Entrepreneurs Shape Free Data Into Money

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Angus Loten in the Wall Street Journal: “More cities are putting information on everything from street-cleaning schedules to police-response times and restaurant inspection reports in the public domain, in the hope that people will find a way to make money off the data.
Supporters of such programs often see them as a local economic stimulus plan, allowing software developers and entrepreneurs in cities ranging from San Francisco to South Bend, Ind., to New York, to build new businesses based on the information they get from government websites.
When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti issued an executive directive last month to launch the city’s open-data program, he cited entrepreneurs and businesses as important beneficiaries. Open-data promotes innovation and “gives companies, individuals, and nonprofit organizations the opportunity to leverage one of government’s greatest assets: public information,” according to the Dec. 18 directive.
A poster child for the movement might be 34-year-old Matt Ehrlichman of Seattle, who last year built an online business in part using Seattle work permits, professional licenses and other home-construction information gathered up by the city’s Department of Planning and Development.
While his website is free, his business, called Porch.com, has more than 80 employees and charges a $35 monthly fee to industry professionals who want to boost the visibility of their projects on the site.
The site gathers raw public data—such as addresses for homes under renovation, what they are doing, who is doing the work and how much they are charging—and combines it with photos and other information from industry professionals and homeowners. It then creates a searchable database for users to compare ideas and costs for projects near their own neighborhood.
…Ian Kalin, director of open-data services at Socrata, a Seattle-based software firm that makes the back-end applications for many of these government open-data sites, says he’s worked with hundreds of companies that were formed around open data.
Among them is Climate Corp., a San Francisco-based firm that collects weather and yield-forecasting data to help farmers decide when and where to plant crops. Launched in 2006, the firm was acquired in October by Monsanto Co. MON -2.90% , the seed-company giant, for $930 million.
Overall, the rate of new business formation declined nationally between 2006 and 2010. But according to the latest data from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, an entrepreneurship advocacy group in Kansas City, Mo., the rate of new business formation in Seattle in 2011 rose 9.41% in 2011, compared with the national average of 3.9%.
Other cities where new business formation was ahead of the national average include Chicago, Austin, Texas, Baltimore, and South Bend, Ind.—all cities that also have open-data programs. Still, how effective the ventures are in creating jobs is difficult to gauge.
One wrinkle: privacy concerns about the potential for information—such as property tax and foreclosure data—to be misused.
Some privacy advocates fear that government data that include names, addresses and other sensitive information could be used by fraudsters to target victims.”

Walgreens Taps Crowdsourcing to Deliver Cold Medicine to Shut-Ins

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mashable: “Walgreens is reaching out to consumers who are so walloped with a cold or flu that a trip to the corner drugstore seems an insurmountable obstacle.
The national drug chain is partnering with TaskRabbit, the online mobile marketplace, to allow deliveries of over-the-counter cold medicine in any of the 19 cities in which TaskRabbit is available. Such deliveries can be made via TaskRabbit’s iOS app or on its website. Standard TaskRabbit rates apply including a 20% service charge and a runner’s fee. So if a runner’s fee is $10, you would pay an additional $12 plus the cost of your cold medicine, to get the delivery.
The partnership, arranged by OMD’s Ignition Factory, runs this week through Feb. 18, typically the weeks in which cold and flu complaints have the sharpest increases. During that time, the Walgreens option will appear in TaskRabbit’s iOS app’s Task Wheel and on the website. Though TaskRabbit has partnered with other national brands, including Pepsi, this is its first with a retailer.
However, the deal is more of a pr exercise than anything else: Consumers have had the ability arrange a TaskRabbit to shop and buy cold medicine at Walgreens prior to the agreement. The chain is hoping to raise awareness about this option, though.
“We just wanted to make it as easy as possible,” says Wilson Standish, project manager at Ignition Factory. “When you’re sick, you don’t even want to get out of bed.”

