city & municipal

The Whatsapp-inspired, Facebook-investor funded app tackling India’s doctor shortage

Curated on March 4, 2017October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kylee McIntyre at TechInAsia: “A problem beyond India’s low doctor-to-patient ratio is the distribution of those doctors. Most, particularly specialists, congregate in bigger cities and get seen by patients in the surrounding areas. Only 19 percent of specialists are available in community health centers across India, and most fall well below the country’s requirement for specialists. Community health centers are located in smaller towns and help patients in the area decide if they need to visit a larger, better-equipped city facility….

The IIT-Madras grad’s company, DocsApp, co-founded with fellow IIT-Madras alum Enbasekar D (CTO), joins startups like Practo, DocDoc, and Medinfi in helping patients find physicians. However, the app’s main focus is specialists, and it lets patients chat with doctors and get consultations.

DocsApp’s name is directly inspired by WhatsApp. As long as you have a chat screen on your phone, you can input your problems and location, find a doctor, and ask questions. A user can pay for his or her own appointment over mobile. If treatment requires a physical visit, the user’s money is refunded….

Doctor profiles include the physician’s experience, medical counsel ID, patient reviews, specialty, and languages – DocsApp covers 17 different languages. DocsApp has 1,200 doctors in 15 specialties. All doctors on the platform are verified by looking up certification, an interview, and a facilities review.

If a consultation reveals that a patient needs a prescription, the doctor can provide a digitally-signed e-prescription. DocsApp can deliver medicines within two days to any location in India, says Satish.

Once a user has access to one of the doctors, he or she can message the doctor 24/7 and get a response in 30 minutes – Satish says that the company’s average is now 18 minutes. The team of 55 is aiming for a minute or less….

Telemedicine is one of the ways tech is combatting India’s doctor shortage. Other startups in the industry in the country include Visit, which focuses on both physical and mental health, and SeeDoc, a physician video consultation app.

A chat is a little less personal than a physical visit, which can open the door for patients who want to discuss more taboo topics in India, like mental health and fertility questions. Satish adds that women who live in locations where it’s best to be accompanied by a man when going out also find convenience, as they don’t necessarily need to wait for a husband to come back from work before addressing a medical question she has about her child…(More)”.

Cities need to innovate to survive. Here are four ways they can do it

Curated on March 2, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Alice Charles: “…The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities chronicled a list of Top 10 Urban Innovations from around the world, that are providing best practice examples of how cities are creating innovative solutions to a variety of urban problems.

Within these innovations, four principles surface again and again. They can be seen as a core framework to find innovative solutions to complex urban problems:

Unleashing spare capacity: Many innovations cleverly make use of existing yet underutilized resources. Airbnb, for example, enables the renting out of unused private homes; co-locating schools and recreational facilities enables public-private sharing of space; and the circular economy provides opportunities to reuse, recycle and upcycle.
Cutting out the peaks: From electricity and water to roads and public transport, upwards of 20% of capacity sits idle for much of the time ready to cope with demand peaks; cutting out these peaks with technology-enabled demand management or innovative pricing structures can significantly limit the burden on financial and natural resources.
Small-scale infrastructure thinking: Cities will always need large-infrastructure projects, but sometimes small-scale infrastructure – from cycle lanes and bike sharing to the planting of trees for climate change adaptation – can also have a big impact on an urban area.
People-centred innovation: The best way to improve a city is by mobilizing its citizens. From smart traffic lights to garbage taxes, innovations in technology, services and governance are not ends in themselves but means to shape the behaviour and improve the lives of the city’s inhabitants. All innovations should be centred on the citizen, adhering to the principles of universal design and usable by people of all ages and abilities.

Cities are expected to provide a better standard of living, increase community cohesion, wellness and happiness while progressing towards sustainable development. To be successful in meeting these requirements, cities need to transform their strategies to include innovation and enable the convergence of the digital and physical dimensions. Cities need to support the design and development of cutting-edge solutions and processes in collaboration with the private sector, scientific research institutions, academia, citizens and start-ups, to maintain the competitive edge, while progressing towards better performance and urban service deliveries….(More)”

What is the Spectrum of Public Participation?

Curated on March 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Post by Graeme Stuart: “The Spectrum of Public Participation was developed by the International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) to help clarify the role of the public (or community) in planning and decision-making, and how much influence the community has over planning or decision-making processes. It identifies five levels of public participation (or community engagement). The further to the right on the Spectrum, the more influence the community has over decisions, and each level can be appropriate depending on the context. It is important to recognise they are levels; not steps.

