An Open Data Team Experiments with a New Way to Tell City Stories

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by  Sean Finnan: “Can you see me?” says Mark Linnane, over Zoom, as he walks around a plastic structure on the floor of an office at Maynooth University. “That gives you some sense of the size of it. It’s 3.5 metres by 2.”

Linnane trails his laptop’s webcam over the surface of the off-white 3D model, giving a birds-eye view of tens of thousands of tiny buildings, the trails of roads and the clear pathway of the Liffey.

This replica of the heart of the city from Phoenix Park to Dublin Port was created to scale by the university’s Building City Dashboards team, using data from the Ordnance Survey Ireland.

In the five years since they started to grapple with the question of how to present data about the city in an engaging and accessible way, the team has experimented with virtual reality, and augmented reality – and most recently, with this new form of mapping, which blends the lego-like miniature of Dublin’s centre with changeable data projected on.

This could really come into its own as a public exhibit if they start to tell meaningful data-driven and empirical stories, says Linnane, a digital exhibition developer at Maynooth University.

Stories that are “relevant in terms of the everyday daily lives of people who will be coming to see it”, he says.

Layers of Meaning

Getting the projector that throws the visualisations onto the model to work right was Linnane’s job, he says.

He had to mesh the Ordnance Survey data with others that showed building heights for example. “Every single building down to the sheds in someone’s garden have a unique identifier,” says Linnane.

Projectors are built to project onto flat surfaces and not 3D models so that had to be finessed, too, he says. “Every step on the way was a new development. There wasn’t really a process there before.”

The printed 3D model shows 7km by 4km of Dublin and 122,355 structures, says Linnane. That includes bigger buildings but also small outbuildings, railway platforms, public toilets and glasshouses – all mocked up and serving as a canvas for a kaleidoscope of data.

“We’re just projecting data on to it and seeing what’s going on with that,” says Rob Kitchin, principal investigator at Maynooth University’s Programmable City project….(More)”

Image of model courtesy of Mark Linnane.

CommunityClick: Capturing and Reporting Community Feedback from Town Halls to Improve Inclusivity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mahmood Jasim: “Local governments still depend on traditional town halls for community consultation, despite problems such as a lack of inclusive participation for attendees and difficulty for civic organizers to capture attendees’ feedback in reports. Building on a formative study with 66 town hall attendees and 20 organizers, we designed and developed CommunityClick, a community sourcing system that captures attendees’ feedback in an inclusive manner and enables organizers to author more comprehensive reports. During the meeting, in addition to recording meeting audio to capture vocal attendees’ feedback, we modify iClickers to give voice to reticent attendees by allowing them to provide real-time feedback beyond a binary signal. This information then automatically feeds into a meeting transcript augmented with attendees’ feedback and organizers’ tags. The augmented transcript along with a feedback-weighted summary of the transcript generated from text analysis methods is incorporated into an interactive authoring tool for organizers to write reports. From a field experiment at a town hall meeting, we demonstrate how CommunityClick can improve inclusivity by providing multiple avenues for attendees to share opinions. Additionally, interviews with eight expert organizers demonstrate CommunityClick’s utility in creating more comprehensive and accurate reports to inform critical civic decision-making. We discuss the possibility of integrating CommunityClick with town hall meetings in the future as well as expanding to other domains….(More)”.

Participation and the pandemic: how planners are keeping democracy alive, online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Viewpoint by Dan Milz and Curt D. Gervich: “….The COVID-19 pandemic has paved the way for a multitude of experiments in e-democracy as local governments strive to continue to hold public meetings; make and implement plans; issue permits, variances and zoning decisions; and gather public input while under quarantine. This paper anecdotally discusses the role of online participatory technologies (OPTs) during this time.

Amidst the obvious impacts, COVID-19 also represents a threat to public participation. Because meeting in person is too risky, local leaders are cautious about hosting meetings in which citizens, government agents and elected officials gather together in one place. Consequently, municipal and county governments, among others, are taking the public’s business online. The purpose of this Viewpoint is to jump-start a conversation about how we prepare planners for a future in which in-person meetings are not guaranteed and how planners might continue to incorporate new technologies when face-to-face meetings resume….(More)”.

Co-creation applied to public policy: a case study on collaborative policies for the platform economy in the city of Barcelona

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mayo Fuster Morell & Enric Senabre Hidalgo: “This paper addresses how far co-creation methodologies can be applied to policy-making innovation in the platform economy. The driving question is how co-creation collaboration-based policy-making can increase diversity and strengthen the participation of actors. The analysis is based on a three-year case study on the platform economy in Barcelona, describing how co-creation dynamics contributed to the participatory definition of local public policies and agenda. The methodology is based on participatory design techniques, involving participant observation and content analysis. Results indicate that co-creation can increase participation diversity aligning academic, economic, and social viewpoints in policy innovation from a quadruple helix perspective. In addition, collaboration schemes assist in engaging a wide diversity of participants in the policy ideation process which, in this case, resulted in 87 new policy measures, with contributions from more than 300 people of different backgrounds and perspectives. The case study demonstrates the value of a cycle of collaboration going beyond mere symbolic engagement or citizen support to public policy-making. It further shows the importance of combining co-creation with methods of action research, strategic planning and knowledge management, as well as with face-to-face interactions and online channels….(More)”.

