Big Data and Mass Shootings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Holman W. Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal: “As always, the dots are connected after the fact, when the connecting is easy. …The day may be coming, sooner than we think, when such incidents can be stopped before they get started. A software program alerts police to a social-media posting by an individual of interest in their jurisdiction. An algorithm reminds them why the individual had become a person of interest—a history of mental illness, an episode involving a neighbor. Months earlier, discreet inquires by police had revealed an unhealthy obsession with weapons—key word, unhealthy. There’s no reason why gun owners, range operators and firearms dealers shouldn’t be a source of information for local police seeking information about who might merit special attention.

Sound scary? Big data exists to find the signal among the noise. Your data is the noise. It’s what computerized systems seek to disregard in their quest for information that actually would be useful to act on. Big data is interested in needles, not hay.

Still don’t trust the government? You’re barking up an outdated tree. Consider the absurdly ancillary debate last year on whether the government should be allowed to hold telephone “metadata” when the government already holds vastly more sensitive data on all of us in the form of tax, medical, legal and census records.

All this seems doubly silly given the spacious information about each of us contained in private databases, freely bought and sold by marketers. Bizarre is the idea that Facebook should be able to use our voluntary Facebook postings to decide what we might like to buy, but police shouldn’t use the same information to prevent crime.

Hitachi, the big Japanese company, began testing its crime-prediction software in several unnamed American cities this month. The project, called Hitachi Visualization Predictive Crime Analytics, culls crime records, map and transit data, weather reports, social media and other sources for patterns that might otherwise go unnoticed by police.

Colorado-based Intrado, working with LexisNexis and Motorola Solutions, already sells police a service that instantly scans legal, business and social-media records for information about persons and circumstances that officers may encounter when responding to a 911 call at a specific address. Hundreds of public safety agencies find the system invaluable though that didn’t stop the city of Bellingham, Wash., from rejecting it last year on the odd grounds that such software must be guilty of racial profiling.

Big data is changing how police allocate resources and go about fighting crime. …It once was freely asserted that police weren’t supposed to prevent crime, only solve it. But recent research shows investment in policing actually does reduce crime rates—and produces a large positive return measured in dollars and cents. A day will come when failing to connect the dots in advance of a mass-shooting won’t be a matter for upturned hands. It will be a matter for serious recrimination…(More)“

As a Start to NYC Prison Reform, Jail Data Will Be Made Public

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brentin Mock at CityLab: “…In New York City, 40 percent of the jailed population are there because they couldn’t afford bail—most of them for nonviolent drug crimes. The city spends $42 million on average annually incarcerating non-felony defendants….

Wednesday, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law legislation aimed at helping correct these bail problems, providing inmates a bill of rights for when they’re detained and addressing other problems that lead to overstuffing city jails with poor people of color.

The omnibus package of criminal justice reform bills will require the city to produce better accounting of how many people are in city jails, what they’re average incarceration time is while waiting for trial, the average bail amounts imposed on defendants, and a whole host of other data points on incarceration. Under the new legislation, the city will have to release reports quarterly and semi-annually to the public—much of it from data now sheltered within the city’s Department of Corrections.

“This is bringing sunshine to information that is already being looked at internally, but is better off being public data,” New York City council member Helen Rosenthal tells CityLab. “We can better understand what polices we need to change if we have the data to understand what’s going on in the system.”…

The city passed a package of transparency bills last month that focused on Rikers, but the legislation passed Wednesday will focus on the city’s courts and jails system as a whole….(More)”

Opening City Hall’s Wallets to Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg at the New York Times: “Six years ago, the city of San Francisco decided to upgrade its streetlights. This is its story: O.K., stop. This is a parody, right? Government procurement is surely too nerdy even for Fixes. Procurement is a clerical task that cities do on autopilot: Decide what you need. Write a mind-numbing couple of dozen pages of specifications. Collect a few bids from the usual suspects. Yep, that’s procurement.But it doesn’t have to be. Instead of a rote purchasing exercise, what if procurement could be a way for cities to find new approaches to their problems?….

