Business Models For Sustainable Research Data Repositories

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: “In 2007, the OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding were published and in the intervening period there has been an increasing emphasis on open science. At the same time, the quantity and breadth of research data has massively expanded. So called “Big Data” is no longer limited to areas such as particle physics and astronomy, but is ubiquitous across almost all fields of research. This is generating exciting new opportunities, but also challenges.

The promise of open research data is that they will not only accelerate scientific discovery and improve reproducibility, but they will also speed up innovation and improve citizen engagement with research. In short, they will benefit society as a whole. However, for the benefits of open science and open research data to be realised, these data need to be carefully and sustainably managed so that they can be understood and used by both present and future generations of researchers.

Data repositories – based in local and national research institutions and international bodies – are where the long-term stewardship of research data takes place and hence they are the foundation of open science. Yet good data stewardship is costly and research budgets are limited. So, the development of sustainable business models for research data repositories needs to be a high priority in all countries. Surprisingly, perhaps, little systematic analysis has been done on income streams, costs, value propositions, and business models for data repositories, and that is the gap this report attempts to address, from a science policy perspective…..

This project was designed to take up the challenge and to contribute to a better understanding of how research data repositories are funded, and what developments are occurring in their funding. Central questions included:

  • How are data repositories currently funded, and what are the key revenue sources?
  • What innovative revenue sources are available to data repositories?
  • How do revenue sources fit together into sustainable business models?
  • What incentives for, and means of, optimising costs are available?
  • What revenue sources and business models are most acceptable to key stakeholders?…(More)”

A New City O/S: The Power of Open, Collaborative, and Distributed Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen Goldsmith and Neil Kleiman: “At a time when trust is dropping precipitously and American government at the national level has fallen into a state of long-term, partisan-based gridlock, local government can still be effective—indeed more effective and even more responsive to the needs of its citizens. Based on decades of direct experience and years studying successful models around the world, the authors of this intriguing book propose a new operating system (O/S) for cities. Former mayor and Harvard professor Stephen Goldsmith and New York University professor Neil Kleiman suggest building on the giant leaps that have been made in technology, social engagement, and big data.

Calling their approach “distributed governance,” Goldsmith and Kleiman offer a model that allows public officials to mobilize new resources, surface ideas from unconventional sources, and arm employees with the information they need to become pre-emptive problem solvers. This book highlights lessons from the many innovations taking place in today’s cities to show how a new O/S can create systemic transformation.

For students of government, A New City O/S: The Power of Distributed Governance presents a groundbreaking strategy for rethinking the governance of cities, marking an important evolution of the current bureaucratic authority-based model dating from the 1920s. More important, the book is designed for practitioners, starting with public-sector executives, managers, and frontline workers. By weaving real-life examples into a coherent model, the authors have created a step-by-step guide for all those who would put the needs of citizens front and center. Nothing will do more to restore trust in government than solutions that work. A New City O/S: The Power of Distributed Governanceputs those solutions within reach of those public officials responsible for their delivery….(More)”.

Scientists can now figure out detailed, accurate neighborhood demographics using Google Street View photos

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post: “A team of computer scientists has derived accurate, neighborhood-level estimates of the racial, economic and political characteristics of 200 U.S. cities using an unlikely data source — Google Street View images of people’s cars.

Published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the report details how the scientists extracted 50 million photographs of street scenes captured by Google’s Street View cars in 2013 and 2014. They then trained a computer algorithm to identify the make, model and year of 22 million automobiles appearing in neighborhoods in those images, parked outside homes or driving down the street.

The vehicles seen in Street View images are often small or blurry, making precise identification a challenge. So the researchers had human experts identify a small subsample of the vehicles and compare those to the results churned out by their algorithm. They that the algorithm correctly identified whether a vehicle was U.S.- or foreign-made roughly 88 percent of the time, got the manufacturer right 66 percent of the time and nailed the exact model 52 percent of the time.

