OpenAidMap: “In all countries, whether rich or poor, contracts are at the nexus of revenue generation, budget planning, resource management and the delivery of public goods. Open contracting refers to norms and practices for increased disclosure and participation in public contracting at all stages of the contracting process.
There are very good reasons for making procurement processes transparent. Public posting of tender notices and “requests for proposals” helps support free and fair competitive bidding – increasing citizen trust while also improving the likelihood of securing the best possible supplier. Once procurement is finished, public posting of contract awards gives important assurance for citizens, development partners, and competing companies that procurement processes are open and fair. Increasingly, open contracting in procurement transparency through portals like this one is becoming the norm for governments around the world. There is also a global initiative at work to establish a common standard for contracting data….
With so much momentum behind procurement transparency, there is an untapped opportunity to leverage data from public procurement processes to provide operational insight into activities. Procurement data can help answer two of the most important questions in project-level aid transparency: (1) Where are projects taking place? (2) How much money is being invested at each location?
Take an example from Nepal. Consulting the government’s aid management system yields some basic, but already useful, information about a particular transportation project. This type of information can be useful for anyone trying to assess patterns of transportation investment in the country or, for that matter, patterns of development partner financing….
Open contracting data have intrinsic value for transparency and accountability. However, they also have significant value for planners – even those who only care about getting greater insight into project activities. At the moment though, contracting data are too difficult to access. While contracting data are increasingly becoming available, they are often posted on stand-alone websites, in diverse data formats and without structured access. By standardizing around a core contracting data format and accessibility approach, we can unlock the potential to use contracting data at scale not only for transparency, but also as an effort-free addition to the arsenal of available data for project-level planning, coordination, and accountability. The utility could be even higher if combined with performance and results data.
When developing any public data standard, there are opportunities and risks. For open contracting data, there is a huge opportunity to make those data equally relevant for project planners as for those more purely interested in transparency and accountability. The pilot conducted by the Open Aid Partnership and AidData has explored this potential for overlap, yielding key insights that we hope can be used in the future development of an open and broadly relevant open contracting data standard.”
Managing Innovation in a Crowd
New paper by Acemoglu, Daron and Mostagir, Mohamed and Ozdaglar, Asuman E.: “Crowdsourcing is an emerging technology where innovation and production are sourced out to the public through an open call. At the center of crowdsourcing is a resource allocation problem: there is an abundance of workers but a scarcity of high skills, and an easy task assigned to a high-skill worker is a waste of resources. This problem is complicated by the fact that the exact difficulties of innovation tasks may not be known in advance, so tasks that require high-skill labor cannot be identified and allocated ahead of time. We show that the solution to this problem takes the form of a skill hierarchy, where tasks are first attempted by low-skill labor, and high skill workers only engage with a task if less skilled workers are unable to finish it. This hierarchy can be constructed and implemented in a decentralized manner even though neither the difficulties of the tasks nor the skills of the candidate workers are known. We provide a dynamic pricing mechanism that achieves this implementation by inducing workers to self-select into different layers. The mechanism is simple: each time a task is attempted and not finished, its price (reward upon completion) goes up.”
Civic Works Project translates data into community tools
The blog of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation:”The Civic Works Project is a two-year effort to create apps and other tools to help increase the utility of local government data to benefit community organizations and the broader public. w
This project looks systemically at public and private information that can be used to engage residents, solve community problems and increase government accountability. We believe that there is a new frontier where information can be used to improve public services and community building efforts that benefit local residents.
Through the Civic Works Project, we’re seeking to improve access to information and identify solutions to problems facing diverse communities. Uncovering the value of data—and the stories behind it—can enhance the provision of public services through the smart application of technology.
Here’s some of what we’ve accomplished.
Partnership with WBEZ Public Data Blog
The WBEZ Public Data Blog is dedicated to examining and promoting civic data in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois. WBEZ is partnering with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to provide news and analysis on open government by producing content items that explain and tell stories hidden in public data. The project seeks to increase the utility, understanding, awareness and availability of local civic data. It comprises blog postings on the hidden uses of data and stories from the data, while including diverse voices and discussions on how innovations can improve civic life. It also features interviews with community organizations, businesses, government leaders and residents on challenges that could be solved through more effective use of public data.