“Instead of saying to the marketplace ‘here’s the solution we want,’ we said ‘here’s the challenge, here’s the problem we’re having’,” said Barbara Hale, assistant general manager of the city’s Public Utilities Commission. “That opened us up to what other people thought the solution to the problem was, rather than us in our own little world deciding we knew the answer.”

The city got 59 different ideas from businesses in numerous countries. A Swiss company called Paradox won an agreement to do a 12-streetlight pilot test.

So — a happy ending for the scrappy and innovative Paradox? No. Paradox’s system worked, but the city could not award a contract for 18,500 streetlights that way. It held another competition for just the control systems, and tried out three of them. Last year the city issued a traditional R.F.P., using what it learned from the pilots. The contract has not yet been awarded.

Dozens of cities around the world are using problem-based procurement.   Barcelona has posed six challenges that it will spend a million euros on, and Moscow announced last year that five percent of city spending would be set aside for innovative procurement. But in the vast majority of cities, as in San Francisco, problem-based procurement is still just for small pilot projects — a novelty.

It will grow, however. This is largely because of the efforts ofCityMart, a company based in New York and Barcelona that has almost single-handedly taken the concept from a neat idea to something cities all over want to figure out how to do.

The concept is new enough that there’s not yet a lot of evidence about its effects. There’s plenty of proof, however, of the deficiencies of business-as-usual.

With the typical R.F.P., a city uses a consultant, working with local officials, to design what to ask for. Then city engineers and lawyers write the specifications, and the R.F.P. goes out for bids.

“If it’s a road safety issue it’s likely it will be the traffic engineers who will be asked to tell you what you can do, what you should invest in,” said Sascha Haselmayer, CityMart’s chief executive. “They tend to come up with things like traffic lights. They do not know there’s a world of entrepreneurs who work on educating drivers better, or that have a different design approach to public space — things that may not fit into the professional profile of the consultant.”

Such a process is guaranteed to be innovation-free. Innovation is far more likely when expertise from one discipline is applied to another. If you want the most creative solution to a traffic problem, ask people who aren’t traffic engineers.

The R.F.P. process itself was designed to give anyone a shot at a contract, but in reality, the winners almost always come from a small group of businesses with the required financial stability, legal know-how to negotiate the bureaucracy, and connections. Put those together, and cities get to consider only a tiny spectrum of the possible solutions to their problems.

Problem-based procurement can provide them with a whole rainbow. But to do that, the process needs clearinghouses — eBays or Craigslists for urban ideas….(More)”

Smoke Signals: Open data & analytics for preventing fire deaths

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Enigma: “Today we are launching Smoke Signals, an open source civic analytics tool that helps local communities determine which city blocks are at the highest risk of not having a smoke alarm.

25,000 people are killed or injured in 1 million fires across the United States each year. With over 130 million housing units across the country, 4.5 million of them do not have smoke detectors, placing their inhabitants at substantial risk. Driving this number down is the single most important factor for saving lives put at risk by fire.

Organizations like the Red Cross are investing a lot of resources to buy and install smoke alarms in people’s homes. But a big challenge remains: in a city of millions, what doors should you knock on first when conducting an outreach effort?

We began working on the problem of targeting the blocks at highest risk of not having a smoke alarm with the City of New Orleans last spring. (You can read about this work here.) Over the past few months, with collaboration from the Red Cross and DataKind, we’ve built out a generalized model and a set of tools to offer the same analytics potential to 178 American cities, all in a way that is simple to use and sensitive to how on-the-ground operations are organized.

