New Research Network to Study and Design Innovative Ways of Solving Public Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Network

MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance formed to gather evidence and develop new designs for governing 

NEW YORK, NY, March 4, 2014 – The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at New York University today announced the formation of a Research Network on Opening Governance, which will seek to develop blueprints for more effective and legitimate democratic institutions to help improve people’s lives.
Convened and organized by the GovLab, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance is made possible by a three-year grant of $5 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as well as a gift from Google.org, which will allow the Network to tap the latest technological advances to further its work.
Combining empirical research with real-world experiments, the Research Network will study what happens when governments and institutions open themselves to diverse participation, pursue collaborative problem-solving, and seek input and expertise from a range of people. Network members include twelve experts (see below) in computer science, political science, policy informatics, social psychology and philosophy, law, and communications. This core group is supported by an advisory network of academics, technologists, and current and former government officials. Together, they will assess existing innovations in governing and experiment with new practices and how institutions make decisions at the local, national, and international levels.
Support for the Network from Google.org will be used to build technology platforms to solve problems more openly and to run agile, real-world, empirical experiments with institutional partners such as governments and NGOs to discover what can enhance collaboration and decision-making in the public interest.
The Network’s research will be complemented by theoretical writing and compelling storytelling designed to articulate and demonstrate clearly and concretely how governing agencies might work better than they do today. “We want to arm policymakers and practitioners with evidence of what works and what does not,” says Professor Beth Simone Noveck, Network Chair and author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citi More Powerful, “which is vital to drive innovation, re-establish legitimacy and more effectively target scarce resources to solve today’s problems.”
“From prize-backed challenges to spur creative thinking to the use of expert networks to get the smartest people focused on a problem no matter where they work, this shift from top-down, closed, and professional government to decentralized, open, and smarter governance may be the major social innovation of the 21st century,” says Noveck. “The MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance is the ideal crucible for helping  transition from closed and centralized to open and collaborative institutions of governance in a way that is scientifically sound and yields new insights to inform future efforts, always with an eye toward real-world impacts.”
MacArthur Foundation President Robert Gallucci added, “Recognizing that we cannot solve today’s challenges with yesterday’s tools, this interdisciplinary group will bring fresh thinking to questions about how our governing institutions operate, and how they can develop better ways to help address seemingly intractable social problems for the common good.”
Members
The MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance comprises:
Chair: Beth Simone Noveck
Network Coordinator: Andrew Young
Chief of Research: Stefaan Verhulst
Faculty Members:

  • Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)/University of Southampton, UK)
  • Deborah Estrin (Cornell Tech/Weill Cornell Medical College)
  • Erik Johnston (Arizona State University)
  • Henry Farrell (George Washington University)
  • Sheena S. Iyengar (Columbia Business School/Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business)
  • Karim Lakhani (Harvard Business School)
  • Anita McGahan (University of Toronto)
  • Cosma Shalizi (Carnegie Mellon/Santa Fe Institute)

Institutional Members:

  • Christian Bason and Jesper Christiansen (MindLab, Denmark)
  • Geoff Mulgan (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts – NESTA, United Kingdom)
  • Lee Rainie (Pew Research Center)

The Network is eager to hear from and engage with the public as it undertakes its work. Please contact Stefaan Verhulst to share your ideas or identify opportunities to collaborate.”

Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Internet: “Conversations on Twitter create networks with identifiable contours as people reply to and mention one another in their tweets. These conversational structures differ, depending on the subject and the people driving the conversation. Six structures are regularly observed: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spoke structures. These are created as individuals choose whom to reply to or mention in their Twitter messages and the structures tell a story about the nature of the conversation.
If a topic is political, it is common to see two separate, polarized crowds take shape. They form two distinct discussion groups that mostly do not interact with each other. Frequently these are recognizably liberal or conservative groups. The participants within each separate group commonly mention very different collections of website URLs and use distinct hashtags and words. The split is clearly evident in many highly controversial discussions: people in clusters that we identified as liberal used URLs for mainstream news websites, while groups we identified as conservative used links to conservative news websites and commentary sources. At the center of each group are discussion leaders, the prominent people who are widely replied to or mentioned in the discussion. In polarized discussions, each group links to a different set of influential people or organizations that can be found at the center of each conversation cluster.
While these polarized crowds are common in political conversations on Twitter, it is important to remember that the people who take the time to post and talk about political issues on Twitter are a special group. Unlike many other Twitter members, they pay attention to issues, politicians, and political news, so their conversations are not representative of the views of the full Twitterverse. Moreover, Twitter users are only 18% of internet users and 14% of the overall adult population. Their demographic profile is not reflective of the full population. Additionally, other work by the Pew Research Center has shown that tweeters’ reactions to events are often at odds with overall public opinion— sometimes being more liberal, but not always. Finally, forthcoming survey findings from Pew Research will explore the relatively modest size of the social networking population who exchange political content in their network.
Still, the structure of these Twitter conversations says something meaningful about political discourse these days and the tendency of politically active citizens to sort themselves into distinct partisan camps. Social networking maps of these conversations provide new insights because they combine analysis of the opinions people express on Twitter, the information sources they cite in their tweets, analysis of who is in the networks of the tweeters, and how big those networks are. And to the extent that these online conversations are followed by a broader audience, their impact may reach well beyond the participants themselves.
Our approach combines analysis of the size and structure of the network and its sub-groups with analysis of the words, hashtags and URLs people use. Each person who contributes to a Twitter conversation is located in a specific position in the web of relationships among all participants in the conversation. Some people occupy rare positions in the network that suggest that they have special importance and power in the conversation.
Social network maps of Twitter crowds and other collections of social media can be created with innovative data analysis tools that provide new insight into the landscape of social media. These maps highlight the people and topics that drive conversations and group behavior – insights that add to what can be learned from surveys or focus groups or even sentiment analysis of tweets. Maps of previously hidden landscapes of social media highlight the key people, groups, and topics being discussed.

