Azmak Okan et al in the Journal “Big Data”: “Until now, most large-scale studies of humans have either focused on very specific domains of inquiry or have relied on between-subjects approaches. While these previous studies have been invaluable for revealing important biological factors in cardiac health or social factors in retirement choices, no single repository contains anything like a complete record of the health, education, genetics, environmental, and lifestyle profiles of a large group of individuals at the within-subject level. This seems critical today because emerging evidence about the dynamic interplay between biology, behavior, and the environment point to a pressing need for just the kind of large-scale, long-term synoptic dataset that does not yet exist at the within-subject level. At the same time that the need for such a dataset is becoming clear, there is also growing evidence that just such a synoptic dataset may now be obtainable—at least at moderate scale—using contemporary big data approaches. To this end, we introduce the Kavli HUMAN Project (KHP), an effort to aggregate data from 2,500 New York City households in all five boroughs (roughly 10,000 individuals) whose biology and behavior will be measured using an unprecedented array of modalities over 20 years. It will also richly measure environmental conditions and events that KHP members experience using a geographic information system database of unparalleled scale, currently under construction in New York. In this manner, KHP will offer both synoptic and granular views of how human health and behavior coevolve over the life cycle and why they evolve differently for different people. In turn, we argue that this will allow for new discovery-based scientific approaches, rooted in big data analytics, to improving the health and quality of human life, particularly in urban contexts….(More)”
How Morocco Formed a Citizen Powered Constitution and Now Everyone Can Too
Jocelyn Fong at FeedbackLabs: “What if citizens could write the constitution for the society in which they live?
Legislation Lab — a new product of GovRight launched this spring — asks just this question. Dedicated to increasing public awareness and discussion of upcoming legislation, the platform offers citizens easy access to legislation and provides a participatory model to collect their feedback. Citizens can read through drafted legislation, compare it internationally, and then vote, comment, and propose changes to the very language itself — citizens can re-write the fundamental systems and laws that govern their lives.
The world of feedback sees new tools emerging all the time, with only some built to address an actual need. The makers of Legislation Lab are building on years of experience and know that the demand for such radical, open governance not only exists, it thrives.
In the wake of mass demonstrations calling for political reform in Morrocco, Tarik Nesh-Nash (Ashoka Fellow and GovRight co-founder/CEO) launched Reforme.ma to collect the opinions of average Moroccan citizens on proposed changes to the constitution. Little did he know that he would be tapping into a groundswell of citizens eager and determined to share their voices. Within two months, Reforme.ma had over 200,000 visitors from diverse backgrounds, representing all regions of the country. Those 200,000 visitors made over 10,000 comments and proposals to the constitution — 40% of which were included in the new, official draft. In July 2011, Moroccan citizens voted in a referendum and overwhelmingly approved the new constitution.
But Legislation Lab is only GovRight’s latest of many efforts to create channels for better e-governance. Previous endeavors have focused on open legal text, open budgeting, corruption reporting, and citizen-government direct communication — all of which have primarily focused on improving governance in North Africa.
In regions that do not have the history of vibrant democracy, Tariq believes these platforms all work together to create a more informed, engaged, and empowered citizenry–one who is able to participate fully in its government. “Including voice in our laws takes three steps. First, there’s access to information. Then, citizens have the capacity to monitor their government. The last tier is citizen participation in government.” It’s a step-by-step process of building transparency, and then accountability, such that citizens can be involved in the very decision-making that structures their day-to-day lives.
But Legislation Lab is not only relevant for countries transitioning to more democratic styles of governance. Though still in beta, the platform has been asked to replicate its model in Chile for an open consultation on the constitution; New York City has recently approached the organization to help include public opinion in the city’s upcoming housing policy changes. Especially with the platform’s real-time, automated data analysis broken down by demographics, both governments and civil society organizations are yearning to see what the platform can enable.
While global clients may be clammering to use the platform, Legislation Lab is finding that it’s more difficult to get other local citizens as engaged. “In Kurdistan, people are just excited this platform exists. In a more mature democracy, people don’t care,” Tarik explains. When citizens feel political fatigue from false promises and continued negligence, an online platform isn’t going to be a comprehensive fix….(More)”
What should governments require for their open data portals?