For each level it each articulates the public participation goal and the promise to the public….

Using the Spectrum of Public Participation

Many practitioners and organisations find the Spectrum very helpful. The IAP2 claims that the Spectrum is “quickly becoming an international standard” and, while this claim is partly marketing, it certainly has some validity in some sectors. In Australia, the Spectrum forms a basis for many state and federal government guides to community engagement (e.g., Department Environment, Land, Water and Planning, Department of Primary Industries) local government community engagement plans (e.g., City of Newcastle, Latrobe City and the Local Government Association of South Australia ) and a range of other organisations (e.g., Australian Water Recycling Centre of Excellence and Trinity Grammar School).

While not as widely used in other parts of the world, it is still relevant and has been used in a range of contexts (e.g., The United States Environmental Protection Agency, the British Forestry Commission and Vancouver’s Engage City Task Force).

….

Selecting a level

The Spectrum is not a flow chart. They are not steps in a process – starting on the left and working to the right – so selecting a level needs to be based on the specific context.

Higher levels are not necessarily “better”. If an issue is not controversial and does not provoke passionate feelings, a lower level maybe more appropriate, but for issues which are complex and controversial, it can save time in the long run to choose a higher level ….

Selecting a level of participation does not mean that the level cannot change, (e.g., it might be discovered that an issue was more controversial than thought, and so a higher level might be adopted) nor is the selected level the only one that can be used. It can be quite appropriate to provide ways of engaging the community at lower levels than the level selected. For example, some people may not have the time and energy to participate in day long workshop held at the Collaborate level, but might still want to have the opportunity to contribute their ideas.

The level is only part of the picture

Community engagement needs to have strong ethical base. Selecting appropriate levels is important but the way we engage the community and who we engage are also vitally important.

The Spectrum of Public Participation is underpinned by seven values.….

The Spectrum is a useful tool in thinking about, and planning, community engagement that has helped many practitioners in a wide range of contexts. Although there are examples where it has been used poorly, it provides a valuable starting place and can, in fact, be used to challenge poor community engagement practice….(More)”

The Techno-Politics of Data and Smart Devolution in City-Regions: Comparing Glasgow, Bristol, Barcelona, and Bilbao

Curated on March 1, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Igor Calzada: “This paper explores the substantial effect that the critical understanding and techno-political consideration of data are having in some smart city strategies. Particularly, the paper presents some results of a comparative study of four cases of smart city transitions: Glasgow, Bristol, Barcelona, and Bilbao. Likewise, considering how relevant the city-regional path-dependency is in each territorial context, the paper will elucidate the notion of smart devolution as a key governance component that is enabling some cities to formulate their own smart city-regional governance policies and implement them by considering the role of the smart citizens as decision makers rather than mere data providers. The paper concludes by identifying an implicit smart city-regional governance strategy for each case based on the techno-politics of data and smart devolution….(More)”

Open Data Privacy Playbook

Curated on February 27, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

A data privacy playbook by Ben Green, Gabe Cunningham, Ariel Ekblaw, Paul Kominers, Andrew Linzer, and Susan Crawford: “Cities today collect and store a wide range of data that may contain sensitive or identifiable information about residents. As cities embrace open data initiatives, more of this information is available to the public. While releasing data has many important benefits, sharing data comes with inherent risks to individual privacy: released data can reveal information about individuals that would otherwise not be public knowledge. In recent years, open data such as taxi trips, voter registration files, and police records have revealed information that many believe should not be released.

Effective data governance is a prerequisite for successful open data programs. The goal of this document is to codify responsible privacy-protective approaches and processes that could be adopted by cities and other government organizations that are publicly releasing data. Our report is organized around four recommendations:

Conduct risk-benefit analyses to inform the design and implementation of open data programs.
Consider privacy at each stage of the data lifecycle: collect, maintain, release, delete.
Develop operational structures and processes that codify privacy management widely throughout the City.
Emphasize public engagement and public priorities as essential aspects of data management programs.