Crime and Punishment in Chicago
The Crime and Punishment in Chicago project will provide an index of data sources regarding the criminal justice system in Chicago. This site will aggregate sources of data, how this data is generated, how to get it and what data is unavailable.
Illinois OpenTech Challenge
The Illinois Open Technology Challenge aims to bring governments, developers and communities together to create digital tools that use public data to serve today’s civic needs and promote economic development. Smart Chicago and our partners worked with government officials to publish 138 new datasets (34 in Champaign, 15 in Rockford, 12 in Belleville, and 77 from the 42 municipalities in the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association) on the State of Illinois data portal. Smart Chicago has worked with developers in meet-ups all over the state—in six locations in four cities with 149 people. The project has also allowed Smart Chicago to conduct outreach in each of our communities to reach regular residents with needs that can be addressed through data and technology.
LocalData + SWOP
The LocalData + SWOP project is part of our effort to help bridge technology gaps in high-capacity organizations. This effort helps the Southwest Organizing Project collect information about vacant and abandoned housing using the LocalData tool.
Affordable Care Act Outreach App
With the ongoing implementation of the Affordable Care Act, community organizations such as LISC-Chicago have been hard at work providing navigators to help residents register through the healthcare.gov site.
Currently, LISC-Chicago organizers are in neighborhoods contacting residents and encouraging them to go to their closest Center for Working Families. Using a combination of software, such as Wufoo and Twilio, Smart Chicago is helping LISC with its outreach by building a tool that enables organizers to send text reminders to sign up for health insurance to residents.
Texting Tools: Twilio and Textizen
Smart Chicago is expanding the Affordable Care Act outreach project to engage residents in other ways using SMS messaging.
Smart Chicago is also a local provider for Textizen, an SMS-based survey tool that civic organizations can use to obtain resident feedback. Organizations can create a survey campaign and then place the survey options on posters, postcards or screens during live events. They can then receive real-time feedback as people text in their answers.
WikiChicago
WikiChicago will be a hyper-local Wikipedia-like website that anyone can edit. For this project, Smart Chicago is partnering with the Chicago Public Library to feature local authors and books about Chicago, and to publish more information about Chicago’s rich history.”
New format of congressional documents creates transparency, opportunity
Colby Hochmuth in FedScoop: “Today, in a major win for the open data community, the Government Printing Office partnered with the Library of Congress to make summaries for House bills available in XML format. Bill summaries can now be downloaded in bulk from GPO’s Federal Digital System or FDsys. This format allows the data to be repurposed and reused by third-party providers, whether for mobile apps, analytical purposes or data mashups.
“This is the result of an effective ongoing collaboration between the Library and GPO to provide legislative information in modern, widely used formats,” said Librarian of Congress James Billington. “We are pleased the popular bill summaries, which provide objective descriptions of complex legislative text, are now available through the Federal Digital System.”
The movement for more transparent government data gained traction in the House Appropriations Committee and its support of the task force on bulk data established by the House.
House bills, the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations as well as various executive branch documents are currently available in XML downloadable format, but this latest development is different. These bill summaries are prepared by LOC’s Congressional Research Service and describe the key provisions of a piece of legislation, and explain the potential implications the legislation may have on current federal programs and laws.”
Building Transparency Momentum
Aspen Baker in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Even engaged citizens in Oakland, Calif., didn’t know the city had a Public Ethics Commission, let alone what its purpose was, when I joined its ranks three years ago. And people who did know about it didn’t have many nice things to say: Local blogs sneered at its lack of power and few politicians feared its oversight. Created in 1996 as a watchdog organization responsible for opening up city government, the commission had become just another element of Oakland’s cumbersome, opaque bureaucracy.
It’s easy to see why. Technology and media have dramatically changed our expectations for what defines transparency and accountability. For example, in the past, walking into City Hall, making an official request for a public record, and receiving it in the mail within two weeks meant good, open government. Now, if an Internet search doesn’t instantly turn up an answer to your question about local government, the assumption often is: Government’s hiding something.
