An Introduction to the Economic Analysis of Open Data


Research Note by Soichiro Takagi: “Open data generally refers to a movement in which public organizations provide data in a machine-readable format to the public, so that anyone can reuse the data. Open data is becoming an important phenomenon in Japan. At this moment, utilization of open data in Japan is emerging with collaborative efforts among small units of production such as individuals. These collaborations have been also observed in the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, but collaboration in open data is somewhat different in respect to small-scale, distributed collaboration. The aim of this research note is to share the phenomena of open data as an object of economic analysis with readers by describing the movement and providing a preliminary analysis. This note discusses how open data is associated with mass collaboration from the viewpoint of organizational economics. It also provides the results of empirical analysis on how the regional characteristics of municipalities affect the decision of local governments to conduct open data initiatives.”

Here’s What Happens When Community Input Meets Great Ideas


People4Smarter Cities: “Making Connections for Positive Change in Communities: New York-based Ioby is connecting community change-makers with resources. The organization, which stands for “In our back yard,” offers an online crowd-resourcing platform aimed at matching up people working on neighborhood ecological and environmental projects with citizens who can offer either financial or physical support. Current projects on the online platform include creating urban gardens in Harlem to provide healthful, organic food to children living in the area, while another seeks to build fitness zones for individuals with physical and developmental disabilities.
Aiming to Make the Grade in D.C.: In Washington, D.C., citizens can choose whether the local government passes or fails. Through a program launched by the city called Grade D.C., feedback and comments by residents on their interaction with municipal services and departments are culled from the Grade D.C. website and social-media outlets. A third-party firm then uses an algorithm to convert the feedback into a score and a letter grade ranging from A to F. The grades are posted online each month for about 15 agencies. The city says its goal is to help citizens offer actionable feedback and help government agencies improve the quality of customer care.
When Citizens Want a Piece of the ACTion: For residents of Alexandria, Virginia, who want to improve their community, waiting for local issues to solve themselves isn’t an option. With the citizen-created online platform ACTion Alexandria, they can team up with others to share ideas, debate solutions and take action simply by connecting through the portal. Residents can go to the site’s Challenge section to propose solutions to community problems posted by locals. When an idea receives substantial community support, the website tries to rally others around the idea. Meanwhile, the platform’s Action Center lists projects already underway that need a helping hand….More at People4Smarter Cities”

Organizing for Coordination in the Public Sector


Book edited by Per Lægreid, Külli Sarapuu, Lise H. Rykkja, and Tiina Randma-Liiv: “New coordination practices have emerged across European public sectors in order to cope with complex societal challenges. Governments struggle to handle challenging policy problems that escape simple solutions and transcend the borders of organizations, administrative levels and ministerial areas. Public sector coordination has become one of the key aspects of governments’ policy capacity. This important collection is comprised of 20 European case studies; it offers valuable insights into public sector coordination and points to important lessons for devising and implementing new coordination instruments. It is essential reading for public sector practitioners as well as students and scholars of public administration and policy.”

Surprise! Creativity in the Public Sector


Jes Howen McBride at Good Magazine: “….As a watchword, “innovation” has been slow to infiltrate the public sector. We are a nation of private inventors and public regulators. However, while this bizarre gem of a cover page may not signify a major event, I see it as an indicator of where the public sector is headed. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, a CalTrans supervisor said of the cover, “This was an innovative project… We wanted people to notice the document and open it up.” And it worked. This “innovative project” brought attention to the 1,300-page report, which was not mentioned in local media until people noticed the unconventional cover page.

Less than a month later, the mayor of Los Angeles perpetuated the theme of public sector ingenuity by announcing an “Innovation Fund.” The Fund will support creative solutions proposed not by professionals in the art or tech industries, but by city employees. Anyone from janitors to general managers will be able to submit original ideas to improve the status quo. This initiative acknowledges the innovative potential in city staff and, moreover, provides funding to effectively tap into that potential.
The idea of creative change within the public sector aligns with the philosophy behind the Startup Cities Institute. Their model encourages unconventional ideas to be implemented by cities on a small scale to find solutions to problems in governance, infrastructure, and similar challenges. The key concept in this approach is that innovation comes not only from outside city hall, but from inside as well. Even though planners love guerrilla urbanism, it’s pretty spectacular when city government pulls off a good surprise. Some of my favorite “surprise-innovations” are New York’s Time Square beach chairs, Bogata’s traffic control mimes, and Hans Monderman’s naked streets, all conceived and executed by the public sector.
Innovative acts can be found everywhere. I have many friends in creative industries, but also some who are nurses, teachers, social workers, and full-time parents, and they are among the most creative people I know. I work for the City of Los Angeles in the Planning Department. I have seen the political and logistical challenges that the public sector is up against, but I am convinced that we can meet these challenges with novel ideas, fresh perspectives, and unconventional approaches. (And maybe some ‘90s clip art.) We can serve the public as well as delight them. That is the future of public service.…”

