Steve Kelman at FCW: “Innovation, particularly in government, can be very hard. Lots of signoffs, lots of naysayers. For many, it’s probably not worth the hassle.
Yet all sorts of examples are surfacing about ways civil servants, non-profits, startups and researchers have thought to use social media — or data mining of government information — to get information that can either help citizens directly or help agencies serve citizens. I want to call attention to examples that I’ve seen just in the past few weeks — partly to recognize the creative people who have come up with these ideas, but partly to make a point about the relationship between these ideas and the general issue of innovation in government. I think that these social media and data-driven experiments are often a much simpler way for civil servants to innovate than many of the changes we typically think of under the heading “innovation in government.” They open the possibility to make innovation in government an activity for the civil service masses.
One example that was reported in The New York Times was about a pilot project at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to do rapid keyword searches with phrases such as “vomit” and “diarrhea” associated with 294,000 Yelp restaurant reviews in New York City. The city is using a software program developed at Columbia University. They have now expended the monitoring to occur daily, to get quick information on possible problems at specific restaurants or with specific kinds of food.
A second example, reported in BloombergBusinessWeek, involved — perhaps not surprisingly, given the publication — an Israeli startup called Treato that is applying a similar idea to ferretting out adverse drug reactions before they come in through FDA studies and other systems. The founders are cooperating with researchers at Harvard Medical School and FDA officials, among others. Their software looks through Twitter and Facebook, along with a large number of patient forum sites, to cull out from all the reports of illnesses the incidents that may well reflect an unusual presence of adverse drug reactions.
These examples are fascinating in themselves. But one thing that caught my eye about both is that each seems high on the creativity dimension and low on the need-to-overcome-bureaucracy dimension. Both ideas reflect new and improved ways to do what these organizations do anyway, which is gather information to help inform regulatory and health decisions by government. Neither requires any upheaval in an agency’s existing culture, or steps on somebody’s turf in any serious way. Introducing the changes doesn’t require major changes in an agency’s internal procedures. Compared to many innovations in government, these are easy ones to make happen. (They do all need some funds, however.)
What I hope is that the information woven into social media will unlock a new era of innovation inside government. The limits of innovation are much less determined by difficult-to-change bureaucratic processes and can be much more responsive to an individual civil servant’s creativity…”
How NYC Open Data and Reddit Saved New Yorkers Over $55,000 a Year
IQuantNY: “NYC generates an enormous amount of data each year, and for the most part, it stays behind closed doors. But thanks to the Open Data movement, signed into law by Bloomberg in 2012 and championed over the last several years by Borough President Gale Brewer, along with other council members, we now get to see a small slice of what the city knows. And that slice is growing.
There have been some detractors along the way; a senior attorney for the NYPD said in 2012 during a council hearing that releasing NYPD data in csv format was a problem because they were “concerned with the integrity of the data itself” and because “data could be manipulated by people who want ‘to make a point’ of some sort”. But our democracy is built on the idea of free speech; we let all the information out and then let reason lead the way.
In some ways, Open Data adds another check and balance into government: its citizens. I’ve watched the perfect example of this check work itself out over the past month. You may have caught my post that used parking ticket data to identify the fire hydrant in New York City that was generating the most income for the city in the form of fines: $33,000 a year. And on the next block, the second most profitable hydrant was generating $24,000 a year. That’s two consecutive blocks with hydrants generating over $55,000 a year. But there was a problem. In my post, I laid out why these two parking spots were extremely confusing and basically seemed like a trap; there was a wide “curb extension” between the street and the hydrant, making it appear like the hydrant was not by the street. Additionally, the DOT had painted parking spots right where you would be fined if you parked.
Once the data was out there, the hydrant took on a life of its own. First, it raised to the top of the nyc sub-reddit. That is basically one way that the internet voted that this is in-fact “interesting”. And that is how things go from small to big. From there, it travelled to the New York Observer, which was able to get a comment from the DOT. After that, it appeared in the New York Post, the post was republished in Gothamist and finally it even went global in the Daily Mail.