Crowdsourcing Social Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by   in Reason: “reCAPTCHA and Duolingo both represent a distinctly 21st-century form of distributed problem solving. These Internet-enabled approaches tend to be faster, far less expensive, and far more resilient than the heavyweight industrial-age methods of solving big social problems that we’ve grown accustomed to over the past century. They typically involve highly diverse resources-volunteer time, crowdfunding, the capabilities of multinational corporations, entrepreneurial capital, philanthropic funding-aligned around common objectives such as reducing congestion, providing safe drinking water, or promoting healthy living. Crowdsourcing offers not just a better way of doing things, but a radical challenge to the bureaucratic status quo.
Here are several ways public, private, and nonprofit organizations can use lightweight, distributed approaches to solve societal problems faster and cheaper than the existing sclerotic models.
Chunk the Problem
The genius of reCAPTCHA and Duolingo is that they divide labor into small increments, performed for free, often by people who are unaware of the project they’re helping to complete. This strategy has wide public-policy applications, even in dealing with potholes….
Meanwhile, Finland’s DigitalKoot project enlisted volunteers to digitize their own libraries by playing a computer game that challenged them to transcribe scans of antique manuscripts.
Governments can set up a microtasking platform, not just for citizen engagement but as a way to harness the knowledge and skills of public employees across multiple departments and agencies. If microtasking can work to connect people outside the “four walls” of an organization, think of its potential as a platform to connect people and conduct work inside an organization-even an organization as bureaucratic as government.
…
Decentralize Service to the Self
A young woman slices her finger on a knife. As she compresses the bleeding with gauze, she needs to know if her wound warrants stitches. So she calls up Blue Cross’ 24-hour nurse hotline, where patients call to learn if they should see a doctor. The nurse asks her to describe the depth of the cut. He explains she should compress it with gauze and skip the ER. In aggregate, savings like this amount to millions of dollars of avoided emergency room visits.
Since 2003, Blue Cross has been shifting the work of basic triage and risk mitigation to customers. Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) implemented a similar program, NHS Direct, in 1998. NHS estimates that the innovation has saved it £44 million a year….
Gamify Drudgery
Finland’s national library houses an enormous archive of antique texts, which officials hoped to scan and digitize into ordinary, searchable text documents. Rather than simply hire people for the tedium of correcting garbled OCR scans, the library invited the public to play a game. An online program called DigitalKoot lets people transcribe scanned words, and by typing accurately, usher a series of cartoon moles safely across a bridge….
Build a Two-Sided Market
Road infrastructure costs government five cents per driver per mile, according to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute. “That’s a dollar the government paid for the paving of that road and the maintaining of that infrastructure…just for you, not the other 3,000 people that travelled that same segment of highway in that same hour that you did,” says Sean O’Sullivan, founder of Carma, a ridesharing application.
Ridesharing companies such as Carma, Lyft, and Zimride are attempting to recruit private cars for the public transit network, by letting riders pay a small fee to carpool. A passenger waits at a designated stop, and the app alerts drivers, who can scan a profile of their potential rider. It’s a prime example of a potent new business model…
Remove the Middleman
John McNair dropped out of high school at age 16. By his thirties, he became an entrepreneur, producing and selling handmade guitars, but carpentry alone wouldn’t grow his business. So the founder of Red Dog Guitars enrolled in a $20 class on Skillshare.com, taught by the illustrator John Contino, to learn to brand his work with hand lettered product labels. Soon, a fellow businessman was asking McNair for labels to market guitar pickups.
Traditionally, the U.S. government might invest in retraining someone like John. Instead, peer-to-peer technology has allowed a community of designers to help John develop his skills. Peer-to-peer strategies enable citizens to meet each other’s needs, cheaply. Peer-to-peer solutions can help fix problems, deliver services, and supplement traditional approaches.
Peer-to-peer can lessen our dependence on big finance. Kickstarter lets companies skip the energy of convincing a banker that their product is viable. They just need to convince customers…”

Protecting personal data in E-government: A cross-country study

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Yuehua Wu in Government Information Quarterly: “This paper presents the findings of a comparative study of laws and policies employed to protect personal data processed in the context of e-government in three countries (the United States, Germany, and China) with rather different approaches. Drawing on governance theory, the paper seeks to document the mechanisms utilized and to understand the factors that shape the governance modes adopted. The cases reveal that national government regulations have not kept pace with technological change and with the current information practices of the public sector. Nonetheless, traditional government regulation remains the major governance mode for the issue under discussion. Self-regulation and code-based regulation serve supplementary roles to traditional government regulation. National context is found to impact the form and level of data protection and the choice of governance modes.”

How could technology improve policy-making?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beccy Allen from the Hansard Society (UK): “How can civil servants be sure they have the most relevant, current and reliable data? How can open data be incorporated into the policy making process now and what is the potential for the future use of this vast array of information? How can parliamentary clerks ensure they are aware of the broadest range of expert opinion to inform committee scrutiny? And how can citizens’ views help policy makers to design better policy at all stages of the process?
These are the kind of questions that Sense4us will be exploring over the next three years. The aim is to build a digital tool for policy-makers that can:

  1. locate a broad range of relevant and current information, specific to a particular policy, incorporating open data sets and citizens’ views particularly from social media; and
  2. simulate the consequences and impact of potential policies, allowing policy-makers to change variables and thereby better understand the likely outcomes of a range of policy options before deciding which to adopt.

