National Transit Map Seeks to Close the Transit Data Gap


Ben Miller at GovTech: “In bringing together the first ever map illustrating the nation’s transit system, the U.S. Department of Transportation isn’t just making data more accessible — it’s also aiming to modernize data collection and dissemination for many of the country’s transit agencies.

With more than 10,000 routes and 98,000 stops represented, the National Transit Map is already enormous. But Dan Morgan, chief data officer of the department, says it’s not enough. When measuring vehicles operated in maximum service — a metric illustrating peak service at a transit agency — the National Transit Map captures only about half of all transit in the U.S.

“Not all of these transit agencies have this data available,” Morgan said, “so this is an ongoing project to really close the transit data gap.”Which is why, in the process of building out the map, the DOT is working with transit agencies to make their data available.

Which is why, in the process of building out the map, the DOT is working with transit agencies to make their data available.

On the whole, transit data is easier to collect and process than a lot of transportation data because many agencies have adopted a standard called General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) that applies to schedule-related data. That’s what made the National Transit Map an easy candidate for completion, Morgan said.

But as popular as GTFS has become, many agencies — especially smaller ones — haven’t been able to use it. The tools to convert to GTFS come with a learning curve.

“It’s really a matter of priority and availability of resources,” he said.

Bringing those agencies into the mainstream is important to achieving the goals of the map. In the map, Morgan said he sees an opportunity to achieve a new level of clarity where it has never existed before.

That’s because transit has long suffered from difficulty in seeing its own history. Transit officials can describe their systems as they exist, but looking at how they got there is trickier.

“There’s no archive,” Morgan said, “there’s no picture of how transit changes over time.”

And that’s a problem for assessing what works and what doesn’t, for understanding why the system operates the way it does and how it responds to changes. …(More)”

Recent Developments in Open Data Policy


Presentation by Paul Uhlir:  “Several International organizations have issued policy statements on open data policies in the past two years. This presentation provides an overview of those statements and their relevance to developing countries.

International Statements on Open Data Policy

Open data policies have become much more supported internationally in recent years. Policy statements in just the most recent 2014-2016 period that endorse and promote openness to research data derived from public funding include: the African Data Consensus (UNECA 2014); the CODATA Nairobi Principles for Data Sharing for Science and Development in Developing Countries (PASTD 2014); the Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age (LIBER 2014); Policy Guidelines for Open Access and Data Dissemination and Preservation (RECODE 2015); Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World (Science International 2015). This presentation will present the principal guidelines of these policy statements.

The Relevance of Open Data from Publicly Funded Research for Development

There are many reasons that publicly funded research data should be made as freely and openly available as possible. Some of these are noted here, although many other benefits are possible. For research, it is closing the gap with more economically developed countries, making researchers more visible on the web, enhancing their collaborative potential, and linking them globally. For educational benefits, open data assists greatly in helping students learn how to do data science and to manage data better. From a socioeconomic standpoint, open data policies have been shown to enhance economic opportunities and to enable citizens to improve their lives in myriad ways. Such policies are more ethical in allowing access to those that have no means to pay and not having to pay for the data twice—once through taxes to create the data in the first place and again at the user level . Finally, access to factual data can improve governance, leading to better decision making by policymakers, improved oversight by constituents, and digital repatriation of objects held by former colonial powers.

Some of these benefits are cited directly in the policy statements themselves, while others are developed more fully in other documents (Bailey Mathae and Uhlir 2012, Uhlir 2015). Of course, not all publicly funded data and information can be made available and there are appropriate reasons—such as the protection of national security, personal privacy, commercial concerns, and confidentiality of all kinds—that make the withholding of them legal and ethical. However, the default rule should be one of openness, balanced against a legitimate reason not to make the data public….(More)”

The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science


New book by Cass R. Sunstein: “In recent years, ‘Nudge Units’ or ‘Behavioral Insights Teams’ have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book, Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge (2008), breaks new ground with a deep yet highly readable investigation into the ethical issues surrounding nudges, choice architecture, and mandates, addressing such issues as welfare, autonomy, self-government, dignity, manipulation, and the constraints and responsibilities of an ethical state. Complementing the ethical discussion, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science contains a wealth of new data on people’s attitudes towards a broad range of nudges, choice architecture, and mandates…(More)”

Civil Solutions


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy in the data age: Data enablement for the common good


Karim Tadjeddine and Martin Lundqvist of McKinsey: “Like companies in the private sector, governments from national to local can smooth the process of digital transformation—and improve services to their “customers,” the public—by adhering to certain core principles. Here’s a road map.