Luke Fretwell at GovFresh: “Johns Hopkins University’s new Center for Government Excellence is developing a much-needed open data portal requirements resource to serve as a “set of sample requirements to help governments evaluate, develop (or procure), deploy, and launch an open data web site (portal).”
As many governments ramp up their open data initiatives, this is an important project in that we often see open data platform decisions being made without a holistic approach and awareness of what government should purchase (or have the flexibility to develop on its own).
“The idea here is that any interested city can use this as a baseline and make their own adjustments before proceeding,” said GovEx Director of Open Data Andrew Nicklin via email. “Perhaps with this we can create some common denominators amongst open data portals and eventually push the whole movement forwards.”
My fundamental suggestion is that government-run open data platforms be fully open source. There are a number of technical and financial reasons for this, which I will address in the future, but I believe strongly that if the platform you’re hosting data on doesn’t adhere to the same licensing standards you hold for your data, you’re only doing open data half right.
With both CKAN and DKAN continuing to grow in adoption, we’re seeing an emergence of reliable solutions that adequately meet the same technical and procurement requirements as propriety options (full disclosure: I work with NuCivic on DKAN and NuCivic Data).
Learn more about the GovEx open data portal standards project”
Who you are/where you live: do neighbourhood characteristics explain co-production?
Paper by Peter Thijssen and Wouter Van Dooren in the International Review of Administrative Sciences: “Co-production establishes an interactive relationship between citizens and public service providers. Successful co-production hence requires the engagement of citizens. Typically, individual characteristics such as age, gender, and income are used to explain why citizens co-produce. In contrast, neighbourhood-level variables receive less attention. Nevertheless, the co-production literature, as well as social capital and urban planning theory, provides good arguments why neighbourhood variables may be relevant. In this study, we examine the administrative records of citizen-initiated contacts in a reporting programme for problems in the public domain. This co-production programme is located in the district of Deurne in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. A multilevel analysis is used to simultaneously assess the impact of neighbourhood characteristics and individual variables. While the individual variables usually found to explain co-production are present in our case, we also find that neighbourhood characteristics significantly explain co-production. Thus, our findings suggest that participation in co-production activities is determined not only by who you are, but also by where you live.
Points for practitioners In order to facilitate co-production and participation, the neighbourhood should be the first place to look. Co-production benefits may disproportionaly accrue to strong citizens, but also to strong neighbourhoods. Social corrections should take both into account. More broadly, a good understanding of the neighbourhoods in the city is needed to grasp citizen behaviour. Place-based policies in the city should focus on the neighbourhood….(More)”
Smarter as the New Urban Agenda: A Comprehensive View of the 21st Century City
Book edited by Gil-Garcia, J. Ramon, Pardo, Theresa A., Nam, Taewoo: “This book will provide one of the first comprehensive approaches to the study of smart city governments with theories and concepts for understanding and researching 21st century city governments innovative methodologies for the analysis and evaluation of smart city initiatives. The term “smart city” is now generally used to represent efforts that in different ways describe a comprehensive vision of a city for the present and future. A smarter city infuses information into its physical infrastructure to improve conveniences, facilitate mobility, add efficiencies, conserve energy, improve the quality of air and water, identify problems and fix them quickly, recover rapidly from disasters, collect data to make better decisions, deploy resources effectively and share data to enable collaboration across entities and domains. These and other similar efforts are expected to make cities more intelligent in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, transparency, and sustainability, among other important aspects. Given this changing social, institutional and technology environment, it seems feasible and likeable to attain smarter cities and by extension, smarter governments: virtually integrated, networked, interconnected, responsive, and efficient. This book will help build the bridge between sound research and practice expertise in the area of smarter cities and will be of interest to researchers and students in the e-government, public administration, political science, communication, information science, administrative sciences and management, sociology, computer science, and information technology. As well as government officials and public managers who will find practical recommendations based on rigorous studies that will contain insights and guidance for the development, management, and evaluation of complex smart cities and smart government initiatives.…(More)”
(US) Administration Announces New “Smart Cities” Initiative to Help Communities Tackle Local Challenges and Improve City Services
Factsheet from the White House: “Today, the Administration is announcing a new “Smart Cities” Initiative that will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage more than 25 new technology collaborations to help local communities tackle key challenges such as reducing traffic congestion, fighting crime, fostering economic growth, managing the effects of a changing climate, and improving the delivery of city services. The new initiative is part of this Administration’s overall commitment to target federal resources to meet local needs and support community-led solutions.
