Creating Safer Streets Through Data Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Datakind: “Tens of thousands of people are killed or injured in traffic collisions each year. To improve road safety and combat life-threatening crashes, over 25 U.S. cities have adopted Vision Zero, an initiative born in Sweden in the 1990’s that aims to reduce traffic-related deaths and serious injuries to zero. Vision Zero is built upon the belief that crashes are predictable and preventable, though determining what kind of engineering, enforcement and educational interventions are effective can be difficult and costly for cities with limited resources.

While many cities have access to data about where and why serious crashes occur to help pinpoint streets and intersections that are trouble spots, the use of predictive algorithms and advanced statistical methods to determine the effectiveness of different safety initiatives is less widespread. Seeing the potential for data and technology to advance the Vision Zero movement in the U.S., DataKind and Microsoft wondered: How might we support cities to apply data science to reduce traffic fatalities and injuries to zero?
What Happened?Three U.S. cities – New York, Seattle and New Orleans – partnered with DataKind, in the first and largest multi-city, data-driven collaboration of its kind, to support Vision Zero efforts within the U.S. Each city had specific questions that they wished to address related to better understanding the factors contributing to crashes and what types of engineering treatments or enforcement interventions may be most effective in helping each of their local efforts and increase traffic safety for all.

To help the cities answer these questions, DataKind launched its first ever Labs project, led by DataKind data scientists Erin Akred, Michael Dowd, Jackie Weiser and Sina Kashuk. A DataDive was held in Seattle to help support the project. Dozens of volunteers participated in the event and helped fuel the work that was achieved, including volunteers from Microsoft and the University of Washington’s E-Science Institute, as well as many other Seattle data scientists.

The DataKind team also worked closely with local city officials and transportation experts to gain valuable insight and feedback on the project, and access a wide variety of datasets, such as information on past crashes, roadway attributes (e.g. lanes, traffic signals, and sidewalks), land use, demographic data, commuting patterns, parking violations, and existing safety intervention placements.

The cities provided information about their priority issues, expertise on their local environments, access to their data, and feedback on the models and analytic insights.  Microsoft enabled the overall collaboration by providing resources, including expertise in support of the collaborative model, technical approaches, and project goals.

Below are detailed descriptions of the specific local traffic safety questions each city asked, the data science approach and outputs the DataKind team developed, and the outcomes and impacts these analyses are providing each city….(More)”

New cycling system helps riders beat red lights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “There are few things more frustrating for cyclists than red lights, especially when riders have built up a good speed only to have to apply the brakes and lose all that momentum. To make things easier Dutch operation Springlab has designed a new system called Flo, which is being tested out in the city of Utrecht and has been set up to work alongside the city’s cycling lanes.

It works by using speed cameras placed 100 metres before each set of traffic lights, and calculates whether or not the cyclist should change speed to hit the green light. It uses animals to inform a cyclist if they should change speed, so a rabbit means speed up, a turtle means slow down, a cow means users are hitting the red light no matter what, and a simple thumbs up indicates the cyclist is doing the right speed.

It’s currently being tested out on Utrecht’s main road Amsterdamsestraatweg and all being well it’s hoped it’ll expand across the rest of the city and hopefully across Holland. Although it’s possible a nation so well known for its love of cycling will embrace such a system, whether or not it’ll go global is another matter. Another recent Dutch-based innovation ByCycling illustrates just how big cycling is in Holland, and in Poland a solar-powered glow in the dark bike lane is a genuinely impressive safety development….(More)”

