national

Facebook tinkered with users’ feeds for a massive psychology experiment

Curated on July 6, 2014January 28, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

William Hughes in AVClub: “Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to determine whether this would affect their emotional state. The paper, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” was published in The Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences. It shows how Facebook data scientists tweaked the algorithm that determines which posts appear on users’ news feeds—specifically, researchers skewed the number of positive or negative terms seen by randomly selected users. Facebook then analyzed the future postings of those users over the course of a week to see if people responded with increased positivity or negativity of their own, thus answering the question of whether emotional states can be transmitted across a social network. Result: They can! Which is great news for Facebook data scientists hoping to prove a point about modern psychology. It’s less great for the people having their emotions secretly manipulated.

In order to sign up for Facebook, users must click a box saying they agree to the Facebook Data Use Policy, giving the company the right to access and use the information posted on the site. The policy lists a variety of potential uses for your data, most of them related to advertising, but there’s also a bit about “internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement.” In the study, the authors point out that they stayed within the data policy’s liberal constraints by using machine analysis to pick out positive and negative posts, meaning no user data containing personal information was actually viewed by human researchers. And there was no need to ask study “participants” for consent, as they’d already given it by agreeing to Facebook’s terms of service in the first place.

Facebook data scientist Adam Kramer is listed as the study’s lead author. In an interview the company released a few years ago, Kramer is quoted as saying he joined Facebook because “Facebook data constitutes the largest field study in the history of the world.”

See also:
Facebook Experiments Had Few Limits, Data Science Lab Conducted Tests on Users With Little Oversight, Wall Street Journal.
Stop complaining about the Facebook study. It’s a golden age for research, Duncan Watts

We Need a Citizen Maker Movement

Curated on June 25, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lorelei Kelly at the Huffington Post: “It was hard to miss the giant mechanical giraffe grazing on the White House lawn last week. For the first time ever, the President organized a Maker Faire–inviting entrepreneurs and inventors from across the USA to celebrate American ingenuity in the service of economic progress.
The maker movement is a California original. Think R2D2 serving margaritas to a jester with an LED news scroll. The #nationofmakers Twitter feed has dozens of examples of collaborative production, of making, sharing and learning.
But since this was the White House, I still had to ask myself, what would the maker movement be if the economy was not the starting point? What if it was about civics? What if makers decided to create a modern, hands-on democracy?
What is democracy anyway but a never ending remix of new prototypes? Last week’s White House Maker Faire heralded a new economic bonanza. This revolution’s poster child is 3-D printing– decentralized fabrication that is customized to meet local needs. On the government front, new design rules for democracy are already happening in communities, where civics and technology have generated a front line of maker cities.
But the distance between California’s tech capacity and DC does seem 3000 miles wide. The NSA’s over collection/surveillance problem and Healthcare.gov’s doomed rollout are part of the same system-wide capacity deficit. How do we close the gap between California’s revolution and our institutions?

In California, disruption is a business plan. In DC, it’s a national security threat.
In California, hackers are artists. In DC, they are often viewed as criminals.
In California, “cyber” is a dystopian science fiction word. In DC, cyber security is in a dozen oversight plans for Congress.

in California, individuals are encouraged to “fail forward.” In DC, risk-aversion is bipartisan.

Scaling big problems with local solutions is a maker specialty. Government policymaking needs this kind of help.
Here’s the issue our nation is facing: The inability of the non-military side of our public institutions to process complex problems. Today, this competence and especially the capacity to solve technical challenges often exist only in the private sector. If something is urgent and can’t be monetized, it becomes a national security problem. Which increasingly means that critical decision making that should be in the civilian remit instead migrates to the military. Look at our foreign policy. Good government is a counter terrorism strategy in Afghanistan. Decades of civilian inaction on climate change means that now Miami is referred to as a battle space in policy conversations.
This rhetoric reflects an understandable but unacceptable disconnect for any democracy.
To make matters more confusing, much of the technology in civics (like list building petitions) is suited for elections, not for governing. It is often antagonistic. The result? policy making looks like campaigning. We need some civic tinkering to generate governing technology that comes with relationships. Specifically, this means technology that includes many voices, but has identifiable channels for expertise that can sort complexity and that is not compromised by financial self-interest.
Today, sorting and filtering information is a huge challenge for participation systems around the world. Information now ranks up there with money and people as a lever of power. On the people front, the loud and often destructive individuals are showing up effectively. On the money front, our public institutions are at risk of becoming purely pay to play (wonks call this “transactional”).
Makers, ask yourselves, how can we turn big data into a political constituency for using real evidence–one that can compete with all the negative noise and money in the system? For starters, technologists out West must stop treating government like it’s a bad signal that can be automated out of existence. We are at a moment where our society requires an engineering mindset to develop modern, tech-savvy rules for democracy. We need civic makers….”

