Vadym Pyrozhenko at Administration & Society: “This article places the Obama administration’s open government initiative within the context of evolution of the U.S. information society. It examines the concept of openness along the three dimensions of Daniel Bell’s social analysis of the postindustrial society: structure, polity, and culture. Four “missing questions” raise the challenge of the compatibility of public service values with the culture of openness, address the right balance between postindustrial information management practices and the capacity of public organizations to accomplish their missions, and ask to reconsider the idea that greater structural openness of public organizations will necessarily increase their democratic legitimacy….(More)”
Book by Arthur Lupia: “Research polls, media interviews, and everyday conversations reveal an unsettling truth: citizens, while well-meaning and even passionate about current affairs, appear to know very little about politics. Hundreds of surveys document vast numbers of citizens answering even basic questions about government incorrectly. Given this unfortunate state of affairs, it is not surprising that more knowledgeable people often deride the public for its ignorance. Some experts even think that less informed citizens should stay out of politics altogether.
As Arthur Lupia shows in Uninformed, this is not constructive. At root, critics of public ignorance fundamentally misunderstand the problem. Many experts believe that simply providing people with more facts will make them more competent voters. However, these experts fail to understand how most people learn, and hence don’t really know what types of information are even relevant to voters. Feeding them information they don’t find relevant does not address the problem. In other words, before educating the public, we need to educate the educators.
Lupia offers not just a critique, though; he also has solutions. Drawing from a variety of areas of research on topics like attention span and political psychology, he shows how we can actually increase issue competence among voters in areas ranging from gun regulation to climate change. To attack the problem, he develops an arsenal of techniques to effectively convey to people information they actually care about.
Citizens sometimes lack the knowledge that they need to make competent political choices, and it is undeniable that greater knowledge can improve decision making. But we need to understand that voters either don’t care about or pay attention to much of the information that experts think is important. Uninformed provides the keys to improving political knowledge and civic competence: understanding what information is important to others and knowing how to best convey it to them….(More)”
Pew Research Center: “A year ahead of the presidential election, the American public is deeply cynical about government, politics and the nation’s elected leaders in a way that has become quite familiar.
Currently, just 19% say they can trust the government always or most of the time,among the lowest levels in the past half-century. Only 20% would describe government programs as being well-run. And elected officials are held in such low regard that 55% of the public says “ordinary Americans” would do a better job of solving national problems.
Yet at the same time, most Americans have a lengthy to-do list for this object of their frustration: Majorities want the federal government to have a major role in addressing issues ranging from terrorism and disaster response to education and the environment.
And most Americans like the way the federal government handles many of these same issues, though they are broadly critical of its handling of others – especially poverty and immigration.
A new national survey by Pew Research Center, based on more than 6,000 interviews conducted between August 27 and October 4, 2015, finds that public attitudes about government and politics defy easy categorization. The study builds upon previous reports about the government’s role and performance in 2010 and 1998. This report was made possible by The Pew Charitable Trusts, which received support for the survey from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
The partisan divide over the size and scope of government remains as wide as ever: Support for smaller government endures as a Republican touchstone. Fully 80% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they prefer a smaller government with fewer services, compared with just 31% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.
Yet both Republicans and Democrats favor significant government involvement on an array of specific issues. Among the public overall, majorities say the federal government should have a major role in dealing with 12 of 13 issues included in the survey, all except advancing space exploration.
There is bipartisan agreement that the federal government should play a major role in dealing with terrorism, natural disasters, food and medicine safety, and roads and infrastructure. And while the presidential campaign has exposed sharp partisan divisions over immigration policy, large majorities of both Republicans (85%) and Democrats (80%) say the government should have a major role in managing the immigration system.
But the partisan differences over government’s appropriate role are revealing – with the widest gaps on several issues relating to the social safety net….(More)
O’Leary, Daniel E. at Intelligent Systems, IEEE : “The goals of big data and privacy are fundamentally opposed to each other. Big data and knowledge discovery are aimed reducing information asymmetries between organizations and the data sources, whereas privacy is aimed at maintaining information asymmetries of data sources. A number of different definitions of privacy are used to investigate some of the tensions between different characteristics of big data and potential privacy concerns. Specifically, the author examines the consequences of unevenness in big data, digital data going from local controlled settings to uncontrolled global settings, privacy effects of reputation monitoring systems, and inferring knowledge from social media. In addition, the author briefly analyzes two other emerging sources of big data: police cameras and stingray for location information….(More)”
Matthew Woollard at LSE Impact Blog: “…Data made available for reuse, such as those in the UK Data Service collection have huge potential. They can unlock new discoveries in research, provide evidence for policy decisions and help promote core data skills in the next generation of researchers. By being part of a single infrastructure, data owners and data creators can work together with the UK Data Service – rather than duplicating efforts – to engage with the people who can drive the impact of their research further to provide real benefit to society. As a service we are also identifying new ways to understand and promote our impact, and our Impact Fellow and Director of Impact and Communications, Victoria Moody, is focusing on raising the visibility of the UK Data Service holdings and developing and promoting the use and impact of the data and resources in policy-relevant research, especially to new audiences such as policymakers, government sectors, charities, the private sector and the media…..