I guess the pressure was on the DOT at this point, as each media source reached out for comment, but what struck me was their response to the Observer:
“While DOT has not received any complaints about this location, we will review the roadway markings and make any appropriate alterations”
Why does someone have to complain in order for the DOT to see problems like this? In fact, the DOT just redesigned every parking sign in New York because some of the old ones were considered confusing. But if this hydrant was news to them, it implies that they did not utilize the very strongest source of measuring confusion on our streets: NYC parking tickets….”
Why Governments Should Adopt a Digital Engagement Strategy
Lindsay Crudele at StateTech: “Government agencies increasingly value digital engagement as a way to transform a complaint-based relationship into one of positive, proactive constituent empowerment. An engaged community is a stronger one.
Creating a culture of participatory government, as we strive to do in Boston, requires a data-driven infrastructure supported by IT solutions. Data management and analytics solutions translate a huge stream of social media data, drive conversations and creative crowdsourcing, and support transparency.
More than 50 departments across Boston host public conversations using a multichannel, multidisciplinary portfolio of accounts. We integrate these using an enterprise digital engagement management tool that connects and organizes them to break down silos and boost collaboration. Moreover, the technology provides a lens into ways to expedite workflow and improve service delivery.
A Vital Link in Times of Need
Committed and creative daily engagement builds trusting collaboration that, in turn, is vital in an inevitable crisis. As we saw during the tragic events of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and recent major weather events, rapid response through digital media clarifies the situation, provides information about safety and manages constituent expectations.
Boston’s enterprise model supports coordinated external communication and organized monitoring, intake and response. This provides a superadmin with access to all accounts for governance and the ability to easily amplify central messaging across a range of cultivated communities. These communities will later serve in recovery efforts.
The conversations must be seeded by a keen, creative and data-driven content strategy. For an agency to determine the correct strategy for the organization and the community it serves, a growing crop of social analytics tools can provide efficient insight into performance factors: type of content, deployment schedule, sentiment, service-based response time and team performance, to name a few. For example, in February, the city of Boston learned that tweets from our mayor with video saw 300 percent higher engagement than those without.
These insights can inform resource deployment, eliminating guesswork to more directly reach constituents by their preferred methods. Being truly present in a conversation demonstrates care and awareness and builds trust. This increased positivity can be measured through sentiment analysis, including change over time, and should be monitored for fluctuation.
During a major event, engagement managers may see activity reach new peaks in volume. IT solutions can interpret Big Data and bring a large-scale digital conversation back into perspective, identifying public safety alerts and emerging trends, needs and community influencers who can be engaged as amplifying partners.
Running Strong One Year Later
Throughout the 2014 Boston Marathon, we used three monitoring tools to deliver smart alerts to key partners across the organization:
• An engagement management tool organized conversations for account performance and monitoring.
• A brand listening tool scanned for emerging trends across the city and uncovered related conversations.
• A location-based predictive tool identified early alerts to discover potential problems along the marathon route.
With the team and tools in place, policy-based training supports the sustained growth and operation of these conversation channels. A data-driven engagement strategy unearths all of our stories, where we, as public servants and neighbors, build better communities together….”
The Emerging Science of Computational Anthropology
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: The increasing availability of big data from mobile phones and location-based apps has triggered a revolution in the understanding of human mobility patterns. This data shows the ebb and flow of the daily commute in and out of cities, the pattern of travel around the world and even how disease can spread through cities via their transport systems.
So there is considerable interest in looking more closely at human mobility patterns to see just how well it can be predicted and how these predictions might be used in everything from disease control and city planning to traffic forecasting and location-based advertising.
Today we get an insight into the kind of detailed that is possible thanks to the work of Zimo Yang at Microsoft research in Beijing and a few pals. These guys start with the hypothesis that people who live in a city have a pattern of mobility that is significantly different from those who are merely visiting. By dividing travelers into locals and non-locals, their ability to predict where people are likely to visit dramatically improves.
Zimo and co begin with data from a Chinese location-based social network called Jiepang.com. This is similar to Foursquare in the US. It allows users to record the places they visit and to connect with friends at these locations and to find others with similar interests.
The data points are known as check-ins and the team downloaded more than 1.3 million of them from five big cities in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Chengdu and Hong Kong. They then used 90 per cent of the data to train their algorithms and the remaining 10 per cent to test it. The Jiapang data includes the users’ hometowns so it’s easy to see whether an individual is checking in in their own city or somewhere else.
