Book by Patrick Heller and Vijayendra Rao for the Worldbank: “Deliberation is the process by which a group of people, each with equal voice, can – via a process of discussion and debate – reach an agreement. This book attempts to do two things. First, it rethinks the role of deliberation in development and shows that it has potential well beyond a narrow focus on participatory projects. Deliberation, if properly instituted, has the potential to have a transformative effect on many if not all aspects of development, and especially in addressing problems of collective action, coordination, and entrenched inequality. This has broad implications both at the global and local level. Second, the book demonstrates that taking deliberation seriously calls for a different approach to both research and policy design and requires a much greater emphasis on the processes by which decisions are made, rather than an exclusive focus on the outcomes. Deliberation and Development contributes to a broader literature to understand the role of communicative processes in development….(More)“
Disruptive Technology that Could Transform Government-Citizen Relationships
David Raths at GovTech: “William Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined the term “cyberspace,” once said: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” That may be exactly the way to look at the selection of disruptive technologies we have chosen to highlight in eight critical areas of government, ranging from public safety to health to transportation. ….
PUBLIC SAFETY: WEARABLE TECH IS TRANSFORMING EMERGENCY RESPONSE
The wearable technology market is expected to grow from $20 billion in 2015 to almost $70 billion in 2025, according to research firm IDTechEx. As commercial applications bloom, more will find their way into the public sector and emergency response.
This year has seen an increase in the number of police departments using body cameras. And already under development are wireless devices that monitor a responder’s breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, as well as potentially harmful environmental conditions, and relay concerns back to incident command.
But rather than sitting back and waiting for the market to develop, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is determined to spur innovation in the field. DHS’ research and development arm is funding a startup accelerator program called Emerge managed by the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), a Virginia-based nonprofit. Two accelerators, in Texas and Illinois, will work with 10 to 15 startups this year to develop wearable products and adopt them for first responder use….
HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES: ‘HOT-SPOTTING’ FOR POPULATION HEALTH MANAGEMENT
A hot health-care trend is population health management: using data to improve health at a community level as well as an individual level. The growth in sophistication of GIS tools has allowed public health researchers to more clearly identify and start addressing health resource disparities.
Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a Camden, N.J.-based physician, uses data gathered in a health information exchange (HIE) to target high-cost individuals. The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers uses the HIE data to identify high-cost “hot spots” — high-rise buildings where a large number of hospital emergency room “super users” live. By identifying and working with these individuals on patient-centered care coordination issues, the coalition has been able to reduce emergency room use and in-patient stays….
PARKS & RECREATION: TRACKING TREES FOR A BETTER FUTURE
A combination of advances in mobile data collection systems and geocoding lets natural resources and parks agencies be more proactive about collecting tree data, managing urban forests and quantifying their value, as forests become increasingly important resources in an era of climate change.
Philadelphia Parks and Recreation has added approximately 2 million trees to its database in the past few years. It plans to create a digital management system for all of them. Los Angeles City Parks uses the Davey Tree Expert Co.’s Web-based TreeKeeper management software to manage existing tree inventories and administer work orders. The department can also more easily look at species balance to manage against pests, disease and drought….
CORRECTIONS: VIDEO-BASED TOOLS TRANSFORM PRISONS AND JAILS
Videoconferencing is disrupting business as usual in U.S. jails and prisons in two ways: One is the rising use of telemedicine to reduce inmate health-care costs and to increase access to certain types of care for prisoners. The other is video visitation between inmates and families.
A March 2015 report by Southern California Public Radio noted that the federal court-appointed receiver overseeing inmate health care in California is reviewing telemedicine capabilities to reduce costly overtime billing by physicians and nurses at prisons. In one year, overtime has more than doubled for this branch of corrections, from more than $12 million to nearly $30 million….
FINANCE & BUDGETING: DATA PORTALS OFFER TRANSPARENCY AT UNPRECEDENTED LEVELS
The transparency and open data movements have hit the government finance sector in a big way and promise to be an area of innovation in the years ahead.
A partnership between Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel and the finance visualization startup OpenGov will result in one of the most sweeping statewide transparency efforts to date.
