Official Google Blog: “Constitutions are as unique as the people they govern, and have been around in one form or another for millennia. But did you know that every year approximately five new constitutions are written, and 20-30 are amended or revised? Or that Africa has the youngest set of constitutions, with 19 out of the 39 constitutions written globally since 2000 from the region?
The process of redesigning and drafting a new constitution can play a critical role in uniting a country, especially following periods of conflict and instability. In the past, it’s been difficult to access and compare existing constitutional documents and language—which is critical to drafters—because the texts are locked up in libraries or on the hard drives of constitutional experts. Although the process of drafting constitutions has evolved from chisels and stone tablets to pens and modern computers, there has been little innovation in how their content is sourced and referenced.
With this in mind, Google Ideas supported the Comparative Constitutions Project to build Constitute, a new site that digitizes and makes searchable the world’s constitutions. Constitute enables people to browse and search constitutions via curated and tagged topics, as well as by country and year. The Comparative Constitutions Project cataloged and tagged nearly 350 themes, so people can easily find and compare specific constitutional material. This ranges from the fairly general, such as “Citizenship” and “Foreign Policy,” to the very specific, such as “Suffrage and turnouts” and “Judicial Autonomy and Power.”
Our aim is to arm drafters with a better tool for constitution design and writing. We also hope citizens will use Constitute to learn more about their own constitutions, and those of countries around the world.”
Open Data 500 gives voice to companies using government data
Fedscoop: “Federal agencies have been working toward a Nov. 1 deadline to unlock their data, as mandated by an executive order issued in May. But what has yet to be examined is how useful those data sets have been to companies and the economic value they have created.
Enter the Open Data 500 – a project that gives companies the opportunity to provide feedback to government about which data sets are most useful and which type of data demand exists.
The initiative is part of a broader effort by the New York University’s Governance Lab’s research of how government can work more effectively with its constituents, said Joel Gurin, GovLab’s senior adviser and director of Open Data 500.
“We hope this will be a research project that illuminates the way government open data sets are being used by the private sector and help people gauge the economic impact and also help to make open data more effective, more useful,” he said.
Companies participating in Open Data 500 submit their responses via a survey to give insight into which data has been easiest to use and which type of data they would like to see made available. The survey also ranks agencies’ data sets on how useful they are.
What the project won’t do is score companies based on their use of federal data, but instead gives them a chance to interact with government and express which data they want.”
What the project won’t do is score companies based on their use of federal data, but instead gives them a chance to interact with government and express which data they want.”
Social media: its emerging importance and impact on citizen engagement
New article by Victoria Burton in International Affairs Forum that “examines the impact of social media which not only provides citizens alternative avenues to express themselves about government policies but presents new challenges and means for government to provide services to the public. An example is the CovJam online venture presented by Coventry City and IBM that used social media as part of a three-day brainstorming event about the city. Social media have facilitated government programs to carry out surveys and fine-tune services but perhaps the greatest aspect is that of greater public participation. Moving forward, it will be important to address social media across public sectors and establish strategies to leverage its advantages and benefits.”
Prizes and Productivity: How Winning the Fields Medal Affects Scientific Output
New NBER working paper by George J. Borjas and Kirk B. Doran: “Knowledge generation is key to economic growth, and scientific prizes are designed to encourage it. But how does winning a prestigious prize affect future output? We compare the productivity of Fields medalists (winners of the top mathematics prize) to that of similarly brilliant contenders. The two groups have similar publication rates until the award year, after which the winners’ productivity declines. The medalists begin to “play the field,” studying unfamiliar topics at the expense of writing papers. It appears that tournaments can have large post-prize effects on the effort allocation of knowledge producers.”
Open Data’s Road to Better Transit
Stephen Goldsmith in GovTech: “Data is everywhere. It now costs less to capture, store and process data than ever before, thanks to better technology and economies of scale. And more than ever, the public expects government to use data to improve its services. Increasingly, government’s problem is not capturing the data, but having sufficient resources to clean and analyze the information in order to address issues, improve performance and make informed decisions.
In particular, public transit not only produces an immense volume of data, but it also stands to benefit from good analysis in the form of streamlined operations and a better rider experience. More than 200 transit agencies worldwide — from Buffalo to Budapest — are well on their way. They are publishing their schedules, fares and station locations to Google’s TransitDataFeed in a common format and for free. Such information is called open data, which is any data that’s publicly shared.