We believe that Smoke Signals is more a collection of tools and collaborations than it is a slick piece of software that can somehow act as a panacea to the problem of fire fatalities. Core to its purpose and mission are a set of commitments:

  • an ongoing collaboration with the Red Cross wherein our smoke alarm work informs their on-the-ground outreach
  • a collaboration with DataKind to continue applying volunteer work to the improvement of the underlying models and data that drive the risk analysis
  • a working relationship with major American cities to help integrate our prediction models into their outreach programs

and tools:

  • a downloadable CSV for 178 American municipalities that associate city streets to risk scores
  • an interactive map for an immediate bird’s eye assessment of at-risk city blocks
  • an API endpoint to which users can upload a CSV of local fire incidents in order to improve scores for their area

We believe this is an important contribution to public safety and the better delivery of government services. However, we also consider it a work in progress, a demonstration of how civic analytic solutions can be shared and generalized across the country. We are open sourcing all of the components that went into it and invite anyone with an interest in making it better to get involved….(More)”

Openness an Essential Building Block for Inclusive Societies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 (Mexico) in the Huffington Post: “The international community faces a complex environment that requires transforming the way we govern. In that sense, 2015 marks a historic milestone, as 193 Member States of the United Nations will come together to agree on the adoption of the 2030 Agenda. With the definition of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we will set an ambitious course toward a better and more inclusive world for the next 15 years.

The SDGs will be established just when governments deal with new and more defiant challenges, which require increased collaboration with multiple stakeholders to deliver innovative solutions. For that reason, cutting-edge technologies, fueled by vast amounts of data, provide an efficient platform to foster a global transformation and consolidate more responsive, collaborative and open governments.

Goal 16 seeks to promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies by ensuring access to public information, strengthening the rule of law, as well as building stronger and more accountable institutions. By doing so, we will contribute to successfully achieve the rest of the 2030 Agenda objectives.

During the 70th United Nations General Assembly, the 11 countries of the Steering Committee of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), along with civil-society leaders, will gather to acknowledge Goal 16 as a common target through a Joint Declaration: Open Government for the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As the Global Summit of OGP convenes this year in Mexico City, on October 28th and 29th, my government will call on all 65 members to subscribe to this fundamental declaration.

The SDGs will be reached only through trustworthy, effective and inclusive institutions. This is why Mexico, as current chair of the OGP, has committed to promote citizen participation, innovative policies, transparency and accountability.

Furthermore, we have worked with a global community of key players to develop the international Open Data Charter (ODC), which sets the founding principles for a greater coherence and increased use of open data across the world. We seek to recognize the value of having timely, comprehensive, accessible, and comparable data to improve governance and citizen engagement, as well as to foster inclusive development and innovation….(More)”

The era of “Scientific Urban Management” is approaching

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Francesco Ferrero: “As members of the Smart City Strategic Program at Istituto Superiore Mario Boella, we strongly believe in the concept of Scientific Urban Management. This concept means that through new ICT trends such as the massive diffusion of sensors, wireless broadband and tools for data collection and analysis, the administration of urban spaces can get closer to being an exact science, i.e. urban decision-makers can exploit these technologies for practicing evidence based decision making. We are spending quite some efforts in doing research on Decision Support Systems integrating different Modelling & Simulation (M&S) techniques, to better predict and measure the impact of alternative Smart City initiatives on the path towards the social, economic and environmental sustainability target.

We believe that these tools will allow urban decision makers, solution providers and investment managers to predict, on the basis of a scientific approach, what initiatives will better contribute to implement the local Smart City strategies, and to satisfy the real needs of the citizens, thus reducing the risks associated with the deployment of large-scale innovations in the urban context.

Following this research roadmap, we have reached a paramount result on the theme of urban mobility simulation, by means of open-source software and open-data. Our work, done in collaboration with the CNR-IEIIT, University of Bologna and EURECOM has been recently published on IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

Simulation is an important technique to analyse the complex urban mobility system and to develop tools for supporting decision-making on top of it. However the effectiveness of this approach relies on the truthfulness of the mobility traces used to feed the traffic simulators. Furthermore, there is a lack of reference publicly available mobility traces. The main reasons for this lack are that the tools to generate realistic road traffic are complex to configure and operate, and real-world input data to be fed to such tools is hard to retrieve….(More)”

Using Big Data to Understand the Human Condition: The Kavli HUMAN Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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)”