New book edited by Martin Lodge and Kai Wegrich: “The early 21st century has presented considerable challenges to the problem-solving capacity of the contemporary state in the industrialised world. Among the many uncertainties, anxieties and tensions, it is, however, the cumulative challenge of fiscal austerity, demographic developments, and climate change that presents the key test for contemporary states. Debates abound regarding the state’s ability to address these and other problems given increasingly dispersed forms of governing and institutional vulnerabilities created by politico-administrative and economic decision-making structures. This volume advances these debates, first, by moving towards a cross-sectoral perspective that takes into account the cumulative nature of the contemporary challenge to governance focusing on the key governance areas of infrastructure, sustainability, social welfare, and social integration; second, by considering innovations that have sought to add problem-solving capacity; and third, by exploring the kind of administrative capacities (delivery, regulatory, coordination, and analytical) required to encourage and sustain innovative problem-solving. This edition introduces a framework for understanding the four administrative capacities that are central to any attempt at problem-solving and how they enable the policy instruments of the state to have their intended effect. It also features chapters that focus on the way in which these capacities have become stretched and how they have been adjusted, given the changing conditions; the way in which different states have addressed particular governance challenges, with particular attention paid to innovation at the level of policy instrument and the required administrative capacities; and, finally, types of governance capacities that lie outside the boundaries of the state.”
Innovation in Philanthropy is not a Hack-a-thon
Sam McAfee in Medium: “…Antiquated funding models and lack of a rapid data-driven evaluation process aren’t the only issues though. Most of the big ideas in the technology-for-social-impact space are focused either on incremental improvements to existing service models, maybe leveraging online services or mobile applications to improve cost-efficiency marginally. Or they solve only a very narrow niche problem for a small audience, often applying a technology that was already in development, and just happened to find a solution in the field.
Innovation Requires Disruption
When you look at innovation in the commercial world, like the Ubers and AirBnBs of the world, what you see is a clear and substantive break from previous modes of thinking about transportation and accommodation. And it’s not the technology itself that is all that impressive. There is nothing ground-breaking technically under the hood of either of those products that wasn’t already lying around for a decade. What makes them different is that they created business models that stepped completely out of the existing taxi and hotel verticals, and simply used technology to leverage existing frustrations with those antiquated models and harness latent demands, to produce a new, vibrant commercial ecosystem.
Now, let’s imagine the same framework in the social sector, where there are equivalent long-standing traditional modes of providing resources. To find new ways of meeting human needs that disrupt those models requires both safe-to-fail experimentation and rapid feedback and iteration in the field, with clear success criteria. Such rapid development can only be accomplished by a sharp, nimble and multifaceted team of thinkers and doers who are passionate about the problem, yes, but also empowered and enabled to break a few institutional eggs on the way to the creative omelet.
Agile and Lean are Proven Methods
It turns out that there are proven working models for cultivating and fostering this kind of innovative thinking and experimentation. As I mentioned above, agile and lean are probably the single greatest contribution to the world by the tech sector, far more impactful than any particular technology produced by it. Small, cross-functional teams working on tight, iterative timeframes, using an iterative data-informed methodology, can create new and disruptive solutions to big, difficult problems. They are able to do this precisely because they are unhindered by the hulking bureaucratic structures of the old guard. This is precisely why so many Fortune 500 companies are experimenting with innovation and R&D laboratories. Because they know their existing staff, structures, and processes cannot produce innovation within those constraints. Only the small, nimble teams can do it, and they can only do it if they are kept separate from, protected from even, the traditional production systems of the previous product cycle.
Yet big philanthropy still have barely experimented with this model, only trying it in a few isolated instances. Here at Neo, for example, we are working on a project for teachers funded by a forward-thinking foundation. What our client is trying to disrupt is no less than the entire US education system, and with goals and measurements developed by teachers for teachers, not by Silicon Valley hotshots who have no clue how to fix education.
Small, cross-functional teams working on tight, iterative timeframes, using an iterative data-informed methodology, can create new and disruptive solutions to big, difficult problems.
To start with, the project was funded in iterations of six-weeks at a time, each with a distinct and measurable goal. We built a small cross-functional team to tackle some of the tougher issues faced by teachers trying to raise the level of excellence in their classrooms. The team was empowered to talk directly to teachers, and incorporate their feedback into new versions of the project, released on almost a daily basis. We have iterated the design more than sixteen times in less then four months, and it’s starting to really take shape.
