Outcome-driven open innovation at NASA

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Jennifer L. Gustetic et al in Space Policy: “In an increasingly connected and networked world, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recognizes the value of the public as a strategic partner in addressing some of our most pressing challenges. The agency is working to more effectively harness the expertise, ingenuity, and creativity of individual members of the public by enabling, accelerating, and scaling the use of open innovation approaches including prizes, challenges, and crowdsourcing. As NASA’s use of open innovation tools to solve a variety of types of problems and advance of number of outcomes continues to grow, challenge design is also becoming more sophisticated as our expertise and capacity (personnel, platforms, and partners) grows and develops. NASA has recently pivoted from talking about the benefits of challenge-driven approaches, to the outcomes these types of activities yield. Challenge design should be informed by desired outcomes that align with NASA’s mission. This paper provides several case studies of NASA open innovation activities and maps the outcomes of those activities to a successful set of outcomes that challenges can help drive alongside traditional tools such as contracts, grants and partnerships….(More)”

Index: Crime and Criminal Justice Data

Curated on Posted on by Ryan Sibley

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on crime and criminal justice data and was originally published in 2015.

This index provides information about the type of crime and criminal justice data collected, shared and used in the United States. Because it is well known that data related to the criminal justice system is often times unreliable, or just plain missing, this index also highlights some of the issues that stand in the way of accessing useful and in-demand statistics.

Data Collections: National Crime Statistics

  • Number of incident-based crime datasets created by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): 2
    • Number of U.S. Statistical Agencies: 13
    • How many of those are focused on criminal justice: 1, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)
    • Number of data collections focused on criminal justice the BJS produces: 61
    • Number of federal-level APIs available for crime or criminal justice data: 1, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).
    • Frequency of the NCVS: annually
  • Number of Statistical Analysis Centers (SACs), organizations that are essentially clearinghouses for crime and criminal justice data for each state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands: 53

Open data, data use and the impact of those efforts

  • Number of datasets that are returned when “criminal justice” is searched for on Data.gov: 417, including federal-, state- and city-level datasets
  • Number of datasets that are returned when “crime” is searched for on Data.gov: 281
  • The percentage that public complaints dropped after officers started wearing body cameras, according to a study done in Rialto, Calif.: 88
  • The percentage that reported incidents of officer use of force fell after officers started wearing body cameras, according to a study done in Rialto, Calif.: 5
  • The percent that crime decreased during an experiment in predictive policing in Shreveport, LA: 35  
  • Number of crime data sets made available by the Seattle Police Department – generally seen as a leader in police data innovation – on the Seattle.gov website: 4
    • Major crime stats by category in aggregate
    • Crime trend reports
    • Precinct data by beat
    • State sex offender database
  • Number of datasets mapped by the Seattle Police Department: 2:
      • 911 incidents
    • Police reports
  • Number of states where risk assessment tools must be used in pretrial proceedings to help determine whether an offender is released from jail before a trial: at least 11.

Police Data

    • Number of federally mandated databases that collect information about officer use of force or officer involved shootings, nationwide: 0
    • The year a crime bill was passed that called for data on excessive force to be collected for research and statistical purposes, but has never been funded: 1994
    • Number of police departments that committed to being a part of the White House’s Police Data Initiative: 21
    • Percentage of police departments surveyed in 2013 by the Office of Community Oriented Policing within the Department of Justice that are not using body cameras, therefore not collecting body camera data: 75

The criminal justice system

  • Parts of the criminal justice system where data about an individual can be created or collected: at least 6
    • Entry into the system (arrest)
    • Prosecution and pretrial
    • Sentencing
    • Corrections
    • Probation/parole
    • Recidivism

Sources

  • Crime Mapper. Philadelphia Police Department. Accessed August 24, 2014.

Review Federal Agencies on Yelp…and Maybe Get a Response

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yelp Official Blog: “We are excited to announce that Yelp has concluded an agreement with the federal government that will allow federal agencies and offices to claim their Yelp pages, read and respond to reviews, and incorporate that feedback into service improvements.