While far from perfect, the sheer size of the vehicle database means those numbers are still useful for real-world statistical applications, like drawing connections between vehicle preferences and demographic data. The 22 million vehicles in the database comprise roughly 8 percent of all vehicles in the United States. By comparison, the U.S. Census Bureau’s massive American Community Survey reaches only about 1.6 percent of American householdseach year, while the typical 1,000-person opinion poll includes just 0.0004 of American adults.

To test what this data set could be capable of, the researchers first paired the Zip code-level vehicle data with numbers on race, income and education from the American Community Survey. They did this for a random 15 percent of the Zip codes in their data set to create a “training set.” They then created another algorithm to go through the training set to see how vehicle characteristics correlated with neighborhood characteristics: What kinds of vehicles are disproportionately likely to appear in white neighborhoods, or black ones? Low-income vs. high-income? Highly-educated areas vs. less-educated ones?

That yielded a number of reliable correlations….(More)”.

SAM, the first A.I. politician on Messenger

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Digital Trends: “It’s said that all politicians are the same, but it seems safe to assume that you’ve never seen a politician quite like this. Meet SAM, heralded as the politician of the future. Unfortunately, you can’t exactly shake this politician’s hand, or have her kiss your baby. Rather, SAM is the world’s first Virtual Politician (and a female presence at that), “driven by the desire to close the gap between what voters want and what politicians promise, and what they actually achieve.”

The artificially intelligent chat bot is currently live on Facebook Messenger, though she probably is most helpful to those in New Zealand. After all, the bot’s website notes, “SAM’s goal is to act as a representative for all New Zealanders, and evolves based on voter input.” Capable of being reached by anyone at just about anytime from anywhere, this may just be the single most accessible politician we’ve ever seen. But more importantly, SAM purports to be a true representative, claiming to analyze “everyone’s views [and] opinions, and impact of potential decisions.” This, the bot notes, could make for better policy for everyone….(More)”.

The world watches Reykjavik’s digital democracy experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Jacobs at the Financial Times: “When Iceland’s banks collapsed and mistrust of politicians soared during the 2008 financial crisis, two programmers thought software could help salvage the country’s democracy. They created Your Priorities, a platform that allows citizens to suggest laws, policies and budget measures, which can then be voted up or down by other users. “

We thought: If we manage somehow to connect regular citizens with government then we create a dialogue that will ultimately result in better decisions,” says Robert Bjarnason, chief executive of Citizens Foundation, the company that created Your Priorities. Mr Bjarnason and his fellow co-founder of Citizens Foundation, Gunnar Grimsson, used the software to create a policy website called Better Reykjavik just before the city’s 2010 elections.

Jon Gnarr, Reykjavik’s then mayor, encouraged people to use the platform to give him policy suggestions and he committed to funding the top 10 ideas each month. Seven years on, Better Reykjavik has some 20,000 users and 769 of their ideas have been approved by the city council. These include increasing financial support for the city’s homeless, converting a former power station into a youth centre, introducing gender-neutral toilets and naming a street after Darth Vader, the character from Star Wars.

Your Priorities has also been tested in other countries, including Estonia, Australia, Scotland, Wales, Norway and Malta. In Estonia, seven proposals have become law, including one limiting donations from companies to political parties and another that requires the national parliament to debate any proposal with more than 1,000 votes.

The software is part of a global trend for people to seek more influence over their politicians. In Australia, for example, the MiVote app allows people to vote on issues being debated in parliament.

…At times, the portal can become a “crazy sounding board” Mr Svansson concedes. The Reykjavik council has put in quality controls to filter out hare-brained proposals, although Mr Bjarnason says he has had to remove inappropriate content only a handful of times….During Iceland’s parliamentary elections last month, 10 out of 11 political parties published their election pitches on Your Priorities, allowing voters to comment on policies and propose new ones. This interactive manifesto website attracted 22,000 visitors.

Testing the efficacy of platforms such as Your Priorities is perhaps easier in Reykjavik — population 123,000 — than in larger cities. Even so, integrating the site into the council’s policymaking apparatus has been slower than Mr Bjarnason had foreseen. “Everything takes a long time and sometimes it is like you are swimming in syrup,” he says. “Still, it has been a really good experience working with the city.”…(More).

