The Next 5 Years in Open Data: 3 Key Trends to Watch

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kevin Merritt (Socrata Inc.) at GovTech: “2014 was a pivotal year in the evolution of open data for one simple and powerful reason – it went mainstream and was widely adopted on just about every continent. Open data is now table stakes. Any government that is not participating in open data is behind its peers…The move toward data-driven government will absolutely accelerate between 2015 and 2020, thanks to three key trends.

1. Comparative Analytics for Government Employees

The first noteworthy trend that will drive open data change in 2015 is that open data technology offerings will deliver first-class benefits to public-sector employees. This means government employees will be able to derive enormous insights from their own data and act on them in a deep, meaningful and analytical way. Until only recently, the primary beneficiaries of open data initiatives were external stakeholders: developers and entrepreneurs; scientists, researchers, analysts, journalists and economists; and ordinary citizens lacking technical training. The open data movement, until now, has ignored an important class of stakeholders – government employees….

2. Increased Global Expansion for Open Data

The second major trend fueling data-driven government is that 2015 will be a year of accelerating adoption of open data internationally.
Right now, for example, open data is being adopted prolifically in Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
….
We will continue to see international governments adopt open data in 2015 for a variety of reasons. Northern European governments, for instance, are interested in efficiency and performance right now; Southern European governments, on the other hand, are currently focused on transparency, trust, and credibility. Despite the different motivations, the open data technology solutions are the same. And, looking out beyond 2015, it’s important to note that Southern European governments will also adopt open data to help increase job creation and improve delivery of services.

3. “Open Data” Will Simply Become “Government Data”

The third trend that we’ll see in the arena of open data lies a little further out on the horizon, and it will be surprising. In my opinion, the term “open data” may disappear within a decade; and in its place will simply be the term “government data.”
That’s because virtually all government data will be open data by 2020; and government data will be everywhere it needs to be – available to the public as fast as it’s created, processed and accumulated….(More).”

The Fundamental Shortcoming With How We View Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Dabscheck on “Why we should all be Chief Innovation Officers at work” at FastCompany:  “Do you think CINO’s will be around in five years?” asked a fellow attendee at Innovation Enterprise’s recent Chief Innovation Officer Summit in New York.
It was a hard question to answer, particularly because I had no idea what a “CINO” was.
Even though I am literally a card-carrying member of the new religion of innovation, I hadn’t realized our high priests secured their own coveted C-suite acronym—CINOs for Chief INnovation Officer. Certainly this signals a function on the rise and was reinforced by the variety of industries represented over the two-day conference, including conservative ones that are more commonly associated with regulation than innovation, such as banking and healthcare. Indeed, Dr. Molly Coye, Chief Innovation Officer at UCLA Health, described how when she started in 2010 there were perhaps two or three similar positions, whereas today there are conferences purely for healthcare CINOs….
As even with vigorous C-suite support, innovation is often a misunderstood and misused concept because it presents psychological, as well as organizational challenges. The devil is not just in the details with innovation; he is dozing in our brains while simultaneously flipping off managers agonizing over their P&L statements.
What we need are conferences where people with “innovation” anywhere in their title cannot attend; where what is new is not the content, but those hearing it; where attendees learn that if innovation is what those people do “over there” it will never succeed “right here.” That is not to say those working in innovation do not also need more rigor within their approaches and genuinely appreciate why this word too often becomes a synonym for “expensive diversion.”
To return to the original question, the longevity of CINOs depends ironically on how effectively they make themselves redundant. They will succeed by helping employees view themselves as “innovative” exactly like they see themselves as “punctual” or “enthusiastic.” I am looking forward to the CINO conference where I am instead asked, “Do you think CINO’s will be around in five years, as aren’t we all one already?”…(More).

The News We Need to Hear

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in the New York Times: “When we began writing the column in late 2010 we hoped to show that serious reporting about responses to social problems could both provide useful insights for society and engage readers. We aimed to distinguish Fixes — an example of what we call solutions journalism — from uncritical “good news” reporting by examining approaches to social problems that show results and focusing on the specifics of how they work and what we can learn from them….

Journalists need better tools to find these stories systematically. Because the problems scream, but the solutions whisper, we often overlook them. We’re not good at letting society know when we are winning against problems; we are hamstrung by our techniques and our very sense of purpose. If winning means there is never another police killing of an unarmed black man, then it may also mean that the story goes away at its finest moment.

But it doesn’t have to. In our experience writing this column, we have found that it is almost always worthwhile to ask the question, Who’s doing it better?

Consider the immigration crisis in the United States. The news coverage focuses on the battle in Washington and the politics around tougher policing of the border. But immigration is at heart a local story that will continue to unfold in countless ways in the year ahead. Which cities or communities are doing a better job building or improving relations between new immigrants and their receiving communities? What are they doing and what can be learned from them?…

To be sure, journalism is not meant to be an obstacle to progress; it’s meant to describe the world accurately and circulate real-time information to help societies understand themselves and improve. But the news can influence human behavior in unintended ways. “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do,” wrote Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion, in 1922.