This is rarely the case. Consider that Oakland has more than 40,000 boxes full of paper documents housed in locations throughout the city, not to mention hundreds of thousands of email messages generated each year. Records management is a serious—and legal—issue, and it’s fallen way behind the times. In an age when local municipalities are financially stretched more than ever before (38 US cities have declared bankruptcy since 2010), the ability of cities to invest in the technology, systems, and staff—and to facilitate the culture change that cities often need—is a real, major challenge.
Yet, for the innovators, activists, and leaders within and outside city government, this difficult moment is also one of significant opportunity for change; and many are seizing it.
Last month, the Transparency Project of the Public Ethics Commission—a subcommittee that I initiated and have led as chair for the last year—released a report detailing just how far Oakland has come and how far we have to go to create a culture of innovation, accountability, and transparency throughout all levels of the city.
Collaboration Is Critical
What comes through the report loud and clear is the important role that collaboration between city staff, the community, nonprofits, and others played in shifting expectations and establishing new standards—including the momentum generated by the volunteer-led “City Camps,” a gathering of citizens, city government, and businesses to work on open government issues, and the recent launch of RecordTrac, an online public records request tracking system built by Code for America Fellows that departments throughout the city have successfully adopted. RecordTrac makes information available to everyone, not just the person who requested it.
Ideas and Experiments Matter
Innovators didn’t let financial circumstances get in the way of thinking about what even a cash-strapped, problem-plagued city like Oakland could do to meet the new expectations of its citizens to find information quickly and easily online. The commission’s executive director Whitney Barazoto, along with her collaborators, didn’t think “small and practical”; they chose “big and futuristic” instead. Most importantly, they sought to experiment with new ways of spreading ideas and engaging the public in discussions—far beyond the standard (and often ineffective) “three minutes at the mic” practice at public meetings….
The “Toward Collective Transparency” report details the history of the innovative efforts to increase transparency within the City of Oakland and offers a number of recommendations for what’s next. The most defining feature of this report is its acknowledgment of the significant cultural changes that are taking place within the city, and around the country, in the way we think about the role of government, citizens, and the type of engagement and collaboration that can—and should—exist between the two.
It’s easy to get caught up in what’s gone wrong, but our subcommittee made a choice early on not to get buried in the past. We capitalized on our commission’s strengths rather than our weaknesses, leaving “deficit thinking” behind so that we could think creatively about what the commission and city were uniquely positioned to do.
Why does all this matter?
Last year, John Bridgeland and Peter Orszag, former officials in the administrations of President Obama and President George W. Bush, wrote an article in The Atlantic titled, “Can Government Play Moneyball?” They pointed out the need to measure the impact of government spending using the evidence-based statistical approach that the Oakland A’s own manager, Billy Beane, made famous. They argued that the same kind of scarcity Billy faced building a competitive baseball team is not unlike the scarcity that the federal government is facing, and they hope it will help government break some of its own traditions. Governments at all levels—city, county, state and federal—are all facing revenue challenges, but we can’t let that stop progress and change.
It takes a lot more than data and technology to improve the way government operates and engages with its citizens; it demands vision and leadership. We need innovators who can break traditions and make the future come alive through collaboration, ideas, and experiments.”
Open data: Strategies for impact
Havey Lewis at Open Government Partnership Blog: “When someone used to talk about “data for good”, chances are they were wondering whether the open data stream they relied on was still going to be available in the future. Similarly, “good with data” meant that experienced data scientists were being sought for a deeply technical project. Both interpretations reflect a state of being rather than of doing: data being around for good; people being good with data.
Important though these considerations are, they miss what should be an obvious and more profound alternative.
Right now, organisations like DataKind™ and Periscopic, and many other entrepreneurs, innovators and established social enterprises that use open data, see things differently. They are using these straplines to shake up the status quo, to demonstrate that data-driven businesses can do well by doing good.
And it’s the confluence of the many national and international open data initiatives, and the growing number of technically able, socially responsible organisations that provide the opportunity for social as well as economic growth. The World Wide Web Foundation now estimates that there are over 370 open data initiatives around the world. Collectively, and through portals such as Quandl and and datacatalogs.org, these initiatives have made a staggering quantity of data available – in excess of eight million data sets. In addition, several successful and data-rich companies are entering into a new spirit of philanthropy – by donating their data for the public good. There’s no doubt that opening up data signals a new willingness by governments and businesses all over the world to engage with their citizens and customers in a new and more transparent way.