Conversational archetypes on Twitter

The Polarized Crowd network structure is only one of several different ways that crowds and conversations can take shape on Twitter. There are at least six distinctive structures of social media crowds which form depending on the subject being discussed, the information sources being cited, the social networks of the people talking about the subject, and the leaders of the conversation. Each has a different social structure and shape: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spokes.
After an analysis of many thousands of Twitter maps, we found six different kinds of network crowds.

Polarized Crowds in Twitter Conversations
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Polarized Crowd: Polarized discussions feature two big and dense groups that have little connection between them. The topics being discussed are often highly divisive and heated political subjects. In fact, there is usually little conversation between these groups despite the fact that they are focused on the same topic. Polarized Crowds on Twitter are not arguing. They are ignoring one another while pointing to different web resources and using different hashtags.
Why this matters: It shows that partisan Twitter users rely on different information sources. While liberals link to many mainstream news sources, conservatives link to a different set of websites.

Tight Crowds in Twitter Conversations
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Tight Crowd: These discussions are characterized by highly interconnected people with few isolated participants. Many conferences, professional topics, hobby groups, and other subjects that attract communities take this Tight Crowd form.
Why this matters: These structures show how networked learning communities function and how sharing and mutual support can be facilitated by social media.

Brand Clusters in Twitter Conversations
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Brand Clusters: When well-known products or services or popular subjects like celebrities are discussed in Twitter, there is often commentary from many disconnected participants: These “isolates” participating in a conversation cluster are on the left side of the picture on the left). Well-known brands and other popular subjects can attract large fragmented Twitter populations who tweet about it but not to each other. The larger the population talking about a brand, the less likely it is that participants are connected to one another. Brand-mentioning participants focus on a topic, but tend not to connect to each other.
Why this matters: There are still institutions and topics that command mass interest. Often times, the Twitter chatter about these institutions and their messages is not among people connecting with each other. Rather, they are relaying or passing along the message of the institution or person and there is no extra exchange of ideas.

Community Clusters in Twitter Conversations
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Community Clusters: Some popular topics may develop multiple smaller groups, which often form around a few hubs each with its own audience, influencers, and sources of information. These Community Clusters conversations look like bazaars with multiple centers of activity. Global news stories often attract coverage from many news outlets, each with its own following. That creates a collection of medium-sized groups—and a fair number of isolates (the left side of the picture above).
Why this matters: Some information sources and subjects ignite multiple conversations, each cultivating its own audience and community. These can illustrate diverse angles on a subject based on its relevance to different audiences, revealing a diversity of opinion and perspective on a social media topic.

Broadcast Networks in Twitter Conversations
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Broadcast Network: Twitter commentary around breaking news stories and the output of well-known media outlets and pundits has a distinctive hub and spoke structure in which many people repeat what prominent news and media organizations tweet. The members of the Broadcast Network audience are often connected only to the hub news source, without connecting to one another. In some cases there are smaller subgroups of densely connected people— think of them as subject groupies—who do discuss the news with one another.
Why this matters: There are still powerful agenda setters and conversation starters in the new social media world. Enterprises and personalities with loyal followings can still have a large impact on the conversation.

Support Networks in Twitter Conversations
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Support Network: Customer complaints for a major business are often handled by a Twitter service account that attempts to resolve and manage customer issues around their products and services. This produces a hub and spoke structure that is different from the Broadcast Network pattern. In the Support Network structure, the hub account replies to many otherwise disconnected users, creating outward spokes. In contrast, in the Broadcast pattern, the hub gets replied to or retweeted by many disconnected people, creating inward spokes.
Why this matters: As government, businesses, and groups increasingly provide services and support via social media, support network structures become an important benchmark for evaluating the performance of these institutions. Customer support streams of advice and feedback can be measured in terms of efficiency and reach using social media network maps.

Why is it useful to map the social landscape this way?