It is early days for open data and open policy making. The word ‘digital’ peppers the Civil Service Reform Plan but the focus is often on providing information and transactional services digitally. Less attention is paid to how digital tools could improve the nature of policy-making itself.
The Sense4us tool aims to help bridge the gap. It will be developed in consultation with policy-makers at different levels of government across Europe to ensure its potential use by a wide range of stakeholders. At the local level, our partners GESIS (the Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences) will be responsible for engaging with users at the city level in Berlin and in the North Rhine-Westphalia state legislature At the multi-national level Government to You (Gov2u) will engage with users in the European Parliament and Commission. Meanwhile the Society will be responsible for national level consultation with civil servants, parliamentarians and parliamentary officials in Whitehall and Westminster exploring how the tool can be used to support the UK policy process. Our academic partners leading on technical development of the tool are the IT Innovation Centre at Southampton University, eGovlab at Stockholm University, the University of Koblenz-Landau and the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University.”

Open Government? Check. Public Participation? Not yet.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New blog post by Tina Nabatchi: “By requiring all federal agencies to be more transparent, collaborative, and participatory, the Obama Administration’s Open Government Initiative promised to bring watershed changes to government. While much progress has been made since the release of its first National Action Plan, advances in the arena of public participation have been disappointing. Champions of public participation had high hopes for the second National Action Plan, which was released by the White House on December 5, 2013. While the second plan has numerous commendable and important commitments that increase transparency and collaboration, it falls flat with regard to public participation, perhaps with the exception of its promotion of participatory budgeting.
The second plan includes three explicit commitments involving “public participation.” The first commitment, “Improving Public Participation in Government,” is to be done by: (1) “expanding and simplifying the use of the We the People e-petition platform,” and (2) “publishing best practices and metrics for public participation” (see page 2). Both of these commitments (in different form) were in the first National Action Plan.
….
Perhaps the lack of movement is because realizing the promise of public participation at the federal level requires making challenging, substantive changes to our administrative infrastructure. Several issues impede the effective use of participation in open government at the federal level, including among others:
Most of the laws that govern that use of public participation are over thirty years old and pre-date the internet. Existing laws and regulations use a narrow definition of public participation and fail to embrace the vast array of robust, empowered participatory methods. Moreover, the laws are often in tension with agency missions and the goals of participation, and leave agency staff wondering whether participatory innovations are legal.
Agency officials sometimes lack the knowledge, skills, and abilities to launch effective and meaningful participatory programs, and there are few opportunities for officials to learn about best practices from each other and from civil society. Agency officials who have taken lead roles in innovative public participation efforts do not always feel supported by the Administration.
Several laws, rules, and regulations limit agencies’ ability to collect and use routine data from participatory programs, which impedes evaluation efforts. Thus, agencies are severely restricted in their ability to appraise and improve participatory developments and implementation.
Had these issues been addressed in the second National Action Plan, then perhaps federal agencies would have been able to focus on the participatory aspects of open government and help the U.S. become a leader in public participation innovation. To this end, as the Administration moves forward with Open Government, it should work on: (1) reviewing and clarifying the legal framework for participation, including a more expansive and clear definition of public participation; (2) helping agencies develop the internal capacity needed to conduct more meaningful public participation; and (3) developing a generic, OMB-approved tool that all agencies can use to collect common data about individual participants for routine uses. Without attention to these issues, the Open Government Initiative will fail to reshape the practices and activities of public participation in the work of federal agencies.”

Open Data in Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Nick Sinai at the White House: “Over the past few years, the Administration has launched a series of Open Data Initiatives, which, have released troves of valuable data in areas such as health, energy, education, public safety, finance, and global development…
Today, in furtherance of this exciting economic dynamic, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) —a research institution at New York University—released the beta version of its Open Data 500 project—an initiative designed to identify, describe, and analyze companies that use open government data in order to study how these data can serve business needs more effectively. As part of this effort, the organization is compiling a list of 500+ companies that use open government data to generate new business and develop new products and services.
This working list of 500+ companies, from sectors ranging from real estate to agriculture to legal services, shines a spotlight on surprising array of innovative and creative ways that open government data is being used to grow the economy – across different company sizes, different geographies, and different industries. The project includes information about  the companies and what government datasets they have identified as critical resources for their business.
Some of examples from the Open Data 500 Project include:
  • Brightscope, a San Diego-based company that leverages data from the Department of Labor, the Security and Exchange Commission, and the Census Bureau to rate consumers’ 401k plans objectively on performance and fees, so companies can choose better plans and employees can make better decisions about their retirement options.
  • AllTuition, a  Chicago-based startup that provides services—powered by data from Department of Education on Federal student financial aid programs and student loans— to help students and parents manage the financial-aid process for college, in part by helping families keep track of deadlines, and walking them through the required forms.
  • Archimedes, a San Francisco healthcare modeling and analytics company, that leverages  Federal open data from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, to  provide doctors more effective individualized treatment plans and to enable patients to make informed health decisions.
You can learn more here about the project and view the list of open data companies here.