The initiative offers 3,900-plus local governments — from townships, cities and counties to school districts and more — a chance to place revenues and expenditures online free of charge through the state’s budget transparency site OhioCheckbook.com. Citizens will be able to track local government revenues and expenditures via interactive graphs that illustrate not only a bird’s-eye view of a budget, but also the granular details of check-by-check spending….
DMV: DRIVERS’ LICENSES: THERE WILL SOON BE AN APP FOR THAT
The laminated driver’s license you keep in your wallet may eventually give way to an app on your smartphone, and that change may have wider significance for how citizens interact digitally with their government. Legislatures in at least three states have seen bills introduced authorizing their transportation departments to begin piloting digital drivers’ licenses…..
TRANSPORTATION & MASS TRANSIT: BIG BREAKTHROUGHS ARE JUST AROUND THE CORNER
Nothing is likely to be more disruptive to transportation, mass transit and urban planning than the double whammy of connected vehicle technology and autonomous vehicles.
The U.S. Department of Transportation expects great things from the connected vehicles of the future — and that future may be just around the corner. Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication capabilities and anonymous information from passengers’ wireless devices relayed through dedicated short-range connections could provide transportation agencies with improved traffic, transit and parking data, making it easier to manage transportation systems and improve traffic safety….. (More)”
How Our Days Became Numbered
Review by Clive Cookson of ‘How Our Days Became Numbered’, by Dan Bouk in the Financial Times: “The unemployed lumber worker whose 1939 portrait adorns the cover of How Our Days Became Numbered has a “face fit for a film star”, as Dan Bouk puts it. But he is not there for his looks. Bouk wants us to focus on his bulging bicep, across which is tattooed “SSN 535-07-5248”: his social security number.
The photograph of Thomas Cave by documentary photographer Dorothea Lange illustrates the high water mark of American respect for statistical labelling. Cave was so proud of his newly issued number that he had it inked forever on his arm.
When the Roosevelt administration introduced the federal social security system in the 1930s, it worked out rates of contribution and benefit on the basis of statistical practices already established by life insurance companies. The industry is at the heart of Bouk’s history of personal data collection and analysis — because it worked out how to measure and predict the health of ordinary Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (More)”
Harnessing Mistrust for Civic Action
Ethan Zuckerman: “…One predictable consequence of mistrust in institutions is a decrease in participation. Fewer than 37% of eligible US voters participated in the 2014 Congressional election. Participation in European parliamentary and national elections across Europe is higher than the US’s dismal rates, but has steadily declined since 1979, with turnout for the 2014 European parliamentary elections dropping below 43%. It’s a mistake to blame low turnout on distracted or disinterested voters, when a better explanation exists: why vote if you don’t believe the US congress or European Parliament is capable of making meaningful change in the world?
In his 2012 book, “Twilight of the Elites”, Christopher Hayes suggests that the political tension of our time is not between left and right, but between institutionalists and insurrectionists. Institutionalists believe we can fix the world’s problems by strengthening and revitalizing the institutions we have. Insurrectionists believe we need to abandon these broken institutions we have and replace them with new, less corrupted ones, or with nothing at all. The institutionalists show up to vote in elections, but they’re being crowded out by the insurrectionists, who take to the streets to protest, or more worryingly, disengage entirely from civic life.
Conventional wisdom suggests that insurrectionists will grow up, stop protesting and start voting. But we may have reached a tipping point where the cultural zeitgeist favors insurrection. My students at MIT don’t want to work for banks, for Google or for universities – they want to build startups that disrupt banks, Google and universities.
The future of democracy depends on finding effective ways for people who mistrust institutions to make change in their communities, their nations and the world as a whole. The real danger is not that our broken institutions are toppled by a wave of digital disruption, but that a generation disengages from politics and civics as a whole.
It’s time to stop criticizing youth for their failure to vote and time to start celebrating the ways insurrectionists are actually trying to change the world. Those who mistrust institutions aren’t just ignoring them. Some are building new systems designed to make existing institutions obsolete. Others are becoming the fiercest and most engaged critics of of our institutions, while the most radical are building new systems that resist centralization and concentration of power.