We have no idea whether this particular project will be successful in the long run. But what we do know is that the client and their funder have had the courage to step out of the traditional project funding models and apply agile and lean thinking to a very tough problem. And we’re proud to be invited along for the ride.
The vast majority of the social sector is still trying to tackle social problems with program and funding models that were pioneered early in the last century. Agile and lean methods hold the key to finally breaking the mold of the old, traditional model of resourcing social change initiatives. The philanthropic community should be interested in the agile and lean methods produced by the technology sector, not the money produced by it, and start reorganizing project teams and resource allocation strategies and timelines in line this proven innovation model.
Only then we will be in a position to really innovate for social change.”
HopeLab
Press Release from the Drucker Institute: “Today, we announced that HopeLab is the winner of the 2014 Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation.
The judges recognized HopeLab for its pioneering work in creating products that help people tap into their innate resilience and respond to life’s adversity in healthy ways….
The judges noted that they were particularly impressed with the way that HopeLab met a key criteria for the award—showing how its programming makes a real difference in the lives of the people it serves.
For example, its Re-Mission video games for adolescents and young adults with cancer address the problem of poor treatment adherence by putting players inside the body to battle the disease with weapons like chemotherapy, antibiotics and the body’s natural defenses. Working with hospitals and clinics, HopeLab has distributed more than 210,000 copies of the game in 81 countries. And research published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that playing Re-Mission significantly improved key behavioral and psychological factors associated with successful cancer treatment. In fact, in the largest randomized controlled study of a video-game intervention ever conducted, participants who were given Re-Mission took their chemotherapy and antibiotics more consistently, showed faster acquisition of cancer-related knowledge and increased their self-efficacy.
Building on the success of this founding project, HopeLab has since launched the Re-Mission 2 online games and mobile app, the Zamzee program to boost physical activity and combat sedentary behavior in children, and a number of other mobile apps and social technologies that support resilience and improve health….”
New Technology and the Prevention of Violence and Conflict
Report edited by Francesco Mancini for the International Peace Institute: “In an era of unprecedented interconnectivity, this report explores the ways in which new technologies can assist international actors, governments, and civil society organizations to more effectively prevent violence and conflict. It examines the contributions that cell phones, social media, crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, blogging, and big data analytics can make to short-term efforts to forestall crises and to long-term initiatives to address the root causes of violence.
Five case studies assess the use of such tools in a variety of regions (Africa, Asia, Latin America) experiencing different types of violence (criminal violence, election-related violence, armed conflict, short-term crisis) in different political contexts (restrictive and collaborative governments).
Drawing on lessons and insights from across the cases, the authors outline a how-to guide for leveraging new technology in conflict-prevention efforts:
1. Examine all tools.
2. Consider the context.
3. Do no harm.
4. Integrate local input.
5. Help information flow horizontally.
6. Establish consensus regarding data use.
7. Foster partnerships for better results.”
Big Talk about Big Data: Discourses of ‘Evidence’ and Data in British Civil Society
From the Digital Economy “Communities and Culture” Network: “The term ‘Big Data’ carries a great deal of currency in business and academic spheres. Data and their subsequent analysis are obviously not new. ‘Bigness’ in this context often refers to three characteristics that differentiate it from so-called ‘small’ data: volume, variety, and velocity. These three attributes of ‘bigness’, promising to open novel, macro-level perspectives on complex issues (Boyd and Crawford 2011), led enthusiasts like Chris Anderson to claim that ‘with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”. But is this actually the case? Critical voices like Manovich (2011) argue that data never exist in ‘raw’ forms but are rather influenced by humans who—whether intentionally or not—select and construct them in certain ways.
These debates about data are relevant to wider discussions about digital change in society because they point to a more general concern about the potential of all sizes of data to selectively reveal dimensions of social phenomena on which decisions or policies are based. Crucially, if data generation and analysis is not entirely neutral but rather carries assumptions about what is ‘worthwhile’ or ‘acceptable’ to measure in the first place, then it raises critical questions of whether preferences for certain types of research—particularly work conducted under the auspices of a Big Data ‘brand’—reflect coherent sets of values and worldviews. What assumptions underpin preferences for ‘evidence-based’ research based on data? What qualities does such a phrase signify or confer to research? Which ‘sizes’ of data qualify as ‘evidence’ in the first place, or, to play on Anderson’s words, what kinds of data are allowed to speak for themselves in the realms of policy, media, and advocacy?