The Impact of Open: Keeping you healthy

Curated on June 25, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Emily Shaw of Sunlight: “In healthcare, the goal-set shared widely throughout the field is known as “the Triple Aim”: improving individual experience of care, improving population health, and reducing the cost of care. Across the wide array of initiatives undertaken by health care data users, the great majority seem to fall within the scope of at least one aspect of the Triple Aim. Below is a set of examples that reveal how data — both open and not — is being used to achieve its elements.

The use of open data to reduce costs:

The US Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) provided a critical boost to efforts to understand variation in health care pricing by releasing data about millions of payments to hospitals and individual physicians treating Medicare patients. Within CMS itself, this data release has powered visualization tools intended to inform and empower health care consumers; externally, researchers and journalists have used the CMS data to bring attention to unexplained variation in the cost of medical service provision. Through highlighting this variation, these analyses bring pressure to bear on high-cost places and providers.
Federal action has increased the pressure on states to improve collection and provide access to their health care cost data. Non-profit organizations focused on health care cost observed that while states still have a far way to go before they are providing adequate levels of information about health care costs to their citizens, there has been a substantial amount of policy action and some concrete improvements just in the last year. Cooperation between associations of health care providers, insurance groups, and evaluative NGOs have produced efforts to produce comprehensive standards for health care cost transparency.
Public-led efforts to increase cost transparency have led to additional non-governmental efforts to create both public-facing databases and price-check tools for private insurance subscribers, adding to the points of access for learning about variation in healthcare costs.

The use of open data to improve quality of care:

Using open data on a substantial series of individual hospital quality measures, CMS created a hospital comparison tool that allows consumers to compare average quality of care outcomes across their local hospitals.
Non-profit organizations survey hospitals and have used this data to provide another national measure of hospital quality that consumers can use to select a high-quality hospital.
In New York state, widely-shared data on cardiac surgery outcomes associated with individual providers has led to improved outcomes and better understanding of successful techniques.
In the UK, the National Health Service is actively working towards defining concrete metrics to evaluate how the system as a whole is moving towards improved quality. …
The broad cultural shift towards data-sharing in healthcare appears to have facilitated additional secured sharing in order to achieve the joint goal of improving healthcare quality and effectiveness. The current effort to securely network of millions of patient data records through the federal PCORI system has the potential to advance understanding of disease treatment at an unprecedented pace.
Through third-party tools, people are able to use the products of aggregated patient data in order to begin diagnosing their own symptoms more accurately, giving them a head start in understanding how to optimize their visit to a provider.

The use of open data to improve population health:

Out of the three elements of the triple aim, population health may have the longest and deepest relationship with open data. Public datasets like those collected by the Centers for Disease Control and the US Census have for decades been used to monitor disease prevalence, verify access to health insurance, and track mortality and morbidity statistics.
Population health improvement has been a major focus for newer developments as well. Health data has been a regular feature in tech efforts to improve the ways that governments — including local health departments — reach their constituencies. The use of data in new communication tools improves population health by increasing population awareness of local health trends and disease prevention opportunities. Two examples of this work in action include the Chicago Health Atlas, which combines health data and healthcare consumer problem-solving, and Philadelphia’s map interface to city data about available flu vaccines.

One final observation for open data advocates to take from health data concerns the way that the sector encourages the two-way information flow: it embraces the notion that data users can also be data producers. Open data ecosystems are properly characterized by multi-directional relationships among governmental and non-governmental actors, with opportunities for feedback, correction and augmentation of open datasets. That this happens at the scale of health data is important and meaningful for open data advocates who can face push-back when they ask their governments to ingest externally-generated data….”

