How Citizen Attachment to Neighborhoods Helps to Improve Municipal Services and Public Spaces

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Daniel O’Brien, Dietmar Offenhuber, Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Melissa Sands, and Eric Gordon: “What motivates people to contact their local governments with reports about street light outages, potholes, graffiti, and other deteriorations in public spaces? Current efforts to improve government interactions with constituents operate on the premise that citizens who make such reports are motivated by broad civic values. In contrast, our recent research demonstrates that such citizens are primarily motivated by territoriality – that is, attachments to the spaces where they live. Our research focuses on Boston’s “311 system,” which provides telephone hotlines and web channels through which constituents can request non-emergency government services.

Although our study focuses on 311 users in Boston, it holds broader implications for more than 400 U.S. municipalities that administer similar systems. And our results encourage a closer look at the drivers of citizen participation in many “coproduction programs” – programs that involve people in the design and implementation of government services. Currently, 311 is just one example of government efforts to use technology to involve constituents in joint efforts.

Territorial Ties and Civic Engagement

The concept of territoriality originated in studies of animal behavior – such as bears marking trees in the forest or lions and hyenas fighting over a kill. Human beings also need to manage the ownership of objects and spaces, but social psychologists have demonstrated that human territoriality, whether at home, the workplace, or a neighborhood, entails more than the defense of objects or spaces against others. It includes maintenance and caretaking, and even extends to items shared with others….(More)”

What is being done with open government data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

An exploratory analysis of public uses of New York City open data by Karen Okamoto in Webology: “In 2012, New York City Council passed legislation to make government data open and freely available to the public. By approving this legislation, City Council was attempting to make local government more transparent, accountable, and streamlined in its operations. It was also attempting to create economic opportunities and to encourage the public to identify ways in which to improve government and local communities. The purpose of this study is to explore public uses of New York City open data. Currently, more than 1300 datasets covering broad areas such as health, education, transportation, public safety, housing and business are available on the City’s Open Data Portal. This study found a plethora of maps, visualizations, tools, apps and analyses made by the public using New York City open data. Indeed, open data is inspiring a productive range of creative reuses yet questions remain concerning how useable the data is for users without technical skills and resources….(More)”

Discrimination by Design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lena Groeger at ProPublica: “A few weeks ago, Snapchat released a new photo filter. It appeared alongside many of the other such face-altering filters that have become a signature of the service. But instead of surrounding your face with flower petals or giving you the nose and ears of a Dalmatian, the filter added slanted eyes, puffed cheeks and large front teeth. A number of Snapchat users decried the filter as racist, saying it mimicked a “yellowface” caricature of Asians. The company countered that they meant to represent anime characters and deleted the filter within a few hours.

“Snapchat is the prime example of what happens when you don’t have enough people of color building a product,” wrote Bay Area software engineer Katie Zhu in an essay she wrote about deleting the app and leaving the service. In a tech world that hires mostly white men, the absence of diverse voices means that companies can be blind to design decisions that are hurtful to their customers or discriminatory.A Snapchat spokesperson told ProPublica that the company has recently hired someone to lead their diversity recruiting efforts.

A Snapchat spokesperson told ProPublica that the company has recently hired someone to lead their diversity recruiting efforts.

But this isn’t just Snapchat’s problem. Discriminatory design and decision-making affects all aspects of our lives: from the quality of our health care and education to where we live to what scientific questions we choose to ask. It would be impossible to cover them all, so we’ll focus on the more tangible and visual design that humans interact with every day.

You can’t talk about discriminatory design without mentioning city planner Robert Moses, whose public works projects shaped huge swaths of New York City from the 1930s through the 1960s. The physical design of the environment is a powerful tool when it’s used to exclude and isolate specific groups of people. And Moses’ design choices have had lasting discriminatory effects that are still felt in modern New York.

A notorious example: Moses designed a number of Long Island Parkway overpasses to be so low that buses could not drive under them. This effectively blocked Long Island from the poor and people of color who tend to rely more heavily on public transportation. And the low bridges continue to wreak havoc in other ways: 64 collisions were recorded in 2014 alone (here’s a bad one).

The design of bus systems, railways, and other forms of public transportation has a history riddled with racial tensions and prejudiced policies. In the 1990s the Los Angeles’ Bus Riders Union went to court over the racial inequity they saw in the city’s public transportation system. The Union alleged that L.A.’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority spent “a disproportionately high share of its resources on commuter rail services, whose primary users were wealthy non-minorities, and a disproportionately low share on bus services, whose main patrons were low income and minority residents.” The landmark case was settled through a court-ordered consent decree that placed strict limits on transit funding and forced the MTA to invest over $2 billion in the bus system.