Social media is increasingly home to civil society, the place where knowledge sharing, public discussions, debates, and disputes are carried out. As the new public square, social media conversations are as important to document as any other large public gathering. Network maps of public social media discussions in services like Twitter can provide insights into the role social media plays in our society. These maps are like aerial photographs of a crowd, showing the rough size and composition of a population. These maps can be augmented with on the ground interviews with crowd participants, collecting their words and interests. Insights from network analysis and visualization can complement survey or focus group research methods and can enhance sentiment analysis of the text of messages like tweets.
Like topographic maps of mountain ranges, network maps can also illustrate the points on the landscape that have the highest elevation. Some people occupy locations in networks that are analogous to positions of strategic importance on the physical landscape. Network measures of “centrality” can identify key people in influential locations in the discussion network, highlighting the people leading the conversation. The content these people create is often the most popular and widely repeated in these networks, reflecting the significant role these people play in social media discussions.
While the physical world has been mapped in great detail, the social media landscape remains mostly unknown. However, the tools and techniques for social media mapping are improving, allowing more analysts to get social media data, analyze it, and contribute to the collective construction of a more complete map of the social media world. A more complete map and understanding of the social media landscape will help interpret the trends, topics, and implications of these new communication technologies.”

Can We Balance Data Protection With Value Creation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A “privacy perspective” by Sara Degli Esposti: “In the last few years there has been a dramatic change in the opportunities organizations have to generate value from the data they collect about customers or service users. Customers and users are rapidly becoming collections of “data points” and organizations can learn an awful lot from the analysis of this huge accumulation of data points, also known as “Big Data.”

Organizations are perhaps thrilled, dreaming about new potential applications of digital data but also a bit concerned about hidden risks and unintended consequences. Take, for example, the human rights protections placed on personal data by the EU.  Regulators are watching closely, intending to preserve the eight basic privacy principles without compromising the free flow of information.
Some may ask whether it’s even possible to balance the two.
Enter the Big Data Protection Project (BDPP): an Open University study on organizations’ ability to leverage Big Data while complying with EU data protection principles. The study represents a chance for you to contribute to, and learn about, the debate on the reform of the EU Data Protection Directive. It is open to staff with interests in data management or use, from all types of organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, with interests in Europe.
Join us by visiting the study’s page on the Open University website. Participants will receive a report with all the results. The BDP is a scientific project—no commercial organization is involved—with implications relevant to both policy-makers and industry representatives..
What kind of legislation do we need to create that positive system of incentive for organizations to innovate in the privacy field?
There is no easy answer.
That’s why we need to undertake empirical research into actual information management practices to understand the effects of regulation on people and organizations. Legal instruments conceived with the best intentions can be ineffective or detrimental in practice. However, other factors can also intervene and motivate business players to develop procedures and solutions which go far beyond compliance. Good legislation should complement market forces in bringing values and welfare to both consumers and organizations.
Is European data protection law keeping its promise of protecting users’ information privacy while contributing to the flourishing of the digital economy or not? Will the proposed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) be able to achieve this goal? What would you suggest to do to motivate organizations to invest in information security and take information privacy seriously?
Let’s consider for a second some basic ideas such as the eight fundamental data protection principles: notice, consent, purpose specification and limitation, data quality, respect of data subjects’ rights, information security and accountability. Many of these ideas are present in the EU 1995 Data Protection Directive, the U.S. Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) andthe 1980 OECD Guidelines. The fundamental question now is, should all these ideas be brought into the future, as suggested in the proposed new GDPR, orshould we reconsider our approach and revise some of them, as recommended in the 21st century version of the 1980 OECD Guidelines?
As you may know, notice and consent are often taken as examples of how very good intentions can be transformed into actions of limited importance. Rather than increase people’s awareness of the growing data economy, notice and consent have produced a tick-box tendency accompanied by long and unintelligible privacy policies. Besides, consent is rarely freely granted. Individuals give their consent in exchange for some product or service or as part of a job relationship. The imbalance between the two goods traded—think about how youngsters perceive not having access to some social media as a form of social exclusion—and the lack of feasible alternatives often make an instrument, such as the current use made of consent, meaningless.
On the other hand, a principle such as data quality, which has received very limited attention, could offer opportunities to policy-makers and businesses to reopen the debate on users’ control of their personal data. Having updated, accurate data is something very valuable for organizations. Data quality is also key to the success of many business models. New partnerships between users and organizations could be envisioned under this principle.
Finally, data collection limitation and purpose specification could be other examples of the divide between theory and practice: The tendency we see is that people and businesses want to share, merge and reuse data over time and to do new and unexpected things. Of course, we all want to avoid function creep and prevent any detrimental use of our personal data. We probably need new, stronger mechanisms to ensure data are used for good purposes.
Digital data have become economic assets these days. We need good legislation to stop the black market for personal data and open the debate on how each of us wants to contribute to, and benefit from, the data economy.”

