Teresa Scassa and Alexandra Diebel in Journal of e-Democracy: “This paper explores how real-time data are made available as “open data” using municipal transit data as a case study. Many transit authorities in North America and elsewhere have installed technology to gather GPS data in real-time from transit vehicles. These data are in high demand in app developer communities because of their use in communicating predicted, rather than scheduled, transit vehicle arrival times. While many municipalities have chosen to treat real-time GPS data as “open data,” the particular nature of real-time GPS data requires a different mode of access for developers than what is needed for static data files. This, in turn, has created a conflict between the “openness” of the underlying data and the sometimes restrictive terms of use which govern access to the real-time data through transit authority Application Program Interfaces (APIs). This paper explores the implications of these terms of use and considers whether real-time data require a separate standard for openness. While the focus is on the transit data context, the lessons from this area will have broader implications, particularly for open real-time data in the emerging smart cities environment….(More)”
Getting Smart on Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Transport Authorities from Emerging Data Sources
Urban Transport Group: “Transformative technological changes are shaping the world and unleashing unprecedented volumes of data. Transport is a key generator of emerging data and also stands to be a significant beneficiary of new products, services, insights and ways of working that accompany this. Emerging data will mean transport users will become far more fully informed about their travel choices whilst at the same time transform the ability of transport authorities to plan and manage transport networks and services more efficiently and effectively.The purpose of this report is to outline key challenges and opportunities from the perspective of city region transport authorities, and to articulate a case for action.
Why are we doing this? Emerging data is a rapidly changing area. It is clear from the actions of some early movers that value can be created by using this data (see case studies throughout the report). However, at present, the transport community does not fully understand the challenges and opportunities that emerging data present. Therefore, this report seeks to identify some of these unknowns and communicate the case for action in this area to our member organisations and beyond….(More)”.
Open eGovernment practices in all EU Member States make public services more collaborative, efficient and inclusive
The studies provide a valuable information base and could inspire current and future activities under the European Commission e-Government Action Plan 2016-2020, in particular those related to facilitating digital interaction between administrations and citizens/businesses.
The emergence of Open Government in Member States
The study “Towards faster implementation and uptake of open government” maps 395 inspiring examples of Open eGovernment Services across Europe. This wealth of data and practices, is proof of successful cooperation between public administrations, companies, organizations and citizens. It demonstrates how the process of digitalisation can create better opportunities for everyone and shows concretely how to make it happen. The European Commission will give visibility to these best practices, support the policy processes and invest in digital innovation in the public sector.
Openness between public administrations
This is mostly driven by administrations seeking better efficiency and cost reduction. For example, applying once-only principle – under which people and businesses provide information only once to public authorities – may result in increasingly automated exchanges. For example,
- By applying the once-only principle, the Spanish government saved € 2.8 million (costs of exchange of paper documents between administrations) by introducing SIR (System of Interconnection of Registers).
- In the Netherlands, public administrations share among them the data hosted in 12 existing base registers., This helps to speed up administrative processes and citizens or companies no longer need to provide the same information time and again.
- Agiv, the agency for geographical information in Flanders (Belgium) has a central platform KLIP where administrations share the location of underground cables and pipes, helping thus companies to plan construction works. Its services were requested 100.000 times during the first six months after its launch.
Openness towards third parties
Openess towards third parties aims at increasing transparency and responsiveness and even participation in decision-making, for instance,
- Greek citizens use the Vouliwatch platform to publicly question government officials and share their own expertise;
- More and more cities foresee that citizens can have a say about how their money gets spent. The residents of Madrid vote online on 2% of city budget and those of Paris even on 5% of municipal expenses and can suggest projects within these financial limits; the inhabitants of Southern Italy submit formal web-based evaluations of public services and infrastructure thanks to cooperation of administration with the third sector.
- OpenSpending, an initiative by the Open Knowledge Foundation, contains datasets on public administrations expenditure in 76 countries so that citizens can see how authorities spend taxpayers’ money. Moreover, it allowed the UK government to save £ 4 million in only 15 minutes by simply comparing markets for different services.