The question that Zimo and co want to answer is the following: given a particular user and their current location, where are they most likely to visit in the near future? In practice, that means analysing the user’s data, such as their hometown and the locations recently visited, and coming up with a list of other locations that they are likely to visit based on the type of people who visited these locations in the past.
Zimo and co used their training dataset to learn the mobility pattern of locals and non-locals and the popularity of the locations they visited. The team then applied this to the test dataset to see whether their algorithm was able to predict where locals and non-locals were likely to visit.
They found that their best results came from analysing the pattern of behaviour of a particular individual and estimating the extent to which this person behaves like a local. That produced a weighting called the indigenization coefficient that the researchers could then use to determine the mobility patterns this person was likely to follow in future.
In fact, Zimo and co say they can spot non-locals in this way without even knowing their home location. “Because non-natives tend to visit popular locations, like the Imperial Palace in Beijing and the Bund in Shanghai, while natives usually check in around their homes and workplaces,” they add.
The team say this approach considerably outperforms the mixed algorithms that use only individual visiting history and location popularity. “To our surprise, a hybrid algorithm weighted by the indigenization coefficients outperforms the mixed algorithm accounting for additional demographical information.”
It’s easy to imagine how such an algorithm might be useful for businesses who want to target certain types of travelers or local people. But there is a more interesting application too.
Zimo and co say that it is possible to monitor the way an individual’s mobility patterns change over time. So if a person moves to a new city, it should be possible to see how long it takes them to settle in.
One way of measuring this is in their mobility patterns: whether they are more like those of a local or a non-local. “We may be able to estimate whether a non-native person will behave like a native person after a time period and if so, how long in average a person takes to become a native-like one,” say Zimo and co.
That could have a fascinating impact on the way anthropologists study migration and the way immigrants become part of a local community. This is computational anthropology a science that is clearly in its early stages but one that has huge potential for the future.”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1405.7769 : Indigenization of Urban Mobility
A brief history of open data
Article by Luke Fretwell in FCW: “In December 2007, 30 open-data pioneers gathered in Sebastopol, Calif., and penned a set of eight open-government data principles that inaugurated a new era of democratic innovation and economic opportunity.
“The objective…was to find a simple way to express values that a bunch of us think are pretty common, and these are values about how the government could make its data available in a way that enables a wider range of people to help make the government function better,” Harvard Law School Professor Larry Lessig said. “That means more transparency in what the government is doing and more opportunity for people to leverage government data to produce insights or other great business models.”
The eight simple principles — that data should be complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine-processable, nondiscriminatory, nonproprietary and license-free — still serve as the foundation for what has become a burgeoning open-data movement.
In the seven years since those principles were released, governments around the world have adopted open-data initiatives and launched platforms that empower researchers, journalists and entrepreneurs to mine this new raw material and its potential to uncover new discoveries and opportunities. Open data has drawn civic hacker enthusiasts around the world, fueling hackathons, challenges, apps contests, barcamps and “datapaloozas” focused on issues as varied as health, energy, finance, transportation and municipal innovation.
In the United States, the federal government initiated the beginnings of a wide-scale open-data agenda on President Barack Obama’s first day in office in January 2009, when he issued his memorandum on transparency and open government, which declared that “openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.” The president gave federal agencies three months to provide input into an open-government directive that would eventually outline what each agency planned to do with respect to civic transparency, collaboration and participation, including specific objectives related to releasing data to the public.
In May of that year, Data.gov launched with just 47 datasets and a vision to “increase public access to high-value, machine-readable datasets generated by the executive branch of the federal government.”
When the White House issued the final draft of its federal Open Government Directive later that year, the U.S. open-government data movement got its first tangible marching orders, including a 45-day deadline to open previously unreleased data to the public.
Now five years after its launch, Data.gov boasts more than 100,000 datasets from 227 local, state and federal agencies and organizations….”
Open Data Is Open for Business
Jeffrey Stinson at Stateline: ” Last month, web designer Sean Wittmeyer and colleague Wojciech Magda walked away with a $25,000 prize from the state of Colorado for designing an online tool to help businesses decide where to locate in the state.