We are improving how we demonstrate the impact of both the Service and the data which we hold, by focusing on generating more and more authentic user corroboration. Our emphasis is on drawing together evidence about the reach and significance of the impact of our data and resources, and of the Service as a whole through our infrastructure and expertise. Headline impact indicators through which we will better understand our impact cover a range of areas (outlined above) where the Service brings efficiency to data access and re-use, benefit to its users and a financial and social return on investment.
We are working to understand more about how Service data contributes to impact by tracking the use of Service data in a range of initiatives focused on developing impact from research and by developing our insight into usage of our data by our users. Data in the collection have featured in a range of impact case studies in the Research Excellence Framework 2014. We are also developing a focus on understanding the specific beneficial effect, rather than simply that data were used in an output, that is – as it appears in policy, debate or the evidential process (although important). Early thoughts in developing this process are where (ideally) cited data can be tracked through the specific beneficial outcome and on to an evidenced effect, corroborated by the end user.
Our impact case studies demonstrate how the data have supported research which has led to policy change in a range of areas including; the development of mathematical models for Practice based Commissioning budgets for adult mental health in the UK and informing public policy on obesity; both using the Health Survey for England. Service data have also informed the development of impact around understanding public attitudes towards the police and other legal institutions using the Crime Survey for England and Wales and research to support the development of the national minimum wage using the Labour Force Survey. The cutting-edge new Demos Integration Hub maps the changing face of Britain’s diversity, revealing a mixed picture in the integration and upward mobility of ethnic minority communities and uses 2011 Census aggregate data (England and Wales) and Understanding Society….(More)”
Todd W. Schneider: “The New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission has released a staggeringly detailed historical dataset covering over 1.1 billion individual taxi trips in the city from January 2009 through June 2015. Taken as a whole, the detailed trip-level data is more than just a vast list of taxi pickup and drop off coordinates: it’s a story of New York. How bad is the rush hour traffic from Midtown to JFK? Where does the Bridge and Tunnel crowd hang out on Saturday nights? What time do investment bankers get to work? How has Uber changed the landscape for taxis? And could Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson have made it from 72nd and Broadway to Wall Street in less than 30 minutes? The dataset addresses all of these questions and many more.
I mapped the coordinates of every trip to local census tracts and neighborhoods, then set about in an attempt to extract stories and meaning from the data. This post covers a lot, but for those who want to pursue more analysis on their own: everything in this post—the data, software, and code—is freely available. Full instructions to download and analyze the data for yourself are available on GitHub.
The Economist on “The open-data revolution has not lived up to expectations. But it is only getting started…
The app that helped save Mr Rich’s leg is one of many that incorporate government data—in this case, supplied by four health agencies. Six years ago America became the first country to make all data collected by its government “open by default”, except for personal information and that related to national security. Almost 200,000 datasets from 170 outfits have been posted on the data.gov website. Nearly 70 other countries have also made their data available: mostly rich, well-governed ones, but also a few that are not, such as India (see chart). The Open Knowledge Foundation, a London-based group, reckons that over 1m datasets have been published on open-data portals using its CKAN software, developed in 2010.
Ramda Yanurzha in GovInsider: “…This is a map of Musrenbang 2014 in Jakarta. Red is a no-go, green means the proposal is approved.
To give you a brief background, musrenbang is Indonesia’s flavor of participatory, bottom-up budgeting. The idea is that people can propose any development for their neighbourhood through a multi-stage budgeting process, thus actively participating in shaping the final budget for the city level, which will then determine the allocation for each city at the provincial level, and so on.
The catch is, I’m confident enough to say that not many people (especially in big cities) are actually aware of this process. While civic activists tirelessly lament that the process itself is neither inclusive nor transparent, I’m leaning towards a simpler explanation that most people simply couldn’t connect the dots.
People know that the public works agency fixed that 3-foot pothole last week. But it’s less clear how they can determine who is responsible for fixing a new streetlight in that dark alley and where the money comes from. Someone might have complain to the neighbourhood leader (Pak RT) and somehow the message gets through, but it’s very hard to trace how it got through. Just keep complaining to the black box until you don’t have to. There are very few people (mainly researchers) who get to see the whole picture.
This has now changed because the brand-new Jakarta open data portal provides musrenbang data from 2009. Who proposed what to whom, for how much, where it should be implemented (geotagged!), down to kelurahan/village level, and whether the proposal is accepted into the final city budget. For someone who advocates for better availability of open data in Indonesia and is eager to practice my data wrangling skill, it’s a goldmine.
Diving In
All the different units of goods proposed.
The data is also, as expected, incredibly messy. While surprisingly most of the projects proposed are geotagged, there are a lot of formatting inconsistencies that makes the clean up stage painful. Some of them are minor (m? meter? meter2? m2? meter persegi?) while others are perplexing (latitude: -6,547,843,512,000 – yes, that’s a value of more than a billion). Annoyingly, hundreds of proposals point to the center of the National Monument so it’s not exactly a representative dataset.