Over the past six years, the Administration has pursued a place-based approach to working with communities as they tackle a wide range of challenges, from investing in infrastructure and filling open technology jobs to bolstering community policing. Advances in science and technology have the potential to accelerate these efforts. An emerging community of civic leaders, data scientists, technologists, and companies are joining forces to build “Smart Cities” – communities that are building an infrastructure to continuously improve the collection, aggregation, and use of data to improve the life of their residents – by harnessing the growing data revolution, low-cost sensors, and research collaborations, and doing so securely to protect safety and privacy.
As part of the initiative, the Administration is announcing:
- More than $35 million in new grants and over $10 million in proposed investments to build a research infrastructure for Smart Cities by the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology.
- Nearly $70 million in new spending and over $45 million in proposed investments to unlock new solutions in safety, energy, climate preparedness, transportation, health and more, by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
- More than 20 cities participating in major new multi-city collaborations that will help city leaders effectively collaborate with universities and industry.
Today, the Administration is also hosting a White House Smart Cities Forum, coinciding with Smart Cities Week hosted by the Smart Cities Council, to highlight new steps and brainstorm additional ways that science and technology can support municipal efforts.
The Administration’s Smart Cities Initiative will begin with a focus on key strategies:
- Creating test beds for “Internet of Things” applications and developing new multi-sector collaborative models: Technological advancements and the diminishing cost of IT infrastructure have created the potential for an “Internet of Things,” a ubiquitous network of connected devices, smart sensors, and big data analytics. The United States has the opportunity to be a global leader in this field, and cities represent strong potential test beds for development and deployment of Internet of Things applications. Successfully deploying these and other new approaches often depends on new regional collaborations among a diverse array of public and private actors, including industry, academia, and various public entities.
- Collaborating with the civic tech movement and forging intercity collaborations: There is a growing community of individuals, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits interested in harnessing IT to tackle local problems and work directly with city governments. These efforts can help cities leverage their data to develop new capabilities. Collaborations across communities are likewise indispensable for replicating what works in new places.
- Leveraging existing Federal activity: From research on sensor networks and cybersecurity to investments in broadband infrastructure and intelligent transportation systems, the Federal government has an existing portfolio of activities that can provide a strong foundation for a Smart Cities effort.
- Pursuing international collaboration: Fifty-four percent of the world’s population live in urban areas. Continued population growth and urbanization will add 2.5 billion people to the world’s urban population by 2050. The associated climate and resource challenges demand innovative approaches. Products and services associated with this market present a significant export opportunity for the U.S., since almost 90 percent of this increase will occur in Africa and Asia.
Complementing this effort, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology is examining how a variety of technologies can enhance the future of cities and the quality of life for urban residents. The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program is also announcing the release of a new framework to help coordinate Federal agency investments and outside collaborations that will guide foundational research and accelerate the transition into scalable and replicable Smart City approaches. Finally, the Administration’s growing work in this area is reflected in the Science and Technology Priorities Memo, issued by the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Science and Technology Policy in preparation for the President’s 2017 budget proposal, which includes a focus on cyber-physical systems and Smart Cities….(More)”
Civic Jazz in the New Maker Cities
Peter Hirshberg at Techonomy: “Our civic innovation movement is about 6 years old. It began when cities started opening up data to citizens, journalists, public-sector companies, non-profits, and government agencies. Open data is an invitation: it’s something to go to work on— both to innovate and to create a more transparent environment about what works and what doesn’t. I remember when we first opened data in SF and began holding conferences and hackathons. In short order we saw a community emerge with remarkable capacity to contribute to, tinker with, hack, explore and improve the city.