The frontiers of data interoperability for sustainable development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report from the Joined-Up Data Standards [JUDS] project: “…explores where progress has been made, what challenges still remain, and how the new Collaborative on SDG Data Interoperability will play a critical role in moving forward the agenda for interoperability policy.

There is an ever-growing need for a more holistic picture of development processes worldwide and interoperability solutions that can be scaled, driven by global development agendas such as the 2030 Agenda and the Open Data movement. This requires the ability to join up data across multiple data sources and standards to create actionable information.

Solutions that create value for front-line decision makers — health centre managers, local school authorities or water and sanitation committees, for example, and those engaged in government accountability – will be crucial to meet the data needs of the SDGs, and do so in an internationally comparable way. While progress has been made at both a national and international level, moving from principle to practice by embedding interoperability into day-to-day work continues to present challenges.

Based on research and learning generated by the JUDS project team at Development Initiatives and Publish What You Fund, as well as inputs from interviews with key stakeholders, this report aims to provide an overview of the different definitions and components of interoperability and why it is important, and an outline of the current policy landscape.

We offer a set of guiding principles that we consider essential to implementing interoperability, and contextualise the five frontiers of interoperability for sustainable development that we have identified. The report also offers recommendations on what the role of the Collaborative could be in this fast-evolving landscape….(More)”.

Crowd.Law

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New project by The GovLab: “With rates of trust in government at historic lows, the legitimacy of traditional representative models of lawmaking — often conducted by professional staff and politicians working behind closed doors and distorted by political party agendas–is called into question. New forms of public participation could help to improve both legitimacy and effectiveness by introducing more data and diverse viewpoints at each stage of the lawmaking process.

CrowdLaw is the practice of using technology to tap the intelligence and expertise of the public in order to improve the quality of lawmaking. Around the world, there are already over two dozen examples of local legislatures and national parliaments turning to the Internet to involve the public in legislative drafting and decision-making. These ambitious crowdlaw initiatives show that the public can, in many cases, go beyond contributing opinions and signing petitions online to playing a more substantive role, including: proposing legislation, drafting bills, monitoring implementation, and supplying missing data. Through such processes, the public becomes collaborators and co-creators in the legislative process to the end of improving the quality of legislative outcomes and the effectiveness of governing.

GovLab is supporting legislative bodies in investigating, designing, implementing, and testing crowdlaw initiatives. Our work includes:

  • Studying and sharing learnings about CrowdLaw practices in use around the world and convening practitioners to share learnings.
  • Synthesizing best practices for the design of CrowdLaw initiatives — including platforms, processes, and policies — through an on-going survey of over 25 public engagement initiatives.
  • Cultivating a thriving network of now more than 90 CrowdLaw and public engagement experts and practitioners.
  • Crafting a model legal framework to accelerate the integration of public input into the legislative process.
  • Advising on the implementation of CrowdLaw practices….(More)”

The Unsung Role That Ordinary Citizens Played in the Great Crime Decline

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emily Badger in The New York Times: “Most theories for the great crime decline that swept across nearly every major American city over the last 25 years have focused on the would-be criminals.

Their lives changed in many ways starting in the 1990s: Strict new policing tactics kept closer watch on them. Mass incarceration locked them up in growing numbers. The crack epidemic that ensnared many began to recede. Even the more unorthodox theories — around the rise of abortion, the reduction in lead or the spread of A.D.H.D. medication — have argued that larger shifts in society altered the behavior (and existence) of potential criminals.

But none of these explanations have paid much attention to the communities where violence plummeted the most. New research suggests that people there were working hard, with little credit, to address the problem themselves.

Local nonprofit groups that responded to the violence by cleaning streets, building playgrounds, mentoring children and employing young men had a real effect on the crime rate. That’s what Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at New York University, argues in a new study and a forthcoming book. Mr. Sharkey doesn’t contend that community groups alone drove the national decline in crime, but rather that their impact is a major missing piece.