Too Much of a Good Thing? Frequent Flyers and the Implications for the Coproduction of Public Service Delivery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Benjamin Y. Clark and Jeffrey L. Brudney: “The attention on coproduction and specifically technology-enabled coproduction has grown substantially. This attention had provided findings that highlight the benefits for citizens and governments. Previous research on technologically-enabled coproduction (Internet, smartphones, and centralized non-emergency municipal call centers), show that these technologies have brought coproduction within reach of citizens (Meijer 2011; Kim and Lee 2012; Norris and Reddick 2013; Clark, Brudney, and Jang 2013; Linders 2012; Clark et al. 2016; Clark and Shurik 2016) and have the potential to improve perceptions of government performance (Clark and Shurik 2016). The advent of technologically-enabled coproduction has also made it possible for some residents to participate at levels not previously possible. These high volume coproducers, now known as “frequent flyers,” have the potential to become pseudo-bureaucrats. This chapter seeks to understand if we need to be concerned about this development. Additionally, we seek to understand what individual & neighborhood characteristics affect the intensity of coproduction of public services and if there are diffusion effects of frequent flyers.

To address these questions, we use surveys of San Francisco, California, residents conducted in 2011, 2013, and 2015. Our results suggest that the frequent flyers are largely representative of their communities. Our study finds some evidence that racial and ethnic minorities might be more likely to be a part of this group than the white majority. And perhaps most interestingly we find that neighbors appear to be learning from one another — the more frequent flyers that live in a neighborhood, the more likely it is that you are going to be a frequent flyer….(More)”

Smart Government: A New Adjective to Government Transformation or a Trick?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Leonidas G. Anthopoulos in Understanding Smart Cities: A Tool for Smart Government or an Industrial Trick: “Smart city and smart government appear to share a common scientific interest, since they structure corresponding research and practice terms like the “Web Applications and Smart Cities (AW4City)”, “The Smart Cities and Smart Government Research-Practice (SCSGRP) Consortium” and the “Beyond Bureaucracy”, while calls for mutual scientific tracks, workshops and articles can be located in several conference posts. This chapter analyzes the context of smart government. It performs a literature review on the term, where several conceptualization models are compared and explained. It is cleared that smart government is different to smart city government and to smart city. On the contrary, smart city can be seen as an area of practice for smart government, while smart governance is one of the smart city’s dimensions.

Moreover, the role of government is documented to be changed due to urbanization and technology. Urbanization results to communities, which are larger to nations and the role of local government is more complex compared to the usual national one. Moreover, technology provides governments with tools that has never got before, like the Internet-of-Things (IoT), which changes information collection and process flow, while it enables a direct and continuous connection with the community. Both these two phenomena highlight the government challenges of the forthcoming decades, which governments try to deal with data, process re-engineering, co-decision and service co-production….(More)”

Digital Participation in an Open Innovation Platform : An Empirical Study on Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by J. Ojasalo and L. Tähtinen as part of the INTED2017 Proceedings: “The purpose of this paper is to increase knowledge of participation in collaborative innovation of cities with digital channels, as well as propose a model of digital participation system in an open innovation platform of a city. There is very little knowledge of this area is available in the existing research literature. This paper empirically addresses this knowledge gap and contributes to the literature on digital participation in collaborative innovation, innovation intermediaries and platforms, as well as urban development and Smart City literature. The results of this study have also clear practical implications particularly to urban policy makers and developers, companies and third sector organization collaborating with cities, as well as educators in the field of innovation and urban development. The empirical research method is qualitative and draws on data from in-depth interviews and co-creative multi-actor workshops. As the result, it proposes a model which shows the main methods of digital participation in an open innovation platform, namely information dissemination, actor recruitment, and idea generation, explains their nature….(More)”

Hackathons, entrepreneurship and the passionate making of smart cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Programmable City Working Paper by Sung-Yueh Perng, Rob Kitchin and Darach Mac Donncha: “Hackathons – quick prototyping events for commercial purposes – have become an important means to foster innovation, entrepreneurship and the start-up economy in smart cities. Smart and entrepreneurial cities have been critiqued with respect to the neoliberalization of governance and statecraft. We consider the passions, inventions and imitations in the assemblage of practices – alongside neoliberalizing and capitalist operations – that shape the economy and governance of smart cities. The paper examines hackathons as tech events that extend the passions for digital innovation and entrepreneurship and act as sites of social learning for the development of smart urbanism. We argue that passionate and imitative practices energize the desire and belief in entrepreneurial life and technocratic governance, and also engender precarious, ambiguous and uncertain future for participants and prototypes…(More)”.