Mapping urban temperature using crowd-sensing data and machine learning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marius Zumwald, Benedikt Knüsel, David N.Bresch and Reto Knutti: :”Understanding the patterns of urban temperature a high spatial and temporal resolution is of large importance for urban heat adaptation and mitigation. Machine learning offers promising tools for high-resolution modeling of urban heat, but it requires large amounts of data. Measurements from official weather stations are too sparse but could be complemented by crowd-sensed measurements from citizen weather stations (CWS). Here we present an approach to model urban temperature using the quantile regression forest algorithm and CWS, open government and remote sensing data. The analysis is based on data from 691 sensors in the city of Zurich (Switzerland) during a heat wave using data from for 25-30th June 2019. We trained the model using hourly data from for 25-29th June (n = 71,837) and evaluate the model using data from June 30th (n = 14,105). Based on the model, spatiotemporal temperature maps of 10 × 10 m resolution were produced. We demonstrate that our approach can accurately map urban heat at high spatial and temporal resolution without additional measurement infrastructure. We furthermore critically discuss and spatially map estimated prediction and extrapolation uncertainty. Our approach is able to inform highly localized urban policy and decision-making….(More)”.

Silicon Valley’s next goal is 3D maps of the world — made by us

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Bradshaw at the Financial Times: “When technology transformed the camera, the shift from film to digital sensors was just the beginning. As standalone cameras were absorbed into our phones, they gained software smarts, enabling them not only to capture light but also to understand the contents of a photo and even recognise people in it.

A similar transformation is now starting to happen to maps — and it too is powered by those advances in camera technology. In the next 20 years, our collective understanding of a “map” will be unrecognisable from the familiar grid of roads and places that has endured even as the A-Z street atlas has been supplanted by Google Maps.

Before long, countless objects and places will be captured and recreated in 3D digital models that we can view through our phones or even, at some stage, on headsets. This digital world might be populated by our avatars, turned into a playing field for new kinds of games or used to discover routes, buildings and services around us. 

Nobody seems sure yet what the killer app for this “digital twin” of Planet Earth might be, but that hasn’t stopped Silicon Valley from racing to build it anyway. Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft, as well as the developers of Snapchat and Pokémon Go, are all hoping to bring this “mirrorworld” to life, as a precursor to the augmented-reality (AR) glasses that many in tech see as the next big thing.

To place virtual objects in our world, our devices need to know the textures and contours of their surroundings, which GPS cannot see. But instead of sending out cars with protruding cameras to scan the world, as Google did to build Street View over the past decade and a half, these maps will be plotted by hundreds of millions of users like you and me. The question is whether we even realise that we have been dragooned into Silicon Valley’s army of cartographers. They cannot do it without us.

This month, Google said it would ask Maps users to upload photos to Street View using their smartphones for the first time. Only handsets running its AR software can contribute.  As Michael Abrash, chief scientist at Facebook’s Oculus headset unit, recently told Fast Company magazine: “Crowdsourcing has to be the primary way that this works. There is no other way to scale.”…(More)”.

COVID-19 Pushes Digital Services from Luxury to Necessity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zack Quintance at GovTech: “So much of American life was pushed out of physical spaces and onto the Internet this year, including the vast majority of local government services. Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and resultant social distancing guidelines, seemingly overnight it became dangerous to wait in line at city hall, or to interact with a public servant in close proximity across the space of a traditional counter.

As a result, long-simmering governmental efforts to modernize and make services digital in 2020 were supercharged. For digital government services, the danger of the virus was like a turbo boost for a race car that had been lazily chugging along. Indeed, public-sector entities at state and local levels have sought to catch up to private companies online for years, struggling to offer a modern customer experience to constituents with projects that have ranged from online permit renewal to 24-hour chatbots. With the pandemic, providing digital services fast moved from luxury to necessity….

A great example of the former at the state level took place in Vermont, specifically within that state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). The Vermont DMV was already working to launch a new online driver’s license renewal platform, one that would enable residents there to avoid in-person trips to the office. The pandemic made the timing of that launch ideal, finally giving users a digital option they could use from home.

And the Vermont DMV is far from alone. There were others at the state level that worked on and debuted new online processes as well. Maryland, for example, managed to stand up a new online grant application in the early days of the crisis, doing so in just eight hours. Digitization efforts like this have traditionally taken far longer, but agencywide buy-in was fostered here by COVID-19. Armed with this, the Maryland Department of Information Technology (DoIT) was able to rapidly collaborate with the state’s Department of Commerce to add new small business grant application functionality to a platform the IT shop had launched for a different purpose back in early 2018.