The tool, called “Beagle Score,” is a widget that can be embedded in online commercial real estate listings. It can rate a location by taxes and incentives, zoning, even the location of possible competitors – all derived from about 30 data sets posted publicly by the state of Colorado and its municipalities.
The creation of Beagle Score is an example of how states, cities, counties and the federal government are encouraging entrepreneurs to take raw government data posted on “open data” websites and turn the information into products the public will buy.
“The (Colorado contest) opened up a reason to use the data,” said Wittmeyer, 25, of Fort Collins. “It shows how ‘open data’ can solve a lot of challenges. … And absolutely, we can make it commercially viable. We can expand it to other states, and fairly quickly.”
Open-data advocates, such as President Barack Obama’s former information chief Vivek Kundra, estimate a multibillion-dollar industry can be spawned by taking raw government data files on sectors such as weather, population, energy, housing, commerce or transportation and turn them into products for the public to consume or other industries to pay for.
They can be as simple as mobile phone apps identifying every stop sign you will encounter on a trip to a different town, or as intricate as taking weather and crops data and turning it into insurance policies farmers can buy.
States, Cities Sponsor ‘Hackathons’
At least 39 states and 46 cities and counties have created open-data sites since the federal government, Utah, California and the cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., began opening data in 2009, according to the federal site, Data.gov.
Jeanne Holm, the federal government’s Data.gov “evangelist,” said new sites are popping up and new data are being posted almost daily. The city of Los Angeles, for example, opened a portal last week.
In March, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that in the year since it was launched, his state’s site has grown to some 400 data sets with 50 million records from 45 agencies. Available are everything from horse injuries and deaths at state race tracks to maps of regulated child care centers. The most popular data: top fishing spots in the state.
State and local governments are sponsoring “hackathons,” “data paloozas,” and challenges like Colorado’s, inviting businesspeople, software developers, entrepreneurs or anyone with a laptop and a penchant for manipulating data to take part. Lexington, Kentucky, had a civic hackathon last weekend. The U.S. Transportation Department and members of the Geospatial Transportation Mapping Association had a three-day data palooza that ended Wednesday in Arlington, Virginia.
The goals of the events vary. Some, like Arlington’s transportation event, solicit ideas for how government can present its data more effectively. Others seek ideas for mining it.
Aldona Valicenti, Lexington’s chief information officer, said many cities want advice on how to use the data to make government more responsive to citizens, and to communicate with them on issues ranging from garbage pickups and snow removal to upcoming civic events.
Colorado and Wyoming had a joint hackathon last month sponsored by Google to help solve government problems. Colorado sought apps that might be useful to state emergency personnel in tracking people and moving supplies during floods, blizzards or other natural disasters. Wyoming sought help in making its tax-and-spend data more understandable and usable by its citizens.
Unless there’s some prize money, hackers may not make a buck from events like these, and participate out of fun, curiosity or a sense of public service. But those who create an app that is useful beyond the boundaries of a particular city or state, or one that is commercially valuable to business, can make serious money – just as Beagle Score plans to do. Colorado will hold onto the intellectual property rights to Beagle Score for a year. But Wittmeyer and his partner will be able to profit from extending it to other states.
States Trail in Open Data
Open data is an outgrowth of the e-government movement of the 1990s, in which government computerized more of the data it collected and began making it available on floppy disks.
States often have trailed the federal government or many cities in adjusting to the computer age and in sharing information, said Emily Shaw, national policy manager for the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency in government. The first big push to share came with public accountability, or “checkbook” sites, that show where government gets its revenue and how it spends it.
The goal was to make government more transparent and accountable by offering taxpayers information on how their money was spent.
The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts site, established in 2007, offers detailed revenue, spending, tax and contracts data. Republican Comptroller Susan Combs’ office said having a one-stop electronic site also has saved taxpayers about $12.3 million in labor, printing, postage and other costs.
Not all states’ checkbook sites are as openly transparent and detailed as Texas, Shaw said. Nor are their open-data sites. “There’s so much variation between the states,” she said.