Early on this took the form of visualizing data, like crime patterns in Oakland. This was followed by engagement: “Look, the police are skating by and not enforcing prostitution laws. Lets call them on it!” Civic hackathons brought together journalists, software developers, hardware people, and urbanists. I recall when artists teamed with the Arup engineering firm to build noise sensors and deployed them in the Tenderloin neighborhood (with absolutely no permission from anybody). Noise was an issue. How could you understand the problem unless you measured it?
Something as wonky as an API invited people in, at which point a sense of civic possibility and wonder set in. Suddenly whole swaths of the city were working on the city. During the SF elections four years ago Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (which I chair) led a project with candidates, bureaucrats, and hundreds of volunteers for a summer-long set of hackathons and projects. We were stunned so many people would come together and collaborate so broadly. It was a movement, fueled by a sense of agency and informed by social media. Today cities are competing on innovation. It has become a movement.
All this has been accelerated by startups, incubators, and the economy’s whole open innovation conversation. Remarkably, we now see capital from flowing in to support urban and social ventures where we saw none just a few years ago. The accelerator Tumml in SF is a premier example, but there are similar efforts in many cities.
This initial civic innovation movement was focused on apps and data, a relatively easy place to start. With such an approach you’re not contending for real estate or creating something that might gentrify neighborhoods. Today this movement is at work on how we design the city itself. As millennials pour in and cities are where most of us live, enormous experimentation is at play. Ours is a highly interdisciplinary age, mixing new forms of software code and various physical materials, using all sorts of new manufacturing techniques.
Brooklyn is a great example. A few weeks ago I met with Bob Bland, CEO of Manufacture New York. This ambitious 160,000 square foot public/private partnership is reimagining the New York fashion business. In one place it co-locates contract manufacturers, emerging fashion brands and advanced fashion research. Think wearables, sensors, smart fabrics, and the application of advanced manufacturing to fashion. By bringing all these elements under one roof, the supply chain can be compressed, sped-up, and products made more innovative.
New York City’s Economic Development office envisions a local urban supply chain that can offer a scalable alternative to the giant extended global one. In fashion it makes more and more sense for brands to be located near their suppliers. Social media speeds up fashion cycles, so we’re moving beyond predictable seasons and looks specified ahead of time. Manufacturers want to place smaller orders more frequently, so they can take less inventory risk and keep current with trends.
When you put so much talent in one space, creativity flourishes. In fashion, unlike tech, there isn’t a lot of IP protection. So designers can riff off each other’s idea and incorporate influences as artists do. What might be called stealing ideas in the software business is seen in fashion as jazz and a way to create a more interesting work environment.
A few blocks away is the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a mammoth facility at the center of New York’s emerging maker economy. …In San Francisco this urban innovation movement is working on the form of the city itself. Our main boulevard, Market Street, is to be reimagined, repaved, and made greener with far fewer private vehicles over the next two years. Our planning department, in concert with art organizations here, has made citizen-led urban prototyping the centerpiece of the planning process….(More)”
How will security attitudes change in the era of the smart city?
Chloe Green at Information Age: “The phrase ‘Cities of the Future’ conjures up so many different images, from the utopia of The Jetsons to the dystopia of Judge Dredd. But one thing that most agree on is the connected nature of our cities, with every aspect of life being connected to the internet, machines communicating with machines and with us.
….
Connected cities, also called smart cities, are one aspect of the Internet of Things. Smart cities are where services use technology to be more efficient and cost-effective, from traffic and transport systems to waste management to energy and healthcare…. – with these technological advances come big concerns. Specifically these concerns revolve around data and its protection.
A connected city will be generating huge quantities of data, which will be shared from machine to machine and department to department. That’s a lot of data to target, and a lot of attack vectors to get at it.
And, as this article on Dark Reading points out, those attack vectors include the sensors themselves, which can be hacked and used to feed fake data into the system. This can result in transport systems being shut down, for example. In a big city that is a quick route to total mayhem….