At the city level, Buffalo, N.Y., managed the similarly speedy task of transitioning its 311 infrastructure to be remote-operated as its city staff moved to work-from-home operations. In that instance, City Hall was vacated in the service of social distancing on a Friday, and by the following Monday, the IT shop had 311 up and running again via remote operation, doing so again with a collaboration, this time with the University of Buffalo and Cisco….(More)”.

For America’s New Mayors, a Chance to Lead with Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Zachary Markovits and Molly Daniell:”While the presidential race drew much of the nation’s attention this year, voters also chose leaders in 346 mayoral elections, as well as many more city and county commission and council races, reshaping the character of government leadership from coast to coast.

These newly elected and re-elected leaders will enter office facing an unprecedented set of challenges: a worsening pandemic, weakened local economies, budget shortfalls and a reckoning over how government policies have contributed to racial injustice. To help their communities “build back better”—in the words of the new President-elect—these leaders will need not just more federal support, but also a strategy that is data-driven in order to protect their residents and ensure that resources are invested where they are needed most.

For America’s new mayors, it’s a chance to show the public what effective leadership looks like after a chaotic federal response to Covid-19—and no response can be fully effective without putting data at the center of how leaders make decisions.

Throughout 2020, we’ve been documenting the key steps that local leaders can take to advance a culture of data-informed decision-making. Here are five lessons that can help guide these new leaders as they seek to meet this moment of national crisis:

1. Articulate a vision

The voice of the chief executive is galvanizing and unlike any other in city hall. That’s why the vision for data-driven government must be articulated from the top. From the moment they are sworn in, mayors have the opportunity to lean forward and use their authority to communicate to the whole administration, council members and city employees about the shift to using data to drive policymaking.

Consider Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti who, upon coming into office, spearheaded an internal review process culminating in this memo to all general managers stressing the need for a culture of both continuous learning and performance. In this memo, he creates urgency, articulates precisely what will change and how it will affect the success of the organization as well as build a data-driven culture….(More)”.

Smart urban governance: an alternative to technocratic “smartness”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Huaxiong Jiang, Stan Geertman & Patrick Witte: “This paper argues for a specific urban planning perspective on smart governance that we call “smart urban governance,” which represents a move away from the technocratic way of governing cities often found in smart cities. A framework on smart urban governance is proposed on the basis of three intertwined key components, namely spatial, institutional, and technological components. To test the applicability of the framework, we conducted an international questionnaire survey on smart city projects. We then identified and discursively analyzed two smart city projects—Smart Nation Singapore and Helsinki Smart City—to illustrate how this framework works in practice. The questionnaire survey revealed that smart urban governance varies remarkably: As urban issues differ in different contexts, the governance modes and relevant ICT functionalities applied also differ considerably. Moreover, the case analysis indicates that a focus on substantive urban challenges helps to define appropriate modes of governance and develop dedicated technologies that can contribute to solving specific smart city challenges. The analyses of both cases highlight the importance of context (cultural, political, economic, etc.) in analyzing interactions between the components. In this, smart urban governance promotes a sociotechnical way of governing cities in the “smart” era by starting with the urban issue at stake, promoting demand-driven governance modes, and shaping technological intelligence more socially, given the specific context….(More)”.

Responsible Data Re-Use for COVID19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

” The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, with support from the Henry Luce Foundation, today released guidance to inform decision-making in the responsible re-use of data — re-purposing data for a use other than that for which it was originally intended — to address COVID-19. The findings, recommendations, and a new Responsible Data Re-Use framework stem from The Data Assembly initiative in New York City. An effort to solicit diverse, actionable public input on data re-use for crisis response in the United States, the Data Assembly brought together New York City-based stakeholders from government, the private sector, civic rights and advocacy organizations, and the general public to deliberate on innovative, though potentially risky, uses of data to inform crisis response in New York City. The findings and guidance from the initiative will inform policymaking and practice regarding data re-use in New York City, as well as free data literacy training offerings.

The Data Assembly’s Responsible Data Re-Use Framework provides clarity on a major element of the ongoing crisis. Though leaders throughout the world have relied on data to reduce uncertainty and make better decisions, expectations around the use and sharing of siloed data assets has remained unclear. This summer, along with the New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library, The GovLab co-hosted four months of remote deliberations with New York-based civil rights organizations, key data holders, and policymakers. Today’s release is a product of these discussions, to show how New Yorkers and their leaders think about the opportunities and risks involved in the data-driven response to COVID-19….(More)”

See: The Data Assembly Synthesis Report by y Andrew Young, Stefaan G. Verhulst, Nadiya Safonova, and Andrew J. Zahuranec