Open government can also unlock economic potential for growth and jobs, for example,
- The Belgian Mercurius e-invoicing and e-procurement platform which allows all levels of administrations and businesses to cooperate and reduces the costs of invoices for companies by 62% (with expected 4,5 M € of savings per year)
- The Dutch Base Register Topography works as open data for anyone interested and has developed TopoGPS , a GPS application, based on data from the base registry, with an economic effect estimated at €9 million.
- The British NHS Job Platform, now used by 500 NHS employers, is a focal point for job seekers in the medical sector. Also in the UK, TransportAPI aggregates and analyses public transport data, allowing users and developers to access the transport data opened up by public transportation bodies and to work on their own applications.
Numerous initiatives also support inclusion:
- Konto Bariery uses accessibility data for an app-based map of buildings accessible to disabled people in Czech Republic and the non-profit
- Techfugees is an initiative organised by tech professionals that makes engineers, entrepreneurs, NGOs, public administrations collaborate in order to provide innovative technology solutions to help refugees….(More)
Datafication and democracy: Recalibrating digital information systems to address societal interests
The Centre for Humanitarian Data
Centre for HumData: “The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is establishing a Centre for Humanitarian Data in the Netherlands. It will be operational by early 2017 for an initial three years.
The Centre’s mission is to increase the use and impact of data in the humanitarian sector. The vision is to create a future where all people involved in a humanitarian situation have access to the data they need, when and how they need it, to make responsible and informed decisions.
The Centre will support humanitarian partners and OCHA staff in the field and at headquarters with their data efforts. It will be part of the city of The Hague’s Humanity Hub, a dedicated building for organizations working on data and innovation in the social sector. The location offers OCHA and partners a new, neutral setting where a hybrid culture can be created around data collaboration.
The Centre is a key contribution towards the Secretary-General’s Agenda for Humanity under core commitment four — changing the way we work to end need. The Centre’s activities will accelerate the changes required for the humanitarian system to become data driven….(More)”
Science Can Restore America’s Faith in Democracy
Ariel Procaccia in Wired: “…Like most other countries, individual states in the US employ the antiquated plurality voting system, in which each voter casts a vote for a single candidate, and the person who amasses the largest number of votes is declared the winner. If there is one thing that voting experts unanimously agree on, it is that plurality voting is a bad idea, or at least a badly outdated one….. Maine recently became the first US state to adopt instant-runoff voting; the approach will be used for choosing the governor and members of Congress and the state legislature….
So why aren’t we already using cutting-edge voting systems in national elections? Perhaps because changing election systems usually itself requires an election, where short-term political considerations may trump long-term, scientifically grounded reasoning….Despite these difficulties, in the last few years state-of-the-art voting systems have made the transition from theory to practice, through not-for-profit online platforms that focus on facilitating elections in cities and organizations, or even just on helping a group of friends decide where to go to dinner. For example, the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team has created an online tool whereby residents of a city can vote on how to allocate the city’s budget for public projects such as parks and roads. This tool has been used by New York City, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle to allocate millions of dollars. Building on this success, the Stanford team is experimenting with groundbreaking methods, inspired by computational thinking, to elicit and aggregate the preferences of residents.
The Princeton-based project All Our Ideas asks voters to compare pairs of ideas, and then aggregates these comparisons via statistical methods, ultimately providing a ranking of all the ideas. To date, roughly 14 million votes have been cast using this system, and it has been employed by major cities and organizations. Among its more whimsical use cases is the Washington Post’s 2010 holiday gift guide, where the question was “what gift would you like to receive this holiday season”; the disappointingly uncreative top idea, based on tens of thousands of votes, was “money”.
Finally, the recently launched website RoboVote (which I created with collaborators at Carnegie Mellon and Harvard) offers AI-driven voting methods to help groups of people make smart collective decisions. Applications range from selecting a spot for a family vacation or a class president, to potentially high-stakes choices such as which product prototype to develop or which movie script to produce.
