Open Data Intermediaries: Their Crucial Role

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Web Foundation: “….data intermediaries are undertaking a wide range of functions.  As well as connecting data providers (for example, governments) with those who can benefit by using data or data-driven products, intermediaries are helping to articulate demand for data, creating and repackaging data, and creating novel applications. In Nepal for instance, intermediaries play a range of roles, from running the government open data portal, to translating complex data sets into formats that are easily understood by a population that is largely offline and suffers from low literacy levels.

How are intermediaries connecting data providers to end-users?

To answer this question, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s social model, in particular his concept of species of capital, was used as a lens. According to Bourdieu, capital is not only economic or material. We use other symbolic forms of capital like social capital (e.g. friends and memberships) or cultural capital (e.g. competencies and qualifications) in our social interactions.

Unsurprisingly, the study found that most open data intermediaries use their technical capital to connect to data providers (97%). However, to fulfil their role of not only connecting to data providers but of facilitating the use of open data, open data intermediaries require multiple forms of capital. And because no single intermediary necessarily has all the types of capital to link effectively to users, multiple intermediaries with complementary configurations of capital are more likely to connect data providers and users.

Intermediaries ModelA model of layers of intermediaries connecting a data source with users  

 

….Of the 32 intermediaries studied, 72% can be described as not-for profit and, as a consequence, rely on donor funding to sustain their operations. This has significant implications for future sustainability.

What are some of the key conclusions and implications of the study?

  • Intermediaries are playing a critical role in making data truly useful.
  • The presence of multiple intermediaries in an ecosystem may increase the probability of use (and impact) because no single intermediary is likely to possess all the types of capital required to unlock the full value of the transaction between the provider and the end user.
  • Working either alone or in collaboration with others, intermediaries must go beyond technical capital to unlock the benefits of open data – using social, political or economic capital too.
  • Governments would do well to engage with a broad spectrum of intermediaries, and not simply focus on intermediaries who possess only the technical capital required to interpret and repackage open government data.
  • Given that intermediaries are presently largely donor funded, in the short term, funders should ask whether possible grantees possess all the types of capital required not only to re-use open data but to connect open data to specific user groups in order to ensure the use and impact of open data.
  • In the medium term, different funding models for intermediaries may need to be explored, or the sustainability of civically-minded open data initiatives could be at risk….

ACCESS THE FULL REPORT:

ODintermediariesOpen Data Intermediaries in Developing Countries

By François van Schalkwyk, Michael Caňares, Sumandro Chattapadhyay & Alexander Andrason

Our World in Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Life around the world is changing rapidly – here you find the data visualizations that show you how. Poverty, violence, health, education, the environment and much more. Our World In Data covers a wide range of topics and visualizes the empirical evidence of how living standards changed over the last decades, centuries, and millennia. A web publication authored by Max Roser. (work in progress)”

How Startups Are Transforming the Smart City Movement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Shueh at GovTech: “Remember the 1990s visions of the future? Those first incantations of the sweeping “smart city,” so technologically utopian and Tomorrowland-ish in design? The concept and solutions were pitched by tech titans like IBM and Cisco, cost obscene amounts of money, and promised equally outlandish levels of innovation.

It was a drive — as idealistic as it was expedient — to spark a new industry that infused cities with data, analytics, sensors and clean energy. Two-and-a-half decades later, the smart city market has evolved. Its solutions are more pragmatic and its benefits more potent. Evidence brims inSingapore, where officials boast that they can predict traffic congestion an hour in advance with 90 percent accuracy. Similarly, in Chicago, the city has embraced analytics to estimate rodent infestations and prioritizerestaurant inspections. These of course are a few standouts, but as many know, the movement is highly diverse and runs its fingers through cities and across continents.

And yet what’s not as well-known is what’s happened in the last few years. The industry appears to be undergoing another metamorphosis, one that takes the ingenuity inspired by its beginnings and reimagines it with the help of do-it-yourself entrepreneurs….

Asked for a definition, Abrahamson centered his interpretation on tech that enhances quality of life. With the possible exception of health care, finance and education — systems large enough to merit their own categories, Abrahamson explains smart cities by highlighting investment areas at Urban.us. Specific areas are packaged as follows:

Mobility and Logistics: How cities move people and things to, from and within cities.