Hiding the data away on an internal network won’t work, in fact that goes against the very idea of a smart city, where data sharing is the norm. The problem is, many of the companies producing hardware and software for smart cities are not experts in cyber security and so it’s often an after-thought. There is also a startling lack of standards in the smart city industry at the moment.
That is slowly changing though; Securing Smart Cities is a non-profit organisation made up of cyber security companies such as Kaspersky Lab, research bodies such as IOActive and industry bodies like the Cloud Security Alliance.
Similarly, there have been calls for smart cities to have a Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) on standby in case of a cyber attack against the infrastructure.
But in some ways new security threats posed by smart cities are not too different from what we’ve seen with the emergence of mobile and cloud computing. What’s changed is the perimeter of the network; it’s no longer contained to a data centre. The same rules that apply here could well apply to smart cities.
Access management will play a big role in securing smart cities; ensuring only the right people (or devices) from the right location can interact with each other can help to keep the bad guys out.
From encryption to DDoS mitigation to intelligent traffic management, there are systems that can be put in place to secure the data that smart cities and the IoT need to be truly effective…..(More)
Civic engagement platform brings the town meeting online
Springwise: “Citizens may have the ability to express enthusiasm or disgust for government policies online, but these opinions are only as valuable as the ears they reach. We recently saw Balancing Act offer citizens the ability to view and play around with their city’s budget, providing governments with a better understanding of the wants and needs of their constituents. Now, CitizenLab is another civic engagement platform, which is bringing the town meeting into the digital age — providing a space for citizens to communicate with their government, and for governments to ‘citizensource’ opinions on their policies.
To begin, participants visit the platform and enter their city. This will take them to a collection of ‘labs’ — categories such as education, health and public spaces. They can then post new ideas, join existing conversations and upvote interesting topics. Local governments can then use the platform as a resource to discover the priorities of its citizens. They can respond directly to discussions and consult the public opinion on important issues. Governments can also acknowledge the most vital issues raised by taking them to city council for discussion. The platform is designed to host positive ideas, rather than raise issues.
Website: www.citizenlab.co“
The Website That Visualizes Human Activity in Cities Across the World
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “The data from mobile phones is revolutionizing our understanding of human activity. In recent years, it has revealed commuting patterns in major cities, wealth distribution in African countries, and even reproductive strategies in western societies. That has provided unprecedented insight for economists, sociologists, and city planners among others.
But this kind of advanced research is just a first step in a much broader trend. Phone data is set to become a standard resource that almost anyone can use to study and watch humanity continuously, much as they can now watch the weather unfold anywhere on the planet almost in real time.
But one thing is holding them back—the lack of powerful computational tools that can gather, crunch, and present the data in meaningful ways.
Today, that looks set to change to the work of Dániel Kondor and a few pals at the SENSEable City Laboratory, part of MIT, and at Ericsson, a company that produces network infrastructure technologies. These guys have unveiled a powerful online tool that uses mobile phone data to visualize human activity in cities all over the world.
This new tool, called ManyCities, allows anybody to study human activity in various cities with unprecedented detail. But the key is that it organizes and presents the data in intuitive ways that quickly reveals trends and special events….
ManyCities then presents the data in three simple ways. The first shows how phone usage varies over time, revealing clear daily and weekly patterns as well as longer term trends. For example, ManyCities clearly shows a steady, long-term increase in data traffic, the effect of holidays, and how usage patterns change dramatically during important events like the Wimbledon tennis championship in London.
ManyCities also allows user to drill down into the data to compare patterns in different neighborhoods or in different cities. It shows, for example, that text message activity peaks in the morning in Hong Kong, in the evening in New York and at midday in London….Kondor and co have made it available at www.ManyCities.org for anybody to try.
This kind of tool is clearly evolving into a real time analytics tool. It’s not hard to imagine how people could use it to plan events such as conferences, sporting contests, or concerts or to plan emergency city infrastructure. One day people may even tune in to a “smartphone forecast” to find out if their phone will work when the big game kicks off that evening.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1509.00459 : Visualizing Signatures Of Human Activity In Cities Across The Globe”