Hosted at the ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS) and The Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, this project critically interrogates the values that inform demands by civil society organisations for research that is ‘data-driven’ or ‘evidence-based’. Specifically, it aims to document the extent to which perceived advantages of data ‘bigness’ (volume, variety, and velocity) influence these demands.
Read the report.“
Announcing New U.S. Open Government Commitments on the Third Anniversary of the Open Government Partnership
US White House Fact Sheet: “Three years ago, President Obama joined with the leaders of seven other nations to launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international partnership between governments and civil society to promote transparency, fight corruption, energize civic engagement, and leverage new technologies to open up governments worldwide. The United States and other founding countries pledged to transform the way that governments serve their citizens in the 21st century. Today, as heads of state of OGP participating countries gather at the UN General Assembly, this partnership has grown from 8 to 65 nations and hundreds of civil society organizations around the world. These countries are embracing the challenge by taking steps in partnership with civil society to increase the ability of citizens to engage their governments, access government data to fuel entrepreneurship and innovation, and promote accountability….
The United States is committed to continuing to lead by example in OGP. Since assuming office, President Obama has prioritized making government more open and accountable and has taken substantial steps to increase citizen participation, collaboration with civil society, and transparency in government. The United States will remain a global leader of international efforts to promote transparency, stem corruption and hold to account those who exploit the public’s trust for private gain. Yesterday, President Obama announced several steps the United States is taking to deepen our support for civil society globally.
Today, to mark the third anniversary of OGP, President Obama is announcing four new and expanded open government initiatives that will advance our efforts through the end of 2015.
1. Promote Open Education to Increase Awareness and Engagement
Open education is the open sharing of digital learning materials, tools, and practices that ensures free access to and legal adoption of learning resources. The United States is committed to open education and will:
- Raise open education awareness and identify new partnerships. The U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy will jointly host a workshop on challenges and opportunities in open education internationally with stakeholders from academia, industry, and government.
- Pilot new models for using open educational resources to support learning. The State Department will conduct three pilots overseas by December 2015 that use open educational resources to support learning in formal and informal learning contexts. The pilots’ results, including best practices, will be made publicly available for interested educators.
- Launch an online skills academy. The Department of Labor (DOL), with cooperation from the Department of Education, will award $25 million through competitive grants to launch an online skills academy in 2015 that will offer open online courses of study, using technology to create high-quality, free, or low-cost pathways to degrees, certificates, and other employer-recognized credentials.
2. Deliver Government Services More Effectively Through Information Technology
The Administration is committed to serving the American people more effectively and efficiently through smarter IT delivery. The newly launched U.S. Digital Service will work to remove barriers to digital service delivery and remake the experience that people and businesses have with their government. To improve delivery of Federal services, information, and benefits, the Administration will:
- Expand digital service delivery expertise in government. Throughout 2015, the Administration will continue recruiting top digital talent from the private and public sectors to expand services across the government. These individuals —who have expertise in technology, procurement, human resources, and financing —will serve as digital professionals in a number of capacities in the Federal government, including the new U.S. Digital Service and 18F digital delivery team within the U.S. General Services Administration, as well as within Federal agencies. These teams will take best practices from the public and private sectors and scale them across agencies with a focus on the customer experience.
- Build digital services in the open. The Administration will expand its efforts to build digital services in the open. This includes using open and transparent processes intended to better understand user needs, testing pilot digital projects, and designing and developing digital services at scale. In addition, building on the recently published Digital Services Playbook, the Administration will continue to openly publish best practices on collaborative websites that enable the public to suggest improvements.
- Adopt an open source software policy. Using and contributing back to open source software can fuel innovation, lower costs, and benefit the public. No later than December 31, 2015, the Administration will work through the Federal agencies to develop an open source software policy that, together with the Digital Services Playbook, will support improved access to custom software code developed for the Federal government.
3. Increase Transparency in Spending
The Administration has made an increasing amount of Federal spending data publicly available and searchable, allowing nationwide stakeholders to perform analysis of Federal spending. The Administration will build on these efforts by committing to:
- Improve USAspending.gov. In 2015, the Administration will launch a refreshed USAspending.gov website that will improve the site’s design and user experience, including better enabling users to explore the data using interactive maps and improving the search functionality and application programming interface.