Developing an open government plan in the open

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Tim Hughes at OGP: “New laws, standards, policies, processes and technologies are critical for opening up government, but arguably just as (if not more) important are new cultures, behaviours and ways of working within government and civil society.
The development of an OGP National Action Plan, therefore, presents a twofold opportunity for opening up government: On the one hand it should be used to deliver a set of robust and ambitious commitments to greater transparency, participation and accountability. But just as importantly, the process of developing a NAP should also be used to model new forms of open and collaborative working within government and civil society. These two purposes of a NAP should be mutually reinforcing. An open and collaborative process can – as was the case in the UK – help to deliver a more robust and ambitious action plan, which in turn can demonstrate the efficacy of working in the open.
You could even go one step further to say that the development of an National Action Plan should present an (almost) “ideal” vision of what open government in a country could look like. If governments aren’t being open as they’re developing an open government action plan, then there’s arguably little hope that they’ll be open elsewhere.
As coordinators of the UK OGP civil society network, this was on our mind at the beginning and throughout the development of the UK’s 2013-15 National Action Plan. Crucially, it was also on the minds of our counterparts in the UK Government. From the start, therefore, the process was developed with the intention that it should itself model the principles of open government. Members of the UK OGP civil society network met with policy officials from the UK Government on a regular basis to scope out and develop the action plan, and we published regular updates of our discussions and progress for others to follow and engage with. The process wasn’t without its challenges – and there’s still much more we can do to open it up further in the future – but it was successful in moving far beyond the typical model of government deciding, announcing and defending its intentions and in delivering an action plan with some strong and ambitious commitments.
One of the benefits of working in an open and collaborative way is that it enabled us to conduct and publish a full – warts and all – review of what went well and what didn’t. So, consider this is an invitation to delve into our successes and failures, a challenge to do it better and a request to help us to do so too. Head over to the UK OGP civil society network blog to read about what we did, and tell us what you think: http://www.opengovernment.org.uk/national-action-plan/story-of-the-uk-national-action-plan-2013-15/”

The newsonomics of measuring the real impact of news

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ken Doctor at Nieman Journalism Lab: “Hello there! It’s me, your friendly neighborhood Tweet Button. What if you could tap me and unlock a brand new source of funding for startup news sources of all kinds? What if, even better, you the reader could tap that money loose with a single click?
That’s the delightfully simple conceit behind a little widget, Impaq.me, you may have seen popping up as you traverse the news web. It’s social. It’s viral. It uses OPM (Other People’s Money) — and maybe a little bit of your own. It makes a new case to funders and maybe commercial sponsors. And it spits out metrics around the clock. It aims to be a convergence widget, acting on that now-aging idea that our attention is as important as our wallet. Consider it a new digital Swiss Army knife for the attention economy. TWEET
It’s impossible to tell how much of an impact Impaq.me may have. It’s still in its second round of testing at six of the U.S.’s most successful independent nonprofit startups — MinnPost, Center for Investigative Reporting, The Texas Tribune, Voice of San Diego, ProPublica, and the Center for Public Integrity — but as in all things digital, timing is everything. And that timing seems right.
First, let’s consider that spate of new news sites that have sprouted with the winter rains — Bill Keller’s and Neil Barsky’s Marshall Project being only the latest. It’s been quite a run — from Ezra Klein’s Project X to Pierre Omidyar’s First Look (and just launched The Intercept) to the reimagining of FiveThirtyEight. While they encompass a broad range of business models and goals (“The newsonomics of why everyone seems to be starting a news site”), they all need two things: money and engagement. Or, maybe better ordered, engagement and money. The dance between the two is still in the early stages of Internet choreography. Get the sequences right and you win.
Second, and related, is the big question of “social” and how our sharing of news is changing the old publishing dynamic of editors deciding what we’re going to read. Just this week, two pieces here at the Lab — one on Upworthy’s influence and one on the social/search tango — highlighted the still-being-understood role of social in our news-reading lives.
Third, funders of news sites, especially Knight and other lead foundations, are looking for harder evidence of the value generated by their early grants. Millions have been poured into creating new news sites. Now they’re asking: What has our funding really done? Within that big question, Impaq.me is only one of several new attempts to demonstrably measure real impact in new ways. We’ll take a brief look at those impact initiatives below….
If Impaq.me is all about impact and money, then it’s got good company. There are at least two other noteworthy impact-measuring projects going on.

  • The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Impact Tracker effort impact-tracking initiative launched last fall. The big idea: getting beyond the traditional metrics like unique visitors and pageviews to track the value of investigative and enterprise work. To that end, CIR has hired Lindsay Green-Barber, a CUNY-trained social scientist, and given her a perhaps first-ever title: media impact analyst.We can see the fruits of the work around CIR’s impressive Returning Home to Battle veterans series. On that series, CIR is tracking such impacts as change and rise in the public discourse around veterans’ issues and related allocation of government resources. The notion of good journalism intended to shine a light in dark places has been embedded in the CIR DNA for a long time; this new effort is intended to provide data — and words — to describe progress toward solutions. CIR is working with The Seattle Times on the impact of that paper’s education reporting, and CIR may soon look at more partnerships as well. Related: CIR is holding two “Dissection” events in New York and Washington in April, bringing together journalists, funders, and social scientists to widen the media impact movement.
  • Chalkbeat, a growing national education news site, too, is moving on impact analysis. It’s called MORI (Measures of our Reporting’s Influence), and it’s a WordPress plugin. Says Chalkbeat cofounder Elizabeth Green: “We built MORI to solve for a problem that I guess you could call ‘impact loss.’ We knew that our stories were having all kinds of impacts, but we had no way of keeping track of these impacts or making sense of them. That meant that we couldn’t easily compile what we had done in the last year to share with the outside world (board, donors, foundations, readers, our moms) but also — just as important — we couldn’t look back on what we’d done and learn from it.”Sound familiar?
    After much inquiry, Chalkbeat settled on technology. “Within each story’s back end,” Green said, “we can enter inputs — qualitative data about the type of story, topic, and target audience — as well as outcomes — impacts on policy and practice (what we call ‘informed action’) as well as impacts on what we call ‘civic deliberation.’”