See also:
Open Government Data: Companies Cash In

NYU project touts 500 top open-data firms”

Digital Passivity

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jaron Lanier in the New York Times: “I fear that 2013 will be remembered as a tragic  and dark year in the digital universe, despite the fact that a lot of wonderful advances took place.

It was the year in which tablets became ubiquitous and advanced gadgets like 3-D printers and wearable interfaces emerged as pop phenomena; all great fun. Our gadgets have widened access to our world. We now regularly communicate with people we would not have been aware of before the networked age. We can find information about almost anything, any time.

But 2013 was also the year in which we became aware of the corner we’ve backed ourselves into. We learned — through the leaks of Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, and the work of investigative journalists — how much our gadgets and our digital networks are being used to spy on us by ultra-powerful, remote organizations. We are being dissected more than we dissect.

I wish I could separate the two big trends of the year in computing — the cool gadgets and the revelations of digital spying — but I cannot.

Back at the dawn of personal computing, the idealistic notion that drove most of us was that computers were tools for leveraging human intelligence to ever-greater achievement and fulfillment. This was the idea that burned in the hearts of pioneers like Alan Kay, who a half-century ago was already drawing illustrations of how children would someday use tablets.

But tablets do something unforeseen: They enforce a new power structure. Unlike a personal computer, a tablet runs only programs and applications approved by a central commercial authority. You control the data you enter into a PC, while data entered into a tablet is often managed by someone else.

Steve Jobs, who oversaw the introduction of the spectacularly successful iPad at Apple, declared that personal computers were now ‘‘trucks’’ — tools for working-class guys in T-shirts and visors, but not for upwardly mobile cool people. The implication was that upscale consumers would prefer status and leisure to influence or self-determination.

I am not sure who is to blame for our digital passivity. Did we give up on ourselves too easily?

This would be bleak enough even without the concurrent rise of the surveillance economy. Not only have consumers prioritized flash and laziness over empowerment; we have also acquiesced to being spied on all the time.

The two trends are actually one. The only way to persuade people to voluntarily accept the loss of freedom is by making it look like a great bargain at first.

Consumers were offered free stuff (like search and social networking) in exchange for agreeing to be watched. Vast fortunes can be made by those who best use the personal data you voluntarily hand them. Instagram, introduced in 2010, had only 13 employees and no business plan when it was bought by Facebook less than two years later for $1 billion.

One can argue that network technology enhances democracy because it makes it possible, for example, to tweet your protests. But complaining is not yet success. Social media didn’t create jobs for young people in Cairo during the Arab Spring…”