The challenge, though, is ensuring that these popular national and international open data initiatives are cohesive and impactful. And that the plans drawn up by public sector bodies to release specific data sets are based on the potential the data has to achieve a beneficial outcome, not – or, at least, not solely – based on the cost or ease of publication. Despite the best of intentions, only a relatively small proportion of open data sets now available has the latent potential to create significant economic or social impact. In our push to open up data and government, it seems that we may have fallen into the trap of believing the ends are the same as the means; that effect is the same as cause…”
Important though these considerations are, they miss what should be an obvious and more profound alternative.
Right now, organisations like DataKind™ and Periscopic, and many other entrepreneurs, innovators and established social enterprises that use open data, see things differently. They are using these straplines to shake up the status quo, to demonstrate that data-driven businesses can do well by doing good.
And it’s the confluence of the many national and international open data initiatives, and the growing number of technically able, socially responsible organisations that provide the opportunity for social as well as economic growth. The World Wide Web Foundation now estimates that there are over 370 open data initiatives around the world. Collectively, and through portals such as Quandl and and datacatalogs.org, these initiatives have made a staggering quantity of data available – in excess of eight million data sets. In addition, several successful and data-rich companies are entering into a new spirit of philanthropy – by donating their data for the public good. There’s no doubt that opening up data signals a new willingness by governments and businesses all over the world to engage with their citizens and customers in a new and more transparent way.
The challenge, though, is ensuring that these popular national and international open data initiatives are cohesive and impactful. And that the plans drawn up by public sector bodies to release specific data sets are based on the potential the data has to achieve a beneficial outcome, not – or, at least, not solely – based on the cost or ease of publication. Despite the best of intentions, only a relatively small proportion of open data sets now available has the latent potential to create significant economic or social impact. In our push to open up data and government, it seems that we may have fallen into the trap of believing the ends are the same as the means; that effect is the same as cause…”
How Open Data Are Turned into Services?
New Paper by Muriel Foulonneau, Sébastien Martin, Slim Turki: “The Open Data movement has mainly been a data provision movement. The release of Open Data is usually motivated by (i) government transparency (citizen access to government data), (ii) the development of services by third parties for the benefit for citizens and companies (typically smart city approach), or (iii) the development of new services that stimulate the economy. The success of the Open Data movement and its return on investment should therefore be assessed among other criteria by the number and impact of the services created based on those data. In this paper, we study the development of services based on open data and means to make the data opening process more effective.”
The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator
New book by Ken Banks: “Despite the tens of billions spent each year in international aid, some of the most promising and exciting social innovations and businesses have come about by chance. Many of the people behind them didn’t consciously set out to solve anything, but they did. Welcome to the world of the ‘reluctant innovator’…
This book provides a welcome challenge to conventional wisdom in social entrepreneurship. It highlights the personal stories of ten social innovators from around the world. Ten social innovators – ordinary people – who randomly stumbled across problems, injustices and wrongs and, armed with little more than determination and belief, decided not to turn their backs but to dedicate their lives to solving them. Here are their stories….
Watching yet another Spanish movie in his friend’s apartment to avoid writing up his doctoral dissertation, Brij Kothari makes a throwaway comment about subtitles, which plants the seed of an idea and spawns a literacy initiative that has had, in Bill Clinton’s words, “a staggering impact on people’s lives”.
Worried about the political turmoil in Kenya, and concerned at the lack of information that is forthcoming from his adoptive country, Erik Hersman mobilises his own five-strong army to conceive, create and launch a web-based facility that revolutionises how breaking news is disseminated worldwide.
Parachuted into the middle of sub-Saharan Africa with a brief to collect public health data, and confronted with a laborious, environmentally wasteful paper-based system, paediatrician Joel Selanikio finds the perfect outlet for the skills he acquired as a Wall Street computer consultant.