Crowdsourcing and regulatory reviews: A new way of challenging red tape in British government?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Martin Lodge and Kai Wegrich in Regulation and Governance: “Much has been said about the appeal of digital government devices to enhance consultation on rulemaking. This paper explores the most ambitious attempt by the UK central government so far to draw on “crowdsourcing” to consult and act on regulatory reform, the “Red Tape Challenge.” We find that the results of this exercise do not represent any major change to traditional challenges to consultation processes. Instead, we suggest that the extensive institutional arrangements for crowdsourcing were hardly significant in informing actual policy responses: neither the tone of the crowdsourced comments, the direction of the majority views, nor specific comments were seen to matter. Instead, it was processes within the executive that shaped the overall governmental responses to this initiative. The findings, therefore, provoke wider debates about the use of social media in rulemaking and consultation exercises.”

Open Data (Updated and Expanded)

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. We start our series with a focus on Open Data. To suggest additional readings on this or any other topic, please email biblio@thegovlab.org.

Data and its uses for GovernanceOpen data refers to data that is publicly available for anyone to use and which is licensed in a way that allows for its re-use. The common requirement that open data be machine-readable not only means that data is distributed via the Internet in a digitized form, but can also be processed by computers through automation, ensuring both wide dissemination and ease of re-use. Much of the focus of the open data advocacy community is on government data and government-supported research data. For example, in May 2013, the US Open Data Policy defined open data as publicly available data structured in a way that enables the data to be fully discoverable and usable by end users, and consistent with a number of principles focused on availability, accessibility and reusability.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Fox, Mark S. “City Data: Big, Open and Linked.” Working Paper, Enterprise Integration Laboratory (2013). http://bit.ly/1bFr7oL.

  • This paper examines concepts that underlie Big City Data using data from multiple cities as examples. It begins by explaining the concepts of Open, Unified, Linked, and Grounded data, which are central to the Semantic Web. Fox then explore Big Data as an extension of Data Analytics, and provide case examples of good data analytics in cities.
  • Fox concludes that we can develop the tools that will enable anyone to analyze data, both big and small, by adopting the principles of the Semantic Web:
    • Data being openly available over the internet,
    • Data being unifiable using common vocabularies,
    • Data being linkable using International Resource Identifiers,
    • Data being accessible using a common data structure, namely triples,
    • Data being semantically grounded using Ontologies.

Foulonneau, Muriel, Sébastien Martin, and Slim Turki. “How Open Data Are Turned into Services?” In Exploring Services Science, edited by Mehdi Snene and Michel Leonard, 31–39. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing 169. Springer International Publishing, 2014. http://bit.ly/1fltUmR.

  • In this chapter, the authors argue that, considering the important role the development of new services plays as a motivation for open data policies, the impact of new services created through open data should play a more central role in evaluating the success of open data initiatives.
  • Foulonneau, Martin and Turki argue that the following metrics should be considered when evaluating the success of open data initiatives: “the usage, audience, and uniqueness of the services, according to the changes it has entailed in the public institutions that have open their data…the business opportunity it has created, the citizen perception of the city…the modification to particular markets it has entailed…the sustainability of the services created, or even the new dialog created with citizens.”

Goldstein, Brett, and Lauren Dyson. Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation. 1 edition. (Code for America Press: 2013). http://bit.ly/15OAxgF

  • This “cross-disciplinary survey of the open data landscape” features stories from practitioners in the open data space — including Michael Flowers, Brett Goldstein, Emer Colmeman and many others — discussing what they’ve accomplished with open civic data. The book “seeks to move beyond the rhetoric of transparency for transparency’s sake and towards action and problem solving.”
  • The book’s editors seek to accomplish the following objectives:
    • Help local governments learn how to start an open data program
    • Spark discussion on where open data will go next
    • Help community members outside of government better engage with the process of governance
    • Lend a voice to many aspects of the open data community.
  • The book is broken into five sections: Opening Government Data, Building on Open Data, Understanding Open Data, Driving Decisions with Data and Looking Ahead.

Granickas, Karolis. “Understanding the Impact of Releasing and Re-using Open Government Data.” European Public Sector Information Platform, ePSIplatform Topic Report No. 2013/08, (2013). http://bit.ly/GU0Nx4.

  • This paper examines the impact of open government data by exploring the latest research in the field, with an eye toward enabling  an environment for open data, as well as identifying the benefits of open government data and its political, social, and economic impacts.
  • Granickas concludes that to maximize the benefits of open government data: a) further research is required that structure and measure potential benefits of open government data; b) “government should pay more attention to creating feedback mechanisms between policy implementers, data providers and data-re-users”; c) “finding a balance between demand and supply requires mechanisms of shaping demand from data re-users and also demonstration of data inventory that governments possess”; and lastly, d) “open data policies require regular monitoring.”

Gurin, Joel. Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014). http://amzn.to/1flubWR.