A Data-driven Approach to Assess the Potential of Smart Cities: The Case of Open Data for Brussels Capital Region

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Miguel Angel Gomez Zotano and Hugues Bersini in Energy Procedia: “The success of smart city projects is intrinsically related to the existence of large volumes of data that could be processed to achieve their objectives. For this purpose, the plethora of data stored by public administrations becomes an incredibly rich source of insight and information due to its volume and diversity. However, it was only with the Open Government Movement when governments have been concerned with the need to open their data to citizens and businesses. Thus, with the emergence of open data portals, these myriad of data enables the development of new business models. The achievement of the benefits sought by making this data available triggers new challenges to cope with the diversity of sources involved. The business potential could be jeopardized by the scarcity of relevant data in the different blocks and domains that makes a city and by the lack of a common approach to data publication, in terms of format, content, etc.

This paper introduces a holistic approach that relies on the Smart City Ontology as the cornerstone to standardise and structure data. This approach, which is proposed to be an analytical tool to assess the potential of data in a given smart city, analyses three main aspects: availability of data, the criteria that data should fulfil to be considered eligible and the model used to structure and organise data. The approach has been applied to the case of Brussels Capital Region, which first results are presented and discussed in this paper. The main conclusion that has been obtained is that, besides its commitment with open data and smart cities, Brussels is not mature enough to fully exploit the real intelligence that smart cities could provide. This maturity would be achieved in the following years with the implementation of the new Brussels’ Smart City Strategy…(More)”.

DoGood: Examining gamification, civic engagement, and collective intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rehm, Sebastian, Foth, Marcus, & Mitchell, Peta: “The mobile internet provides new and easier ways for people to organise themselves, raise issues, take action, and interact with their city. However, lack of information or motivation often prevents citizens from regularly contributing to the common good. In this paper, we present DoGood, a mobile app that aims at motivating citizens to join civic activities in their local community. Our study asks to what extent gamification can motivate users to participate in civic activities. The term civic activity is not yet well defined, so we collect activities citizens consider to be civic in order to work towards a broadly accepted definition of the term. The DoGood app uses gamified elements that we studied in order to gauge their role in encouraging citizens to submit and promote their civic activities as well as to join the activities of others. DoGood was implemented and deployed to citizens in a five-week-long user study. The app succeeded in motivating most of its users to do more civic activities, and its gamified elements were well received….(More)”.

Towards an experimental culture in government: reflections on and from practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 Jesper Christiansen et al at Nesta: “…we share some initial reflections from this work with the hope of prompting a useful discussion about how to articulate the value of experimentation as well as what to consider when strategically planning and doing experiments in government contexts.

Reflection 1: Experimentation as a way of accelerating learning and exploring “the room of the non-obvious”

Governments need to increase their pace and agility in learning about which ideas have the highest potential value-creation and make people’s lives the rationale of governing.

Experimental approaches accelerate learning by systematically testing assumptions and identifying knowledge gaps. What is there to be known about the problem and the function, fit and probability of a suggested solution? Experimentation helps fill these gaps without allocating too much time or resource, and helps governments accelerate the exploration of new potential solution spaces.

This approach is often a key contribution of government policy labs and public sector innovation teams. Units like Lab para la Ciudad in Mexico City, Alberta Co-Lab in Canada, Behavioural insights and Design Unit in Singapore, MindLab in Denmark and Policy Lab in the UK are specifically set up to promote, develop and/or embed experimental approaches and accelerate user-centred learning in different levels of government.

In addition, creating a culture of experimentation extends the policy options available by creating a political environment to test non-linear approaches to wicked problems. In our training, we often distinguish between “the room of the obvious” and the “room of the non-obvious”. By designing portfolios of experiments that include – by deliberate design – the testing of at least some non-linear, non-obvious solutions, government officials can move beyond the automatic mode of many policy interventions and explore the “room of the non-obvious” in a safe-to-fail context (think barbers to prevent suicides or dental insurance to prevent deforestation).

