Patrick Meier at iRevolution: “There is currently no unified code of conduct for digital crowdsourcing efforts in the development, humanitarian or human rights space. As such, we propose the following principles (displayed below) as a way to catalyze a conversation on these issues and to improve and/or expand this Code of Conduct as appropriate. This initial draft was put together by Kate Chapman, Brooke Simons and myself. The link above points to this open, editable Google Doc. So please feel free to contribute your thoughts by inserting comments where appropriate. Thank you. An organization that launches a digital crowdsourcing... (More >)
Giving Americans Easier Access to Their Own Data
Nick Sinai and Rajive Mathur at the White House Blog: “…One of the newest My Data efforts is the IRS tool, Get Transcript. Launched in 2014, Get Transcript allows taxpayers to securely view, print, and download a PDF record of the last three years of their IRS tax account. Get Transcript has produced over 17 million so-called tax transcripts, reducing phone, mail, or in-person requests by approximately 40% from last year. Secure access to your own tax data makes it easier to demonstrate your income with prospective lenders and employers, or help with tax preparation. What was a paper-based... (More >)
Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
Webcast of Book release by G. Thomas Kingsley Claudia J. Coulton, and Kathryn L. S. Pettit: “Efforts to address the problems of distressed urban neighborhoods stretch back to the 1800s, but until relatively recently, data played little role in forming policy solutions. Published by the Urban Institute with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the new book Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data documents how government and nonprofit institutions have used information about neighborhood conditions to change the way we think about community and local governance in America.” Get a free copy of Strengthening Communities with... (More >)
Stories of Innovative Democracy at Local Level
Special Issue of Field Actions Science Reports published in partnership with CIVICUS, coordinated by Dorothée Guénéheux, Clara Bosco, Agnès Chamayou and Henri Rouillé d’Orfeuil: “This special issue presents many and varied field actions, such as the promotion of the rights of young people, the resolution of the conflicts of agropastoral activities, or the process of participatory decisionmaking on community budgetary allocations, among many others. It addresses projects developed all over the world, on five continents, and covering both the northern and southern hemispheres. The legitimate initial queries and doubts that assailed those who started this publication as regards its... (More >)
Spain is trialling city monitoring using sound
Springwise: “There’s more traffic on today’s city streets than there ever has been, and managing it all can prove to be a headache for local authorities and transport bodies. In the past, we’ve seen the City of Calgary in Canada detect drivers’ Bluetooth signals to develop a map of traffic congestion. Now the EAR-IT project in Santander, Spain, is using acoustic sensors to measure the sounds of city streets and determine real time activity on the ground. Launched as part of the autonomous community’s SmartSantander initiative, the experimental scheme placed hundreds of acoustic processing units around the region. These... (More >)
Hashtag Standards For Emergencies
Key Findings of New Report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs:” The public is using Twitter for real-time information exchange and for expressing emotional support during a variety of crises, such as wildfires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, political protests, mass shootings, and communicable-disease tracking.31 By encouraging proactive standardization of hashtags, emergency responders may be able to reduce a big-data challenge and better leverage crowdsourced information for operational planning and response. Twitter is the primary social media platform discussed in this Think Brief. However, the use of hashtags has spread to other social media platforms, including Sina... (More >)
Transparency for Trust in Government: How Effective is Formal Transparency?
Article by Maria Cucciniello & Greta Nasi in the International Journal of Public Administration: “Many countries refer to transparency not only as the right to access information, but also as a tool for enhancing government efficiency and accountability. However, the practice of transparency is still linked to the need to comply with legal obligations, not necessarily meeting citizens’ needs. The purpose of this article is twofold: it measures the levels of transparency of governments and the needs of citizens for government information and consequently assesses whether there is a gap, offering recommendations for reducing it. This should contribute to... (More >)
Why the World Needs Anonymous
Gabriella Coleman at MIT Technology Review: “Anonymity is under attack, and yet the actions of a ragtag band of hackers, activists, and rabble-rousers reveal how important it remains. “It’s time to end anonymous comments sections,” implored Kevin Wallsten and Melinda Tarsi in the Washington Post this August. In the U.K., a parliamentary committee has even argued for a “cultural shift” against treating pseudonymous comments as trustworthy. This assault is matched by pervasive practices of monitoring and surveillance, channeled through a stunning variety of mechanisms—from CCTV cameras to the constant harvesting of digital data. But just as anonymity’s value has... (More >)
Politics, Policy and Privatisation in the Everyday Experience of Big Data in the NHS
Chapter by Andrew Goffey ; Lynne Pettinger and Ewen Speed in Martin Hand , Sam Hillyard (ed.) Big Data? Qualitative Approaches to Digital Research (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Volume 13) : “This chapter explains how fundamental organisational change in the UK National Health Service (NHS) is being effected by new practices of digitised information gathering and use. It analyses the taken-for-granted IT infrastructures that lie behind digitisation and considers the relationship between digitisation and big data. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative research methods including discourse analysis, ethnography of software and key informant interviews were used. Actor-network theories, as developed by Science and... (More >)
Open Elections
“Welcome to OpenElections Our goal is to create the first free, comprehensive, standardized, linked set of election data for the United States, including federal and statewide offices. No freely available comprehensive source of official election results exists. The current options for election data can be difficult to find and use or financially out-of-reach for most journalists and civic hackers. We want the people who work with election data to be able to get what they need, whether that’s a CSV file for stories and data analysis or JSON usable for web applications and interactive graphics. OpenElections is generously supported... (More >)