Google And Autism Speaks Team Up To Create Genomic Database On Autism


Emma Hutchings at PSFK: “Google and Autism Speaks have collaborated to launch ‘Mssng‘, an awareness campaign to support the development of the world’s largest genomic database on autism. By sequencing the DNA of over 10,000 people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their families, Mssng aims to answer many of the questions about the disorder that still remain unknown.
The Google Cloud will ensure that all of the stored sequenced data is accessible for free to researchers around the world. Scientists will be able to study trillions of data points in one single database. As a result of this open resource, many subtypes of autism could be identified, leading to more accurate and personalized treatments for individuals.
The huge amount of data being collected has created unique challenges for storage, analysis, and access. The Google Cloud Platform provides a solution with the engineering innovation needed to address the storage and analysis challenges. It also provides a portal for open source access by qualified researchers.
The campaign for Mssng includes visual components with striking images of crystalized DNA that tell the story of who we are as individuals. It will be supported on social media by a movement to try to raise both awareness and donations. Supporters are encouraged to remove vowels from their Twitter display name and post the following tweet: “We’re missing a lot of information on autism. Support @AutismSpeaks project #MSSNG by removing letters from your name: http://mss.ng.”

Techs Mex: a laboratory for Mexico


David Lida at the LongandShort: “…The five are members of Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City), an innovation lab founded by Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera soon after he assumed office in December 2012. While innovation labs have sprung up around much of the developed world in the last few years, the Laboratory for the City is the first of its kind in Latin America. Over espresso, croissants and sandwiches, the lab members brainstormed about strategy for other parts of Latin America.

The meeting was convened because the lab had been approached by governments and organisations in cities such as São Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo, as well as the entire country of Chile, and Miraflores, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Lima, Peru. All these locations asked for advice about establishing their own innovation labs or to collaborate with the Mexican lab on specific projects. Among the ideas bandied about was whether or not the lab should share the code of its website. Should they host a symposium about innovation labs for people from all over Latin America? Could they get funding for it from the World Bank? Would it be helpful to write a manual about starting an innovation lab? Should they establish alliances with other cities?

Amid all the breathless propositions and after the second cup of coffee, the lab’s director, Gabriella Gómez-Mont, reminded her four staff members of a crucial point: “We are in the middle of our own apprenticeship.”

Indeed. Despite the mostly gushing articles about the Laboratory for the City that have appeared in international media such as Monocle, Wired, and Forbes, it might be a bit premature for it to offer advice. Despite the fact that some of the staff members seem to work 24 hours a day, the lab is only in its infancy, at least in terms of tangible results.

 …

“Innovation labs can generate good ideas for change on a civic scale,” says Nate Berg, who writes about cities for such publications as City Lab, Architects and Next City.” But the implementation is sometimes put off.”

The Laboratory for the City has only been up and running for a year and a half, so perhaps it’s too early to expect many results. Still, the language in its promotional literature – and indeed that spoken by its staff – can be frustratingly vague in terms of what it is trying to accomplish.

“We are very interested in the possibilities of tech as a social amplifier. But we are not a digital department,” says Gabriella Gómez-Mont. “We are an experimental area and creative thinktank and tech is just one of our many tools. Our real work lies in bringing in different perspectives and methodologies, exploring other means and ways forward, engaging other types of disciplines and people into the fascinating realm of city-making.

“We believe there are fascinating possibilities in creating spaces for experimentation within government, as well as making its dividing walls more porous. Through several projects and experimenting with different methodologies, we are prototyping what it means to add a temporal yet intensive ‘layer’ of citizen participation to government, break inward-looking orientation subconsciously generated by the way that most governments structure themselves, and even embedding up to nine months’ different profiles within different city departments, with our Code for Mexico City and Open Office programmes, for example.”… (full article).

The Free 'Big Data' Sources Everyone Should Know


Bernard Marr at Linkedin Pulse: “…The moves by companies and governments to put large amounts of information into the public domain have made large volumes of data accessible to everyone….here’s my rundown of some of the best free big data sources available today.

Data.gov

The US Government pledged last year to make all government data available freely online. This site is the first stage and acts as a portal to all sorts of amazing information on everything from climate to crime. To check it out, click here.

US Census Bureau

A wealth of information on the lives of US citizens covering population data, geographic data and education. To check it out, click here. To check it out, click here.

European Union Open Data Portal

As the above, but based on data from European Union institutions. To check it out, click here.

Data.gov.uk

Data from the UK Government, including the British National Bibliography – metadata on all UK books and publications since 1950. To check it out, click here.