We encourage Yelpers to review any of the thousands of agency field offices, TSA checkpoints, national parks, Social Security Administration offices, landmarks and other places already listed on Yelp if you have good or bad feedback to share about your experiences. Not only is it helpful to others who are looking for information on these services, but you can actually make an impact by sharing your feedback directly with the source.

It’s clear Washington is eager to engage with people directly through social media. Earlier this year a group of 46 lawmakers called for the creation of a “Yelp for Government” in order to boost transparency and accountability, and Representative Ron Kind reiterated this call in a letter to the General Services Administration (GSA). Luckily for them, there’s no need to create a new platform now that government agencies can engage directly on Yelp.

As this agreement is fully implemented in the weeks and months ahead, we’re excited to help the federal government more directly interact with and respond to the needs of citizens and to further empower the millions of Americans who use Yelp every day.

In addition to working with the federal government, last week we announced our our partnership with ProPublica to incorporate health care statistics and consumer opinion survey data onto the Yelp business pages of more than 25,000 medical treatment facilities. We’ve also partnered with local governments in expanding the LIVES open data standard to show restaurant health scores on Yelp….(More)”

Can big databases be kept both anonymous and useful?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “….The anonymisation of a data record typically means the removal from it of personally identifiable information. Names, obviously. But also phone numbers, addresses and various intimate details like dates of birth. Such a record is then deemed safe for release to researchers, and even to the public, to make of it what they will. Many people volunteer information, for example to medical trials, on the understanding that this will happen.

But the ability to compare databases threatens to make a mockery of such protections. Participants in genomics projects, promised anonymity in exchange for their DNA, have been identified by simple comparison with electoral rolls and other publicly available information. The health records of a governor of Massachusetts were plucked from a database, again supposedly anonymous, of state-employee hospital visits using the same trick. Reporters sifting through a public database of web searches were able to correlate them in order to track down one, rather embarrassed, woman who had been idly searching for single men. And so on.

Each of these headline-generating stories creates a demand for more controls. But that, in turn, deals a blow to the idea of open data—that the electronic “data exhaust” people exhale more or less every time they do anything in the modern world is actually useful stuff which, were it freely available for analysis, might make that world a better place.

Of cake, and eating it

Modern cars, for example, record in their computers much about how, when and where the vehicle has been used. Comparing the records of many vehicles, says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the Oxford Internet Institute, could provide a solid basis for, say, spotting dangerous stretches of road. Similarly, an opening of health records, particularly in a country like Britain, which has a national health service, and cross-fertilising them with other personal data, might help reveal the multifarious causes of diseases like Alzheimer’s.

This is a true dilemma. People want both perfect privacy and all the benefits of openness. But they cannot have both. The stripping of a few details as the only means of assuring anonymity, in a world choked with data exhaust, cannot work. Poorly anonymised data are only part of the problem. What may be worse is that there is no standard for anonymisation. Every American state, for example, has its own prescription for what constitutes an adequate standard.

Worse still, devising a comprehensive standard may be impossible. Paul Ohm of Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, thinks that this is partly because the availability of new data constantly shifts the goalposts. “If we could pick an industry standard today, it would be obsolete in short order,” he says. Some data, such as those about medical conditions, are more sensitive than others. Some data sets provide great precision in time or place, others merely a year or a postcode. Each set presents its own dangers and requirements.

Fortunately, there are a few easy fixes. Thanks in part to the headlines, many now agree that public release of anonymised data is a bad move. Data could instead be released piecemeal, or kept in-house and accessible by researchers through a question-and-answer mechanism. Or some users could be granted access to raw data, but only in strictly controlled conditions.

All these approaches, though, are anathema to the open-data movement, because they limit the scope of studies. “If we’re making it so hard to share that only a few have access,” says Tim Althoff, a data scientist at Stanford University, “that has profound implications for science, for people being able to replicate and advance your work.”

Purely legal approaches might mitigate that. Data might come with what have been called “downstream contractual obligations”, outlining what can be done with a given data set and holding any onward recipients to the same standards. One perhaps draconian idea, suggested by Daniel Barth-Jones, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, in New York, is to make it illegal even to attempt re-identification….(More).”

President Obama Signs Executive Order Making Presidential Innovation Fellows Program Permanent

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

White House Press Release: “My hope is this continues to encourage a culture of public service among our innovators, and tech entrepreneurs, so that we can keep building a government that’s as modern, as innovative, and as engaging as our incredible tech sector is.  To all the Fellows who’ve served so far – thank you.  I encourage all Americans with bold ideas to apply.  And I can’t wait to see what those future classes will accomplish on behalf of the American people.” –- President Barack Obama

Today, President Obama signed an executive order that makes the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program a permanent part of the Federal government going forward. The program brings executives, entrepreneurs, technologists, and other innovators into government, and teams them up with Federal employees to improve programs that serve more than 150 million Americans.

The Presidential Innovation Fellows Program is built on four key principles:

  • Recruit the best our nation has to offer: Fellows include entrepreneurs, startup founders, and innovators with experience at large technology companies and startups, each of whom leverage their proven skills and technical expertise to create huge value for the public.
  • Partner with innovators inside government: Working as teams, the Presidential Innovation Fellows and their partners across the government create products and services that are responsive, user-friendly, and help to improve the way the Federal government interacts with the American people.
  • Deploy proven private sector strategies: Fellows leverage best practices from the private sector to deliver better, more effective programs and policies across the Federal government.
  • Focus on some of the Nation’s biggest and most pressing challenges: Projects focus on topics such as improving access to education, fueling job creation and the economy, and expanding the public’s ability to access their personal health data.

Additional Details on Today’s Announcements

The Executive Order formally establishes the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program within the General Services Administration (GSA), where it will continue to serve departments and agencies throughout the Executive Branch. The Presidential Innovation Fellow Program will be administered by a Director and guided by a newly-established Advisory Board. The Director will outline steps for the selection, hiring, and deployment of Fellows within government….

Fellows have partnered with leaders at more than 25 government agencies, delivering impressive results in months, not years, driving extraordinary work and innovative solutions in areas such as health care; open data and data science; crowd-sourcing initiatives; education; veterans affairs; jobs and the economy; and disaster response and recovery. Examples of projects include:

Open Data

When government acts as a platform, entrepreneurs, startups, and the private sector can build value-added services and tools on top of federal datasets supported by federal policies. Taking this approach, Fellows and agency stakeholders have supported the creation of new products and services focused on education, health, the environment, and social justice. As a result of their efforts and the agencies they have worked with:….

Jobs and the Economy

Fellows continue to work on solutions that will give the government better access to innovative tools and services. This is also helping small and medium-sized companies create jobs and compete for Federal government contracts….

Digital Government

The Presidential Innovation Fellows Program is a part of the Administration’s strategy to create lasting change across the Federal Government by improving how it uses technology. The Fellows played a part in launching 18F within the General Services Administration (GSA) and the U.S. Digital Services (USDS) team within the Office of Management and Budget….

Supporting Our Veterans

  • …Built a one-stop shop for finding employment opportunities. The Veterans Employment Center was developed by a team of Fellows working with the Department of Veterans Affairs in connection with the First Lady’s Joining Forces Initiative and the Department of Labor. This is the first interagency website connecting Veterans, transitioning Servicemembers, and their spouses to meaningful employment opportunities. The portal has resulted in cost savings of over $27 million to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Education

  • …More than 1,900 superintendents pledged to more effectively leverage education technology in their schools. Fellows working at the Department of Education helped develop the idea of Future Ready, which later informed the creation of the Future Ready District Pledge. The Future Ready District Pledge is designed to set out a roadmap to achieve successful personalized digital learning for every student and to commit districts to move as quickly as possible towards our shared vision of preparing students for success. Following the President’s announcement of this effort in 2014, more than 1,900 superintendents have signed this pledge, representing 14 million students.

Health and Patient Care

  • More than 150 million Americans are able to access their health records online. Multiple rounds of Fellows have worked with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to expand the reach of theBlue Button Initiative. As a result, patients are able to access their electronic health records to make more informed decisions about their own health care. The Blue Button Initiative has received more than 600 commitments from organizations to advance health information access efforts across the country and has expanded into other efforts that support health care system interoperability….

Disaster Response and Recovery

  • Communities are piloting crowdsourcing tools to assess damage after disasters. Fellows developed the GeoQ platform with FEMA and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency that crowdsources photos of disaster-affected areas to assess damage over large regions.  This information helps the Federal government better allocate critical response and recovery efforts following a disaster and allows local governments to use geospatial information in their communities…. (More)

Open data can unravel the complex dealings of multinationals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Guardian: “…Just like we have complementary currencies to address shortcomings in national monetary systems, we now need to encourage an alternative accounting sector to address shortcomings in global accounting systems.

So what might this look like? We already are seeing the genesis of this in the corporate open data sector. OpenCorporates in London has been a pioneer in this field, creating a global unique identifier system to make it easier to map corporations. Groups like OpenOil in Berlin are now using the OpenCorporates classification system to map companies like BP. Under the tagline “Imagine an open oil industry”, they have also begun mapping ground-level contract and concession data, and are currently building tools to allow the public to model the economics of particular mines and oil fields. This could prove useful in situations where doubt is cast on the value of particular assets controlled by public companies in politically fragile states.

 OpenOil’s objective is not just corporate transparency. Merely disclosing information does not advance understanding. OpenOil’s real objective is to make reputable sources of information on oil companies usable to the general public. In the case of BP, company data is already deposited in repositories like Companies House, but in unusable, jumbled and jargon-filled pdf formats. OpenOil seeks to take such transparency, and turn it into meaningful transparency.

According to OpenOil’s Anton Rühling, a variety of parties have started to use their information. “During the recent conflicts in Yemen we had a sudden spike in downloads of our Yemeni oil contract information. We traced this to UAE, where a lot of financial lawyers and investors are based. They were clearly wanting to see how the contracts could be affected.” Their BP map even raised interest from senior BP officials. “We were contacted by finance executives who were eager to discuss the results.”

Open mapping

Another pillar of the alternative accounting sector that is emerging are supply chain mapping systems. The supply chain largely remains a mystery. In standard corporate accounts suppliers appear as mere expenses. No information is given about where the suppliers are based and what their standards are. In the absence of corporate management volunteering that information, Sourcemap has created an open platform for people to create supply chain maps themselves. Progressively-minded companies – such as Fairphone – have now begun to volunteer supply chain information on the platform.

One industry forum that is actively pondering alternative accounting is ICAEW’s AuditFutures programme. They recently teamed up with the Royal College of Art’s service design programme to build design thinking into accounting practice. AuditFuture’s Martin Martinoff wants accountants’ to perceive themselves as being creative innovators for the public interest. “Imagine getting 10,000 auditors online together to develop an open crowdsourced audit platform.”…(More)

Citizen Science used in studying Seasonal Variation in India

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rohin Daswani at the Commons Lab, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars: “Climate change has started affecting many countries around the world. While every country is susceptible to the risks of global warming some countries, such as India, are especially vulnerable.

India’s sheer dependence on rainfall to irrigate its vast agricultural lands and to feed its economy makes it highly vulnerable to climate change. A report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts global temperature will increase between 0.3 and 4.8 degrees Celsius and sea levels will rise 82cm (32 in) by the late 21st century. But what effect will the changing rainfall pattern have on the seasonal variation?

One way to study seasonal variation in India is to analyze the changing patterns of flowering and fruiting of common trees like the Mango and Amaltas trees. SeasonWatch , a program part of the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS), the biological wing of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research, does exactly that. It is an India-wide program that studies the changing seasons by monitoring the seasonal cycles of flowering, fruiting and leaf flush of common trees. And how does it do that? It does it by utilizing the idea of Citizen Science. Anybody, be it children or adults, interested in trees and the effects of climate change can participate. All they have to do is register, select a tree near them and monitor it every week. The data is uploaded to a central website and is analyzed for changing patterns of plant life, and the effects of climate change on plant life cycle. The data is also open source so anyone can get access to it if they wish to. With all this information one could answer questions which were previously impossible to answer such as:

  • How does the flowering of Neem change across India?
  • Is fruiting of Tamarind different in different parts of the country depending on rainfall in the previous year?
  • Is year to year variation in flowering and fruiting time of Mango related to Winter temperatures?

Using Citizen Science and crowdsourcing, programs such as SeasonWatch have expanded the scope and work of conservation biology in various ecosystems across India….(More)”

Open Data and Sub-national Governments: Lessons from Developing Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

WebFoundation: “Open government data (OGD) as a concept is gaining currency globally due to the strong advocacy of global organisations as Open Government Partnership. In recent years, there has been increased commitment on the part of national governments to proactively disclose information. However, much of the discussion on OGD is at the national level, especially in developing countries where commitments of proactive disclosure is conditioned by the commitments of national governments as expressed through the OGP national action plans. However, the local is important in the context of open data. In decentralized contexts, the local is where data is collected and stored, where there is strong feasibility that data will be published, and where data can generate the most impact when used. This synthesis paper wants to refocus the discussion of open government data in sub-national contexts by analysing nine country papers produced through the Open Data in Developing Countries research project.

Using a common research framework that focuses on context, governance setting, and open data initiatives, the study found out that there is substantial effort on the part of sub-national governments to proactively disclose data, however, the design delimits citizen participation, and eventually, use. Second, context demands diff erent roles for intermediaries and diff erent types of initiatives to create an enabling environment for open data. Finally, data quality will remain a critical challenge for sub-national governments in developing countries and it will temper potential impact that open data will be able to generate. Download the full research paper here“

Why transparency can be a dirty word

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Francis Fukuyama in the Financial Times: “It is hard to think of a political good that is more universally praised than government transparency. Whereas secrecy shelters corruption, abuse of power, undue influence and a host of other evils, transparency allows citizens to keep their rulers accountable. Or that is the theory.

It is clear that there are vast areas in which modern governments should reveal more. Edward Snowden’s revelations of eavesdropping by the National Security Agency has encouraged belief that the US government has been not nearly transparent enough. But is it possible to have too much transparency? The answer is clearly yes: demands for certain kinds of transparency have hurt government effectiveness, particularly with regard to its ability to deliberate.

The US has a number of statutes mandating transparency passed decades ago in response to perceived government abuses, and motivated by perfectly reasonable expectations that the government should operate under greater scrutiny. Yet they have had a number of unfortunate consequences.

The Federal Advisory Committee Act, for example, places onerous requirements on any public agency seeking to consult a group outside the government, requiring that they are formally approved and meet various criteria for political balance. Meetings must be held in public. The Government in the Sunshine Act stipulates that, with certain exceptions, “every portion of every meeting of an agency shall be open to public observation”.

These obligations put a serious damper on informal consultations with citizens, and even make it difficult for officials to talk to one another. Deliberation, whether in the context of a family or a federal agency, require people to pose hypotheticals and, when trying to reach agreement, make concessions.

When the process itself is open to public scrutiny, officials fear being hounded for a word taken out of context. They resort to cumbersome methods of circumventing the regulations, such as having one-on-one discussions so as not to trigger a group rule, or having subordinates do all the serious work.

The problem with the Freedom of Information Act is different. It was meant to serve investigative journalists looking into abuses of power. But today a large number of FOIA requests are filed by corporate sleuths trying to ferret out secrets for competitive advantage, or simply by individuals curious to find out what the government knows about them. The FOIA can be “weaponised”, as when the activist group Judicial Watch used it to obtain email documents on the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 attack on the US compound in Benghazi…..