Those outraged by government and corporate complicity in surveillance of the internet have the option of lobbying their governments to forbid these violations of privacy, or building and spreading tools that make it vastly harder for US and European governments to read our mail and track our online behavior. We need both better laws and better tools. But we must recognize that the programmers who build systems like Tor, PGP and Textsecure are engaged in civics as surely as anyone crafting a party’s political platform. The same goes for entrepreneurs building better electric cars, rather than fighting to legislate carbon taxes. As people lose faith in institutions, they seek change less through passing and enforcing laws, and more through building new technologies and businesses whose adoption has the same benefits as wisely crafted and enforced laws….(More)”
Weathernews thinks crowdsourcing is the future of weather
Andrew Freedman at Mashable: “The weather forecast of the future will be crowdsourced, if one Japanese weather firm sees its vision fulfilled.
On Monday, Weathernews Inc. of Japan announced a partnership with the Chinese firm Moji to bring Weathernews’ technology to the latter company’s popular MoWeather app.
The benefit for Weathernews, in addition to more users and entry into the Chinese market, is access to more data that can then be turned into weather forecasts.
The company says that this additional user base, when added to its existing users, will make Weathernews “the largest crowdsourced weather service in the world,” with 420 million users across 175 countries.
…So far, though, mobile phones have not proven to be more reliable weather sensors than the network of thousands of far more expensive and specialized surface weather observation sites throughout the world, but crowdsourcing’s day in the sun may be close at hand. As Weathernews leaders were quick to point out to Mashable in an interview, the existing weather observing network on which most forecasts rely has significant drawbacks that makes crowdsourcing especially appealing outside the U.S.
For example, most surface weather stations are in wealthy nations, primarily in North America and Europe. There’s a giant forecasting blind spot over much of Africa, where many countries lack a national weather agency. However, these countries do have rapidly growing mobile phone networks that, if utilized in certain ways, could provide a way to fill in data gaps and make weather forecasts more accurate, too.
“At Weathernews, we have a core belief that more weather data is better,” said Weathernews managing director Tomohiro Ishibashi.
“So having access to the additional datasets from MoWeather’s vast user community allows us to provide more accurate and safer weather forecasting for all,” he said. “Our advanced algorithms analyze these new datasets and put them in our existing computer forecasting models.”
Weathernews is trying to use observations that most weather companies might regard as interesting but not worth the effort to tailor for computer modeling. For example, photos of clouds are a potential way to ground truth weather satellite imagery, Ishibashi told Mashable.
“For us the picture of the sky… has a lot of information,” he said. (The company’s website refers to such observations as “eye-servation.”)…
Compared to Weathernews’ ambitions, AccuWeather’s recent decision to incorporate crowdsourced data into its iOS app seems more traditional, like a TV weather forecaster adding a few new “weather watchers” to their station’s network during local television’s heyday in the 1980s and 90s.
Now, we’re all weather watchers….(More)”
Datafication and empowerment: How the open data movement re-articulates notions of democracy, participation, and journalism
Paper by Stefan Baack at Big Data and Society: “This article shows how activists in the open data movement re-articulate notions of democracy, participation, and journalism by applying practices and values from open source culture to the creation and use of data. Focusing on the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and drawing from a combination of interviews and content analysis, it argues that this process leads activists to develop new rationalities around datafication that can support the agency of datafied publics. Three modulations of open source are identified: First, by regarding data as a prerequisite for generating knowledge, activists transform the sharing of source code to include the sharing of raw data. Sharing raw data should break the interpretative monopoly of governments and would allow people to make their own interpretation of data about public issues. Second, activists connect this idea to an open and flexible form of representative democracy by applying the open source model of participation to political participation. Third, activists acknowledge that intermediaries are necessary to make raw data accessible to the public. This leads them to an interest in transforming journalism to become an intermediary in this sense. At the same time, they try to act as intermediaries themselves and develop civic technologies to put their ideas into practice. The article concludes with suggesting that the practices and ideas of open data activists are relevant because they illustrate the connection between datafication and open source culture and help to understand how datafication might support the agency of publics and actors outside big government and big business….(More)“
Crowdsourcing: a survey of applications
Paper by Jayshri Namdeorao Ganthade, Sunil R. Gupta: “Crowdsourcing, itself a multidisciplinary field, can be well-served by incorporating theories and methods from affective computing. We present a various applications which are based on crowdsourcing. The direction of research on principles and methods can enable to solve a general problem via human computation systems. Crowdsourcing is nothing but an act of outsourcing tasks to a large group of people through an open request via the Internet. It has become popular among social scientists as a source to recruit research participants from the general public for studies. Crowdsourcing is introduced as the new online distributed problem solving model in which networked people collaborate to complete a task and produce the result. However, the idea of crowdsourcing is not new, and can be traced back to Charles Darwin. Darwin was interested in studying the universality of facial expressions in conveying emotions. For this, it required large amount of database and for this he had to consider a global population to get more general conclusions.