Built Environment: The public and private spaces in which citizens work and live.

Utilities: Critical resources including water, waste and energy.

Service Delivery: How local governments provide services ranging from public works to law enforcement….

Who’s Investing?

….Here is a sampling of a few types, with examples of their startup investments.

General Venture Capitalists

a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) – Mapillary and Moovit

Specialty Venture Capitalists

Fontinalis – Lyft, ParkMe, LocoMobi

Black Coral Capital – Digital Lumens, Clean Energy Collective, newterra

Govtech Fund – AmigoCloud, Mark43, MindMixer

Corporate Venture Capitalists

Google Ventures – Uber, Skycatch, Nest

Motorola Solutions Venture Capital – CyPhy Works and SceneDoc

BMW i Ventures – Life360 and ChargePoint

Impact/Social Investors

Omidyar Network – SeeClickFix and Nationbuilder

Knight Foundation – Public Stuff, Captricity

Kapor Capital – Uber, Via, Blocpower

1776 – Radiator Labs, Water Lens… (More)

The Spectrum of Control: A Social Theory of the Smart City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Sadowski , Jathan and Pasquale, Frank at First Monday: “There is a certain allure to the idea that cities allow a person to both feel at home and like a stranger in the same place. That one can know the streets and shops, avenues and alleys, while also going days without being recognized. But as elites fill cities with “smart” technologies — turning them into platforms for the “Internet of Things” (IoT): sensors and computation embedded within physical objects that then connect, communicate, and/or transmit information with or between each other through the Internet — there is little escape from a seamless web of surveillance and power. This paper will outline a social theory of the “smart city” by developing our Deleuzian concept of the “spectrum of control.” We present two illustrative examples: biometric surveillance as a form of monitoring, and automated policing as a particularly brutal and exacting form of manipulation. We conclude by offering normative guidelines for governance of the pervasive surveillance and control mechanisms that constitute an emerging critical infrastructure of the “smart city.”…(More)”

 

Governance Networks in the Public Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by E.H. Klijn and J. Koppenjan: “Governance Networks in the Public Sector presents a comprehensive study of governance networks and the management of complexities in network settings. Public, private and non-profit organizations are increasingly faced with complex, wicked problems when making decisions, developing policies or delivering services in the public sector. These activities take place in networks of interdependent actors guided by diverging and sometimes conflicting perceptions and strategies. As a result these networks are dominated by cognitive, strategic and institutional complexities. Dealing with these complexities requires sophisticated forms of coordination: network governance.

This book presents the most recent theoretical and empirical insights into governance networks. It provides a conceptual framework and analytical tools to study the complexities involved in handling wicked problems in governance networks in the public sector. The book also discusses strategies and management recommendations for governments, business and third sector organisations operating in and governing networks….(More)”

A systematic review of open government data initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by J. Attard, F. Orlandi, S. Scerri, and S. Auer in Government Information Quarterly: “We conduct a systematic survey with the aim of assessing open government data initiatives, that is; any attempt, by a government or otherwise, to open data that is produced by a governmental entity. We describe the open government data life-cycle and we focus our discussion on publishing and consuming processes required within open government data initiatives. We cover current approaches undertaken for such initiatives, and classify them. A number of evaluations found within related literature are discussed, and from them we extract challenges and issues that hinder open government initiatives from reaching their full potential. In a bid to overcome these challenges, we also extract guidelines for publishing data and provide an integrated overview. This will enable stakeholders to start with a firm foot in a new open government data initiative. We also identify the impacts on the stakeholders involved in such initiatives….(More)”

Inside the fascinating, bizarre world of ‘Prepper Pinterest’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Caitlin Dewey in the Washington Post: “Pinterest, the aspirational candyland of women everywhere, has long been beloved by homebuyers, wedding-planners, moms, narcissists, and people who spend too much time on their hair.

Now you can add another, odder demographic to the list: “doomsday” preppers, whose rabid interest in all things DIY actually makes for a pretty comfortable cultural fit.

Prepper Pinterest has exploded in the past year, according to the site itself: The total volume of prepper pins is up 87 percent, and repins of prepping posts have nearly tripled. Leading preppers on the platform, like Angela Paskett, Damian Brindle and Glenn Levy, have racked up tens of thousands of followers.