Many state legislatures are working to set policies for releasing data. Since the start of 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, nine states have enacted open-data laws, and more legislation is pending. But California, for instance, has been posting open data for five years without legislation setting policies.
Just as states have lagged in getting data out to the public, less of it has been turned into commercial use, said Joel Gurin, senior adviser at the Governance Lab at New York University and author of the book “Open Data Now.”
Gurin leads Open Data 500, which identifies firms that that have made products from open government data and turned them into regional or national enterprises. In April, it listed 500. It soon may expand. “We’re finding more and more companies every day,” he said. “…
Making cities smarter through citizen engagement
Vaidehi Shah at Eco-Business: “Rapidly progressing information communications technology (ICT) is giving rise to an almost infinite range of innovations that can be implemented in cities to make them more efficient and better connected. However, in order for technology to yield sustainable solutions, planners must prioritise citizen engagement and strong leadership.
This was the consensus on Tuesday at the World Cities Summit 2014, where representatives from city and national governments, technology firms and private sector organisations gathered in Singapore to discuss strategies and challenges to achieving sustainable cities in the future.
Laura Ipsen, Microsoft corporate vice president for worldwide public sector, identified globalisation, social media, big data, and mobility as the four major technological trends prevailing in cities today, as she spoke at the plenary session with a theme on “The next urban decade: critical challenges and opportunities”.
Despite these increasing trends, she cautioned, “technology does not build infrastructure, but it does help better engage citizens and businesses through public-private partnerships”.
For example, “LoveCleanStreets”, an online tool developed by Microsoft and partners, enables London residents to report infrastructure problems such as damaged roads or signs, shared Ipsen.
“By engaging citizens through this application, cities can fix problems early, before they get worse,” she said.
In Singapore, the ‘MyWaters’ app of PUB, Singapore’s national water agency, is also a key tool for the government to keep citizens up-to-date of water quality and safety issues in the country, she added.
Even if governments did not actively develop solutions themselves, simply making the immense amounts of data collected by the city open to businesses and citizens could make a big difference to urban liveability, Mark Chandler, director of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of International Trade and Commerce, pointed out.
Opening up all of the data collected by San Francisco, for instance, yielded 60 free mobile applications that allow residents to access urban solutions related to public transport, parking, and electricity, among others, he explained. This easy and convenient access to infrastructure and amenities, which are a daily necessity, is integral to “a quality of life that keeps the talented workforce in the city,” Chandler said….”
Open Government Data: Helping Parents to find the Best School for their Kids
Radu Cucos at the Open Government Partnership blog: “…This challenge – finding the right school – is probably one of the most important decisions in many parents’ lives. Parents are looking for answers to questions such as which schools are located in safe neighborhoods, which ones have the highest teacher – students’ ratio, which schools have the best funding, which schools have the best premises or which ones have the highest grades average.
It is rarely an easy decision, but is made doubly difficult in the case of migrants. People residing in the same location for a long time know, more or less, which are the best education institutions in their city, town or village. For migrants, the situation is absolutely the opposite. They have to spend extra time and resources in identifying relevant information about schools.
Open Government Data is an effective solution which can ease the problem of a lack of accessible information about existing schools in a particular country or location. By adopting the Open Government Data policy in the educational field, governments release data about grades, funding, student and teacher numbers, data generated throughout time by schools, colleges, universities and other educational settings.
Developers then use this data for creating applications which portray information in easy accessible formats. Three of the best apps which I have come across are highlighted below:
- Discover Your School, developed under the Province of British Columbia of Canada Open Data Initiative, is a platform for parents who are interested in finding a school for their kids, learning about the school districts or comparing schools in the same area. The application provides comprehensive information, such as the number of students enrolled in schools each year, class sizes, teaching language, disaster readiness, results of skills assessment, and student and parent satisfaction. Information and data can be viewed in interactive formats, including maps. On top of that, Discover Your School engages parents in policy making and initiatives such as Erase Bullying or British Columbia Education Plan.