These examples show that centuries of research on voting can, at long last, make a societal impact in the internet age. They demonstrate what science can do for democracy, albeit on a relatively small scale, for now….(More)’
New Tech Helps Tenants Make Their Case in Court
Corinne Ramey at the Wall Street Journal: “Tenants and their advocates are using new technology to document a lack of heat in apartment buildings, a condition they say has been difficult to prove in housing-court cases.
Small sensors provided by the New York City-based nonprofit Heat Seek, now installed in some city apartments, measure temperatures and transmit the data to a server. Tenant advocates say the data buttress their contention that some landlords withhold heat as a way to oust rent-regulated tenants.
“It’s really exciting to be able to track this information and hopefully get the courts to accept it, so we can show what everybody knows to be true,” said Sunny Noh, a supervising attorney at the Legal Aid Society’s Tenant Rights Coalition, which filed a civil suit using Heat Seek’s data.
…The smaller device, called a cell, transmits hourly temperature readings to the larger device, called a hub, through a radio signal. The hub is equipped with a small modem, which it uses to send data to a web server. The nonprofit typically places a hub in each building and the cells inside individual apartments.
Last winter, Heat Seek’s data were used in eight court cases representing a total of about 20 buildings, all of which were settled, Ms. Francois said. Currently, the sensors are in about six buildings and she anticipates about 50 buildings will have them by the end of the winter.
Data from Heat Seek haven’t been admitted at a trial yet, said Ms. Noh, the Legal Aid lawyer.
The nonprofit, with help from housing lawyers, has chosen to focus on gentrifying neighborhoods because they expect landlords there have more incentives to force out rent-regulated tenants….(More)
Power To The People! (And Settings for Using It Wisely?)
Public Agenda: “From its inception in Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting (PB) has incorporated, to varying degrees, both direct and deliberative democracy.
In deliberative democracy, citizens become informed about an issue, talk about their concerns and goals, weigh different policy options and find common ground. They may give policy input to public officials, develop action ideas for implementation by other people and organizations or work to implement ideas themselves, or they may engage in some combination of the three. Advocates of deliberative democracy believe in the potential of citizens to be effective learners, advisors and volunteers.
In direct democracy, people have the opportunity to vote on policy questions through initiatives and referenda. Advocates of direct democracy believe in the potential of citizens to be effective public decision makers.
This white paper examines the extent to which North American PB processes are applying deliberative principles and practices, explore the tensions and challenges in making PB more deliberative, suggest questions for further research and offer recommendations for public officials and practitioners for improving their PB processes.
Boosting deliberative engagement in PB processes could have a variety of benefits for communities. First, higher levels of deliberation might produce greater empathy among citizens who hold different opinions or value different things about their communities—and greater understanding between residents and city staff. Second, more deliberative discussions would be more likely to bring to the surface issues of race, religion, class, immigration status and other differences that are always influential but seldom addressed in public life. Finally, the budget ideas produced might be more likely to represent compromises between different groups or opinions, and they might inspire greater efforts by participants to help implement them, beyond the decision to allocate public money.
PB organizers might improve the level and quality of deliberation in their processes in a number of ways:
1. Be more explicit about the importance of deliberation in the process…
2. Ensure participants have the chance to share their stories…
3. Connect the PB process to a broader discussion of city and/or district goals and priorities…
This report is the companion to “Brazil Has Reduced Inequality, Incrementally—Can We Do the Same?,” which focuses on the intersection of PB and economic inequality. Both draw on the data gathered by local PB researchers and by Public Agenda; on local evaluations of PB processes; and on interviews with public officials, also conducted by Public Agenda…(More)”.
Four steps to precision public health
By contrast, a campaign against yellow fever launched this year in sub-Saharan Africa defines risk at the level of entire nations, often hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. More granular assessments have been deemed too complex.
The use of data to guide interventions that benefit populations more efficiently is a strategy we call precision public health. It requires robust primary surveillance data, rapid application of sophisticated analytics to track the geographical distribution of disease, and the capacity to act on such information1.
The availability and use of precise data is becoming the norm in wealthy countries. But large swathes of the developing world are not reaping its advantages. In Guinea, it took months to assemble enough data to clearly identify the start of the largest Ebola outbreak in history. This should take days. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of childhood mortality in the world; it is also where we know the least about causes of death…..
The value of precise disease tracking was baked into epidemiology from the start. In 1854, John Snow famously located cholera cases in London. His mapping of the spread of infection through contaminated water dealt a blow to the idea that the disease was caused by bad air. These days, people and pathogens move across the globe swiftly and in great numbers. In 2009, the H1N1 ‘swine flu’ influenza virus took just 35 days to spread from Mexico and the United States to China, South Korea and 12 other countries…
The public-health community is sharing more data faster; expectations are higher than ever that data will be available from clinical trials and from disease surveillance. In the past two years, the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust in London and the Gates Foundation have all instituted open data policies for their grant recipients, and leading journals have declared that sharing data during disease emergencies will not impede later publication.
Meanwhile, improved analysis, data visualization and machine learning have expanded our ability to use disparate data sources to decide what to do. A study published last year4 used precise geospatial modelling to infer that insecticide-treated bed nets were the single most influential intervention in the rapid decline of malaria.
However, in many parts of the developing world, there are still hurdles to the collection, analysis and use of more precise public-health data. Work towards malaria elimination in South Africa, for example, has depended largely on paper reporting forms, which are collected and entered manually each week by dozens of subdistricts, and eventually analysed at the province level. This process would be much faster if field workers filed reports from mobile phones.
Sources: Ref. 8/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
…Frontline workers should not find themselves frustrated by global programmes that fail to take into account data on local circumstances. Wherever they live — in a village, city or country, in the global south or north — people have the right to public-health decisions that are based on the best data and science possible, that minimize risk and cost, and maximize health in their communities…(More)”
Future of e-government: learning from the past
Special issue of SOCRATES edited by Manoj Dixit: “We are living in an era of digitization thus moving towards a digital government. The use of ICT in public-administration is beneficial and it is not mere a coincidence that the top 10 countries in e-government implementation (according to UN E-Government Survey 2016) are flourishing democracies. There has been a sharp rise in the number of countries using e-government to provide public services online through one stop-platform. According to the 2016 survey, 90 countries now offer one or more single entry portal on public information or online services, or both and 148 countries provide at-least one form of online transaction services. More and more countries are making efforts through e-government to ensure and increase inclusiveness, effectiveness, accountability and transparency in their public institutions. Across the globe, data for public information and security is being opened up. The 2016 survey shows that 128 countries now provide data-sets on government spending in machine readable formats. E-government and innovation seems to have provided significant opportunities to transform public administration into an instrument of sustainable development. The governments around the globe are rapidly transforming. The use of information and communication technology in public administration – combined with organizational change and new skills- seems to be improving public services and democratic processes and strengthening support to public policies. There has been an increased effort to utilize advanced electronic and mobile services that benefits all. Fixed and wireless broadband subscriptions have increased unevenly across regions, with Europe leading, but Africa still lagging behind. We have to focus on these substantial region disparities and growing divide. All countries agreed, in SDG 9, that a major effort is required to ensure universal access to internet in the least developed countries. The rise of Social media and its easy access seems to have enabled an increasing number of countries moving towards participatory decision making, in which developed European countries are among the top 50 performers. But, the issues of diminishing collective thinking and rising Individual thinking are some rising issues that we will have to deal with in the future. There are more sensitive issues like the new classification of citizens into literate-illiterate, e-literate and e-illiterate, that the governments need to look upon. It is a good sign that many developing countries are making good progress. Enhanced e-participation can support the realization of the SDGs by enabling more participatory decision making, but the success of e-government will ultimately depend upon our ability and capability to solve the contrasting issues raised due to this transition with sensitivity.
In this issue of SOCRATES we have discussed, this new era of Digital Government. We have focused on what we have learned from the past and the future we want. From discussions on the role of e-governance within the local government settings in a modern democratic state to the experience of an academia with online examination, we have tried to include every possible aspect of e-government….(More)”