The CIA World Factbook

Information on history, population, economy, government, infrastructure and military of 267 countries. To check it out, click here.

Healthdata.gov

125 years of US healthcare data including claim-level Medicare data, epidemiology and population statistics. To check it out, click here.

NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre

Health data sets from the UK National Health Service. To check it out, click here.

Amazon Web Services public datasets

Huge resource of public data, including the 1000 Genome Project, an attempt to build the most comprehensive database of human genetic information and NASA’s database of satellite imagery of Earth. To check it out, click here.

Facebook Graph

Although much of the information on users’ Facebook profile is private, a lot isn’t – Facebook provide the Graph API as a way of querying the huge amount of information that its users are happy to share with the world (or can’t hide because they haven’t worked out how the privacy settings work). To check it out, click here.

Gapminder

Compilation of data from sources including the World Health Organization and World Bank covering economic, medical and social statistics from around the world. To check it out, click here.

Google Trends

Statistics on search volume (as a proportion of total search) for any given term, since 2004. To check it out, click here.

Google Finance

40 years’ worth of stock market data, updated in real time. To check it out, click here.

Google Books Ngrams

Search and analyze the full text of any of the millions of books digitised as part of the Google Books project. To check it out, click here.

National Climatic Data Center

Huge collection of environmental, meteorological and climate data sets from the US National Climatic Data Center. The world’s largest archive of weather data. To check it out, click here.

DBPedia

Wikipedia is comprised of millions of pieces of data, structured and unstructured on every subject under the sun. DBPedia is an ambitious project to catalogue and create a public, freely distributable database allowing anyone to analyze this data. To check it out, click here.

Topsy

Free, comprehensive social media data is hard to come by – after all their data is what generates profits for the big players (Facebook, Twitter etc) so they don’t want to give it away. However Topsy provides a searchable database of public tweets going back to 2006 as well as several tools to analyze the conversations. To check it out, click here.

Likebutton

Mines Facebook’s public data – globally and from your own network – to give an overview of what people “Like” at the moment. To check it out, click here.

New York Times

Searchable, indexed archive of news articles going back to 1851. To check it out, click here.

Freebase

A community-compiled database of structured data about people, places and things, with over 45 million entries. To check it out, click here.

Million Song Data Set

Metadata on over a million songs and pieces of music. Part of Amazon Web Services. To check it out, click here.”
See also Bernard Marr‘s blog at Big Data Guru

Lab Rats


Clare Dwyer Hogg at the Long and Short:  “Do you remember how you were feeling between 11 and 18 January, 2012? If you’re a Facebook user, you can scroll back and have a look. Your status updates might show you feeling a little bit down, or cheery. All perfectly natural, maybe. But if you were one of 689,003 unwitting users selected for an experiment to determine whether emotions are contagious, then maybe not. The report on its findings was published in March this year: “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”. How did Facebook do it? Very subtly, by adjusting the algorithm of selected users’ news feeds. One half had a reduced chance of being exposed to positive updates, the other had a more upbeat newsfeed. Would users be more inclined to feel positive or negative themselves, depending on which group they were in? Yes. The authors of the report found – by extracting the posts of the people they were experimenting on – that, indeed, emotional states can be transferred to others, “leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness”.

It was legal (see Facebook’s Data Use Policy). Ethical? The answer to that lies in the shadows. A one-off? Not likely. When revealed last summer, the Facebook example created headlines around the world – and another story quickly followed. On 28 July, Christian Rudder, a Harvard math graduate and one of the founders of the internet dating site OkCupid, wrote a blog post titled “We Experiment on Human Beings!”. In it, he outlined a number of experiments they performed on their users, one of which was to tell people who were “bad matches” (only 30 per cent compatible, according to their algorithm) that they were actually “exceptionally good for each other” (which usually requires a 90 per cent match). OkCupid wanted to see if mere suggestion would inspire people to like each other (answer: yes). It was a technological placebo. The experiment found that the power of suggestion works – but so does the bona fide OkCupid algorithm. Outraged debates ensued, with Rudder defensive. “This is the only way to find this stuff out,” he said, in one heated radio interview. “If you guys have an alternative to the scientific method, I’m all ears.”…

The debate, says Mark Earls, should primarily be about civic responsibility, even before the ethical concerns. Earls is a towering figure in the world of advertising and communication, and his book Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour By Harnessing our True Nature, was a gamechanger in how people in the industry thought about what drives us to make decisions. That was a decade ago, before Facebook, and it’s increasingly clear that his theories were prescient.