By virtue of their sheer size, visibility, and economic clout, national, state or provincial, and local governments are central to any societal transformation effort, in particular a digital transformation. Governments at all levels, which account for 30 to 50 percent of most countries’ GDP, exert profound influence not only by executing their own digital transformations but also by catalyzing digital transformations in other societal sectors (Exhibit 1).

The tremendous impact that digital services have had on governments and society has been the subject of extensive research that has documented the rapid, extensive adoption of public-sector digital services around the globe. We believe that the coming data revolution will be even more deeply transformational and that data enablement will produce a radical shift in the public sector’s quality of service, empowering governments to deliver better constituent service, better policy outcomes, and more-productive operations….(More)”

Data and Democracy


(Free) book by Andrew Therriault:  “The 2016 US elections will be remembered for many things, but for those who work in politics, 2016 may be best remembered as the year that the use of data in politics reached its maturity. Through a collection of essays from leading experts in the field, this report explores how political data science helps to drive everything from overall strategy and messaging to individual voter contacts and advertising.

Curated by Andrew Therriault, former Director of Data Science for the Democratic National Committee, this illuminating report includes first-hand accounts from Democrats, Republicans, and members of the media. Tech-savvy readers will get a comprehensive account of how data analysis has prevailed over political instinct and experience and examples of the challenges these practitioners face.

Essays include:

  • The Role of Data in Campaigns—Andrew Therriault, former Director of Data Science for the Democratic National Committee
  • Essentials of Modeling and Microtargeting—Dan Castleman, cofounder and Director of Analytics at Clarity Campaign Labs, a leading modeler in Democratic politics
  • Data Management for Political Campaigns—Audra Grassia, Deputy Political Director for the Democratic Governors Association in 2014
  • How Technology Is Changing the Polling Industry—Patrick Ruffini, cofounder of Echelon Insights and Founder/Chairman of Engage, was a digital strategist for President Bush in 2004 and for the Republican National Committee in 2006
  • Data-Driven Media Optimization—Alex Lundry, cofounder and Chief Data Scientist at Deep Root Analytics, a leading expert on media and voter analytics, electoral targeting, and political data mining
  • How (and Why) to Follow the Money in Politics—Derek Willis, ProPublica’s news applications developer, formerly with The New York Times
  • Digital Advertising in the Post-Obama Era—Daniel Scarvalone, Associate Director of Research and Data at Bully Pulpit Interactive (BPI), a digital marketer for the Democratic party
  • Election Forecasting in the Media—Natalie Jackson, Senior Polling Editor atThe Huffington Post…(More)”

White House, Transportation Dept. want help using open data to prevent traffic crashes


Samantha Ehlinger in FedScoop: “The Transportation Department is looking for public input on how to better interpret and use data on fatal crashes after 2015 data revealed a startling spike of 7.2 percent more deaths in traffic accidents that year.

Looking for new solutions that could prevent more deaths on the roads, the department released three months earlier than usual the 2015 open dataset about each fatal crash. With it, the department and the White House announced a call to action for people to use the data set as a jumping off point for a dialogue on how to prevent crashes, as well as understand what might be causing the spike.

“What we’re ultimately looking for is getting more people engaged in the data … matching this with other publicly available data, or data that the private sector might be willing to make available, to dive in and to tell these stories,” said Bryan Thomas, communications director for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to FedScoop.

One striking statistic was that “pedestrian and pedalcyclist fatalities increased to a level not seen in 20 years,” according to a DOT press release. …

“We want folks to be engaged directly with our own data scientists, so we can help people through the dataset and help answer their questions as they work their way through, bounce ideas off of us, etc.,” Thomas said. “We really want to be accessible in that way.”

He added that as ideas “come to fruition,” there will be opportunities to present what people have learned.