It turns out, this isn’t just an armchair observation. Research now supports that our behavior is strongly influenced by what we imagine other people are doing — and it works in both directions, positive or negative. This is called “social norming.”… (More)”

Social innovation and the challenge of democracy in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Lane and Filippo Addarii in Open Democracy: “…The political challenge of our time—the challenge of democracy in Europe—is how to channel people’s passion, expertise and resources into complex and long-term projects that improve collective life.
This challenge has motivated a group of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners to join together in a project called INSITE (“Innovation, Sustainability and ICT).” INSITE is exploring the cascading dynamics of social innovation processes, and investigating how people can regain control over their results by freeing themselves from dependence on political intermediaries and experts. …
Today, anybody in the world can build a Geiger counter, measure radiation and share the results with others across the world. The technology is free and easy to build at home. It’s based on an open source micro-processor called “Arduino,” and all the instructions required to build the machine are available online. There’s also an online platform to share data and get support in any phase of the process called “Safecast.”
Fast forward to the 86th Academy Awards in Los Angeles in 2014, when Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty” won the Oscar for best Foreign Language Film. Many Italians were unhappy with the film’s portrayal of a society wrapped in a beautiful cover made of Italian heritage and landscapes. So a young film producer called Lorenzo Gangarossa had the idea of asking ordinary citizens to contribute to presenting a different image of their country.
The result was “Italy in a Day,” one of the first crowd-sourced films to be released. 44,000 videos were filmed by Italians on the same day, edited together by Gabriele Salvatores, and produced into a film by Ridley Scott. When thousands of Italians were given the chance to co-create a composite image of their country, the resulting picture was the opposite of the one that had been celebrated by film critics and the media.
Based on the same principles of large-scale participation, the INSITE group has developed a robust methodology designed to engage people in assessing the collective impact of social innovation itself. “Emergence by Design” has developed a new set of tools that allow all the participants in a project to monitor and assess questions of impact and effectiveness. It’s called “dynamic evaluation.” … (More).

Does Real-Time Feedback On Electricity Use Really Change Our Behavior?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jessica Leber at Co.Exist: “Is information power? Or more to the point, does information about our energy usage help us consume less power?
Even though there are a growing number of smart devices and systems on the market designed to give feedback about energy and water usage, in hopes of nudging us to cut back, studies have shown mixed evidence as to whether they actually work in changing long-term behavior.
In September 2010, the developer of a new LEED Gold apartment building in Manhattan approached Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions with the idea of studying whether they could reduce energy use by giving occupants devices that gave them real-time feedback on their electricity demand. They chose the Modlet, a device made by ThinkEco, that monitors energy use at each outlet, appliance by appliance.
The results of the study, published recently as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, show that getting people to change their behavior is more complicated than it seems….(More).”

Innovations in Global Governance: Toward a Distributed Internet Governance Ecosystem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Beth S. Noveck, Jillian Raines, and Antony Declercq as part of the Global Commission on Internet Governance Paper Series: “The growth and globalization of the Internet over the past 40 years has been nothing short of remarkable. Virtually all sectors, from development to healthcare to education to politics, have been transformed. Yet developments in how the Internet is governed have not kept pace with this rapid technological innovation. Figuring out how to evolve the Internet’s governance in ways that are effective and legitimate is essential to ensure its continued potential. Flexible and innovative decision-making mechanisms are needed in order to enable disparate governance actors to address and respond effectively as changes in the network occur. This paper seeks to address the need to develop an effective and legitimate Internet governance ecosystem by proposing a distributed yet coordinated framework that can accommodate a plurality of existing and emerging decision-making approaches. It draws on the lessons of open governance, adopting innovative techniques to facilitate coordination, information sharing, and evidence generation by and across increasingly diverse and global groups of Internet actors, and calls for creating practical tools to support such an effective, legitimate and evolving Internet governance ecosystem. Although no right answer or single model for how to manage all issues of relevance to the Internet is suggested within this paper, the proposed framework intends to allow for diverse experiments in distributed governance approaches to learn what works and what does not. (More)“