- The School Portal, developed under the Moldova Open Data Initiative, uses data made public by the Ministry of Education of Moldova to offer comprehensive information about 1529 educational institutions in the Republic of Moldova. Users of the portal can access information about schools yearly budgets, budget implementation, expenditures, school rating, students’ grades, schools’ infrastructure and communications. The School Portal has a tool which allows visitors to compare schools based on different criteria – infrastructure, students’ performance or annual budgets. The additional value of the portal is the fact that it serves as a platform for private sector entities which sell school supplies to advertise their products. The School Portal also allows parents to virtually interact with the Ministry of Education of Moldova or with a psychologist in case they need additional information or have concerns regarding the education of their children.
- RomaScuola, developed under the umbrella of the Italian Open Data Initiative, allows visitors to obtain valuable information about all schools in the Rome region. Distinguishing it from the two listed above is the ability to compare schools depending on such facets as frequency of teacher absence, internet connectivity, use of IT equipment for teaching, frequency of students’ transfer to other schools and quality of education in accordance with the percentage of issued diplomas.
Open data on schools has great value not only for parents but also for the educational system in general. Each country has its own school market, if education is considered as a product in this market. Perfect information about products is one of the main characteristics of competitive markets. From this perspective, giving parents the opportunity to have access to information about schools characteristics will contribute to the increase in the competitiveness of the schools market. Educational institutions will have incentives to improve their performance in order to attract more students…”
The Trend towards “Smart Cities”
Chien-Chu Chen in the International Journal of Automation and Smart Technology (AUSMT): “Looking back over the past century, the steady pace of development in many of the world’s cities has resulted in a situation where a high percentage of these cities are now faced with the problem of aging, decrepit urban infrastructure; a considerable number of cities are having to undertake large-scale infrastructure renewal projects. While creating new opportunities in the area of infrastructure, ongoing urbanization is also creating problems, such as excessive consumption of water, electric power and heat energy, environmental pollution, increased greenhouse gas emissions, traffic jams, and the aging of the existing residential housing stock, etc. All of these problems present a challenge to cities’ ability to achieve sustainable development. In response to these issues, the concept of the “smart city” has grown in popularity throughout the world. The aim of smart city initiatives is to make the city a vehicle for “smartification” through the integration of different industries and sectors. As initiatives of this kind move beyond basic automation into the realm of real “smartification,” the smart city concept is beginning to take concrete form….”
How to treat government like an open source project
Ben Balter in OpenSource.com: “Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works—it’s arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information’s release.
It used to be that sharing information was really, really hard. Open government wasn’t even a possibility a few hundred years ago. Throughout the history of communication tools—be it the printing press, fax machine, or floppy disks—new tools have generally done three things: lowered the cost to transmit information, increased who that information could be made available to, and increase how quickly that information could be distributed. But, printing presses and fax machines have two limitations: they are one way and asynchronous. They let you more easily request, and eventually see how the sausage was made but don’t let you actually take part in the sausage-making. You may be able to see what’s wrong, but you don’t have the chance to make it better. By the time you find out, it’s already too late.
As technology allows us to communicate with greater frequency and greater fidelity, we have the chance to make our government not only transparent, but truly collaborative.
…
So, how do we encourage policy makers and bureaucrats to move from open government to collaborative government, to learn open source’s lessons about openness and collaboration at scale?
For one, we geeks can help to create a culture of transparency and openness within government by driving up the demand side of the equation. Be vocal, demand data, expect to see process, and once released, help build lightweight apps. Show potential change agents in government that their efforts will be rewarded.
Second, it’s a matter of tooling. We’ve got great tools out there—things like Git that can track who made what change when and open standards like CSV or JSON that don’t require proprietary software—but by-and-large they’re a foreign concept in government, at least among those empowered to make change. Command line interfaces with black background and green text can be intimidating to government bureaucrats used to desktop publishing tools. Make it easier for government to do the right thing and choose open standards over proprietary tooling.”
Last, be a good open source ambassador. Help your home city or state get involved with open source. Encourage them to take their first step (be it consuming open source, publishing, or collaborating with the public), teach them what it means to do things in the open, And when they do push code outside the firewall, above all, be supportive. We’re in this together.
As technology makes it easier to work together, geeks can help make our government not just open, but in fact collaborative. Government is the world’s largest and longest running open source project (bugs, trolls, and all). It’s time we start treating it like one.