For fellow data wranglers, pull requests to improve the data are gladly welcome over here. Ibam generously wrote an RT extractor to yield further location data, and I’m looking into OpenStreetMap RW boundary data to create a reverse geocoder for the points.
A couple hours of scrubbing in OpenRefine yields me a dataset that is clean enough for me to generate the CartoDB map I embedded at the beginning of this piece. More precisely, it is a map of geotagged projects where each point is colored depending on whether it’s rejected or accepted.
Numbers and Patterns
40,511 proposals, some of them merged into broader ones, which gives us a grand total of 26,364 projects valued at over IDR 3,852,162,060,205, just over $250 million at the current exchange rate. This amount represents over 5% of Jakarta’s annual budget for 2015, with projects ranging from a IDR 27,500 (~$2) trash bin (that doesn’t sound right, does it?) in Sumur Batu to IDR 54 billion, 1.5 kilometer drainage improvement in Koja….(More)”
Press Release (Boston): “Mayor Martin J. Walsh today announced the launch of RethinkCityHall.org, a website designed to encourage civic participation in the City Hall campus plan study, a one-year comprehensive planning process that will serve as a roadmap for the operation and design improvements to City Hall and the plaza.
This announcement is one of three interrelated efforts that the City is pursuing to reinvigorate and bring new life to both City Hall and City Hall Plaza. As part of the Campus Plan Request for Qualifications (RFQ) that was released on June 8, 2015, the City has selected Utile, a local architecture and planning firm, to partner with the city to lead the campus plan study. Utile is teamed with Grimshaw Architects and Reed Hilderbrand for the design phases of the effort.
“I am excited to have Utile on board as we work to identify ways to activate our civic spaces,” said Mayor Walsh. “As we progress in the planning process, it is important to take inventory of all of our assets to be able to identify opportunities for improvement. This study will help us develop a thoughtful and forward-thinking plan to reimagine City Hall and the plaza as thriving, healthy and innovative civic spaces.”
“We are energized by Mayor Walsh’s challenge and are excited to work with the various constituencies to develop an innovative plan,” said Tim Love, a principal at Utile. “Thinking about the functional, programmatic and experiential aspects of both the building and plaza provides the opportunity to fundamentally rethink City Hall.”
Both the City and Utile are committed to an open and interactive process that engages members of the public, community groups, professional organizations, and as part of that effort the website will include information about stakeholder meetings and public forums. Additionally, the website will be updated on an ongoing basis with the research, analysis, concepts and design scenarios generated by the consultant team….(More)”
Fabrizio Scrollini at IODC: “As the international open data charter gains momentum in the context of the wider development agenda related to the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations, a pertinent question to ask is: will open data policies contribute to solve development challenges? In this post I try to answer this question grounded in recent Latin American experience to contribute to a global debate.
Latin America has been exploring open data since 2013, when the first open data unconference (Abrelatam)and conference took place in Montevideo. In September 2015 in Santiago de Chile a vibrant community of activists, public servants, and entrepreneurs gathered in the third edition of Abrelatam and Condatos. It is now a more mature community. The days where it was sufficient to just open a few datasets and set up a portal are now gone. The focus of this meeting was on collaboration and use of data to address several social challenges.
Take for instance the health sector. Transparency in this sector is key to deliver better development goals. One of the panels at Condatos showed three different ways to use data to promote transparency and citizen empowerment in this sector. A tu servicio, a joint venture of DATA and the Uruguayan Ministry of Health helped to standardize and open public datasets that allowed around 30,000 users to improve the way they choose health providers. Government-civil society collaboration was crucial in this process in terms pooling resources and skills. The first prototype was only possible because some data was already open.
This contrasts with Cuidados Intensivos, a Peruvian endeavour aiming to provide key information about the health sector. Peruvian activists had to fill right to information requests, transform, and standardize data to eventually release it. Both experiences demanded a great deal of technical, policy, and communication craft. And both show the attitudes the public sector can take: either engaging or at the very best ignoring the potential of open data.
In the same sector look at a recent study dealing with Dengue and open data developed by our research initiative. If international organizations and countries were persuaded to adopt common standards for Dengue outbreaks, they could be potentially predicted if the right public data is available and standardized. Open data in this sector not only delivers accountability but also efficiency and foresight to allocate scarce resources.
Latin American countries – gathered in the open data group of the Red Gealc – acknowledge the increasing public value of open data. This group engaged constructively in Condatos with the principles enshrined in the charter and will foster the formalization of open data policies in the region. A data revolution won’t yield results if data is closed. When you open data you allow for several initiatives to emerge and show its value.
Once a certain level of maturity is reached in a particular sector, more than data is needed. Standards are crucial to ensure comparability and ease the collection, processing, and use of open government data. To foster and engage with open data users is also needed, as several strategies deployed by some Latin American cities show.
Coming back to our question: will open data policies contribute to solve development challenges? The Latin American experience shows evidence that it will….(More)”