He kept an eye on the Facebook experiment furore, and was, he says, heavily against the whole concept. “They’re supporting the private space between people, their contacts and their social media life,” he says. “And then they abused it.”…”

Transparency is not just television


Beth Noveck at the SunLight Foundation Blog: “In 2009, Larry Lessig published a headline-grabbing piece in the New Republic entitled “Against Transparency,” arguing that the “naked transparency movement” might inspire disgust in, rather than reform of, our political system. In their recent Brookings Institution paper, “Why Critics of Transparency Are Wrong,” Gary Bass, Danielle Brian and Norm Eisen rightly critique the latest generation of naysayers who contend that transparency has contributed to our political ills, and that efforts to reduce transparency will cause government to work better. The problem with suggesting that transparency is the root of extreme partisan gridlock, the absence of dealmaking, and the lowest rates of trust by the American people in Congress, however, is that there is no real transparency in that institution.
If there is any shortcoming in Bass, Brian and Eisen’s robust defense of transparency, it is that they should be even tougher in rapping these other writers across the knuckles, including for some critics’ unsophisticated equation of television cameras in the chamber with transparency.
Even in our media-savvy age, televising congressional deliberations (if you can call them that) – what we might call political transparency – surely contributes too little to policy transparency. It lays bare the spectacle but does not provide access to the kinds of information disclosures about the workings of Congress in a way that also affords people an opportunity to participate in changing those workings and that Bass, Brian and Eisen also support. Done right, transparency provides an empirical foundation for developing solutions together. If the Brits can have a 21st Century parliament initiative, we are long overdue for a 21st century Congress….”

4 Tech Trends Changing How Cities Operate


at Governing: “Louis Brandeis famously characterized states as laboratories for democracy, but cities could be called labs for innovation or new practices….When Government Technology magazine (produced by Governing’s parent company, e.Republic, Inc.) published its annual Digital Cities Survey, the results provided an interesting look at how local governments are using technology to improve how they deliver services, increase production and streamline operations…the survey also showed four technology trends changing how local government operates and serves its citizens:

1. Open Data

…Big cities were the first to open up their data and gained national attention for their transparency. New York City, which passed an open data law in 2012, leads all cities with more than 1,300 data sets open to the public; Chicago started opening up data to the public in 2010 following an executive order and is second among cities with more than 600; and San Francisco, which was the first major city to open the doors to transparency in 2009, had the highest score from the U.S. Open Data Census for the quality of its open data.
But the survey shows that a growing number of mid-sized jurisdictions are now getting involved, too. Tacoma, Wash., has a portal with 40 data sets that show how the city is spending tax dollars on public works, economic development, transportation and public safety. Ann Arbor, Mich., has a financial transparency tool that reveals what the city is spending on a daily basis, in some cases….

2. ‘Stat’ Programs and Data Analytics

…First, the so-called “stat” programs are proliferating. Started by the New York Police Department in the 1980s, CompStat was a management technique that merged data with staff feedback to drive better performance by police officers and precinct captains. Its success led to many imitations over the years and, as the digital survey shows, stat programs continue to grow in importance. For example, Louisville has used its “LouieStat” program to cut the city’s bill for unscheduled employee overtime by $23 million as well as to spot weaknesses in performance.
Second, cities are increasing their use of data analytics to measure and improve performance. Denver, Jacksonville, Fla., and Phoenix have launched programs that sift through data sets to find patterns that can lead to better governance decisions. Los Angeles has combined transparency with analytics to create an online system that tracks performance for the city’s economy, service delivery, public safety and government operations that the public can view. Robert J. O’Neill Jr., executive director of the International City/County Management Association, said that both of these tech-driven performance trends “enable real-time decision-making.” He argued that public leaders who grasp the significance of these new tools can deliver government services that today’s constituents expect.

3. Online Citizen Engagement

…Avondale, Ariz., population 78,822, is engaging citizens with a mobile app and an online forum that solicits ideas that other residents can vote up or down.
In Westminster, Colo., population 110,945, a similar forum allows citizens to vote online about community ideas and gives rewards to users who engage with the online forum on a regular basis (free passes to a local driving range or fitness program). Cities are promoting more engagement activities to combat a decline in public trust in government. The days when a public meeting could provide citizen engagement aren’t enough in today’s technology-dominated  world. That’s why social media tools, online surveys and even e-commerce rewards programs are popping up in cities around the country to create high-value interaction with its citizens.

4. Geographic Information Systems

… Cities now use them to analyze financial decisions to increase performance, support public safety, improve public transit, run social service activities and, increasingly, engage citizens about their city’s governance.
Augusta, Ga., won an award for its well-designed and easy-to-use transit maps. Sugar Land, Texas, uses GIS to support economic development and, as part of its citizen engagement efforts, to highlight its capital improvement projects. GIS is now used citywide by 92 percent of the survey respondents. That’s significant because GIS has long been considered a specialized (and expensive) technology primarily for city planning and environmental projects….”