Open innovation and the evaluation of internet-enabled public services in smart cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Krassimira Paskaleva and Ian Cooper in Technovation: This article is focused on public service innovation from an innovation management perspective. It presents research experience gained from a European project for managing social and technological innovation in the production and evaluation of citizen-centred internet-enabled services in the public sector.

It is based on six urban pilot initiatives, which sought to operationalise a new approach to co-producing and co-evaluating civic services in smart cities – commonly referred to as open innovation for smart city services. Research suggests that the evidence base underpinning this approach is not sufficiently robust to support claims being made about its effectiveness.

Instead evaluation research of citizen-centred internet-enabled urban services is in its infancy and there are no tested methods or tools in the literature for supporting this approach.

The paper reports on the development and trialing of a novel Co-evaluation Framework, indicators and reporting categories, used to support the co-production of smart city services in an EU-funded project. Our point of departure is that innovation of services is a sub-set of innovation management that requires effective integration of technological with social innovation, supported by the right skills and capacities. The main skills sets needed for effective co-evaluation of open innovation services are the integration of stakeholder management with evaluation capacities.”

Blockchain is helping build a new Indian city, but it’s no cure for corruption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ananya Bhattacharya at Quartz: “Last year, Tharigopula Sambasiva Rao entered into a deal with the state government of Andhra Pradesh. He gave up six acres of his agricultural land in his village, Sakhamuru, in exchange for 7,250 square yards—6,000 square yards of residential plots and 1,250 square yards of commercial ones.

In February this year, the 50-year-old farmer got his plots registered at the sub-registrar’s office in Thullur town of Guntur district. He booked an appointment through a government-run app and turned up with his Aadhaar number, a unique identity provided by the government of India to every citizen. Rao’s land documents, complete with a map, certificate, and carrying a unique QR code, were prepared by officials and sent directly to the registration office, all done in just a couple of hours.

Kommineni Ramanjaneyulu, another farmer from around Thullur, exchanged 4.5 acres for 10 plots. The 83-year-old was wary of this new technology deployed to streamline the land registration process. However, he was relieved to see the documents for his new assets in his native language, Telugu. There was no information gap….

In theory, blockchain can store land documents in a tamper-proof, secure network, reducing human interventions and adding more transparency. Data is solidified and the transaction history of a property is fully trackable. This has the potential to reduce, if not entirely prevent, property fraud. But unlike in the case of bitcoin, the blockchain utilised by the government agency in charge of shaping Amaravati is private.

So, despite the promise on paper, local landowners and farmers remain convinced that there’s no escaping red tape and corruption yet….

The entire documentation process for this massive exercise is based on blockchain. The decentralised distributed ledger system—central to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ether—can create foolproof digitised land registries of the residential and commercial plots allotted to farmers. It essentially serves as a book-keeping tool that can be accessed by all but is owned by none…

Having seen the government’s dirty tricks, most of the farmers gathered at Rayapudi aren’t buying the claim that the system is tamper-proof—especially at the stages before the information is moved to blockchain. After all, assignments and verifications are still being done by revenue officers on the ground.

That the Andhra Pradesh government is using a private blockchain complicates things further. The public can view information but not directly monitor whether any illicit changes have been made to their records. They have to go through the usual red tape to get those answers. The system may not be susceptible to hacking, but authorities could deliberately enter wrong information or refuse to reveal instances of fraud even if they are logged. This is the farmers’ biggest concern.

“The tampering cannot be stopped. If you give the right people a lot of bribe, they will go in and change the record,” said Seshagiri Rao. Nearly $700 million is paid in bribes across land registrars in India, an Andhra Pradesh government official estimated last year, and even probes into these matters are often flawed….(More)”.

Introducing CitizENGAGE – How Citizens Get Things Done

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Gov Partnership: “In a world full of autocracy, bureaucracy, and opacity, it can be easy to feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle against these trends.

Trust in government is at historic lows. Autocratic leaders have taken the reins in countries once thought bastions of democracy. Voter engagement has been declining around the globe for years.

Despite this reality, there is another, powerful truth: citizens are using open government to engage in their communities in innovative, exciting ways, bringing government closer and creating a more inclusive system.

