for corporate use cases (similar to how OpenCorporates sells access to its data).
Cross-subsidy: In this approach, the data would be available, and the opportunities to generate income would come from providing extra services, like consultancy or white labeling data services alongside publishing the open data.
Network: In this business model, value is created by generating a network effect around the core business interest, which may not be the open data itself. As an example, Tennison suggested that if a post office or delivery company were to create the open address database, it might be interested in encouraging private citizens to collaboratively maintain or crowdsource the quality of the data. The revenue generated by this open data would then come from reductions in the cost of delivery services as the data improved accuracy.

Businesses Built on Top of Open Data

Six startups working in unique ways to make use of available open data also presented their business models to OKFestival attendees: Development Seed, Mapbox, OpenDataSoft, Enigma.io, Open Bank API, and Snips.

Startup: Development Seed
What it does: Builds solutions for development, public health and citizen democracy challenges by creating open source tools and utilizing open data.
Open data API focus: Regularly uses open data APIs in its projects. For example, it worked with the World Bank to create a data visualization website built on top of the World Bank API.
Type of business model: Consultancy, but it has also created new businesses out of the products developed as part of its work, most notably Mapbox (see below).

Startup: Enigma.io
What it does: Open data platform with advanced discovery and search functions.
Open data API focus: Provides the Enigma API to allow programmatic access to all data sets and some analytics from the Enigma platform.
Type of business model: SaaS including a freemium plan with no degradation of data and with access to API calls; some venture funding; some contracting services to particular enterprises; creating new products in Enigma Labs for potential later sale.

Startup: Mapbox
What it does: Enables users to design and publish maps based on crowdsourced OpenStreetMap data.
Open data API focus: Uses OpenStreetMap APIs to draw data into its map-creation interface; provides the Mapbox API to allow programmatic creation of maps using Mapbox web services.
Type of business model: SaaS including freemium plan; some tailored contracts for big map users such as Foursquare and Evernote.

Startup: Open Bank Project
What it does: Creates an open source API for use by banks.
Open data API focus: Its core product is to build an API so that banks can use a standard, open source API tool when creating applications and web services for their clients.
Type of business model: Contract license with tiered SLAs depending on the number of applications built using the API; IT consultancy projects.

Startup: OpenDataSoft
What it does: Provides an open data publishing platform so that cities, governments, utilities and companies can publish their own data portal for internal and public use.
Open data API focus: It’s able to route data sources into the portal from a publisher’s APIs; provides automatic API-creation tools so that any data set uploaded to the portal is then available as an API.
Type of business model: SaaS model with freemium plan, pricing by number of data sets published and number of API calls made against the data, with free access for academic and civic initiatives.

Startup: Snips
What it does: Predictive modeling for smart cities.
Open data API focus: Channels some open and client proprietary data into its modeling algorithm calculations via API; provides a predictive modeling API for clients’ use to programmatically generate solutions based on their data.
Type of business model: Creating one B2C app product for sale as a revenue-generation product; individual contracts with cities and companies to solve particular pain points, such as using predictive modeling to help a post office company better manage staff rosters (matched to sales needs) and a consultancy project to create a visualization mapping tool that can predict the risk of car accidents for a city….”

Portugal: Municipal Transparency Portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The Municipal Transparency Portal is an initiative of the XIX constitutional Government to increase transparency of local public administration management toward citizens. Here are presented and made available a set of indicators regarding management of the 308 Portuguese municipalities, as well as their aggregation on inter-municipal entities (metropolitan areas and intermunicipal communities) when applicable.
Indicators
The indicators are organized in 6 groups:

    • Financial management: financial indicators relating to indebtedness, municipal revenue and expenditure
    • Administrative management: indicators relating to municipal human resources, public procurement and transparency of municipal information
    • Fiscal decisions of municipality: rates determined by the municipalities on IMI, IRS and IRC surcharge
    • Economic dynamics of the municipality: indicators about local economic activity of citizens and businesses
    • Municipal services: indicators regarding the main public services with relevant intervention of municipalities (water and waste treatment, education and housing)
    • Municipal electoral turnout: citizen taking part in local elections and voting results.

More: http://www.portalmunicipal.pt/”