Intending to ground himself in the realities of global health during his internship in rural Malawi, Josh Nesbit discovers that it is hard to sit on the sidelines and soon finds himself proposing a solution to overcome the difficulty of connecting patients, community health workers and hospitals.
After watching local doctors and midwives struggle to treat critically ill pregnant women in near-total darkness on a Nigerian maternity ward, where an untimely power cut can mean the difference between life and death, obstetrician Laura Stachel delivers a solar-based solution that enhances survival prospects.
Observing how well the autistic son of a close friend responds to the therapeutic effects of a Chinese massage technique that she has advocated using, Louisa Silva is convinced that the treatment has the potential to benefit thousands of others, but she needs to prove it.
Haunted by the memory of being separated from her older sister during a childhood spent in foster care, and horrified that other siblings are continuing to suffer the same fate, Lynn Price resolves to devise a way to bring such people back together.
An unexpected conversation over dinner leads Priti Radhakrishnan to build an innovative new organisation with a mission to fight for the rights of people denied access to life saving medicines.
Until a visit to the dermatologist turns her world upside down, Sharon Terry has never heard of pseudanthoma elasticum (PXE), but when she discovers that research into the disease afflicting her children is hidebound by scientific protocol, she sets about changing the system with characteristic zeal.
Encounters and conversations with leftover people occupying leftover spaces and using leftover materials, at home and abroad, led architecture professor Wes Janz to view them as urban pioneers, not victims, and teach him a valuable lesson: think small and listen to those at the sharp end.
See http://www.reluctantinnovation.com/”
Where next for citizen science? Innovative uses for crowd sourcing
VIDEO: “Thanks to new technologies , citizen science has seen huge growth over the past decade, opening up important scientific research to the masses and harnessing the power of the crowd. Ranging from classifying new galaxies to monitoring wildlife in the Serengeti, the Zooniverse stable of citizen science projects led by Dr Chris Lintott has seen incredible success. But what does the future hold for citizen science — does it have the power to help in real life situations such as disaster zones? And what are the implications when dealing with huge amounts of potentially sensitive data in real time?
This seminar is part of the Oxford Martin School Hilary Term seminar series: Blurring the lines: the changing dynamics between man and machine…www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk”
Give the Data to the People
Harlan Krumholz in the New York Times: “LAST week, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has hired my group, Yale University Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review.
This is an extraordinary donation to society, and a reversal of the industry’s traditional tendency to treat data as an asset that would lose value if exposed to public scrutiny.
Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all. The unreported results, not surprisingly, are often those in which a drug failed to perform better than a placebo. As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence. One of the most troubling implications is that full information on a drug’s effects may never be discovered or released.
Even when studies are published, the actual data are usually not made available. End users of research — patients, doctors and policy makers — are implicitly told by a single group of researchers to “take our word for it.” They are often forced to accept the report without the prospect of other independent scientists’ reproducing the findings — a violation of a central tenet of the scientific method.
To be fair, the decision to share data is not easy. Companies worry that their competitors will benefit, that lawyers will take advantage, that incompetent scientists will misconstrue the data and come to mistaken conclusions. Researchers feel ownership of the data and may be reluctant to have others use it. So Johnson & Johnson, as well as companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Medtronic that have made more cautious moves toward transparency, deserve much credit. The more we share data, however, the more we find that many of these problems fail to materialize….
This program doesn’t mean that just anyone can gain access to the data without disclosing how they intend to use it. We require those who want the data to submit a proposal and identify their research team, funding and any conflicts of interest. They have to complete a short course on responsible conduct and sign an agreement that restricts them to their proposed research question. Most important, they must agree to share whatever they find. And we exclude applicants who seek data for commercial or legal purposes. Our intent is not to be tough gatekeepers, but to ensure that the data are used in a transparent way and contribute to overall scientific knowledge.
There are many benefits to this kind of sharing. It honors the contributions of the subjects and scientists who participated in the research. It is proof that an organization, whether it is part of industry or academia, wants to play a role as a good global citizen. It demonstrates that the organization has nothing to hide. And it enables scientists to use the data to learn new ways to help patients. Such an approach can even teach a company like Johnson & Johnson something it didn’t know about its own products.
For the good of society, this is a breakthrough that should be replicated throughout the research world.”