These citizens are everywhere.

In Costa Rica, they are lobbying the government for better and fairer housing for indigenous communities.

In Liberia, they are bringing rights to land back to the communities who are threatened by companies on their traditional lands.

In Madrid, they are using technology to make sure you can participate in government – not just every four years, but every day.

In Mongolia, they are changing the face of education and healthcare services by empowering citizens to share their needs with government.

In Paraguay, hundreds of municipal councils are hearing directly from citizens and using their input to shape how needed public services are delivered.

These powerful examples are the inspiration for the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) new global campaign to CItizENGAGE.  The campaign will share the stories of citizens engaging in government and changing lives for the better.

CitizENGAGE includes videos, photo essays, and impact stories about citizens changing the way government is involved in their lives. These stories talk about the very real impact open government can have on the lives of everyday citizens, and how it can change things as fundamental as schools, roads, and houses.

We invite you to visit CitizENGAGE and find out more about these reforms, and get inspired. Whether or not your government participates in OGP, you can take the lessons from these powerful stories of transformation and use them to make an impact in your own community….(More)”.

‘Data is a fingerprint’: why you aren’t as anonymous as you think online

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Olivia Solon at The Guardian: “In August 2016, the Australian government released an “anonymised” data set comprising the medical billing records, including every prescription and surgery, of 2.9 million people.

Names and other identifying features were removed from the records in an effort to protect individuals’ privacy, but a research team from the University of Melbourne soon discovered that it was simple to re-identify people, and learn about their entire medical history without their consent, by comparing the dataset to other publicly available information, such as reports of celebrities having babies or athletes having surgeries.

The government pulled the data from its website, but not before it had been downloaded 1,500 times.

This privacy nightmare is one of many examples of seemingly innocuous, “de-identified” pieces of information being reverse-engineered to expose people’s identities. And it’s only getting worse as people spend more of their lives online, sprinkling digital breadcrumbs that can be traced back to them to violate their privacy in ways they never expected.

Nameless New York taxi logs were compared with paparazzi shots at locations around the city to reveal that Bradley Cooper and Jessica Alba were bad tippers. In 2017 German researchers were able to identify people based on their “anonymous” web browsing patterns. This week University College London researchers showed how they could identify an individual Twitter user based on the metadata associated with their tweets, while the fitness tracking app Polar revealed the homes and in some cases names of soldiers and spies.

“It’s convenient to pretend it’s hard to re-identify people, but it’s easy. The kinds of things we did are the kinds of things that any first-year data science student could do,” said Vanessa Teague, one of the University of Melbourne researchers to reveal the flaws in the open health data.

One of the earliest examples of this type of privacy violation occurred in 1996 when the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission released “anonymised” data showing the hospital visits of state employees. As with the Australian data, the state removed obvious identifiers like name, address and social security number. Then the governor, William Weld, assured the public that patients’ privacy was protected….(More)”.

The Diversity Dashboard

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Engaging Local Government Leaders:  “The Diversity Dashboard is a crowd-funded data collection effort managed by ELGL and hosted on the OpenGovplatform. The data collection includes the self reported gender, race, age, and veteran status of Chief Administrative Officers and Assistant Chief Administrative Officers in local governments of all sizes and forms.

This link includes background information about the Diversity Dashboard, and access to the “Stories” module where we highlight some key findings.

From there, you can drill down into the data, looking at pre-formatted reports and creating your own reports using the submitted data.

The more local government leaders who take the survey, the bigger the dataset, the better our understanding of what the local government leadership landscape looks like. If your local government hasn’t yet completed the survey, please take the survey!…(More)”.

SMS texts on corruption help Ugandan voters hold elected councillors accountable at the polls

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mark T. Buntaine, Ryan Jablonski, Daniel L. Nielson, and Paula M. Pickering: “Many politicians manipulate information to prevent voters from holding them accountable; however, mobile text messages may make it easier for nongovernmental organizations to credibly share information on official corruption that is difficult for politicians to counter directly.