Of course, the design of a neighborhood is more than just infrastructure. Zoning laws and regulations that determine how land is used or what schools children go to have long been used as a tool to segregate communities. All too often, the end result of zoning is that low-income, often predominantly black and Latino communities are isolated from most of the resources and advantages of wealthy white communities….(More)”

Crowdsourced map of safe drinking water

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Just over two years ago, in April 2014, city officials in Flint, Michigan decided to save costs by switching the city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River. Because of the switch, residents of the town and their children were exposed to dangerous levels of lead. Much of the population suffered from the side effects of lead poisoning, including skin lesions, hair loss, depression and anxiety and in severe cases, permanent brain damage. Media attention, although focussed at first, inevitably died down. To avoid future similar disasters, Sean Montgomery, a neuroscientist and the CEO of technology company, Connected Future Labs, set up CitizenSpring.

CitizenSpring is an app which enables individuals to test their water supply using readily available water testing kits. Users hold a test strip underneath running water, hold the strip to a smartphone camera and press the button. The app then reveals the results of the test, also cataloguing the test results and storing them in the cloud in the form of a digital map. Using what Montgomery describes as “computer vision,” the app is able to detect lead levels in a given water source and confirm whether they exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s “safe” threshold. The idea is that communities can inform themselves about their own and nearby water supplies in order that they can act as guardians of their own health. “It’s an impoverished data problem,” says Montgomery. “We don’t have enough data. By sharing the results of test[s], people can, say, find out if they’re testing a faucet that hasn’t been tested before.”

CitizenSpring narrowly missed its funding target on Kickstarter. However, collective monitoring can work. We have already seen the power of communities harnessed to crowdsource pollution data in the EU and map conflict zones through user-submitted camera footage….(More)”

For Quick Housing Data, Hit Craigslist

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tanvi Misra at CityLab: “…housing researchers can use the Internet bulletin board for a more worthy purpose: as a source of fairly accurate, real-time data on the U.S. rental housing market.

A new paper in the Journal of Planning Education and Research analyzed 11 million Craigslist rental listings posted between May and July 2014 across the U.S. and found a treasure trove of information on regional and local housing trends. “Being able to track rental listings data from Craigslist is really useful for urban planners to take the pulse of [changing neighborhoods] much more quickly,” says Geoff Boeing, a researcher at University of California at Berkeley’s Urban Analytics Lab, who co-authored the paper with Paul Waddell, a Berkeley professor of planning and design.

Here are a couple of big takeaways from their deep dive down the CL rabbit hole:

Overall, Craigslist listings track with HUD data (except when they don’t)

The researchers compared median rents in different Craigslist domains (metropolitan areas, essentially) to the corresponding Housing and Urban Development median rents. In New Orleans and Oklahoma City, the posted and the official rents were very similar. But in other metros, they diverged significantly. In Las Vegas, for example, the Craigslist median rent was lower than the HUD median rent, but in New York, it was much, much higher.

“That’s important for local planners to be careful with because there are totally different cultures and ways that Craigslist is used in different cities,” Boeing explains. “The economies of the cities could very much affect how rentals are being posted. If they’re posting it higher [on Craigslist], they may negotiate down eventually. Or, if they’re posting it low, they could be expecting a bidding war with a bunch of tenants coming in.” …(More)”

‘Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Extract from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari: “There’s an emerging market called Dataism, which venerates neither gods nor man – it worships data. From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system, through four basic methods:

1. Increasing the number of processors. A city of 100,000 people has more computing power than a village of 1,000 people.

2. Increasing the variety of processors. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in a single system may therefore increase its dynamism and creativity. A conversation between a peasant, a priest and a physician may produce novel ideas that would never emerge from a conversation between three hunter-gatherers.

3. Increasing the number of connections between processors. There is little point in increasing the mere number and variety of processors if they are poorly connected. A trade network linking ten cities is likely to result in many more economic, technological and social innovations than ten isolated cities.

4. Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections. Connecting processors is hardly useful if data cannot flow freely. Just building roads between ten cities won’t be very useful if they are plagued by robbers, or if some autocratic despot doesn’t allow merchants and travellers to move as they wish.
These four methods often contradict one another. The greater the number and variety of processors, the harder it is to freely connect them. The construction of the sapiens data-processing system accordingly passed through four main stages, each of which was characterised by an emphasis on different methods.

The first stage began with the cognitive revolution, which made it possible to connect unlimited sapiens into a single data-processing network. This gave sapiens an advantage over all other human and animal species. Although there is a limit to the number of Neanderthals, chimpanzees or elephants you can connect to the same net, there is no limit to the number of sapiens.

Sapiens used their advantage in data processing to overrun the entire world. However, as they spread into different lands and climates they lost touch with one another, and underwent diverse cultural transformations. The result was an immense variety of human cultures, each with its own lifestyle, behaviour patterns and world view. Hence the first phase of history involved an increase in the number and variety of human processors, at the expense of connectivity: 20,000 years ago there were many more sapiens than 70,000 years ago, and sapiens in Europe processed information differently from sapiens in China. However, there were no connections between people in Europe and China, and it would have seemed utterly impossible that all sapiens may one day be part of a single data-processing web.
The second stage began with agriculture and continued until the invention of writing and money. Agriculture accelerated demographic growth, so the number of human processors rose sharply, while simultaneously enabling many more people to live together in the same place, thereby generating dense local networks that contained an unprecedented number of processors. In addition, agriculture created new incentives and opportunities for different networks to trade and communicate.

Nevertheless, during the second phase, centrifugal forces remained predominant. In the absence of writing and money, humans could not establish cities, kingdoms or empires. Humankind was still divided into innumerable little tribes, each with its own lifestyle and world view. Uniting the whole of humankind was not even a fantasy.
The third stage kicked off with the appearance of writing and money about 5,000 years ago, and lasted until the beginning of the scientific revolution. Thanks to writing and money, the gravitational field of human co-operation finally overpowered the centrifugal forces. Human groups bonded and merged to form cities and kingdoms. Political and commercial links between different cities and kingdoms also tightened. At least since the first millennium BC – when coinage, empires, and universal religions appeared – humans began to consciously dream about forging a single network that would encompass the entire globe.

This dream became a reality during the fourth and last stage of history, which began around 1492. Early modern explorers, conquerors and traders wove the first thin threads that encompassed the whole world. In the late modern period, these threads were made stronger and denser, so that the spider’s web of Columbus’s days became the steel and asphalt grid of the 21st century. Even more importantly, information was allowed to flow increasingly freely along this global grid. When Columbus first hooked up the Eurasian net to the American net, only a few bits of data could cross the ocean each year, running the gauntlet of cultural prejudices, strict censorship and political repression.

But as the years went by, the free market, the scientific community, the rule of law and the spread of democracy all helped to lift the barriers. We often imagine that democracy and the free market won because they were “good”. In truth, they won because they improved the global data-processing system.

So over the last 70,000 years humankind first spread out, then separated into distinct groups and finally merged again. Yet the process of unification did not take us back to the beginning. When the different human groups fused into the global village of today, each brought along its unique legacy of thoughts, tools and behaviours, which it collected and developed along the way. Our modern larders are now stuffed with Middle Eastern wheat, Andean potatoes, New Guinean sugar and Ethiopian coffee. Similarly, our language, religion, music and politics are replete with heirlooms from across the planet.
If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish….(More)“

25 Years Later, What Happened to ‘Reinventing Government’?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Governing: “…A generation ago, governments across the United States embarked on ambitious efforts to use performance measures to “reinvent” how government worked. Much of the inspiration for this effort came from the bestselling 1992 book Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit Is Transforming the Public Sector by veteran city manager Ted Gaebler and journalist David Osborne. Gaebler and Osborne challenged one of the most common complaints about public administration — that government agencies were irredeemably bureaucratic and resistant to change. The authors argued that that need not be the case. Government managers and employees could and should, the authors wrote, be as entrepreneurial as their private-sector counterparts. This meant embracing competition; measuring outcomes rather than inputs or processes; and insisting on accountability.

For public-sector leaders, Gaebler and Osborne’s book was a revelation. “I would say it has been the most influential book of the past 25 years,” says Robert J. O’Neill Jr., the executive director of the International City/County Management Association (ICMA). At the federal level, Reinventing Government inspired Vice President Al Gore’s National Performance Review. But it had its greatest impact on state and local governments. Public-sector officials across the country read Reinventing Government and ingested its ideas. Osborne joined the consulting firm Public Strategies Group and began hiring himself out as an adviser to governments.

There’s no question states and localities function differently today than they did 25 years ago. Performance management systems, though not universally beloved, have become widespread. Departments and agencies routinely measure customer satisfaction. Advances in information technology have allowed governments to develop and share outcomes more easily than ever before. Some watchdog groups consider linking outcomes to budgets — also known as performance-based budgeting — to be a best practice. Government executives in many places talk about “innovation” as if they were Silicon Valley executives. This represents real, undeniable change.

Yet despite a generation of reinvention, government is less trusted than ever before. Performance management systems are sometimes seen not as an instrument of reform but as an obstacle to it. Performance-based budgeting has had successes, but they have rarely been sustained. Some of the most innovative efforts to improve government today are pursuing quite different approaches, emphasizing grassroots employee initiatives rather than strict managerial accountability. All of this raises a question: Has the reinventing government movement left a legacy of greater effectiveness, or have the systems it generated become roadblocks that today’s reformers must work around?  Or is the answer somehow “yes” to both of those questions?

Reinventing Government presented dozens of examples of “entrepreneurial” problem-solving, organized into 10 chapters. Each chapter illustrated a theme, such as results-oriented government or enterprising government. This structure — concrete examples grouped around larger themes — reflected the distinctive sensibilities of each author. Gaebler, as a city manager, had made a name for himself by treating constraints such as funding shortfalls or bureaucratic rules as opportunities. His was a bottom-up, let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom sensibility. He wanted his fellow managers to create cultures where risks could be taken and initiative could be rewarded.

Osborne, a journalist, was more of a systematizer, drawn to sweeping ideas. In his previous book, Laboratories of Democracy, he had profiled six governors who he believed were developing new approaches for delivering services that constituted a “third way” between big government liberalism and anti-government conservatism.Reinventing Government suggested how that would work in practice. It also offered readers a daring and novel vision of what government’s core mission should be. Government, the book argued, should focus less on operating programs and more on overseeing them. Instead of “rowing” (stressing administrative detail), senior public officials should do more “steering” (concentrating on overall strategy). They should contract out more, embrace competition and insist on accountability. This aspect of Osborne’s thinking became more pronounced as time went by.

“Today we are well beyond the experimental approach,” Osborne and Peter Hutchinson, a former Minnesota finance commissioner, wrote in their 2004 book, The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis. A decade of experience had produced a proven set of strategies, the book continued. The foremost should be to turn the budget process “on its head, so that it starts with the results we demand and the price we are willing to pay rather than the programs we have and the costs they incur.” In other words, performance-based budgeting. Then, they continued, “we must cut government down to its most effective size and shape, through strategic reviews, consolidation and reorganization.”

Assessing the influence and efficacy of these ideas is difficult. According to the U.S. Census, the United States has 90,106 state and local governments. Tens of thousands of public employees read Reinventing Government and the books that followed. Surveys have shown that the use of performance measurement systems is widespread across state, county and municipal government. Yet only a handful of studies have sought to evaluate systematically the impact of Reinventing Government’s core ideas. Most have focused on just one, the idea highlighted in The Price of Government: budgeting for outcomes.

To evaluate the reinventing government movement primarily by assessing performance-based budgeting might seem a bit narrow. But paying close attention to the budgeting process is the key to understanding the impact of the entire enterprise. It reveals the difficulty of sustaining even successful innovations….

“Reinventing government was relatively blind to the role of legislatures in general,” says University of Maryland public policy professor and Governing columnist Donald F. Kettl. “There was this sense that the real problem was that good people were trapped in a bad system and that freeing administrators to do what they knew how to do best would yield vast improvements. What was not part of the debate was the role that legislatures might have played in creating those constraints to begin with.”

Over time, a pattern emerged. During periods of crisis, chief executives were able to implement performance-based budgeting. Often, it worked. But eventually legislatures pushed back….

There was another problem. Measuring results, insisting on accountability — these were supposed to spur creative problem-solving. But in practice, says Blauer, “whenever the budget was invoked in performance conversations, it automatically chilled innovative thinking; it chilled engagement,” she says. Agencies got defensive. Rather than focusing on solving hard problems, they focused on justifying past performance….

The fact that reinventing government never sparked a revolution puzzles Gaebler to this day. “Why didn’t more of my colleagues pick it up and run with it?” he asks. He thinks the answer may be that many public managers were simply too risk-averse….(More)”.

“Data-Driven Policy”: San Francisco just showed us how it should work.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

abhi nemani at Medium: “…Auto collisions with bikes (and also pedestrians) poses a real threat to the safety and wellbeing of residents. But more than temporary injuries, auto collisions with bikes and pedestrians can kill people. And it does at an alarming rate. According to the city, “Every year in San Francisco, about 30 people lose their lives and over 200 more are seriously injured while traveling on city streets.”…

Problem -> Data Analysis

The city government, in good fashion, made a commitment to do something about. But in better fashion, they decided to do so in a data-driven way. And they tasked the Department of Public Health in collaboration with theDepartment of Transportation to develop policy. What’s impressive is that instead of some blanket policy or mandate, they opted to study the problem,take a nuanced approach, and put data first.

SF High Injury Network

The SF team ran a series of data-driven analytics to determine the causes of these collisions. They developed TransBase to continuously map and visualize traffic incidents throughout the city. Using this platform, then, they developed the “high injury network” — they key places where most problems happen; or as they put it, “to identify where the most investments in engineering, education and enforcement should be focused to have the biggest impact in reducing fatalities and severe injuries.” Turns out that, just12 percent of intersections result in 70% of major injuries. This is using data to make what might seem like an intractable problem, tractable….

Data Analysis -> Policy

So now what? Well, this month, Mayor Ed Lee signed an executive directive to challenge the city to implement these findings under the banner of“Vision Zero”: a goal of reducing auto/pedestrian/bike collision deaths to zero by 2024….

Fortunately, San Francisco took the next step: they put their data to work.

Policy -> Implementation

This week, the city of San Francisco announced plans to build its first“Protected Intersection”:

“Protected intersections use a simple design concept to make everyone safer.Under this configuration, features like concrete islands placed at the cornersslow turning cars and physically separate people biking and driving. They alsoposition turning drivers at an angle that makes it easier for them to see andyield to people walking and biking crossing their path.”

That’s apparently just the start: plans are underway for other intersections,protected bike lanes, and more. Biking and walking in San Francisco is about to become much safer. (Though maybe not easier: the hills — they’rethe worst.)

***

There is ample talk of “Data-Driven Policy” — indeed, I’ve written about it myself — but too often we get lost in the abstract or theoretical….(More)”

How Tech Giants Are Devising Real Ethics for Artificial Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Markoff in the New York Times: “For years, science-fiction moviemakers have been making us fear the bad things that artificially intelligent machines might do to their human creators. But for the next decade or two, our biggest concern is more likely to be that robots will take away our jobs or bump into us on the highway.

Now five of the world’s largest tech companies are trying to create a standard of ethics around the creation of artificial intelligence. While science fiction has focused on the existential threat of A.I. to humans,researchers at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, and those from Amazon,Facebook, IBM and Microsoft have been meeting to discuss more tangible issues, such as the impact of A.I. on jobs, transportation and even warfare.

Tech companies have long overpromised what artificially intelligent machines can do. In recent years, however, the A.I. field has made rapid advances in a range of areas, from self-driving cars and machines that understand speech, like Amazon’s Echo device, to a new generation of weapons systems that threaten to automate combat.

The specifics of what the industry group will do or say — even its name —have yet to be hashed out. But the basic intention is clear: to ensure thatA.I. research is focused on benefiting people, not hurting them, according to four people involved in the creation of the industry partnership who are not authorized to speak about it publicly.

The importance of the industry effort is underscored in a report issued onThursday by a Stanford University group funded by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is one of the executives in the industry discussions. The Stanford project, called the One Hundred Year Study onArtificial Intelligence, lays out a plan to produce a detailed report on the impact of A.I. on society every five years for the next century….The Stanford report attempts to define the issues that citizens of a typicalNorth American city will face in computers and robotic systems that mimic human capabilities. The authors explore eight aspects of modern life,including health care, education, entertainment and employment, but specifically do not look at the issue of warfare..(More)”

Smart Economy in Smart Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Vinod Kumar, T. M.: “The present book highlights studies that show how smart cities promote urban economic development. The book surveys the state of the art of Smart City Economic Development through a literature survey. The book uses 13 in depth city research case studies in 10 countries such as the North America, Europe, Africa and Asia to explain how a smart economy changes the urban spatial system and vice versa. This book focuses on exploratory city studies in different countries, which investigate how urban spatial systems adapt to the specific needs of smart urban economy. The theory of smart city economic development is not yet entirely understood and applied in metropolitan regional plans. Smart urban economies are largely the result of the influence of ICT applications on all aspects of urban economy, which in turn changes the land-use system. It points out that the dynamics of smart city GDP creation takes ‘different paths,’ which need further empirical study, hypothesis testing and mathematical modelling. Although there are hypotheses on how smart cities generate wealth and social benefits for nations, there are no significant empirical studies available on how they generate urban economic development through urban spatial adaptation.  This book with 13 cities research studies is one attempt to fill in the gap in knowledge base….(More)”