This paper provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, guidelines for using crowdsourcing, and its applications in various fields. Finally, this article proposes conclusion which is based upon applications of crowdsourcing….(More)”.
This paper provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, guidelines for using crowdsourcing, and its applications in various fields. Finally, this article proposes conclusion which is based upon applications of crowdsourcing….(More)”.
AI tool turns complicated legal contracts into simple visual charts
Springwise: “We have seen a host of work related apps that aim to make tedious office tasks more approachable — there is a plugin that can find files without knowing the title, and a tracking tool which analyzes competitors online strategies. Joining this is Beagle, an intelligent contract analysis tool which provides users with a graphical summary of lengthy documents in seconds. It is a time-saving tool which translates complicated documents from elusive legal language into comprehensive visual summaries.
The Beagle system is powered by self-learning artificial intelligence which learns the client’s preferences and adapts accordingly. Users begin by dropping in a file into the app. The AI — trained by lawyers and NLP experts — then converts the information into a single page document. It processes the contract at a rate of one page per 0.05 seconds and highlights key information, displaying it in easy to read graphs and charts. The system also comes with built-in collaboration tools so multiple users can edit and export the files….(More)”
Digital government evolution: From transformation to contextualization
Paper by Tomasz Janowski in the Government Information Quarterly: “The Digital Government landscape is continuously changing to reflect how governments are trying to find innovative digital solutions to social, economic, political and other pressures, and how they transform themselves in the process. Understanding and predicting such changes is important for policymakers, government executives, researchers and all those who prepare, make, implement or evaluate Digital Government decisions. This article argues that the concept of Digital Government evolves toward more complexity and greater contextualization and specialization, similar to evolution-like processes that lead to changes in cultures and societies. To this end, the article presents a four-stage Digital Government Evolution Model comprising Digitization (Technology in Government), Transformation (Electronic Government), Engagement (Electronic Governance) and Contextualization (Policy-Driven Electronic Governance) stages; provides some evidence in support of this model drawing upon the study of the Digital Government literature published in Government Information Quarterly between 1992 and 2014; and presents a Digital Government Stage Analysis Framework to explain the evolution. As the article consolidates a representative body of the Digital Government literature, it could be also used for defining and integrating future research in the area….(More)”
From Data to Impact: How the Governance Data Community Can Understand Users and Influence Government Decisions
Nicole Anand at Reboot: “Governance data initiatives are proliferating. And we’re making progress: As a community, we’ve moved from a focus on generating data to caring more about how that data is used. But are these efforts having the impact that we want? Are they influencing how governments make decisions?
Those of us who work with governance data (that is, data on public services or, say, legislative or fiscal issues) recognize its potential to increase government accountability. Yet as a community, we don’t know enough about what impact we’ve had. The one thing we do know is that the impact so far is more limited than we’d like—given our own expectations and the investments that donors have made.
In partnership with the Open Society Foundations’ (OSF) Information Program, we set out to investigate these questions, which we see as increasingly pressing as we expand our own work in this area. Today, we are excited the share the results of a new scoping study that presents further research insights, as well as implications and recommendations for donors….(More)”