We test the potential for texts on budget management to improve democratic accountability by conducting a large (n = 16,083) randomized controlled trial during the 2016 Ugandan district elections. In cooperation with a local partner, we compiled, simplified, and text-messaged official information on irregularities in local government budgets.

Verified recipients of messages that described more irregularities than expected reported voting for incumbent councillors 6% less often; verified recipients of messages conveying fewer irregularities than expected reported voting for incumbent councillors 5% more often. The messages had no observable effect on votes for incumbent council chairs, potentially due to voters’ greater reliance on other sources of information for higher profile elections.

These mixed results suggest that text messages on budget corruption help voters hold some politicians accountable in settings where elections are not free and fair….(More)”

Open Data in Tourism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Data Portal: “New technologies are rapidly changing the tourism industry. Data are central assets in management and marketing of tourism destinations and businesses. Data driven services became a prominent tool for tourists to plan their trips. The study “Utilizing open data in tourism” predicts great potential for Open Data to increase innovations and destination management. Several actors already use Open Data to provide services in the tourism industry, e.g. the open service called Helsinki Region Infoshare from the city of Helsinki. Malta and Montenegro, for example, are providing data sets on tourist expenditure, hotels, accommodation, restaurants, events, bicycle stations, heritage sites, or beaches.

But not only government organisations and companies use Open Data in tourism. User-generated content, such as reviews and comments spread via social networking services, supports Tourists’ decision making. The study “You will like it!”  analyses user generated Open Data to predict tourists’ perception of sights or attractions.  Thereby they are contributing to the process of predicting tourists’ future preferences, what has potential implications and benefits for the tourism industry.

Engage in the discourse of Open data in tourism, for example on 18 July: the meeting “Linked Open Data im Tourismus“for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) takes place  in Innsbruck to discuss possibilities and prerequisites for using Open Data in tourism. If you rather try out using Open Data to plan your next weekend trip, visit the European Data Portal featured data article on  “Use Open Data to prepare your holiday trip”….(More)”.

What if people were paid for their data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Data Slavery” Jennifer Lyn Morone, an American artist, thinks this is the state in which most people now live. To get free online services, she laments, they hand over intimate information to technology firms. “Personal data are much more valuable than you think,” she says. To highlight this sorry state of affairs, Ms Morone has resorted to what she calls “extreme capitalism”: she registered herself as a company in Delaware in an effort to exploit her personal data for financial gain. She created dossiers containing different subsets of data, which she displayed in a London gallery in 2016 and offered for sale, starting at £100 ($135). The entire collection, including her health data and social-security number, can be had for £7,000.

Only a few buyers have taken her up on this offer and she finds “the whole thing really absurd”. ..Given the current state of digital affairs, in which the collection and exploitation of personal data is dominated by big tech firms, Ms Morone’s approach, in which individuals offer their data for sale, seems unlikely to catch on. But what if people really controlled their data—and the tech giants were required to pay for access? What would such a data economy look like?…

Labour, like data, is a resource that is hard to pin down. Workers were not properly compensated for labour for most of human history. Even once people were free to sell their labour, it took decades for wages to reach liveable levels on average. History won’t repeat itself, but chances are that it will rhyme, Mr Weyl predicts in “Radical Markets”, a provocative new book he has co-written with Eric Posner of the University of Chicago. He argues that in the age of artificial intelligence, it makes sense to treat data as a form of labour.

To understand why, it helps to keep in mind that “artificial intelligence” is something of a misnomer. Messrs Weyl and Posner call it “collective intelligence”: most AI algorithms need to be trained using reams of human-generated examples, in a process called machine learning. Unless they know what the right answers (provided by humans) are meant to be, algorithms cannot translate languages, understand speech or recognise objects in images. Data provided by humans can thus be seen as a form of labour which powers AI. As the data economy grows up, such data work will take many forms. Much of it will be passive, as people engage in all kinds of activities—liking social-media posts, listening to music, recommending restaurants—that generate the data needed to power new services. But some people’s data work will be more active, as they make decisions (such as labelling images or steering a car through a busy city) that can be used as the basis for training AI systems….