Open data allows anyone to download and use the information for his or her purposes, particularly software developers who can use it to create mobile and Web-based applications. Google, for example, incorporates the information into its Maps application to help riders plan trips and learn about service updates across bus, rail and bike systems. Other third parties have built successful apps on top of open transit data.
Innovations like these allow transit agencies to leverage external expertise and resources, and have also reduced customer service costs and increased ridership levels. In fact, some members of the American Public Transportation Association believe that open data initiatives have catalyzed more innovation throughout the industry than any other factor in the last three decades….
In Philadelphia, the City Planning Commission is using text message surveying to capture the opinions of transit riders across the demographic spectrum to determine the usefulness of a proposed rapid transit line into downtown. Philadelphia uses the transit information to inform its comprehensive city plan, but this digital citizen survey mechanism, created by a company called Textizen, is a platform that can be used by any government that wants to solicit feedback or begin a dialog with its citizens.
In 2012, Dubuque, Iowa, collaborated with IBM to run a Smarter Travel pilot study. The pilot used a mobile app and RFIDs to collect anonymous travel data from volunteer transit riders. The city has already used the data to open a new late-night bus line for third-shift workers and college students, and by next year will incorporate data into more route planning decisions.”
New book: "Crowdsourcing"
New book by Jean-Fabrice Lebraty, Katia Lobre-Lebraty on Crowdsourcing: “Crowdsourcing is a relatively recent phenomenon that only appeared in 2006, but it continues to grow and diversify (crowdfunding, crowdcontrol, etc.). This book aims to review this concept and show how it leads to the creation of value and new business opportunities.
Chapter 1 is based on four examples: the online-banking sector, an informative television channel, the postal sector and the higher education sector. It shows that in the current context, for a company facing challenges, the crowd remains an untapped resource. The next chapter presents crowdsourcing as a new form of externalization and offers definitions of crowdsourcing. In Chapter 3, the authors attempt to explain how a company can create value by means of a crowdsourcing operation. To do this, authors use a model linking types of value, types of crowd, and the means by which these crowds are accessed.
Chapter 4 examines in detail various forms that crowdsourcing may take, by presenting and discussing ten types of crowdsourcing operation. In Chapter 5, the authors imagine and explore the ways in which the dark side of crowdsourcing might be manifested and Chapter 6 offers some insight into the future of crowdsourcing.
Contents
1. A Turbulent and Paradoxical Environment.
2. Crowdsourcing: A New Form of Externalization.
3. Crowdsourcing and Value Creation.
4. Forms of Crowdsourcing.
5. The Dangers of Crowdsourcing.
6. The Future of Crowdsourcing.”
Chicago Works For You
“Chicago Works For You is a citywide dashboard with ward-by-ward views of service delivery in Chicago. …The homepage is a citywide map with a daily summary of all service requests submitted, by service type and ward.Dark lines under and up-arrows next to a request type means there were more requests of that type on that date than average. The longer the line, the higher above average. Highest above average is highlighted on the map as default. Click any service request type to see the raw numbers and averages. The legend in the lake shows you the number ranges for each type in each ward. Click any service type to see those numbers for any day….
This data comes directly from the City of Chicago’s Open311 API. Chicago’s Open311 API can be used to both view 311 request data as well as enter new requests directly into the system. In 2012, the City of Chicago became a Code for America partner city. A team of four technologists worked to build an Open311 system for Chicago that would help residents track what was happening with their service requests. Through a grant from Smart Chicago the team built Chicago Service Tracker which shows each step the city takes to resolve a 311 request. This also enabled all the 311 data to be accessible on the city’s data portal….
The Smart Chicago Collaborative is a civic organization devoted to using technology to make lives better in Chicago. We were formed to address the challenge of the lack of broadband Internet access for all Chicagoans. More broadly, we work to apply the transformative power of technology to solve problems for the people of Chicago.
We are a startup that was founded in part by our municipal government and nurtured by some of its most venerable institutions. Our founding partners are the City of Chicago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust. As a funding collaborative, we help bring together municipal, philanthropic, and corporate investments in civic innovation.
We have a host of current projects and partnerships, and we are actively seeking to connect ideas and resources in all areas of philanthropy in Chicago.”