  • In this book, GovLab Senior Advisor and Open Data 500 director Joel Gurin explores the broad realized and potential benefit of Open Data, and how, “unlike Big Data, Open Data is transparent, accessible, and reusable in ways that give it the power to transform business, government, and society.”
  • The book provides “an essential guide to understanding all kinds of open databases – business, government, science, technology, retail, social media, and more – and using those resources to your best advantage.”
  • In particular, Gurin discusses a number of applications of Open Data with very real potential benefits:
    • “Hot Startups: turn government data into profitable ventures;
    • Savvy Marketing: understanding how reputational data drives your brand;
    • Data-Driven Investing: apply new tools for business analysis;
    • Consumer Information: connect with your customers using smart disclosure;
    • Green Business: use data to bet on sustainable companies;
    • Fast R&D: turn the online world into your research lab;
    • New Opportunities: explore open fields for new businesses.”

Jetzek, Thorhildur, Michel Avital, and Niels Bjørn-Andersen. “Generating Value from Open Government Data.” Thirty Fourth International Conference on Information Systems, 5. General IS Topics 2013. http://bit.ly/1gCbQqL.

  • In this paper, the authors “developed a conceptual model portraying how data as a resource can be transformed to value.”
  • Jetzek, Avital and Bjørn-Andersen propose a conceptual model featuring four Enabling Factors (openness, resource governance, capabilities and technical connectivity) acting on four Value Generating Mechanisms (efficiency, innovation, transparency and participation) leading to the impacts of Economic and Social Value.
  • The authors argue that their research supports that “all four of the identified mechanisms positively influence value, reflected in the level of education, health and wellbeing, as well as the monetary value of GDP and environmental factors.”

Kassen, Maxat. “A promising phenomenon of open data: A case study of the Chicago open data project.” Government Information Quarterly (2013). http://bit.ly/1ewIZnk.

  • This paper uses the Chicago open data project to explore the “empowering potential of an open data phenomenon at the local level as a platform useful for promotion of civic engagement projects and provide a framework for future research and hypothesis testing.”
  • Kassen argues that “open data-driven projects offer a new platform for proactive civic engagement” wherein governments can harness “the collective wisdom of the local communities, their knowledge and visions of the local challenges, governments could react and meet citizens’ needs in a more productive and cost-efficient manner.”
  • The paper highlights the need for independent IT developers to network in order for this trend to continue, as well as the importance of the private sector in “overall diffusion of the open data concept.”

Keen, Justin, Radu Calinescu, Richard Paige, John Rooksby. “Big data + politics = open data: The case of health care data in England.” Policy and Internet 5 (2), (2013): 228–243. http://bit.ly/1i231WS.

  • This paper examines the assumptions regarding open datasets, technological infrastructure and access, using healthcare systems as a case study.
  • The authors specifically address two assumptions surrounding enthusiasm about Big Data in healthcare: the assumption that healthcare datasets and technological infrastructure are up to task, and the assumption of access to this data from outside the healthcare system.
  • By using the National Health Service in England as an example, the authors identify data, technology, and information governance challenges. They argue that “public acceptability of third party access to detailed health care datasets is, at best, unclear,” and that the prospects of Open Data depend on Open Data policies, which are inherently political, and the government’s assertion of property rights over large datasets. Thus, they argue that the “success or failure of Open Data in the NHS may turn on the question of trust in institutions.”

Kulk, Stefan and Bastiaan Van Loenen. “Brave New Open Data World?” International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, May 14, 2012. http://bit.ly/15OAUYR.

  • This paper examines the evolving tension between the open data movement and the European Union’s privacy regulations, especially the Data Protection Directive.
  • The authors argue, “Technological developments and the increasing amount of publicly available data are…blurring the lines between non-personal and personal data. Open data may not seem to be personal data on first glance especially when it is anonymised or aggregated. However, it may become personal by combining it with other publicly available data or when it is de-anonymised.”

Kundra, Vivek. “Digital Fuel of the 21st Century: Innovation through Open Data and the Network Effect.” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard College: Discussion Paper Series, January 2012, http://hvrd.me/1fIwsjR.

  • In this paper, Vivek Kundra, the first Chief Information Officer of the United States, explores the growing impact of open data, and argues that, “In the information economy, data is power and we face a choice between democratizing it and holding on to it for an asymmetrical advantage.”
  • Kundra offers four specific recommendations to maximize the impact of open data: Citizens and NGOs must demand open data in order to fight government corruption, improve accountability and government services; Governments must enact legislation to change the default setting of government to open, transparent and participatory; The press must harness the power of the network effect through strategic partnerships and crowdsourcing to cut costs and provide better insights; and Venture capitalists should invest in startups focused on building companies based on public sector data.

Noveck, Beth Simone and Daniel L. Goroff. “Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data.” The Aspen Institute Philanthropy & Social Innovation Publication Number 13-004. 2013. http://bit.ly/WDxd7p.