But much still needs to happen for personal data to be widely considered as labour, and paid for as such. For one thing, the right legal framework will be needed to encourage the emergence of a new data economy. The European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation, which came into effect in May, already gives people extensive rights to check, download and even delete personal data held by companies. Second, the technology to keep track of data flows needs to become much more capable. Research to calculate the value of particular data to an AI service is in its infancy.

Third, and most important, people will have to develop a “class consciousness” as data workers. Most people say they want their personal information to be protected, but then trade it away for nearly nothing, something known as the “privacy paradox”. Yet things may be changing: more than 90% of Americans think being in control of who can get data on them is important, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank….(More)”.

Neuroscience for Cities Playbook

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tool resulting from a collaboration between Future Cities Catapult, Centric Lab and University College London: “It brings forward a framework of how neuroscience research can be put into practice in cities. This has been presented as a set of new tools, methodologies and strategies for organisations big and small, to adopt neuroscience insights into their supply chain.

With an aim to reach out to a wide audience from businesses to urban planners and academicians and policymakers, We are sure you will find the playbook a useful resource to explore the potential applications of this important area of research.

This playbook helps cities in three stages. The first is identifying the core environmental stressors, which have the widest mental and physical effects on city citizen, even a small reduction will make a fundamental difference in quality of life. The second is understanding the unintended human consequences of urban trends such as urban sprawl or automation. The final is highlighting the different opportunities for enhancing the user experience of cities through neuroscience-informed technology and urban planning.

The idea of using neuroscience to help design cities only arose in last ten years, and the technology to make it possible in the last three years. We are now on the cusp of a revolution in how metrics from neuroscience inform urban innovation strategies and increase the quality of life of the cities inhabitants. Developments in neuroscience are showing us new ways to understand how people experience the built environment, revealing new opportunities for innovation and improved experiences, leading in turn to greater productivity, wellbeing and attraction. Neuroscientists are also discovering important insights about outcomes for the less advantaged in our cities, providing compelling evidence in support of interventions to tackle the negative health impacts of city living, and ways to reduce barriers to access and opportunity.

Success will be a reduction in mental and physical health outbreaks; less cases of depression, dementia, anxiety disorders, etc. It can be seen in economic terms; a healthy population is a productive population….(More)”.

Meet the Numtots: the millennials who find fixing public transport sexy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elle Hunt in The Guardian: “Who makes a Facebook meme group about trains? The Numtots, that’s who: a global network of millennials who want to make cities better

A metro-map style logo for the New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens Facebook group.
 A metro-map style logo for the New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens Facebook group. Illustration: Mitchell Sheldrick/New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens.

The year is 2025. There are no cars, only public transport and bicycles. Four-lane highways have been replaced by bike paths. Pedestrians share the pavements with cyclists. The air is clean (because the buses are electric), and the living is easy.

This is the future the Numtots want.

Predominantly millennials with a passion for public transport, urban planning and internet humour, Numtots’ interests intersect in New Urbanist Memes for Transit-Oriented Teens, the Facebook group from which they derive their nickname. There, nearly 100,000 of them discuss and debate their perfect city, or transit lines in their area, or perpendicular traffic flow and improvisational vehicle pathing….Numtots – or just ’tots – are the sorts of older teens through to thirtysomethings who identify as being “irrationally excited” for the forthcoming Maryland purple line; who claim their first word as a child was “bus” (“I think I was destined to become a Numtot …”); who stridently propose ideas for “what the Amtrak system should look like” (“Fight me if you don’t like it”); and who mercilessly make fun of Richard Florida’s leather jacket….

Numtots’ guiding principles are broadly summed up by the page’s URL: “What would Jane Jacobs do?”…The enthusiastic response to the group – and the Generation Y-led “yimby” movement for high-density housing it dovetails with – suggests there may be something fundamentally millennial about urbanism. “I think at first people were really excited that they had a place to talk about living in cities,” says Orenstein, also 21. “But as the group has picked up steam, more people are joining that weren’t interested in the issues but are finding that maybe, actually, they are.” It makes sense: improving public transport, transitioning to renewable energy and investing in future-focused infrastructure are not often vote winners, being costly and slow to enact – but young people have more of a stake in seeing them put into action….(More)”.