“It’s a very, very rich data set, there’s a lot of information there,” Thomas said. “Our own ability is, frankly, limited to investigate all of the questions that you might have of it. And so we want to get the public really diving in as well.”…

Here are the questions “worth exploring,” according to the call to action:

  • How might improving economic conditions around the country change how Americans are getting around? What models can we develop to identify communities that might be at a higher risk for fatal crashes?
  • How might climate change increase the risk of fatal crashes in a community?
  • How might we use studies of attitudes toward speeding, distracted driving, and seat belt use to better target marketing and behavioral change campaigns?
  • How might we monitor public health indicators and behavior risk indicators to target communities that might have a high prevalence of behaviors linked with fatal crashes (drinking, drug use/addiction, etc.)? What countermeasures should we create to address these issues?”…(More)”

Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence: Crowdsourcing Approach


Literature review by Sanket Subhash Khanwalkar: “Despite heavy investment by the United States and several other national governments, terrorism related problems are rising at an alarming rate. Lone-wolf terrorism, in particular, in the last decade, has caused 70% of all terrorism related deaths in the US and the West. This literature survey describes lone-wolf terrorism in detail to analyse its structure, characteristics, strengths and weaknesses. It also investigates crowdsourcing intelligence, as an unorthodox approach to counter lone-wolf terrorism, by reviewing its current state-of-the-art and identifying the areas for improvement….(More)”

Why Zika, Malaria and Ebola should fear analytics


Frédéric Pivetta at Real Impact Analytics:Big data is a hot business topic. It turns out to be an equally hot topic for the non profit sector now that we know the vital role analytics can play in addressing public health issues and reaching sustainable development goals.

Big players like IBM just announced they will help fight Zika by analyzing social media, transportation and weather data, among other indicators. Telecom data takes it further by helping to predict the spread of disease, identifying isolated and fragile communities and prioritizing the actions of aid workers.

The power of telecom data

Human mobility contributes significantly to epidemic transmission into new regions. However, there are gaps in understanding human mobility due to the limited and often outdated data available from travel records. In some countries, these are collected by health officials in the hospitals or in occasional surveys.

Telecom data, constantly updated and covering a large portion of the population, is rich in terms of mobility insights. But there are other benefits:

  • it’s recorded automatically (in the Call Detail Records, or CDRs), so that we avoid data collection and response bias.
  • it contains localization and time information, which is great for understanding human mobility.
  • it contains info on connectivity between people, which helps understanding social networks.
  • it contains info on phone spending, which allows tracking of socio-economic indicators.

Aggregated and anonymized, mobile telecom data fills the public data gap without questioning privacy issues. Mixing it with other public data sources results in a very precise and reliable view on human mobility patterns, which is key for preventing epidemic spreads.

Using telecom data to map epidemic risk flows

So how does it work? As in any other big data application, the challenge is to build the right predictive model, allowing decision-makers to take the most appropriate actions. In the case of epidemic transmission, the methodology typically includes five steps :

  • Identify mobility patterns relevant for each particular disease. For example, short-term trips for fast-spreading diseases like Ebola. Or overnight trips for diseases like Malaria, as it spreads by mosquitoes that are active only at night. Such patterns can be deduced from the CDRs: we can actually find the home location of each user by looking at the most active night tower, and then tracking calls to identify short or long-term trips. Aggregating data per origin-destination pairs is useful as we look at intercity or interregional transmission flows. And it protects the privacy of individuals, as no one can be singled out from the aggregated data.
  • Get data on epidemic incidence, typically from local organisations like national healthcare systems or, in case of emergency, from NGOs or dedicated emergency teams. This data should be aggregated on the same level of granularity than CDRs.
  • Knowing how many travelers go from one place to another, for how long, and the disease incidence at origin and destination, build an epidemiological model that can account for the way and speed of transmission of the particular disease.
  • With an import/export scoring model, map epidemic risk flows and flag areas that are at risk of becoming the new hotspots because of human travel.
  • On that base, prioritize and monitor public health measures, focusing on restraining mobility to and from hotspots. Mapping risk also allows launching prevention campaigns at the right places and setting up the necessary infrastructure on time. Eventually, the tool reduces public health risks and helps stem the epidemic.

That kind of application works in a variety of epidemiological contexts, including Zika, Ebola, Malaria, Influenza or Tuberculosis. No doubt the global boom of mobile data will proof extraordinarily helpful in fighting these fierce enemies….(More)”