Opening travel spending through civic intelligence, participation and co-creation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Joel Salas Suárez at the Open Government Partnership Blog: “When we were appointed by the Senate as Commissioners of the Access to Information Institute in Mexico (IFAI), we identified two high profile issues that had negatively affected the Institute’s image: the acquisition of its new building and the lack of transparency on international travel expenditure of the former Commissioners.

IFAI has to lead by example, so my fellow commissioners and I decided to tackle these two problems with transparency actions to send a clear message to the Mexican society and the international community in our first hundred days in office. First we created the website sede.ifai.mx to publish all the information about the new building procurement (a 45.6 million USD lease). Secondly, we decided to start our first civic innovation project, a joint venture with civil society organizations, to find the best way to publish information related to travel spending by IFAI’s public servants.
Travel expenditure of IFAI is comparatively smaller. During 2013 it allotted to 186,760 USD, 0.5% of the Institute’s budget (38.2 million USD). However, this expenditure has historically been of public interest and it should be. According to the 2013 Mexican Government Expenditure Review (the latest available) the Federal Level (Executive, Legislative and Judicial Powers, and Autonomous organs) spent close to 633 million USD in official travel (Chapter 3000, concept 3700). Therefore, we decided to tackle the problem and design a platform that would allow us to effectively publish information related to the public money spent on travel by public officials and the results obtained during these trips.
In order to do this, we worked with civil society experts in public participation, accountability and technology, Codeando México, SocialTIC and IMCO. Together we launched a public challenge to create an open source web application to publish information on official travel spending.
The challenge #RetoViajesTransparentes was a very successful experience. Close to a hundred participants registered 14 projects that competed to develop an app that IFAI would officially use and to win a 3,500 USD prize. The jury selected 3 finalists, who presented their projects on a public Google Hangout. The winner app is named Viajes Claros and is being used to publish travel expenditure information of IFAI at viajesclaros.ifai.mx.
This challenge has allowed us to shift focus from the inputs of official travel (i.e. the money spent) to the outputs or results attained in each trip. Viajes Claros opens relevant information to understand and evaluate the activities performed by the public servants during their trips. It also allowed us to co-create with society an open source tool that can be replicated in Mexico and other countries….(More)”.

The Modern Beauty of 19th-Century Data Visualizations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Bliss at CityLab: “The Library of Congress‘ online presence is a temple of American history, an unmatched, searchable collection of digitized photographs, maps, recordings, sheet music, and documents in the millions, dating back to the 15th century.
 
Sifting through these treasures isn’t so easy, though. When you do manage the clunky search interface and stumble across a gorgeous 1870s statistical atlas, it’s hard to zoom in closely on its pages and properly marvel at the antique gem.
Problem solved, thanks to the info-nerds at Vintage Visualizations, a project of the Brooklyn Brainery. They’ve reproduced a number of the LOC’s Civil War-era data visualizations in high-quality poster prints, and they are mouthwateringly cool. For example, I really wish we still ranked city populations like this chart does, which traces a century of census data in colorful Jenga towers (NYC, forever the biggest apple!):

Behold, the ratio of “church accommodation” by state, circa 1870, displayed like wallpaper swatches….(More):

Study: Complaining on Twitter correlates with heart disease risks

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at ArsTechnica: “Tweets prove better regional heart disease predictor than many classic factors. This week, a study was released by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania that found a surprising correlation when studying two kinds of maps: those that mapped the county-level frequency of cardiac disease, and those that mapped the emotional state of an area’s Twitter posts.
In all, researchers sifted through over 826 million tweets, made available by Twitter’s research-friendly “garden hose” server access, then narrowed those down to roughly 146 million tweets that had been posted with geolocation data from over 1,300 counties (each county needed to have at least 50,000 tweets to sift through to qualify). The team then measured an individual county’s expected “health” level based on frequency of certain phrases, using dictionaries that had been put through scrutiny over their application to emotional states. Negative statements about health, jobs, and attractiveness—along with a bump in curse words—would put a county in the “risk” camp, while words like “opportunities,” “overcome,” and “weekend” added more points to a county’s “protective” rating.
Not only did this measure correlate strongly with age-adjusted heart disease rate data, it turned out to be a more efficient predictor of higher or lower disease likelihood than “ten classical predictors” combined, including education, obesity, and smoking. Twitter beat that data by a rate of 42 percent to 36 percent….Psychological Science, 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614557867  (About DOIs)….(More)”

At Universities, a Push for Data-Driven Career Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at The New York Times: “Officials at the University of California, San Diego, had sparse information on the career success of their graduates until they set up a branded page for the university on LinkedIn a couple of years ago.