- Improve accessibility and reusability of Federal financial data. In 2015, as part of implementation of the DATA Act,[2] the Administration will work to improve the accessibility and reusability of Federal financial data by issuing data element definition standards and standards for exchanging financial data. The Administration, through the Office of Management and Budget, will leverage industry data exchange standards to the extent practicable to maximize the sharing and utilization of Federal financial data.
- Explore options for visualization and publication of additional Federal financial data. The Administration, through the Treasury Department, will use small-scale pilots to help explore options for visualizing and publishing Federal financial data from across the government as required by the DATA Act.
- Continue to engage stakeholders. The Administration will continue to engage with a broad group of stakeholders to seek input on Federal financial transparency initiatives including DATA Act implementation, by hosting town hall meetings, conducting interactive workshops, and seeking input via open innovation collaboration tools.
4. Use Big Data to Support Greater Openness and Accountability
President Obama has recognized the growing importance of “big data” technologies for our economy and the advancement of public good in areas such as education, energy conservation, and healthcare. The Administration is taking action to ensure responsible uses of big data to promote greater openness and accountability across a range of areas and sectors. As part of the work it is doing in this area, the Administration has committed to:
- Enhance sharing of best practices on data privacy for state and local law enforcement. Federal agencies with expertise in law enforcement, privacy, and data practices will seek to enhance collaboration and information sharing about privacy best practices among state and local law enforcement agencies receiving Federal grants.
- Ensure privacy protection for big data analyses in health. Big data introduces new opportunities to advance medicine and science, improve health care, and support better public health. To ensure that individual privacy is protected while capitalizing on new technologies and data, the Administration, led by the Department of Health and Human Services, will: (1) consult with stakeholders to assess how Federal laws and regulations can best accommodate big data analyses that promise to advance medical science and reduce health care costs; and (2) develop recommendations for ways to promote and facilitate research through access to data while safeguarding patient privacy and autonomy.
- Expand technical expertise in government to stop discrimination. U.S. Government departments and agencies will work to expand their technical expertise to identify outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that may have a discriminatory impact on protected classes. …”
Fighting Inequality in the New Gilded Age
Book Review by K. Sabeel Rahman in the Boston Review:
White Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making
Nicholas Carnes
The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala
Daniel Altschuler and Javier Corrales
Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics
Josh Lerner
“In the years since the financial crisis, the realities of rapid economic recovery for some and stagnant wages for most has made increasingly clear that we live in a new Gilded Age: one marked by growing income inequality, decreasing social mobility, and concentrated corporate power. At the same time, we face an increasingly dysfunctional political system, apparently incapable of addressing these fundamental economic challenges.
This is not the first time the country has been caught in this confluence of economic inequality and political dysfunction. The first Gilded Age, in the late nineteenth century, experienced a similar moment of economic upheaval, instability, inequality, rising corporate power, and unresponsive government. These challenges triggered some of the most powerful reform movements in American history: the labor and antitrust movements, the Populist movement of agrarian reformers, and the Progressive movement of urban social and economic reformers. These reformers were not perfect—their record on racial and ethnic inequality is especially glaring—but they were enormously successful in creating new institutions and ideas that reshaped our economy and our politics. In particular, many of them were convinced that to address economic inequality, they had to first democratize politics, creating more robust forms of accountability and popular sovereignty against the influence of economic and political elites….
With his new book, White Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy-Making (2013), Nicholas Carnes argues that there is a third, even more important source of elite political influence: the dominance of upper class individuals in the composition of legislatures themselves. Despite the considerable external pressures of donors, constituent preferences, parties, and interest groups, legislators still possess significant discretion, and as a result their personal views about economic policy matter. Legislators of different class backgrounds, Carnes demonstrates, have distinct views on everything from labor to welfare programs and anti-poverty policies, to the very idea of government itself. On unemployment, labor rights, tax policy, and corporate protections, many of the central economic policy issues of our time involve a cleavage between wealthy and working class interests. The underrepresentation of the working class results in an underrepresentation of working class interests, exacerbating income inequality. “Whether our political system listens to one voice or another depends not just on who’s doing the talking or how loud they are,” writes Carnes; “it also depends on who’s doing the listening.”….