Benjamin Barber: Why mayors should rule the world
TED Talks released a new video by political theorist Benjamin Barber on “Why mayors should rule the world”: “It often seems like federal-level politicians care more about creating gridlock than solving the world’s problems. So who’s actually getting bold things done? City mayors. So, political theorist Benjamin Barber suggests: Let’s give them more control over global policy. Barber shows how these “urban homeboys” are solving pressing problems on their own turf — and maybe in the world.”
See also Emma Green, “Can Mayors Really Save the World?” The Atlantic Cities
Swarm-Based Medicine
Paul Martin Putora and Jan Oldenburgin the Journal of Medical Internet Research: “Humans, armed with Internet technology, exercise crowd intelligence in various spheres of social interaction ranging from predicting elections to company management. Internet-based interaction may result in different outcomes, such as improved response capability and decision-making quality.
The direct comparison of swarm-based medicine with evidence- or eminence-based is interesting, but these concepts should be perceived as complementing each other and working independently of each other. Optimal decision making depends on a balance of personal knowledge and swarm intelligence, taking into account the quality of each, with their weight in decisions being adapted accordingly. The possibility of balancing controversial standpoints and achieving acceptable conclusions for the majority of participants has been an important task of scientific and medical conferences since the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Our swarm continues with this interconnecting synchronization at an unprecedented speed and is, thanks to eVotes, Internet forums, and the like, more reactive than ever. Faster changes in our direction of movement, like a school of fish, are becoming possible. Information spreads from one individual to another. It is unconscious, but with our own dance we influence the rest of the beehive.
Within an environment, individual behavior determines the behavior of the collective and vice versa. Internet technology has dramatically changed the environment we behave in. Traditionally, medical information was provided to patients as well as to physicians by experts. This intermediation was characterized by an expert standing between sources of information and the user. Currently, and probably even more so in the future, Web 2.0 and appropriate algorithms enable users to rely on the guidance or behavior of their peers in selecting and consuming information. This is one of many processes facilitated by medicine 2.0 and is described as “apomediation”. Apomediation, whether implicit or explicit, increases the influence of individuals on others. For an individual to adapt its behavior within a swarm, other individuals need to be perceived and their actions reacted upon. Through apomediation, more individuals take part in the swarm.
Our patients are better informed; second opinions can be sought via the Internet within hours. Our individual behavior is influenced by online resources as well as digital communication with our colleagues. This change in individual behavior influences the way we find, understand, and adopt guidelines. Societies representing larger groups within the swarms use this technology to create recommendations. This process is influenced by individuals and previous actions of the community; these then in return influence individual behavior. Information technology has a major impact on the lifecycle of guidelines and recommendations. There is no entry and exit point for IT in this regard. With increasing influence on individual behavior, its influence on collective behavior increases, influencing the other direction to the same extent.
Dynamic changes in movement of the swarm and within the swarm may lead to individuals leaving the herd. These may influence the herd to move in the direction of the outliers. At the same time, an individual leaving a flock or swarm is exposed. Physicians as well as clinical centers expose themselves when they leave the group for the sake of innovation. Negative results and failure might lead to legal exposure should treatments fail.
The perception of swarm behavior itself changes the way we approach guidelines. When several guidelines are published, being aware of them as a result of interaction increases our awareness for bias. Major deviations from other recommendations warrant scrutiny. The perception of swarm behavior and embracing the knowledge of the swarm may lead to an optimized use of resources. Information that has already been obtained may be incorporated directly by agents, enabling them to build on this and establish new knowledge—as social learning agents”
UK: Good law
“The good law initiative is an appeal to everyone interested in the making and publishing of law to come together with a shared objective of making legislation work well for the users of today and tomorrow…People find legislation difficult. The volume of statutes and regulations, their piecemeal structure, and their level of detail and frequent amendments, make legislation hard to understand and difficult to comply with. That can hinder economic activity. It can create burdens for businesses and communities. It can obstruct good government, and it can undermine the rule of law…
Good law is not a checklist, or a call for more process. It straddles four areas that have traditionally been regarded as separate domains. We think that they are inter-connected, and we invite good law partners to consider each of them from the different perspectives of citizens, professional users and legislators.
- the government’s commitment to openness and transparency
- the government’s digital strategy
- the Red Tape Challenge
- work on behavioural insight, and alternatives to legislation
- the drive to reduce public sector burdens and promote efficiency”