“Back then, we had records on 125,000 alumni, but we had good employment information on less than 10,000 of them,” recalled Armin Afsahi, who oversees alumni relations as the university’s associate vice chancellor for advancement. “Aside from Qualcomm, which is in our back yard, we didn’t know who employed our alumni.”

Within three months of setting up the university page, LinkedIn connections surfaced information on 92,000 alumni, Mr. Afsahi said.

The LinkedIn page of University of California, San Diego.
The LinkedIn page of University of California, San Diego.

….

“The old models of alumni relations don’t work,” Mr. Afsahi said. “We have to be a data-driven, intelligence-oriented organization to create the engagement and value” that students and alumni expect.

In an article on Sunday, I profiled two analytics start-ups, EverTrue and Graduway, which aim to help colleges and universities identify their best prospective donors or student mentors by scanning their graduates’ social networking activities. Each start-up taps into LinkedIn profiles of alumni — albeit in different ways — to help institutions of higher education stay up-to-date with their graduates’ contact information and careers.

Since 2013, however, LinkedIn has offered its own proprietary service, called University Pages, where schools can create hubs for alumni outreach and networking. About 25,000 institutions of higher learning around the world now have official university pages on the site…(More).”

Citizen Science in America’s DNA

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Keynote by NOAA Chief Scientist, Dr. Richard Spinrad at the forum  entitled, Tracking a Changing Climate: “Citizen science is part of America’s DNA.  For centuries, citizens not trained in science have helped shaped our understanding of Earth.
Thomas Jefferson turned Lewis and Clark into citizen scientists when he asked them to explore the landscape, wildlife and weather during their journeys of the West.They investigated plants, animals and geography, and came back with maps, sketches and journals.  These new data were some of the first pieces of environmental intelligence defining our young nation.  President Jefferson instilled citizen science in my own agency’s DNA by creating the Survey of the Coast, a NOAA legacy agency focused on charting  and protecting the entire coast of our Nation.
The National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program, begun in 1890, is an outstanding example of citizen science.  Last year, NOAA honored an observer who has provided weather observations every day for 80 years. Volunteer citizen scientists have transcribed more than 68,000 pages of Arctic ship logs, adding to the long-term climate record by populating a database with historic weather and sea ice observations. Also, citizen scientists are providing new estimates of cyclone intensity by interpreting satellite images.
There is tremendous value in the capability of citizen scientists to feed local data into their own communities’ forecasts. In September 2013, for example, formal observation systems and tracking instruments were washed out when extreme floods struck Colorado and New Mexico. By ensuring that real-time forecasts were still integrated into the National Weather Service Flood Warning System, the reports of about 200 citizen scientists contributed to what has been called the best mapped extreme rain event in Colorado history and possibly nationwide.
The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) Network played a pivotal role in this mapping. CoCoRaHS also shows how citizen science can help make data collection straightforward and inexpensive. To measure the impact and size of hail, for example, it uses a Styrofoam sheet covered with tin foil, creating a “hail pad” that has proven to be quite accurate.
The recognized value of citizen science is growing rapidly.  NOAA has an app to crowdsource real-time precipitation data. If you feel a raindrop, or spot a snowflake, report it through NOAA’s mPING app. Precipitation reports have already topped 600,000, and the National Weather Service uses them to fine-tune forecasts…(More).”

Big Data Now

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at Radar – O’Reilly: “In the four years we’ve been producing Big Data Now, our wrap-up of important developments in the big data field, we’ve seen tools and applications mature, multiply, and coalesce into new categories. This year’s free wrap-up of Radar coverage is organized around seven themes:

  • Cognitive augmentation: As data processing and data analytics become more accessible, jobs that can be automated will go away. But to be clear, there are still many tasks where the combination of humans and machines produce superior results.
  • Intelligence matters: Artificial intelligence is now playing a bigger and bigger role in everyone’s lives, from sorting our email to rerouting our morning commutes, from detecting fraud in financial markets to predicting dangerous chemical spills. The computing power and algorithmic building blocks to put AI to work have never been more accessible.
  • The convergence of cheap sensors, fast networks, and distributed computation: The amount of quantified data available is increasing exponentially — and aside from tools for centrally handling huge volumes of time-series data as it arrives, devices and software are getting smarter about placing their own data accurately in context, extrapolating without needing to ‘check in’ constantly.
  • Reproducing, managing, and maintaining data pipelines: The coordination of processes and personnel within organizations to gather, store, analyze, and make use of data.
  • The evolving, maturing marketplace of big data components: Open-source components like Spark, Kafka, Cassandra, and ElasticSearch are reducing the need for companies to build in-house proprietary systems. On the other hand, vendors are developing industry-specific suites and applications optimized for the unique needs and data sources in a field.
  • The value of applying techniques from design and social science: While data science knows human behavior in the aggregate, design works in the particular, where A/B testing won’t apply — you only get one shot to communicate your proposal to a CEO, for example. Similarly, social science enables extrapolation from sparse data. Both sets of tools enable you to ask the right questions, and scope your problems and solutions realistically.
  • The importance of building a data culture: An organization that is comfortable with gathering data, curious about its significance, and willing to act on its results will perform demonstrably better than one that doesn’t. These priorities must be shared throughout the business.
  • The perils of big data: From poor analysis (driven by false correlation or lack of domain expertise) to intrusiveness (privacy invasion, price profiling, self-fulfilling predictions), big data has negative potential.

Download our free snapshot of big data in 2014, and follow the story this year on Radar.”

Charitable techies can now donate their skills to nonprofits in need

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Technology is a mixed blessing for many of nonprofits. While apps such as SnapDonate and Charitweet make it easier than ever for people to make donations, tech development and upkeep can cost NGOs a lot of money which is desperately needed elsewhere.
With this in mind, a new platform called #charity is encouraging IT professionals to donate their time and specialist tech skills to nonprofits in need, helping those organizations to reduce costs and put the money back into their missions.
Charities of all sizes can list their IT needs, one project at a time, on #charity for free. Volunteers can sign up to the network and #charity will smartmatch them with the project that best suits their skills and interests — using an algorithm which scan’s participants LinkedIn profiles. #charity assign project managers to ensure the right people are in place and they also backup all the volunteers’ work on their platform in case they are not able to complete the task. Support is provided throughout for both parties — ensuring everyone’s experience is as smooth and efficient as possible.
#charity is set to launch in March. It currently has 350 participants on board and is accepting registration for early access. There are pilot programs underway involving Action Against Hunger, Moneythink and Syria Deeply….(More).”

Competition-Based Innovation: The Case of the X Prize Foundation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Hossain, Mokter and Kauranen, Ilkka, in the Journal of Organization Design,/SSRN: “The use of competition-based processes for the development of innovations is increasing. In parallel with the increasing use of competition-based innovation in business firms, this model of innovation is successfully being used by non-profit organizations for advancing the development of science and technology. One such non-profit organization is the X Prize Foundation, which designs and manages innovation competitions to encourage scientific and technological development. The objective of this article is to analyze the X Prize Foundation and three of the competitions it has organized in order to identify the challenges of competition-based innovation and how to overcome them….(More)”.
 

Survive and Thrive: How Big Data Is Transforming Health Care

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at Pacific Standard: “When you step on a scale, take your temperature, or check your blood pressure, you’re using data from your body to measure your health. Advances in fitness trackers have made health quantification more accessible to casual users. But for researchers, health care providers, and people with chronic conditions, advances in tracking technology, data analysis, and automation offer significant improvements in medical treatment and quality of life.

This three-part series explores health quantification through the eyes of Rutgers University Ph.D student Maria Qadri, who has both professional and personal experience in the matter. Qadri’s research aims to help people with traumatic brain injury and Parkinson’s Disease better manage their illness, and, as a Type 1 diabetic, glucose monitoring is a major part of her own life. Below, we take a look at how number crunching and personal data factors into Qadri’s research and life….(More).”

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‘Open Up’ Digital Democracy Commission’s Report published

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
UK Parliament: “The Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy has published its report ‘Open Up’. The report recommends how Parliament can use digital technology to help it to be more transparent, inclusive, and better able to engage the public with democracy.

The Commission’s report is the culmination of a year’s worth of events and meetings, talking to people across the UK face to face and via digital means, about how to use digital technology to improve parliamentary democracy.
The Commission held well over one hundred informal meetings and over twenty roundtable discussions across the country. The Commission spoke to a wide range of people, including people from the tech industry, young people, voluntary organisations, adults with learning difficulties, academics, people with visual and hearing impediments, civil servants, marketing and public relations experts. It received thousands of tweets and more than 150 longer written contributions. Full details of who has helped us over the past year are included in the report….(More)”.