Christopher Moraff at Next City: “…despite the fact that policing is arguably one of the most important and powerful service professions a civilized society can produce, it’s far easier to find out if the plumber you just hired broke someone’s pipe while fixing their toilet than it is to find out if the cop patrolling your neighborhood broke someone’s head while arresting them. A 31-year-old computer programmer has set out to fix that glitch with a new web-based (and soon to be mobile) crowdsourced rating tool called CopScore that is designed to help communities distinguish police officers who are... (More >)
Making emotive games from open data
Katie Collins at WIRED: “Microsoft researcher Kati London’s aim is “to try to get people to think of data in terms of personalities, relationships and emotions”, she tells the audience at the Story Festival in London. Through Project Sentient Data, she uses her background in games development to create fun but meaningful experiences that bridge online interactions and things that are happening in the real world. One such experience invited children to play against the real-time flow of London traffic through an online game called the Code of Everand. The aim was to test the road safety knowledge of... (More >)
The Tricky Task of Rating Neighborhoods on 'Livability'
Tanvi Misra at CityLab: “Jokubas Neciunas was looking to buy an apartment almost two years back in Vilnius, Lithuania. He consulted real estate platforms and government data to help him decide the best option for him. In the process, he realized that there was a lot of information out there, but no one was really using it very well. Fast-forward two years, and Neciunas and his colleagues have created PlaceILive.com—a start-up trying to leverage open data from cities and information from social media to create a holistic, accessible tool that measures the “livability” of any apartment or house in... (More >)
Small Pieces Loosely Joined: How smarter use of technology and data can deliver real reform of local government
Policy Exchange (UK): “Local authorities could save up to £10billion by 2020 through smarter and more collaborative use of technology and data. Small Pieces Loosely Joined highlights how every year councils lose more than £1 billion by failing to identify where fraud has taken place. The paper also sheds light on how a lack of data sharing and collaboration between many local authorities, as well as the use of bespoke IT systems, keeps the cost of providing public services unsustainably high. The report sets out three ways in which local authorities could not only save billions of pounds, but... (More >)
More Power to the People: How Cities Are Letting Data Flow
Stephen Taylor at People4SmarterCities: “Smart cities understand that engaging the public in decision-making is vital to enhancing services and ensuring accountability. Here are three ideas that show how cities are embracing new technologies and opening up data to spur civic participation and improve citizens’ lives. City Texts Help Keep Food on the Table In San Francisco, about a third of the 52,000 people that receive food stamps are disenrolled from the program because they miss certain deadlines, such as filing quarterly reports with the city’s Human Services Agency. To help keep recipients up to date on their status, the... (More >)
The story of the sixth myth of open data and open government
Paper by Ann-Sofie Hellberg and Karin Hedström: “The aim of this paper is to describe a local government effort to realise an open government agenda. This is done using a storytelling approach….The empirical data is based on a case study. We participated in, as well as followed, the process of realising an open government agenda on a local level, where citizens were invited to use open public data as the basis for developing apps and external web solutions. Based on an interpretative tradition, we chose storytelling as a way to scrutinize the competition process. In this paper, we present... (More >)
Moovit Crowdsources Public Transit Data, So You'll Never Get Stuck Waiting For The Bus Again
Ariel Schwartz at Co.Exist: “There are few things more frustrating than rushing to the bus, only to find out that it’s delayed indefinitely. Or arriving at the subway stop to find hundreds of others waiting for the same delayed train, making your chances of entry onto the next car nearly impossible. In cities with open data, localized transit apps with real-time transit updates can alleviate the problem, but those apps aren’t available everywhere—and in most cases, they don’t offer up information about service alerts, like bus stops relocated due to construction. Moovit, an Israeli startup that recently raised $50... (More >)
Training the next generation of public leaders
Thanks to the generous support of the Knight Foundation, this term the Governance Lab Academy – a training program designed to promote civic engagement and innovation – is launching a series of online coaching programs. Geared to the teams and individuals inside and outside of government planning to undertake a new project or trying to figure out how to make an existing project even more effective and scalable, these programs are designed to help participants working in civic engagement and innovation develop effective projects from idea to implementation. Convened by leading experts in their fields, coaching programs meet exclusively... (More >)
With a Few Bits of Data, Researchers Identify ‘Anonymous’ People
Natasha Singer in the New York Times: “Even when real names and other personal information are stripped from big data sets, it is often possible to use just a few pieces of the information to identify a specific person, according to a study to be published Friday in the journal Science. In the study, titled “Unique in the Shopping Mall: On the Reidentifiability of Credit Card Metadata,” a group of data scientists analyzed credit card transactions made by 1.1 million people in 10,000 stores over a three-month period. The data set contained details including the date of each transaction,... (More >)
Schemes used by South Australia to include citizens in policy making
Joshua Chambers at Future Gov Asia: “…South Australia has pioneered a number of innovative methods to try to include its residents in policymaking. …The highest profile participatory programme run by the state government is the Citizens’ Jury initiative, …The Citizens’ Jury takes a randomly selected, representative group of citizens through a process to hear arguments and evidence much like a jury in a trial, before writing an independent report which makes recommendations to government. There were 37 members of the jury, hearing evidence on Thursday evenings and Saturdays over a five week period. They heard from motorists associations, cycling... (More >)