Each chapter of this report is dedicated to one of these four recommendations, and provides fundamental context along with specific suggestions to carry them out. In particular, we provide case studies of best practices from numerous cities and a set of forms and tactics for cities to implement our recommendations. The Appendix synthesizes key elements of the report into an Open Data Privacy Toolkit that cities can use to manage privacy when releasing data….(More)”

Data in public health

Curated on February 21, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy Berg in Science: “In 1854, physician John Snow helped curtail a cholera outbreak in a London neighborhood by mapping cases and identifying a central public water pump as the potential source. This event is considered by many to represent the founding of modern epidemiology. Data and analysis play an increasingly important role in public health today. This can be illustrated by examining the rise in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), where data from varied sources highlight potential factors while ruling out others, such as childhood vaccines, facilitating wise policy choices…. A collaboration between the research community, a patient advocacy group, and a technology company (www.mss.ng) seeks to sequence the genomes of 10,000 well-phenotyped individuals from families affected by ASD, making the data freely available to researchers. Studies to date have confirmed that the genetics of autism are extremely complicated—a small number of genomic variations are closely associated with ASD, but many other variations have much lower predictive power. More than half of siblings, each of whom has ASD, have different ASD-associated variations. Future studies, facilitated by an open data approach, will no doubt help advance our understanding of this complex disorder….

A new data collection strategy was reported in 2013 to examine contagious diseases across the United States, including the impact of vaccines. Researchers digitized all available city and state notifiable disease data from 1888 to 2011, mostly from hard-copy sources. Information corresponding to nearly 88 million cases has been stored in a database that is open to interested parties without restriction (www.tycho.pitt.edu). Analyses of these data revealed that vaccine development and systematic vaccination programs have led to dramatic reductions in the number of cases. Overall, it is estimated that ∼100 million cases of serious childhood diseases have been prevented through these vaccination programs.

These examples illustrate how data collection and sharing through publication and other innovative means can drive research progress on major public health challenges. Such evidence, particularly on large populations, can help researchers and policy-makers move beyond anecdotes—which can be personally compelling, but often misleading—for the good of individuals and society….(More)”

Using Algorithms To Predict Gentrification

Curated on February 20, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tanvi Misra in CityLab: “I know it when I see it,” is as true for gentrification as it is for pornography. Usually, it’s when a neighborhood’s property values and demographics are already changing that the worries about displacement set in—rousing housing advocates and community organizers to action. But by that time, it’s often hard to pause, and put in safeguards for the neighborhood’s most vulnerable residents.

But what if there was an early warning system that detects where price appreciation or decline is about to occur? Predictive tools like this have been developed around the country, most notably by researchers in San Francisco. And their value is clear: city leaders and non-profits pinpoint where to preserve existing affordable housing, where to build more, and where to attract business investment ahead of time. But they’re often too academic or too obscure, which is why it’s not yet clear how they’re being used by policymakers and planners.

That’s the problem Ken Steif, at the University of Pennsylvania, is working to solve, in partnership with Alan Mallach, from the Center for Community Progress.

Mallach’s non-profit focused on revitalizing distressed neighborhoods, particularly in “legacy cities.” These are towns like St. Louis, Flint, Dayton, and Baltimore, that have experienced population loss and economic contraction in recent years, and suffer from property vacancies, blight, and unemployment. Mallach is interested in understanding which neighborhoods are likely to continue down that path, and which ones will do a 180-degree turn. Right now, he can intuitively make those predictions, based on his observations on neighborhood characteristics like housing stock, median income, and race. But an objective assessment can help confirm or deny his hypotheses.

That’s where Steif comes in. Having consulted with cities and non-profits on place-based data analytics, Steif has developed a number of algorithms that predict the movement of housing markets using expensive private data from entities like Zillow. Mallach suggested he try his algorithms on Census data, which is free and standardized.

The phenomenon he tested was ‘endogenous gentrification’—this idea that an increase in home prices moves from wealthy neighborhoods to less expensive ones in its vicinity, like a wave. ..Steif used Census data from 1990 and 2000 to predict housing price change in 2010 in 29 big and small legacy cities. His algorithms took into account the relationship between the median home prices of a census tract to the ones around it, the proximity of census tracts to high-cost areas, and the spatial patterns in home price distribution. It also folded in variables like race, income and housing supply, among others.

After cross-checking the 2010 prediction with actual home prices, he projected the neighborhood change all the way to 2020. His algorithms were able to compute the speed and breadth of the wave of gentrification over time reasonably well, overall…(More)”.