“This was a part that has been completely overlooked and ignored in national debates over the crime drop,” he said. “But I think it’s fundamental to what happened.”…(More)”.

Most of the public doesn’t know what open data is or how to use it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Shueh at Statescoop: “New survey results show that despite the aggressive growth of open data, there is a drastic need for greater awareness and accessibility.

Results of a global survey published last month by Singapore’s Government Technology agency (GovTech) and the Economist Intelligence Unit, a British forecasting and advisory firm, show that open data is not being utilized as effectively as it could be. Researchers surveyed more than 1,000 residents in the U.S. and nine other leading open data counties and found that “an overwhelming” number of respondents say the primary barrier to open data’s use and effectiveness is a lack of public awareness.

The study reports that 50 percent of respondents said that national and local governments need to expand their civic engagements efforts on open data.

“Half of respondents say there is not enough awareness in their country about open government data initiatives and their benefits or potential uses,” the reports notes. “This is seen as the biggest barrier to more open government data use, particularly by citizens in India and Mexico.”

Accessibility is named as the second largest hurdle, with 31 percent calling for more relevant data. Twenty-five percent say open data is difficult to use due to a lack of standardized formats and another 25 percent say they don’t have the skills to understand open data.

Those calling for more relevant data say they wanted to see more information on crime, the economy and the environment, yet report they are happy with the availability and use of open data related to transportation….

When asked to name the main benefit of open data, 70 percent say greater transparency, 78 percent say to drive a better quality of life, and 53 percent cite better decision making….(More)”.

Ethical questions in data journalism and the power of online discussion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Craig, Stan Ketterer and Mohammad Yousuf at Data Driven Journalism: “One common element uniting data journalism projects, across different stories and locations, is the ethical challenges they present.

As scholars and practitioners of data journalism have pointed out, main issues include flawed data, misrepresentation from a lack of context, and privacy concerns. Contributors have discussed the ethics of data journalism on this site in posts about topics such as the use of pervasive data, transparency about editorial processes in computational journalism, and best practices for doing data journalism ethically.

Our research project looked at similar ethical challenges by examining journalists’ discussion of the controversial handling of publicly accessible gun permit data in two communities in the United States. The cases are not new now, but the issues they raise persist and point to opportunities – both to learn from online discussion of ethical issues and to ask a wide range of ethical questions about data journalism

The cases

Less than two weeks after the 2012 shooting deaths of 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, a journalist at The Journal News in White Plains, New York, wrote a story about the possible expansion of publicly accessible gun permit data. The article was accompanied by three online maps with the locations of gun permit holders. The clickable maps of a two-county area in the New York suburbs also included the names and addresses of the gun permit holders. The detailed maps with personal information prompted a public outcry both locally and nationally, mainly involving privacy and safety concerns, and were subsequently taken down.

Although the 2012 case prompted the greatest attention, another New York newspaper reporter’s Freedom of Information request for a gun permit database for three counties sparked an earlier public outcry in 2008. The Glen Falls Post-Star’s editor published an editorial in response. “We here at The Post-Star find ourselves in the unusual position of responding to the concerns of our readers about something that has not even been published in our newspaper or Web site,” the editorial began. The editor said the request “drew great concern from members of gun clubs and people with gun permits in general, a concern we totally understand.”

Both of these cases prompted discussion among journalists, including participants in NICAR-L, the listserv of the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, whose subscribers include data journalists from major news organizations in the United States and around the world. Our study examined the content of three discussion threads with a total of 119 posts that focused mainly on ethical issues.

Key ethical issues

Several broad ethical issues, and specific themes related to those issues, appeared in the discussion.

1. Freedom versus responsibility and journalistic purpose..

2. Privacy and verification..

3. Consequences..

….(More)”

See also: David Craig, Stan Ketterer and Mohammad Yousuf, “To Post or Not to Post: Online Discussion of Gun Permit Mapping and the Development of Ethical Standards in Data Journalism,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly