Hollie Russon Gilman at TechTank: “A new global currency is emerging. Governments understand that people at home and abroad evaluate them based on how they use technology and innovative approaches in their service delivery and citizen engagement. This raises opportunities, and critical questions about the role of innovation in 21st century governance.
Bloomberg Philanthropies and Nesta, the UK’s Innovation foundation, recently released a global report highlighting 20 government innovation teams. Importantly, the study included teams that were established and funded by all levels of government (city, regional and national), and aims to find creative solutions to seemingly intractable solutions. This report features 20 teams across six continents and features some basic principles and commonalities that are instructive for all types of innovators, inside and outside, of government.
Using Government to Locally Engage
One of the challenges of representational democracy is that elected officials and government officials spend time in bureaucracies isolated from the very people they aim to serve. Perhaps there can be different models. For example, Seoul’s Innovation Bureau is engaging citizens to re-design and re-imagine public services. Seoul is dedicated to becoming a Sharing City; including Tool Kit Centers where citizens can borrow machinery they would rarely use that would also benefit the whole community. This approach puts citizens at the center of their communities and leverages government to work for the people…
As I’ve outlined in a earlier TechTank post, there are institutional constraints for governments to try the unknown. There are potential electoral costs, greater disillusionment, and gaps in vital service delivery. Yet, despite all of these barriers there are a variety of promising tools. For example, Finland has Sitra, an Innovation fund, whose mission is to foster experimentation to transform a diverse set of policy issues including sustainable energy and healthcare. Sitra invests in both the practical research and experiments to further public sector issues as well as invest in early stage companies.
We need a deeper understanding of the opportunities, and challenges, of innovation in government. Luckily there are many researchers, think-tanks, and organizations beginning analysis. For example, Professor and Associate Dean Anita McGahan, of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, calls for a more strategic approach toward understanding the use of innovation, including big data, in the public sector…”
The Data Act's unexpected benefit
Adam Mazmanian at FCW: “The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act sets an aggressive schedule for creating governmentwide financial standards. The first challenge belongs to the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget. They must come up with a set of common data elements for financial information that will cover just about everything the government spends money on and every entity it pays in order to give oversight bodies and government watchdogs a top-down view of federal spending from appropriation to expenditure. Those data elements are scheduled for completion by May 2015, one year after the act’s passage.
Two years after those standards are in place, agencies will be required to report their financial information following Data Act guidelines. The government currently supports more than 150 financial management systems but lacks a common data dictionary, so there are not necessarily agreed-upon definitions of how to classify and track government programs and types of expenditures.
“As far as systems today and how we can get there, they don’t necessarily map in the way that the act described,” U.S. CIO Steven VanRoekel said in June. “It’s going to be a journey to get to where the act aspires for us to be.”
However, an Obama administration initiative to encourage agencies to share financial services could be part of the solution. In May, OMB and Treasury designated four financial shared-services providers for government agencies: the Agriculture Department’s National Finance Center, the Interior Department’s Interior Business Center, the Transportation Department’s Enterprise Services Center and Treasury’s Administrative Resource Center.
There are some synergies between shared services and data standardization, but shared financial services alone will not guarantee Data Act compliance, especially considering that the government expects the migration to take 10 to 15 years. Nevertheless, the discipline required under the Data Act could boost agency efforts to prepare financial data when it comes time to move to a shared service….”
Fifteen open data insights
Tim Davies from ODRN: “…below are the 15 points from the three-page briefing version, and you can find a full write-up of these points for download. You can also find reports from all the individual project partners, including a collection of quick-read research posters over on the Open Data Research Network website.
15 insights into open data supply, use and impacts
(1) There are many gaps to overcome before open data availability, can lead to widespread effective use and impact. Open data can lead to change through a ‘domino effect’, or by creating ripples of change that gradually spread out. However, often many of the key ‘domino pieces’ are missing, and local political contexts limit the reach of ripples. Poor data quality, low connectivity, scarce technical skills, weak legal frameworks and political barriers may all prevent open data triggering sustainable change. Attentiveness to all the components of open data impact is needed when designing interventions.
(2) There is a frequent mismatch between open data supply and demand in developing countries. Counting datasets is a poor way of assessing the quality of an open data initiative. The datasets published on portals are often the datasets that are easiest to publish, not the datasets most in demand. Politically sensitive datasets are particularly unlikely to be published without civil society pressure. Sometimes the gap is on the demand side – as potential open data users often do not articulate demands for key datasets.
(3) Open data initiatives can create new spaces for civil society to pursue government accountability and effectiveness. The conversation around transparency and accountability that ideas of open data can support is as important as the datasets in some developing countries.
(4) Working on open data projects can change how government creates, prepares and uses its own data. The motivations behind an open data initiative shape how government uses the data itself. Civil society and entrepreneurs interacting with government through open data projects can help shape government data practices. This makes it important to consider which intermediaries gain insider roles shaping data supply.
(5) Intermediaries are vital to both the supply and the use of open data. Not all data needed for governance in developing countries comes from government. Intermediaries can create data, articulate demands for data, and help translate open data visions from political leaders into effective implementations. Traditional local intermediaries are an important source of information, in particular because they are trusted parties.
(6) Digital divides create data divides in both the supply and use of data. In some developing countries key data is not digitised, or a lack of technical staff has left data management patchy and inconsistent. Where Internet access is scarce, few citizens can have direct access to data or services built with it. Full access is needed for full empowerment, but offline intermediaries, including journalists and community radio stations, also play a vital role in bridging the gaps between data and citizens.
(7) Where information is already available and used, the shift to open data involves data evolution rather than data revolution. Many NGOs and intermediaries already access the information which is now becoming available as data. Capacity building should start from existing information and data practices in organisations, and should look for the step-by-step gains to be made from a data-driven approach.
(8) Officials’ fears about the integrity of data are a barrier to more machine-readable data being made available. The publication of data as PDF or in scanned copies is often down to a misunderstanding of how open data works. Only copies can be changed, and originals can be kept authoritative. Helping officials understand this may help increase the supply of data.
(9) Very few datasets are clearly openly licensed, and there is low understanding of what open licenses entail. There are mixed opinions on the importance of a focus on licensing in different contexts. Clear licenses are important to building a global commons of interoperable data, but may be less relevant to particular uses of data on the ground. In many countries wider conversation about licensing are yet to take place.
(10) Privacy issues are not on the radar of most developing country open data projects, although commercial confidentiality does arise as a reason preventing greater data transparency. Much state held data is collected either from citizens or from companies. Few countries in the ODDC study have weak or absent privacy laws and frameworks, yet participants in the studies raised few personal privacy considerations. By contrast, a lack of clarity, and officials’ concerns, about potential breaches of commercial confidentiality when sharing data gathered from firms was a barrier to opening data.
(11) There is more to open data than policies and portals. Whilst central open data portals act as a visible symbol of open data initiatives, a focus on portal building can distract attention from wider reforms. Open data elements can also be built on existing data sharing practices, and data made available through the locations where citizens, NGOs are businesses already go to access information.
(12) Open data advocacy should be aware of, and build upon, existing policy foundations in specific countries and sectors. Sectoral transparency policies for local government, budget and energy industry regulation, amongst others, could all have open data requirements and standards attached, drawing on existing mechanisms to secure sustainable supplies of relevant open data in developing countries. In addition, open data conversations could help make existing data collection and disclosure requirements fit better with the information and data demands of citizens.
(13) Open data is not just a central government issue: local government data, city data, and data from the judicial and legislative branches are all important. Many open data projects focus on the national level, and only on the executive branch. However, local government is closer to citizens, urban areas bring together many of the key ingredients for successful open data initiatives, and transparency in other branches of government is important to secure citizens democratic rights.
(14) Flexibility is needed in the application of definitions of open data to allow locally relevant and effective open data debates and advocacy to emerge. Open data is made up of various elements, including proactive publication, machine-readability and permissions to re-use. Countries at different stages of open data development may choose to focus on one or more of these, but recognising that adopting all elements at once could hinder progress. It is important to find ways to both define open data clearly, and to avoid a reductive debate that does not recognise progressive steps towards greater openness.
(15) There are many different models for an open data initiative: including top-down, bottom-up and sector-specific. Initiatives may also be state-led, civil society-led and entrepreneur-led in their goals and how they are implemented – with consequences for the resources and models required to make them sustainable. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to open data. More experimentation, evaluation and shared learning on the components, partners and processes for putting open data ideas into practice must be a priority for all who want to see a world where open-by-default data drives real social, political and economic change.
You can read more about each of these points in the full report.”
Selected Readings on Economic Impact of Open Data
The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of open data was originally published in 2014.
Open data is publicly available data – often released by governments, scientists, and occasionally private companies – that is made available for anyone to use, in a machine-readable format, free of charge. Considerable attention has been devoted to the economic potential of open data for businesses and other organizations, and it is now widely accepted that open data plays an important role in spurring innovation, growth, and job creation. From new business models to innovation in local governance, open data is being quickly adopted as a valuable resource at many levels.
Measuring and analyzing the economic impact of open data in a systematic way is challenging, and governments as well as other providers of open data seek to provide access to the data in a standardized way. As governmental transparency increases and open data changes business models and activities in many economic sectors, it is important to understand best practices for releasing and using non-proprietary, public information. Costs, social challenges, and technical barriers also influence the economic impact of open data.
These selected readings are intended as a first step in the direction of answering the question of if we can and how we consider if opening data spurs economic impact.
Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
- Carla Bonina — New Business Models and the Values of Open Data: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities. – Paper provides an introduction to open data and open data business models, evaluating their potential economic value and identifying future challenges for the effectiveness of open data
- John Carpenter and Phil Watts — Assessing the Value of OS OpenData™ to the Economy of Great Britain – Synopsis – A study examining the economic impact of the OS OpenData initiative to the economy of Great Britain.
- Capgemini Consulting. — The Open Data Economy: Unlocking Economic Value by Opening Government and Public Data. Capgemini Consulting – Paper analyzes trends in open government data interventions among different countries with goal of identifying best practices for stimulating economic impact and creating economic value.
- Deloitte — Open Growth: Stimulating Demand for Open Data in the UK. – Explores emerging data-driven business models and its potential to stimulate demand for open data in the UK economy.
- Nicholas Gruen, John Houghton and Richard Tooth — Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target — Assesses exiting literature, in-depth case studies, and proposes key strategies for institutions to open data to spur economic development and growth.
- Felipe I Heusser — Understanding Open Government Data and Addressing Its Impact (draft version) – Early research on open data initiatives and its economic impact in developing countries.
- Alex Howard — San Francisco Looks to Tap into the Open Data Economy – This article examines San Francisco’s use of open data in municipal governance.
- Noor Huijboom and Tijs Van den Broek — Open Data: An International Comparison of Strategies — This paper examines five countries and their open data strategies, identifying key features, main barriers, and drivers of progress for of open data programs.
- James Manyika, Michael Chui, Diana Farrell, Steve Van Kuiken, Peter Groves, and Elizabeth Almasi Doshi —Open Data: Unlocking Innovation and Performance with Liquid Innovation — Focuses on quantifying the potential value of open data in critical domains of the global economy.
- Alida Moore — Congressional Transparency Caucus: How Open Data Creates Jobs — Summary of the March 24th briefing of the Congressional Transparency Caucus on the need to increase government transparency through adopting open data initiatives for job creation.
- Andrew Stott —Open Data for Economic Growth— Examines five archetypes of businesses using open data, and provides recommendations for governments trying to maximize economic growth from open data.
Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Bonina, Carla. New Business Models and the Values of Open Data: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities. NEMODE 3K – Small Grants Call 2013. http://bit.ly/1xGf9oe
- In this paper, Dr. Carla Bonina provides an introduction to open data and open data business models, evaluating their potential economic value and identifying future challenges for the effectiveness of open data, such as personal data and privacy, the emerging data divide, and the costs of collecting, producing and releasing open (government) data.
Carpenter, John and Phil Watts. Assessing the Value of OS OpenData™ to the Economy of Great Britain – Synopsis. June 2013. Accessed July 25, 2014. http://bit.ly/1rTLVUE
- John Carpenter and Phil Watts of Ordnance Survey undertook a study to examine the economic impact of open data to the economy of Great Britain. Using a variety of methods such as case studies, interviews, downlad analysis, adoption rates, impact calculation, and CGE modeling, the authors estimates that the OS OpenData initiative will deliver a net of increase in GDP of £13 – 28.5 million for Great Britain in 2013.
Capgemini Consulting. The Open Data Economy: Unlocking Economic Value by Opening Government and Public Data. Capgemini Consulting. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1n7MR02
- This report explores how governments are leveraging open data for economic benefits. Through using a compariative approach, the authors study important open data from organizational, technological, social and political perspectives. The study highlights the potential of open data to drive profit through increasing the effectiveness of benchmarking and other data-driven business strategies.
Deloitte. Open Growth: Stimulating Demand for Open Data in the UK. Deloitte Analytics. December 2012. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1oeFhks
- This early paper on open data by Deloitte uses case studies and statistical analysis on open government data to create models of businesses using open data. They also review the market supply and demand of open government data in emerging sectors of the economy.
Gruen, Nicholas, John Houghton and Richard Tooth. Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target. Accessed July 24, 2014, http://bit.ly/UOmBRe
- This report highlights the potential economic value of the open data agenda in Australia and the G20. The report provides an initial literature review on the economic value of open data, as well as a asset of case studies on the economic value of open data, and a set of recommendations for how open data can help the G20 and Australia achieve target objectives in the areas of trade, finance, fiscal and monetary policy, anti-corruption, employment, energy, and infrastructure.
Heusser, Felipe I. Understanding Open Government Data and Addressing Its Impact (draft version). World Wide Web Foundation. http://bit.ly/1o9Egym
- The World Wide Web Foundation, in collaboration with IDRC has begun a research network to explore the impacts of open data in developing countries. In addition to the Web Foundation and IDRC, the network includes the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the Open Development Technology Alliance and Practical Participation.
Howard, Alex. San Francisco Looks to Tap Into the Open Data Economy. O’Reilly Radar: Insight, Analysis, and Reach about Emerging Technologies. October 19, 2012. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://oreil.ly/1qNRt3h
- Alex Howard points to San Francisco as one of the first municipalities in the United States to embrace an open data platform. He outlines how open data has driven innovation in local governance. Moreover, he discusses the potential impact of open data on job creation and government technology infrastructure in the City and County of San Francisco.
Huijboom, Noor and Tijs Van den Broek. Open Data: An International Comparison of Strategies. European Journal of ePractice. March 2011. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1AE24jq
- This article examines five countries and their open data strategies, identifying key features, main barriers, and drivers of progress for of open data programs. The authors outline the key challenges facing European, and other national open data policies, highlighting the emerging role open data initiatives are playing in political and administrative agendas around the world.
Manyika, J., Michael Chui, Diana Farrell, Steve Van Kuiken, Peter Groves, and Elizabeth Almasi Doshi. Open Data: Unlocking Innovation and Performance with Liquid Innovation. McKinsey Global Institute. October 2013. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1lgDX0v
- This research focuses on quantifying the potential value of open data in seven “domains” in the global economy: education, transportation, consumer products, electricity, oil and gas, health care, and consumer finance.
Moore, Alida. Congressional Transparency Caucus: How Open Data Creates Jobs. April 2, 2014. Accessed July 30, 2014. Socrata. http://bit.ly/1n7OJpp
- Socrata provides a summary of the March 24th briefing of the Congressional Transparency Caucus on the need to increase government transparency through adopting open data initiatives. They include key takeaways from the panel discussion, as well as their role in making open data available for businesses.
Stott, Andrew. Open Data for Economic Growth. The World Bank. June 25, 2014. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1n7PRJF
- In this report, The World Bank examines the evidence for the economic potential of open data, holding that the economic potential is quite large, despite a variation in the published estimates, and difficulties assessing its potential methodologically. They provide five archetypes of businesses using open data, and provides recommendations for governments trying to maximize economic growth from open data.
Unleashing Climate Data to Empower America’s Agricultural Sector
at the White House Blog: “Today, in a major step to advance the President’s Climate Data Initiative, the Obama administration is inviting leaders of the technology and agricultural sectors to the White House to discuss new collaborative steps to unleash data that will help ensure our food system is resilient to the effects of climate change.
More intense heat waves, heavier downpours, and severe droughts and wildfires out west are already affecting the nation’s ability to produce and transport safe food. The recently released National Climate Assessment makes clear that these kinds of impacts are projected to become more severe over this century.
Food distributors, agricultural businesses, farmers, and retailers need accessible, useable data, tools, and information to ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of their operations – from water availability, to timing of planting and harvest, to storage practices, and more.
Today’s convening at the White House will include formal commitments by a host of private-sector companies and nongovernmental organizations to support the President’s Climate Data Initiative by harnessing climate data in ways that will increase the resilience of America’s food system and help reduce the contribution of the nation’s agricultural sector to climate change.
Microsoft Research, for instance, will grant 12 months of free cloud-computing resources to winners of a national challenge to create a smartphone app that helps farmers increase the resilience of their food production systems in the face of weather variability and climate change; the Michigan Agri-Business Association will soon launch a publicly available web-based mapping tool for use by the state’s agriculture sector; and the U.S. dairy industry will test and pilot four new modules – energy, feed, nutrient, and herd management – on the data-driven Farm Smart environmental-footprint calculation tool by the end of 2014. These are just a few among dozens of exciting commitments.
And the federal government is also stepping up. Today, anyone can log onto climate.data.gov and find new features that make data accessible and usable about the risks of climate change to food production, delivery, and nutrition – including current and historical data from the Census of Agriculture on production, supply, and distribution of agricultural products, and data on climate-change-related risks such as storms, heat waves, and drought.
These steps are a direct response to the President’s call for all hands on deck to generate further innovation to help prepare America’s communities and business for the impacts of climate change.
We are delighted about the steps being announced by dozens of collaborators today, and we can’t wait to see what further tools, apps, and services are developed as the Administration and its partners continue to unleash data to make America’s agriculture enterprise stronger and more resilient than ever before.
Read a fact sheet about all of today’s Climate Data Initiative commitments here.“
How Three Startups Are Using Data to Renew Public Trust In Government
Mark Hall: “Chances are that when you think about the word government, it is with a negative connotation.Your less-than-stellar opinion of government may be caused by everything from Washington’s dirty politics to the long lines at your local DMV.Regardless of the reason, local, state and national politics have frequently garnered a bad reputation. People feel like governments aren’t working for them.We have limited information, visibility and insight into what’s going on and why. Yes, the data is public information but it’s difficult to access and sift through.
Good news. Things are changing fast.
Innovative startups are emerging and they are changing the way we access government information at all levels.
Here are three tech startups that are taking a unique approach to opening up government data:
1. OpenGov is a Mountain View-based software company that enables government officials and local residents to easily parse through the city’s financial data.
Founded by a team with extensive technology and finance experience, this startup has already racked up some of the largest cities to join the movement, including the City of Los Angeles.OpenGov’s approach pairs data with good design in a manner that makes it easy to use.Historically, information like expenditures of public funds existed in a silo within the mayor’s office or city manager, diminishing the accountability of public employees.Imagine you are a citizen who is interested in seeing how much your city spent on a particular matter?
Now you can find out within just a few clicks.
This data is always of great importance but could also become increasingly critical during events like local elections.This level of openness and accessibility to data will be game-changing.
2. FiscalNote is a one-year old startup that uses analytical signals and intelligent government data to map legislation and predict an outcome.
Headquartered in Washington D.C., the company has developed a search layer and unique algorithm that makes tracking legislative data extremely easy. If you are an organization that has vested interests in specific legislative bills, tools by FiscalNote can give you insights into its progress and likelihood of being passed or held up. Want to know if your local representative favors a bill that could hurt your industry? Find out early and take the steps necessary to minimize the impact. Large corporations and special interest groups have traditionally held lobbying power with elected officials. This technology is important because small businesses, nonprofits and organizations now have an additional tool to see a changing legislative landscape in ways that were previously unimaginable.
3. Civic Industries is a San Francisco startup that allows citizens and local government officials to easily access data that previously required you to drive down to city hall. Building permits, code enforcements, upcoming government projects and construction data is now openly available within a few clicks.
Civic Insight maps various projects in your community and enables you to see all the projects with the corresponding start and completion dates, along with department contacts.
Accountability of public planning is no longer concealed to the city workers in the back-office. Responsibility is made clear. The startup also pushes underutilized city resources like empty storefronts and abandoned buildings to the forefront in an effort to drive action, either by residents or government officials.
So What’s Next?
While these three startups using data to push government transparency in the right direction, more work is needed…”
Chief Executive of Nesta on the Future of Government Innovation
Interview between Rahim Kanani and Geoff Mulgan, CEO of NESTA and member of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance: “Our aspiration is to become a global center of expertise on all kinds of innovation, from how to back creative business start-ups and how to shape innovations tools such as challenge prizes, to helping governments act as catalysts for new solutions,” explained Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation. In an interview with Mulgan, we discussed their new report, published in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, which highlights 20 of the world’s top innovation teams in government. Mulgan and I also discussed the founding and evolution of Nesta over the past few years, and leadership lessons from his time inside and outside government.
Rahim Kanani: When we talk about ‘innovations in government’, isn’t that an oxymoron?
Geoff Mulgan: Governments have always innovated. The Internet and World Wide Web both originated in public organizations, and governments are constantly developing new ideas, from public health systems to carbon trading schemes, online tax filing to high speed rail networks. But they’re much less systematic at innovation than the best in business and science. There are very few job roles, especially at senior levels, few budgets, and few teams or units. So although there are plenty of creative individuals in the public sector, they succeed despite, not because of the systems around them. Risk-taking is punished not rewarded. Over the last century, by contrast, the best businesses have learned how to run R&D departments, product development teams, open innovation processes and reasonably sophisticated ways of tracking investments and returns.
Kanani: This new report, published in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, highlights 20 of the world’s most effective innovation teams in government working to address a range of issues, from reducing murder rates to promoting economic growth. Before I get to the results, how did this project come about, and why is it so important?
Mulgan: If you fail to generate new ideas, test them and scale the ones that work, it’s inevitable that productivity will stagnate and governments will fail to keep up with public expectations, particularly when waves of new technology—from smart phones and the cloud to big data—are opening up dramatic new possibilities. Mayor Bloomberg has been a leading advocate for innovation in the public sector, and in New York he showed the virtues of energetic experiment, combined with rigorous measurement of results. In the UK, organizations like Nesta have approached innovation in a very similar way, so it seemed timely to collaborate on a study of the state of the field, particularly since we were regularly being approached by governments wanting to set up new teams and asking for guidance.
Kanani: Where are some of the most effective innovation teams working on these issues, and how did you find them?
Mulgan: In our own work at Nesta, we’ve regularly sought out the best innovation teams that we could learn from and this study made it possible to do that more systematically, focusing in particular on the teams within national and city governments. They vary greatly, but all the best ones are achieving impact with relatively slim resources. Some are based in central governments, like Mindlab in Denmark, which has pioneered the use of design methods to reshape government services, from small business licensing to welfare. SITRA in Finland has been going for decades as a public technology agency, and more recently has switched its attention to innovation in public services. For example, providing mobile tools to help patients manage their own healthcare. In the city of Seoul, the Mayor set up an innovation team to accelerate the adoption of ‘sharing’ tools, so that people could share things like cars, freeing money for other things. In south Australia the government set up an innovation agency that has been pioneering radical ways of helping troubled families, mobilizing families to help other families.
Kanani: What surprised you the most about the outcomes of this research?
Mulgan: Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the speed with which this idea is spreading. Since we started the research, we’ve come across new teams being created in dozens of countries, from Canada and New Zealand to Cambodia and Chile. China has set up a mobile technology lab for city governments. Mexico City and many others have set up labs focused on creative uses of open data. A batch of cities across the US supported by Bloomberg Philanthropy—from Memphis and New Orleans to Boston and Philadelphia—are now showing impressive results and persuading others to copy them.
Recent progress in Open Data production and consumption
Examples from a Governmental institute (SMHI) and a collaborative EU research project (SWITCH-ON) by Arheimer, Berit; and Falkenroth, Esa: “The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) has a long tradition both in producing and consuming open data on a national, European and global scale. It is also promoting community building among water scientists in Europe by participating in and initiating collaborative projects. This presentation will exemplify the contemporary European movement imposed by the INSPIRE directive and the Open Data Strategy, by showing the progress in openness and shift in attitudes during the last decade when handling Research Data and Public Sector Information at a national European institute. Moreover, the presentation will inform about a recently started collaborative project (EU FP7 project No 603587) coordinated by SMHI and called SWITCH-ON http://water-switch-on.eu/. The project addresses water concerns and currently untapped potential of open data for improved water management across the EU. The overall goal of the project is to make use of open data, and add value to society by repurposing and refining data from various sources. SWITCH-ON will establish new forms of water research and facilitate the development of new products and services based on principles of sharing and community building in the water society. The SWITCH-ON objectives are to use open data for implementing: 1) an innovative spatial information platform with open data tailored for direct water assessments, 2) an entirely new form of collaborative research for water-related sciences, 3) fourteen new operational products and services dedicated to appointed end-users, 4) new business and knowledge to inform individual and collective decisions in line with the Europe’s smart growth and environmental objectives. The presentation will discuss challenges, progress and opportunities with the open data strategy, based on the experiences from working both at a Governmental institute and being part of the global research community.”
Indonesian techies crowdsource election results
The Indonesian techies, who work for multinational companies, were spurred into action after both presidential candidates claimed victory and accused each other of trying to rig the convoluted counting process, raising fears that the country’s young democracy was under threat.
Mr Najib and two friends took advantage of the decision by the national election commission (KPU) to upload the individual results from Indonesia’s 480,000 polling stations to its website for the first time, in an attempt to counter widespread fears about electoral fraud.
The three Indonesians scraped the voting data from the KPU website on to a database and then recruited 700 friends and acquaintances through Facebook to type in the results and check them. They uploaded the data to a website called kawalpemilu.org, which means “guard the election” in Indonesian.
Throughout the process, Mr Najib said he had to fend off hacking attacks, forcing him to shift data storage to a cloud-based service. The whole exercise cost $10 for a domain name and $0.10 for the data storage….”
The Skeleton Crew
Book Review by Edward Jay Epstein in the Wall Street Journal: “…Even in an age when we are tracked electronically by our phone companies at every single moment, about 4,000 unidentified corpses turn up in the U.S. every year, of which about half have been murdered. In 2007 no fewer than 13,500 sets of unidentified human remains were languishing in the evidence rooms of medical examiners, according to an analysis published in the National Institute of Justice Journal.
In her brilliant book “The Skeleton Crew,” Deborah Halber explains why local law enforcement often fails to investigate such deaths:”Unidentified corpses are like obtuse, financially strapped houseguests: they turn up uninvited, take up space reserved for more obliging visitors, require care and attention, and then, when you are ready for them to move on, they don’t have anywhere to go.” The result is that many of these remains are consigned to oblivion.
While the population of the anonymous dead receives only scant attention from the police or the media, it has given rise to a macabre subculture of Internet sleuthing. Ms. Halber chronicles with lucidity and wit how amateur investigators troll websites, such as the Doe Network, Official Cold Case Investigations and Websleuths Crime Sleuthing Community, and check online databases looking for matches between the reported missing and the unidentified dead. It is a grisly pursuit involving linking the images of dead bodies to the descriptions posted by people trying to find someone.
Ms. Halber devotes most of “The Skeleton Crew” to describing a handful of cases that have given rise to this bizarre avocation….”