Why Big Data Is a Big Deal for Cities

Curated on February 18, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

John M. Kamensky in Governing: “We hear a lot about “big data” and its potential value to government. But is it really fulfilling the high expectations that advocates have assigned to it? Is it really producing better public-sector decisions? It may be years before we have definitive answers to those questions, but new research suggests that it’s worth paying a lot of attention to.

University of Kansas Prof. Alfred Ho recently surveyed 65 mid-size and large cities to learn what is going on, on the front line, with the use of big data in making decisions. He found that big data has made it possible to “change the time span of a decision-making cycle by allowing real-time analysis of data to instantly inform decision-making.” This decision-making occurs in areas as diverse as program management, strategic planning, budgeting, performance reporting and citizen engagement.

Cities are natural repositories of big data that can be integrated and analyzed for policy- and program-management purposes. These repositories include data from public safety, education, health and social services, environment and energy, culture and recreation, and community and business development. They include both structured data, such as financial and tax transactions, and unstructured data, such as recorded sounds from gunshots and videos of pedestrian movement patterns. And they include data supplied by the public, such as the Boston residents who use a phone app to measure road quality and report problems.

These data repositories, Ho writes, are “fundamental building blocks,” but the challenge is to shift the ownership of data from separate departments to an integrated platform where the data can be shared.

There’s plenty of evidence that cities are moving in that direction and that they already are systematically using big data to make operational decisions. Among the 65 cities that Ho examined, he found that 49 have “some form of data analytics initiatives or projects” and that 30 have established “a multi-departmental team structure to do strategic planning for these data initiatives.”….The effective use of big data can lead to dialogs that cut across school-district, city, county, business and nonprofit-sector boundaries. But more importantly, it provides city leaders with the capacity to respond to citizens’ concerns more quickly and effectively….(More)”

Mapping open data governance models: Who makes decisions about government data and how?

Curated on February 16, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ana Brandusescu, Danny Lämmerhirt and Stefaan Verhulst call for a systematic and comparative investigation of the different governance models for open data policy and publication….

“An important value proposition behind open data involves increased transparency and accountability of governance. Yet little is known about how open data itself is governed. Who decides and how? How accountable are data holders to both the demand side and policy makers? How do data producers and actors assure the quality of government data? Who, if any, are data stewards within government tasked to make its data open?

Getting a better understanding of open data governance is not only important from an accountability point of view. If there is a better insight of the diversity of decision-making models and structures across countries, the implementation of common open data principles, such as those advocated by the International Open Data Charter, can be accelerated across countries.

In what follows, we seek to develop the initial contours of a research agenda on open data governance models. We start from the premise that different countries have different models to govern and administer their activities – in short, different ‘governance models’. Some countries are more devolved in their decision making, while others seek to organize “public administration” activities more centrally. These governance models clearly impact how open data is governed – providing a broad patchwork of different open data governance across the world and making it difficult to identify who the open data decision makers and data gatekeepers or stewards are within a given country.

For example, if one wants to accelerate the opening up of education data across borders, in some countries this may fall under the authority of sub-national government (such as states, provinces, territories or even cities), while in other countries education is governed by central government or implemented through public-private partnership arrangements. Similarly, transportation or water data may be privatised, while in other cases it may be the responsibility of municipal or regional government. Responsibilities are therefore often distributed across administrative levels and agencies affecting how (open) government data is produced, and published….(More)”

Dumpster diving made easier with food donation points

Curated on February 15, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “With food waste a substantial contributor to both environmental and social problems, communities around the world are trying to find ways to make better use of leftovers as well as reduce the overall production of unused foodstuffs. One of the biggest challenges in getting leftovers to the people who need them is the logistics of finding and connecting the relevant groups and transporting the food. Several on-demand apps, like this one that matches homeless shelters with companies that have leftover food, are taking the guesswork out of what to do with available food. And retailers are getting smarter, like this one in the United States, now selling produce that would previously have been rejected for aesthetic reasons only.

In Brazil, the Makers Society collective designed a campaign called Prato de Rua (Street Dish) to help link people in possession of edible leftovers with community members in need. The campaign centers around a sticker that is affixed to the side of city dumpsters requesting that donated food be left at the specific points. By providing a more organized approach to getting rid of leftover food, the collective hopes to help people think more carefully about what they are getting rid of and why. At the same time, the initiative helps people who would otherwise be forced to go through the contents of a dumpster for edible remains, access good food more safely and swiftly.