Government's Crowdsourcing Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John M. Kamensky  in Governing: “In a recent report for the IBM Center for the Business of Government, Brabham says that an important distinction between crowdsourcing and other forms of online participation is that crowdsourcing “entails a mix of top-down, traditional, hierarchical process and a bottom-up, open process involving an online community.”
Crowdsourcing in the public sector can be done within government, among employees as a way to surface ideas — such as the New York City government’s “Simplicity” initiative — or it can be done by nonprofit groups in ways that influence government operations. For example, a transportation advocacy group in New York City has created a site where citizens can report “near miss” accidents, which are then mapped to determine patterns. The idea is that, while the city government already maps accidents that have happened, hazardous traffic zones can be detected and resolved faster by mapping near-misses without waiting for a large number of actual accidents.
Brabham offers a strategic view of crowdsourcing and when it is useful to address public problems. His report also identifies four specific approaches, describing which is most useful for a given category of problem:
• Knowledge discovery and management. This approach is best for information-gathering and cataloguing problems through an online community, such as the reporting of earth tremors or potholes to a central source. This approach could also be used to report conditions of parks or hiking trails or for cataloging public art projects as have been done in several cities across the country.
• Distributed human-intelligence tasking: This approach is most useful when human intelligence is more effective than computer analysis. It involves distributing “micro-tasks” that require human intelligence to solve, such as transcribing handwritten historical documents into electronic files. For example, when the handwritten 1940 census records were publicly released in 2012, the National Archives catalyzed the electronic tagging of more than 130 million records so they could be searchable online. More than 150,000 people volunteered.
• Broadcast search: This approach is most useful when an agency is attempting to find creative solutions to problems. It involves broadcasting a problem-solving challenge widely on the Internet and offering an award for the best solution. NASA, for example, offered a prize for an algorithm to predict solar flares. The federal government sponsors a contest and awards Web platform, Challenge.gov, that various federal agencies can use to post their challenges. To date, hundreds of diverse challenges have been posted, with thousands of people proposing solutions.
• Peer-vetted creative production: This approach is most useful when an agency is looking for innovative ideas that must meet a test of taste or market support. It involves an online community that both proposes possible solutions and is empowered to collectively choose among them. For example, the Utah Transit Authority sponsored the Next Stop Design project, allowing citizens to design and vote on an ideal bus-stop shelter. Nearly 3,200 people participated, submitting 260 high-quality architectural renderings, and there were more than 10,000 votes leading to a final selection….”

When the wisdom of crowds meets the kindness of strangers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Kelsey (NHS) on why patient and citizen participation is fundamental to high quality health and care services: “…But above all my priority is to improve the way in which health and care services listen to people  – and can therefore act and change. The work of entrepreneurs and apps developers like Patients Like Me, Patient Opinion and iwantgreatcare confirms the benefits of real time patient and citizen participation. The challenge is to do this at scale: open the doors, invite the whole community into the job of improving our national health service. Share decision making. Everybody needs the opportunity – and should be encouraged – to participate.
In April, the NHS did something unprecedented – it launched the Friends and Family Test (FFT), the first time a health service has reported a single measure of patient satisfaction for every hospital. It asked people to say whether they would recommend local inpatient and A&E services; the results are published every month on NHS Choices. By October more than 1m people had participated and hundreds of thousands had volunteered additional real time comments and feedback to local hospitals. ‘Great news’, said David Cameron – who has championed FFT from the start – in a tweet to mark the milestone, ‘giving patients a stronger voice in the NHS’.
This is the boldest move yet to promote patient voice at volume in the NHS and to concentrate our collective focus on improvement in care. At Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Trust, patients reported they could not sleep at night so staff have launched a ‘comfort at night’ campaign and developed a protocol for patient experience ‘never events’. In Lewisham, patients complained about poor communication and staff attitudes. They now plan daily visits for each patient. In Hull, bereaved families complained they had to pay car parking fees; the Trust has now given free passes to relatives in mourning. Routine feedback enables a different kind of conversation between the patient and the clinician. It is a catalyst for change. Commissioners will have to demonstrate how they are improving FFT for local communities to qualify for Quality Premium incentives.
This kind of customer insight is fundamental to the way we make choices as consumers. The NHS is not a hotel chain, nor a city authority: but there are vital lessons it can learn from Amazon and Trip Adviser about the power of transparency and feedback. In New York, more than 90,000 people every day share their views by phone, email and tweet on rubbish collections, potholes and dangerous buildings – and the city has become safer and cleaner.
Friends and family has its critics: people worry about the potential for gaming, for example. But the evidence, after six months, is of overwhelming human benefit and that’s why every maternity unit started to offer FFT to patients in October and why every NHS service will do so from 2015. It’s also why we are now requiring that every local organisation should offer people the chance to comment on, as well as rate, services from next year (most already do).
Some people ask me how we are ensuring the focus on transparency and participation is inclusive. We have launched Care Connect, a pilot project to test how giving people access by telephone and social media could improve feedback and complaints.  Recognising that digital exclusion is an issue in some of our communities, we have started a partnership with the Tinder Foundation to help 100,000 people learn how to go online for health benefit. None of these initiatives exist in isolation, nor do I see them as ‘silver bullets’.  My aim is to work with and build on existing good practice to make people’s voices heard and help the NHS act on them.
In a characteristically thoughtful talk last week, MT Rainey, social activist and former marketing guru, issued this challenge to the NHS: ‘How will we make the wisdom of the crowd meet the kindness of strangers?’ How do the tools of our age – big data, the internet, the mobile phone – meet the values of our species: compassion and honesty and doing our best for others? Friends and family is a good start. We are witnessing the birth of a new knowledge economy and a new social movement. The future is open.”