Local Governments and Nonprofits Test Crowdfunding for Civic Projects

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Drew Lindsay at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Fresh from municipal bankruptcy and locked in a court-mandated spending plan, Central Falls, R.I., controlled little of its budget. But officials found wiggle room in their fiscal straitjacket by borrowing a new idea from the world of philanthropy.
About a year ago, they launched a crowdfunding campaign similar to what’s found on Kickstarter, the online platform where artists, entrepreneurs, and others seek donations to bankroll creative projects. Using a Kickstarter-like website, the former mill town posted a proposal to beautify and clean up its landmark park. It promoted the project through videos, mass emails, and social and mainstream media—typical fundraising tools. Within weeks, it had raised $10,000 to buy new bins for trash and recycling in the park, designed by local artists as public art.
Central Falls is one of dozens of municipalities that has gone hat in hand online in recent years. They are part of a niche group of local governments, nonprofits, and community groups experimenting with “civic crowdfunding” campaigns to raise cash for programs and infrastructure designed for the common good.
The campaigns are typically small, aiming to raise from $5,000 to $30,000 and pay for things that might not even merit a line item in a municipal budget. In Philadelphia’s first successful crowdfunding campaign, for instance, it raised $2,163 for a youth garden program—this when the city spends about $4.5-billion a year.
The architects of civic crowdfunding campaigns are using the cash raised online to attract bigger dollars from state and federal sources. They’re also earning grants from private foundations that see robust crowdfunding as evidence of community backing for a project….
Several online platforms devoted to civic crowdfunding have launched in the United States in recent years, among them Citizinvestor, which worked with Central Falls and Philadelphia; ioby, a partner in the Denver bike-lane campaign; and Neighbor.ly, whose projects include neighborhood-based crowdfunding campaigns to expand a Kansas City, Mo., bike-sharing program.
Each typically takes a small commission from funds raised—usually 5 percent or less, plus a smaller percentage to cover credit-card transaction fees…. (More).

The Black Box Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Frank Pasquale on “The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information”: “Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior—silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed, to the point of being invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so—and to set limits on how big data affects our lives.
Hidden algorithms can make (or ruin) reputations, decide the destiny of entrepreneurs, or even devastate an entire economy. Shrouded in secrecy and complexity, decisions at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms were long assumed to be neutral and technical. But leaks, whistleblowers, and legal disputes have shed new light on automated judgment. Self-serving and reckless behavior is surprisingly common, and easy to hide in code protected by legal and real secrecy. Even after billions of dollars of fines have been levied, underfunded regulators may have only scratched the surface of this troubling behavior….(More).”

Insurance company rewards customers for every 10,000 steps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “We’ve already seen Harvard Pilgrim Health Care’s EatRight rewards scheme use tracking technology to monitor employee’s food shopping habits and Alfa-Bank Alfa-Bank in Russia — which rewards customers for every step they run. Now, Oscar Insurance is providing customers with a free Misfit Flash fitness tracker and encouraging them to reach their recommended 10,000 steps a day – rewarding them with up to USD 240 per year in Amazon vouchers.
The New York-based startup were inspired by the US Surgeon Generals’ recommendation that walking every day can have a real impact on many of the top killers in US — such as obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. Oscar Insurance’s new policy is distinctive amongst similar initiatives in that it aims to encourage regular, gentle exercise with a small reward — USD 1 per day or USD 20 per day in Amazon gift cards — but has no built it financial punishments.
To begin, customers download the companion app which automatically syncs with their free wristband. They are then set a personal daily goal — influenced by their current fitness and sometimes as low as 2000 steps per day. The initial goal gradually increases much like a normal fitness regime. This is the latest addition to Oscar Insurance’s technology driven policies, which also enable the customer to connect with healthcare professionals in their area and allow patients and doctors to track and review their healthcare details….”

Public-sector digitization: The trillion-dollar challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cem Dilmegani, Bengi Korkmaz, and Martin Lundqvist from McKinsey: “Citizens and businesses now expect government information to be readily available online, easy to find and understand, and at low or no cost. Governments have many reasons to meet these expectations by investing in a comprehensive public-sector digital transformation. Our analysis suggests that capturing the full potential of govern­ment digitization could free up to $1 trillion annually in economic value worldwide, through improved cost and operational performance. Shared services, greater collaboration and inte­gra­tion, improved fraud management, and productivity enhancements enable system-wide efficiencies. At a time of increasing budgetary pressures, governments at national, regional, and local levels cannot afford to miss out on those savings.
Indeed, governments around the world are doing their best to meet citizen demand and capture benefits. More than 130 countries have online services. For example, Estonia’s 1.3 million residents can use electronic identification cards to vote, pay taxes, and access more than 160 services online, from unemployment benefits to property registration. Turkey’s Social Aid Infor­ma­tion System has consolidated multiple government data sources into one system to provide citizens with better access and faster decisions on its various aid programs. The United Kingdom’s gov.uk site serves as a one-stop information hub for all government departments. Such online services also provide greater access for rural populations, improve quality of life for those with physical infirmities, and offer options for those whose work and lifestyle demands don’t conform to typical daytime office hours.
However, despite all the progress made, most governments are far from capturing the full benefits of digitization. To do so, they need to take their digital transformations deeper, beyond the provision of online services through e-government portals, into the broader business of government itself. That means looking for opportunities to improve productivity, collabo­ration, scale, process efficiency, and innovation….
While digital transformation in the public sector is particularly challenging, a number of successful government initiatives show that by translating private-sector best practices into the public context it is possible to achieve broader and deeper public-sector digitization. Each of the six most important levers is best described by success stories….(More).”