National security aside, the federal government’s executive branch is probably one of the most transparent organisations on earth — no corporation, labour union, lobbying group or non-profit organisation is subject to such scrutiny. The real problem, as Professor John DiIulio of Pennsylvania university has pointed out, is that most of the work of government has been outsourced to contractors who face none of the transparency requirements of the government itself. It is an impossible task even to establish the number of such contractors in a single American city, much less how they are performing their jobs.

In Europe, where there is no equivalent to the FACA or the Sunshine Act, governments can consult citizens’ groups more flexibly. There is, of course, a large and growing distrust of European institutions by citizens. But America’s experience suggests that greater transparency requirements do not necessarily lead to more trust in government….(More)”

 

The New Science of Sentencing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anna Maria Barry-Jester et al at the Marshall Project: “Criminal sentencing has long been based on the present crime and, sometimes, the defendant’s past criminal record. In Pennsylvania, judges could soon consider a new dimension: the future.

Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming one of the first states in the country to base criminal sentences not only on what crimes people have been convicted of, but also on whether they are deemed likely to commit additional crimes. As early as next year, judges there could receive statistically derived tools known as risk assessments to help them decide how much prison time — if any — to assign.

Risk assessments have existed in various forms for a century, but over the past two decades, they have spread through the American justice system, driven by advances in social science. The tools try to predict recidivism — repeat offending or breaking the rules of probation or parole — using statistical probabilities based on factors such as age, employment history and prior criminal record. They are now used at some stage of the criminal justice process in nearly every state. Many court systems use the tools to guide decisions about which prisoners to release on parole, for example, and risk assessments are becoming increasingly popular as a way to help set bail for inmates awaiting trial.

But Pennsylvania is about to take a step most states have until now resisted for adult defendants: using risk assessment in sentencing itself. A state commission is putting the finishing touches on a plan that, if implemented as expected, could allow some offenders considered low risk to get shorter prison sentences than they would otherwise or avoid incarceration entirely. Those deemed high risk could spend more time behind bars.

Pennsylvania, which already uses risk assessment in other phases of its criminal justice system, is considering the approach in sentencing because it is struggling with an unwieldy and expensive corrections system. Pennsylvania has roughly 50,000 people in state custody, 2,000 more than it has permanent beds for. Thousands more are in local jails, and hundreds of thousands are on probation or parole. The state spends $2 billion a year on its corrections system — more than 7 percent of the total state budget, up from less than 2 percent 30 years ago. Yet recidivism rates remain high: 1 in 3inmates is arrested again or reincarcerated within a year of being released.

States across the country are facing similar problems — Pennsylvania’s incarceration rate is almost exactly the national average — and many policymakers see risk assessment as an attractive solution. Moreover, the approach has bipartisan appeal: Among some conservatives, risk assessment appeals to the desire to spend tax dollars on locking up only those criminals who are truly dangerous to society. And some liberals hope a data-driven justice system will be less punitive overall and correct for the personal, often subconscious biases of police, judges and probation officers. In theory, using risk assessment tools could lead to both less incarceration and less crime.

There are more than 60 risk assessment tools in use across the U.S., and they vary widely. But in their simplest form, they are questionnaires — typically filled out by a jail staff member, probation officer or psychologist — that assign points to offenders based on anything from demographic factors to family background to criminal history. The resulting scores are based on statistical probabilities derived from previous offenders’ behavior. A low score designates an offender as “low risk” and could result in lower bail, less prison time or less restrictive probation or parole terms; a high score can lead to tougher sentences or tighter monitoring.

The risk assessment trend is controversial. Critics have raised numerous questions: Is it fair to make decisions in an individual case based on what similar offenders have done in the past? Is it acceptable to use characteristics that might be associated with race or socioeconomic status, such as the criminal record of a person’s parents? And even if states can resolve such philosophical questions, there are also practical ones: What to do about unreliable data? Which of the many available tools — some of them licensed by for-profit companies — should policymakers choose?…(More)”