  • This report is focused on “obtaining better, more usable data about the nonprofit sector,” which encompasses, as of 2010, “1.5 million tax-exempt organizations in the United States with $1.51 trillion in revenues.”
  • Toward that goal, the authors propose liberating data from the Form 990, an Internal Revenue Service form that “gathers and publishes a large amount of information about tax-exempt organizations,” including information related to “governance, investments, and other factors not directly related to an organization’s tax calculations or qualifications for tax exemption.”
  • The authors recommend a two-track strategy: “Pursuing the longer-term goal of legislation that would mandate electronic filing to create open 990 data, and pursuing a shorter-term strategy of developing a third party platform that can demonstrate benefits more immediately.”

Robinson, David G., Harlan Yu, William P. Zeller, and Edward W. Felten, “Government Data and the Invisible Hand.” Yale Journal of Law & Technology 11 (2009), http://bit.ly/1c2aDLr.

  • This paper proposes a new approach to online government data that “leverages both the American tradition of entrepreneurial self-reliance and the remarkable low-cost flexibility of contemporary digital technology.”
  • “In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties’ use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that ‘exposes’ the underlying data.”
Ubaldi, Barbara. “Open Government Data: Towards Empirical Analysis of Open Government Data Initiatives.” OECD Working Papers on Public Governance. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, May 27, 2013. http://bit.ly/15OB6qP.

  • This working paper from the OECD seeks to provide an all-encompassing look at the principles, concepts and criteria framing open government data (OGD) initiatives.
  • Ubaldi also analyzes a variety of challenges to implementing OGD initiatives, including policy, technical, economic and financial, organizational, cultural and legal impediments.
  • The paper also proposes a methodological framework for evaluating OGD Initiatives in OECD countries, with the intention of eventually “developing a common set of metrics to consistently assess impact and value creation within and across countries.”

Worthy, Ben. “David Cameron’s Transparency Revolution? The Impact of Open Data in the UK.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, November 29, 2013. http://bit.ly/NIrN6y.

  • In this article, Worthy “examines the impact of the UK Government’s Transparency agenda, focusing on the publication of spending data at local government level. It measures the democratic impact in terms of creating transparency and accountability, public participation and everyday information.”
  • Worthy’s findings, based on surveys of local authorities, interviews and FOI requests, are disappointing. He finds that:
    • Open spending data has led to some government accountability, but largely from those already monitoring government, not regular citizens.
    • Open Data has not led to increased participation, “as it lacks the narrative or accountability instruments to fully bring such effects.”
    • It has also not “created a new stream of information to underpin citizen choice, though new innovations offer this possibility. The evidence points to third party innovations as the key.
  • Despite these initial findings, “Interviewees pointed out that Open Data holds tremendous opportunities for policy-making. Joined up data could significantly alter how policy is made and resources targeted. From small scale issues e.g. saving money through prescriptions to targeting homelessness or health resources, it can have a transformative impact. “

Zuiderwijk, Anneke, Marijn Janssen, Sunil Choenni, Ronald Meijer and Roexsana Sheikh Alibaks. “Socio-technical Impediments of Open Data.” Electronic Journal of e-Government 10, no. 2 (2012). http://bit.ly/17yf4pM.

  • This paper to seeks to identify the socio-technical impediments to open data impact based on a review of the open data literature, as well as workshops and interviews.
  • The authors discovered 118 impediments across ten categories: 1) availability and access; 2) find-ability; 3) usability; 4) understandability; 5) quality; 6) linking and combining data; 7) comparability and compatibility; 8) metadata; 9) interaction with the data provider; and 10) opening and uploading.

Zuiderwijk, Anneke and Marijn Janssen. “Open Data Policies, Their Implementation and Impact: A Framework for Comparison.” Government Information Quarterly 31, no. 1 (January 2014): 17–29. http://bit.ly/1bQVmYT.

  • In this article, Zuiderwijk and Janssen argue that “currently there is a multiplicity of open data policies at various levels of government, whereas very little systematic and structured research [being] done on the issues that are covered by open data policies, their intent and actual impact.”
  • With this evaluation deficit in mind, the authors propose a new framework for comparing open data policies at different government levels using the following elements for comparison:
    • Policy environment and context, such as level of government organization and policy objectives;
    • Policy content (input), such as types of data not publicized and technical standards;
    • Performance indicators (output), such as benefits and risks of publicized data; and
    • Public values (impact).

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Did we miss anything? Please submit reading recommendations to biblio@thegovlab.org or in the comments below.

Interactive map helps patients find the fastest emergency healthcare

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Waiting is an activity that most people receiving healthcare have acutely experienced, whether it’s being put on a list for treatment or simply passing time before a GP visit. Cutting waiting time is something that can drastically improve patients’ experience, and in the past we’ve seen ideas such as HealthSpot use telemedicine to deliver healthcare advice remotely. For accidents and emergencies that require more hands-on attention however, a new platform called ER Wait Watcher enables users to determine which nearby hospital is likely to see them first.
Developed by journalism nonprofit ProPublica, the tool simply asks for those who have had an accident or emergency to enter in their zip code or street name. Using a number of factors — including average reported wait times for each hospital, how far away each hospital is and live Google traffic reports — it then lists which institution is likely to see them first. Users can see how long they can expect to wait on average before they will be seen, sent home, receive pain medication for a broken bone or transferred to their room for more serious injuries. The site works on the premise that the nearest hospital isn’t necessarily the one that will get patients the treatment they need most speedily.
The site does advise patients to call up their hospital for a more accurate estimate, and users currently need to navigate to the website to use it. Are there ways to make this kind of platform more accurate or user-friendly? Website: www.propublica.org”