In The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala (2013), Daniel Altschuler and Javier Corrales focus similar questions to those animating Carnes’ account: What institutional contexts enable ordinary citizens—especially poorer ones—to expand their representation in decision-making? What expands their knowledge of issues, their political networks, and their willingness to participate more broadly to advocate for their interests? To gain traction on this question, they undertook the first large-scale study of participatory governance, examining the nation-wide community-managed schools program in Honduras and Guatemala. These programs operated in areas that conventionally might be considered inhospitable to participatory governance: poor, rural districts. These programs engaged parents by giving them management and administrative duties in the daily activities of the school. In both countries, the programs were established to both address pervasive disparities in educational attainment, and to improve the accountability of government officials in delivering basic services to the poor….
In Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics, Lerner takes a practitioners’ look at participatory governance. Lerner is the Executive Director of the Participatory Budgeting Project, a non-profit dedicated to adapting participatory budgeting systems and implementing them in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Boston. Where Altschuler and Corrales are primarily concerned with the macro-institutional contexts that make participatory governance systems work well, Lerner’s insights revolve around the micro-practices of how to make participation effective at the face-to-face level….
Our recent experience of economic inequality has fueled the rise of a new social science of economic inequality and oligarchy, most recently and famously captured in the debates over Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. But we also need a constructive account of what a more responsive and representative democratic politics looks like, and how to achieve it. Reformers coming out of the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century similarly located the roots of economic inequality in political inequality. The era of Standard Oil and J.P. Morgan (the man, before the firm), and of widening income inequality was also the era of dysfunctional machine politics and a conservative Supreme Court that stymied social reform. These challenges fueled reform movements that struggled to restore popular sovereignty and genuine democracy—proposing everything from antitrust restraints on corporate power, to the first campaign finance systems, to new procedures for popular elections of Senators, party primaries, and direct democratic referenda. It was during this period that state and federal governments experimented with antitrust laws, rate regulation, and labor regulation. Many of the economic ideas first developed out of this ferment came to fruition in the New Deal.
Today we see the echoes of this zeal in the debates around campaign finance reform and the problem of “too-big-to-fail” banks. But reviving genuine democratic equality to address economic inequality requires a broader view of potential democratizing reforms. Carnes reminds us that the identity of who governs matters as much for class and economic policy as for any other dimension of representation. But Altschuler, Corrales, and Lerner suggest as well the importance of looking outside legislatures. Governing involves more than writing statutes; it is solving disputes, administering social services, implementing directives at the local level. And these are spaces where the prospects for greater political power—especially on the part of economically marginalized groups—may even be greater than at national scale legislatures. The proliferation of open government efforts in the United States—from governmental transparencyto engaging citizens to report potholes—suggests a growing reform interest in creating alternative channels for participation and representation. But too often these efforts are more limited than their rhetoric, focusing more narrowly on making existing policies well known or efficient, rather than empowering participants to challenge and reshape them. These books underscore that genuine democratic reform requires actually empowering ordinary citizens to drive the business of governing.”
DrivenData
DrivenData Blog: “As we begin launching our first competitions, we thought it would be a good idea to lay out what exactly we’re trying to do and why….
At DrivenData, we want to bring cutting-edge practices in data science and crowdsourcing to some of the world’s biggest social challenges and the organizations taking them on. We host online challenges, usually lasting 2-3 months, where a global community of data scientists competes to come up with the best statistical model for difficult predictive problems that make a difference.
Just like every major corporation today, nonprofits and NGOs have more data than ever before. And just like those corporations, they are trying to figure out how to make the best use of their data. We work with mission-driven organizations to identify specific predictive questions that they care about answering and can use their data to tackle.
Then we host the online competitions, where experts from around the world vie to come up with the best solution. Some competitors are experienced data scientists in the private sector, analyzing corporate data by day, saving the world by night, and testing their mettle on complex questions of impact. Others are smart, sophisticated students and researchers looking to hone their skills on real-world datasets and real-world problems. Still more have extensive experience with social sector data and want to bring their expertise to bear on new, meaningful challenges – with immediate feedback on how well their solution performs.
Like any data competition platform, we want to harness the power of crowds combined with the increasing prevalence of large, relevant datasets. Unlike other data competition platforms, our primary goal is to create actual, measurable, lasting positive change in the world with our competitions. At the end of each challenge, we work with the sponsoring organization to integrate the winning solutions, giving them the tools to drive real improvements in their impact….