It’s the conclusive sign, perhaps, that the much-maligned prepper movement has finally gone mainstream — or that a particularly precious branch of it has, at least. One popular infographic, currently circulating among Pinterest’s prepper ranks, depicts a “luxury bomb shelter” complete with self-filtering bathtubs and scented oxygen tanks….

It may help that mainstream culture has, in the past 10 years, become more hospitable to the prepper ethic — thanks, in large part, to a trend that Jessica Grose once dubbed “the Pinterest effect.” Young women have revitalized the $29 billion craft industry, prodded along by ideas on Etsy, Pinterest and lifestyle blogs. Concerns about the origins of our food gave us farmers’ markets, first — followed by urban farms and “Modern Farmers” and backyard chicken coops….(More)”

 

On the Farm: Startups Put Data in Farmers’ Hands

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jacob Bunge at the Wall Street Journal: “Farmers and entrepreneurs are starting to compete with agribusiness giants over the newest commodity being harvested on U.S. farms—one measured in bytes, not bushels.

Startups including Farmobile LLC, Granular Inc. and Grower Information Services Cooperative are developing computer systems that will enable farmers to capture data streaming from their tractors and combines, store it in digital silos and market it to agriculture companies or futures traders. Such platforms could allow farmers to reap larger profits from a technology revolution sweeping the U.S. Farm Belt and give them more control over the information generated on their fields.

The efforts in some cases would challenge a wave of data-analysis tools from big agricultural companies such as Monsanto Co., DuPontCo., Deere & Co. and Cargill Inc. Those systems harness modern planters, combines and other machinery outfitted with sensors to track planting, spraying and harvesting, then crunch that data to provide farm-management guidance that these firms say can help farmers curb costs and grow larger crops. The companies say farmers own their data, and it won’t be sold to third parties.

Some farmers and entrepreneurs say crop producers can get the most from their data by compiling and analyzing it themselves—for instance, to determine the best time to apply fertilizer to their soil and how much. Then, farmers could profit further by selling data to seed, pesticide and equipment makers seeking a glimpse into how and when farmers use machinery and crop supplies.

The new ventures come as farmers weigh the potential benefits of sharing their data with large agricultural firms against privacy concerns and fears that agribusinesses could leverage farm-level information to charge higher rates for seeds, pesticides and other supplies.

“We need to get farmers involved in this because it’s their information,” said Dewey Hukill, board president of Grower Information Services Cooperative, or GISC, a farmer-owned cooperative that is building a platform to collect its members’ data. The cooperative has signed up about 1,500 members across 37 states….

Companies developing markets for farm data say it’s not their intention to displace big seed and machinery suppliers but to give farmers a platform that would enable them to manage their own information. Storing and selling their own data wouldn’t necessarily bar a farmer from sharing information with a seed company to get a planting recommendation, they say….(More)”

 

The World of Indicators: The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Book by Richard Rottenburg et al: “The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance. (More)”

A new journal wants to publish your research ideas

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tania Rabesandratana at ScienceInsider: “Do you have a great idea for a study that you want to share with the world? A new journal will gladly publish it. Research Ideas and Outcomes(RIO) will also publish papers on your methods, workflows, data, reports, and software—in short, “all outputs of the research cycle.” RIO, an open-access (OA) journal, was officially launched today and will start accepting submissions in November.

“We’re interested in making the full process of science open,” says RIO founding editor Ross Mounce, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. Many good research proposals fall by the wayside because funding agencies have limited budgets, Mounce says; RIO is a way to give them another chance. Mounce hopes that funders will use the journal to spot interesting new projects.

Publishing proposals can also help create links between research teams, Mounce says. “Let’s say you’re going to Madagascar for 6 months to sample turtle DNA,” he suggests. ”If you can let other researchers know ahead of time, you can agree to do things together.”

RIO‘s idea to publish research proposals is “exactly what we need if we really want to have open science,” says Iryna Kuchma, the OA program manager at the nonprofit organization Electronic Information for Libraries in Rome. Pensoft, the publishing company behind RIO, is a “strong open-access publishing venue” that has proven its worth with more than a dozen journals in the biodiversity field, Kuchma says.

The big question is, of course: Will researchers want to share promising ideas, at the risk that rivals run with them?…(More)”