Boston's Building a Synergy Between City Hall & Startups

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at BostInno: “Boston’s local government and startup scene want to do more than peacefully co-exist. They want to co-create. The people perhaps credited for contributing the most buzz to this trend are those behind relatively new parking ticket app TicketZen. Cort Johnson, along with a few others from Terrible Labs, a Web and mobile app design consultancy in Chinatown, came up with the idea for the app after spotting a tweet from one of Boston’s trademark entrepreneurs. A few months back, ex-KAYAK CTO (and Blade co-founder) Paul English sent out a 140-character message calling for an easy, instantaneous payment solution for parking tickets, Johnson told BostInno.

The idea was that in the time it takes for Boston’s enforcement office to process a parking ticket, its recipient has already forgotten his or her frustration or misplaced the bright orange slip, thus creating a situation in which both parties lose: the local government’s collection process is held up and the recipient is forced to pay a larger fine for the delay.

With the problem posed and the spark lit, the Terrible Labs team took to building TicketZen, an app which allows people to scan their tickets and immediately send validation to City Hall to kick off the process.

“When we first came up with the prototype, [City Hall was] really excited and worked to get it launched in Boston first,” said Johnson. “But we have built a bunch of integrations for major cities where most of the parking tickets are issued, which will launch early this year.”

But in order to even get the app up-and-running, Terrible Labs needed to work with some local government representatives – namely, Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics….

Since its inception in 2010, the City Hall off-shoot has worked with all kinds of Boston citizens to create civic-facing innovations that would be helpful to the city at large.

For example, a group of mothers with children at Boston Public Schools approached New Urban Mechanics to create an app that shares when the school bus will arrive, similar to that of the MBTA’s, which shows upcoming train times. The nonprofit then arranged a partnership with Vermonster LLC, a software application development firm in Downtown Boston to create the Where’s My School Bus app.

“There’s a whole host of different backgrounds, from undergrad students to parents, who would never consider themselves to be entrepreneurs or innovators originally … There are just so many talented, driven and motivated folks that would likely have a similar interest in doing work in the civic space. The challenge is to scale that beyond what’s currently out there,” shared Osgood. “We’re asking, ‘How can City Hall do a better job to support innovators?’”

Of course, District Hall was created for this very purpose – supporting creatives and entrepreneurs by providing them a perpetually open door and an event space. Additionally, there have been a number of events geared toward civic innovation within the past few months targeting both entrepreneurs and government.

The former mayor Thomas Menino led the charge in opening the Office of Business Development, which features a sleek new website and focuses on providing entrepreneurs and existing businesses with access to financial and technical resources. Further, a number of organizations collaborated in early December 2013 to host a free-to-register event dubbed MassDOT Visualizing Transportation Hackathon to help generate ideas for improving public transit from the next generation’s entrepreneurs; just this month, the Venture Café and the Cambridge Innovation Center hosted Innovation and the City, a conference uniting leading architects, urban planners, educators and business leaders from different cities around the U.S. to speak to the changing landscape of civic development.”

Big Data, Privacy, and the Public Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Forthcoming book and website by Julia Lane, Victoria Stodden, Stefan Bender, and Helen Nissenbaum (editors): “The overarching goal of the book is to identify ways in which vast new sets of data on human beings can be collected, integrated, and analysed to improve evidence based decision making while protecting confidentiality. …
Massive amounts of new data on human beings can now be accessed and analyzed.  Much has been made of the many uses of such data for pragmatic purposes, including selling goods and services, winning political campaigns, and identifying possible terrorists. Yet “big data” can also be harnessed to serve the public good: scientists can use new forms of data to do research that improves the lives of human beings, federal, state and local governments can use data to improve services and reduce taxpayer costs and public organizations can use information to advocate for public causes.
Much has also been made of the privacy and confidentiality issues associated with access. A survey of statisticians at the 2013 Joint Statistical Meeting found that the majority thought consumers should worry about privacy issues, and that an ethical framework should be in place to guide data scientists.  Yet there are many unanswered questions. What are the ethical and legal requirements for scientists and government officials seeking to serve the public good without harming individual citizens?  What are the rules of engagement?  What are the best ways to provide access while protecting confidentiality? Are there reasonable mechanisms to compensate citizens for privacy loss?
The goal of this book is to answer some of these questions.  The book’s authors paint an intellectual landscape that includes the legal, economic and statistical context necessary to frame the many privacy issues, including the value to the public of data access.   The authors also identify core practical approaches that use new technologies to simultaneously maximize the utility of data access while minimizing information risk. As is appropriate for such a new and evolving field, each chapter also identifies important questions that require future research.
The work in this book is also intended to be accessible to an audience broader than the academy. In addition to informing the public, we hope that the book will be useful to people trying to provide data access but protect confidentiality in the roles as data custodians for federal, state and local agencies, or decision makers on institutional review boards.”