We are launching soon and we want you to join us!
If you want to get updates about our launch this fall with exciting, real competitions, please sign up for our mailing list here and follow us on Twitter: @drivendataorg.
If you are a data scientist, feel free to create an account and start playing with our first sandbox competitions.
If you are a nonprofit or public sector organization, and want to squeeze every drop of mission effectiveness out of your data, check out the info on our site and let us know! “
Goodbye, Organization Man
David Brooks in the New York Times:”…The result, right now, is unnecessary deaths from the Ebola virus in Africa. …. At root, this is a governance failure. The disease spreads fastest in places where the health care infrastructure is lacking or nonexistent. Liberia, for example, is being overrun while Ivory Coast has put in a series of policies to prevent an outbreak. The few doctors and nurses in the affected places have trouble acquiring the safety basics: gloves and body bags. More than 100, so far, have died fighting the outbreak.
But it’s not just a failure of governance in Africa. It’s a failure of governance around the world. I wonder if we are looking at the results of a cultural shift.
A few generations ago, people grew up in and were comfortable with big organizations — the army, corporations and agencies. They organized huge construction projects in the 1930s, gigantic industrial mobilization during World War II, highway construction and corporate growth during the 1950s. Institutional stewardship, the care and reform of big organizations, was more prestigious.
Now nobody wants to be an Organization Man. We like start-ups, disrupters and rebels. Creativity is honored more than the administrative execution. Post-Internet, many people assume that big problems can be solved by swarms of small, loosely networked nonprofits and social entrepreneurs. Big hierarchical organizations are dinosaurs.
The Ebola crisis is another example that shows that this is misguided. The big, stolid agencies — the health ministries, the infrastructure builders, the procurement agencies — are the bulwarks of the civil and global order. Public and nonprofit management, the stuff that gets derided as “overhead,” really matters. It’s as important to attract talent to health ministries as it is to spend money on specific medicines.
As recent books by Francis Fukuyama and Philip Howard have detailed, this is an era of general institutional decay. New, mobile institutions languish on the drawing broad, while old ones are not reformed and tended. Executives at public agencies are robbed of discretionary power. Their hands are bound by court judgments and regulations.
When the boring tasks of governance are not performed, infrastructures don’t get built. Then, when epidemics strike, people die.”
How Open Data Is Transforming City Life
Joel Gurin, The GovLab, at Techonomy: “Start a business. Manage your power use. Find cheap rents, or avoid crime-ridden neighborhoods. Cities and their citizens worldwide are discovering the power of “open data”—public data and information available from government and other sources that can help solve civic problems and create new business opportunities. By opening up data about transportation, education, health care, and more, municipal governments are helping app developers, civil society organizations, and others to find innovative ways to tackle urban problems. For any city that wants to promote entrepreneurship and economic development, open data can be a valuable new resource.
The urban open data movement has been growing for several years, with American cities including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington in the forefront. Now an increasing number of government officials, entrepreneurs, and civic hackers are recognizing the potential of open data. The results have included applications that can be used across many cities as well as those tailored to an individual city’s needs.
At first, the open data movement was driven by a commitment to transparency and accountability. City, state, and local governments have all released data about their finances and operations in the interest of good government and citizen participation. Now some tech companies are providing platforms to make this kind of city data more accessible, useful, and comparable. Companies like OpenGov and Govini make it possible for city managers and residents to examine finances, assess police department overtime, and monitor other factors that let them compare their city’s performance to neighboring municipalities.
Other new businesses are tapping city data to provide residents with useful, practical information. One of the best examples is NextBus, which uses metropolitan transportation data to tell commuters when to expect a bus along their route. Commuter apps like this have become common in cities in the U.S. and around the world. Another website, SpotCrime, collects, analyzes, and maps crime statistics to tell city dwellers which areas are safest or most dangerous and to offer crime alerts. And the Chicago-based Purple Binder helps people in need find city healthcare services. Many companies in the Open Data 500, the study of open data companies that I direct at the GovLab at NYU, use data from cities as well as other sources….
Some of the most ambitious uses of city data—with some of the greatest potential—focus on improving education. In Washington, the nonprofit Learn DC has made data about public schools available through a portal that state agencies, community organizations, and civic hackers can all use. They’re using it for collaborative research and action that, they say, has “empowered every DC parent to participate in shaping the future of the public education system.”…”