Reflection 2: Experimentation as a way of turning uncertainty into risk

In everyday language, uncertainty and risk are two notions that are often used interchangeably; yet they are very different concepts. Take, for example, the implementation of a solution. Risk is articulated in terms of the probability that the solution will generate a certain outcome. It is measurable (e.g. based on existing data there is X per cent chance of success, or X per cent chance of failure) and qualitative risk factors can be developed and described.

Uncertainty, on the other hand, is a situation where there is a lack of probabilities. There is no prior data on how the solution might perform; future outcomes are not known, and can therefore not be measured. The chance of success can be 0 per cent, 100 per cent, or anything in between (see table below).

There is often talk of the need for government to become more of a ‘risk taker’, or to become better at ‘managing risk’. But as Marco Steinberg, founder of strategic design practice Snowcone & Haystack, recently reminded us, risk-management – where probabilities are known – is actually something that governments do quite well. Issues arise when governments’ legacies can’t shape current solutions: when governments have to deal with the uncertainty of complex challenges by adapting or creating entirely new service systems to fit the needs of our time.

For example, when transforming a health system to fit the needs of our time, little can be known about the probabilities in terms of what might work when establishing a new practice. Or when transforming a social care system to accommodate the lives of vulnerable families, entirely new concepts for solutions need to be explored. “If you don’t have a map showing the way, you have to write one yourself,” as Sam Rye puts it in his inspirational example on the use of experimental cards at The Labs Wananga….

Reflection 3: Experimentation as a way to reframe failure and KPIs

Reflection 4: Experimentation on a continuum between exploration and validation

Reflection 5: Experimentation as cultural change…(More)”.

Tactical Data Engagement guide

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

and  at the Sunlight Foundation: “United States cities face a critical challenge when it comes to fulfilling the potential of open data: that of moving beyond the mere provision of access to data toward the active facilitation of stakeholder use of data in ways that bring about community impact. Sunlight has been researching innovative projects and strategies that have helped cities tackle this challenge head on. Today we’re excited to share a guide for our new approach to open data in U.S. cities–an approach we’re calling “Tactical Data Engagement,” designed to drive community impact by connecting the dots between open data, public stakeholders, and collaborative action.

Access is critical but we have more work to do

Many city leaders have realized that open data is a valuable innovation to bring to city hall, and have invoked the promise of a new kind of relationship between government and the people: one where government works with the public in new collaborative ways. City mayors, managers, council members, and other leaders are making commitments to this idea in the US, with over 60 US cities having adopted open data reforms since 2006, nearly 20 in 2016 alone–many with the help of the Sunlight team as part of our support of the What Works Cities initiative. While cities are building the public policy infrastructure for open data, they are also making technical advancements as municipal IT and innovation departments build or procure new open data portals and release more and more government datasets proactively online….

However, … these developments alone are not enough. Portals and policies are critical infrastructure for the data-driven open government needed in the 21st century; but there has been and continues to be a disconnect between the rhetoric and promise of open data when compared to what it has meant in terms of practical reform. Let us be clear: the promise of open data is not about data on a website. The promise is for a new kind of relationship between government and the governed, one that brings about collaborative opportunities for impact. While many reforms have been successful in building an infrastructure of access, many have fallen short in leveraging that infrastructure for empowering residents and driving community change.

Announcing Tactical Data Engagement

In order to formulate an approach to help cities go further with their open data programs, Sunlight has been conducting an extensive review of the relevant literature on open data impact, and of the literature on approaches to community stakeholder engagement and co-creation (both civic-tech or open-data driven as well as more traditional)….

The result so far is our “Tactical Data Engagement” Guide (still in beta) designed to address what we see as the the most critical challenge currently facing the open data movement: helping city open data programs build on a new infrastructure of access to facilitate the collaborative use of open data to empower residents and create tangible community impact…(More)”