The Data Revolution in Policy-Making

Curated on June 25, 2014October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Muchiri Nyaggah at the Open Institute: “There continues to be a great deal of dialogue and debate on what the data revolution from the report of the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda is all about. However, some have raised concerns that the emerging narrative around opening up data, strengthening national statistics offices or building capacity for e-government may not be revolutionary enough. In thinking through this it becomes clear that revolutions are highly contextual events. The Arab spring happened due to the unique factors of the cultural and social-economic environment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). A similar ‘spring’ may not happen in the same way in sub-Sahara Africa due to the peculiarities of the region. Attempting to replicate it is therefore an exercise in futility for those hoping for regime change.
We have just published a think piece on the role of public participation in policy making and how a data revolution could play out in that space. None of the ideas are revolutionary. They have been proposed and piloted in various countries to various extents over time. For instance, in some contexts strengthening and safe guarding the autonomy of the national statistics office may not seem revolutionary to some, in some countries it may be unprecedented (this is not part of the report). And that is okay. Nation states should be allowed, in their efforts to build capable and developmental institutions, to interpret the revolution for themselves.
In sub-Sahara Africa the availability of underlying data used to develop public policy is almost non-existent. Even when citizens are expected to participate in the formulation process and implementation of the policies, the data is still difficult to find. This neuters public participation and is a disservice to open government. Therefore making this detailed data and the accompanying rationale publicly available would be a revolutionary change in both culture and policy on access to information and potentially empower citizens to participate.
The data revolution is an opportunity to mainstream statistics into public discourse on public policy in ways that citizens can understand and engage with. I hope African countries will be willing to put an effort in translating the data revolution into an African revolution. If not, there’s a risk we shall continue singing about a revolution and never actually have one.
Download the ThinkPiece here”

15 Ways to bring Civic Innovation to your City

Curated on June 24, 2014July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Moore at AcuitasGov: “In my previous blog post I wrote about a desire to see our Governments transform to be part of the 21st century. I saw a recent reference to how governments across Canada have lost their global leadership, how government in Canada at all levels is providing analog services to a digital society. I couldn’t agree more. I have been thinking lately about some practical ways that Mayors and City Managers could innovate in their communities. I realize that there are a number of municipal elections happening this fall across Canada, a time when leadership changes and new ideas emerge. So this blog is also for Mayoral candidates who have a sense that technology and innovation have a role to play in their city and in their administration.
I thought I would identify 15 initiatives that cities could pursue as part of their Civic Innovation Strategy. For the last 50 years technology in local government in Canada has been viewed as an expense, as a necessary evil, not always understood by elected officials and senior administrators. Information and Technology is part of every aspect of a city, it is critical in delivering services. It is time to not just think of this as an expense but as an investment, as a way to innovate, reduce costs, enhance citizen service delivery and transform government operations.
Here are my top 15 ways to bring Civic Innovation to your city:
1. Build 21st Century Digital Infrastructure like the Chattanooga Gig City Project.
2. Build WiFi networks like the City of Edmonton on your own and in partnership with others.
3. Provide technology and internet to children and youth in need like the City of Toronto.
4. Connect to a national Education and Research network like Cybera in Alberta and CANARIE.
5. Create a Mayors Task-force on Innovation and Technology leveraging your city’s resources.
6. Run a hackathon or two or three like the City of Glasgow or maybe host a hacking health event like the City of Vancouver.
7. Launch a Startup incubator like Startup Edmonton or take it to the next level and create a civic lab like the City of Barcelona.
8. Develop an Open Government Strategy, I like to the Open City Strategy from Edmonton.
9. If Open Government is too much then just start with Open Data, Edmonton has one of the best.
10. Build a Citizen Dashboard to showcase your cities services and commitment to the public.
11. Put your Crime data online like the Edmonton Police Service.
12. Consider a pilot project with sensor technology for parking like the City of Nice or for waste management like the City of Barcelona.
13. Embrace Car2Go, Modo and UBER as ways to move people in your city.
14. Consider turning your IT department into the Innovation and Technology Department like they did at the City of Chicago.
15. Partner with other near by local governments to create a shared Innovation and Technology agency.
Now more than ever before cities need to find ways to innovate, to transform and to create a foundation that is sustainable. Now is the time for both courage and innovations in government. What is your city doing to move into the 21st Century?”

Index: The Networked Public

Curated on June 20, 2014May 29, 2019 by Shruti Sannon

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on the networked public and was originally published in 2014.

Global Overview

The proportion of global population who use the Internet in 2013: 38.8%, up 3 percentage points from 2012
Increase in average global broadband speeds from 2012 to 2013: 17%
Percent of internet users surveyed globally that access the internet at least once a day in 2012: 96
Hours spent online in 2012 each month across the globe: 35 billion
Country with the highest online population, as a percent of total population in 2012: United Kingdom (85%)
Country with the lowest online population, as a percent of total population in 2012: India (8%)
Trend with the highest growth rate in 2012: Location-based services (27%)
Years to reach 50 million users: telephone (75), radio (38), TV (13), internet (4)

Growth Rates in 2014

Rate at which the total number of Internet users is growing: less than 10% a year
Worldwide annual smartphone growth: 20%
Tablet growth: 52%
Mobile phone growth: 81%
Percentage of all mobile users who are now smartphone users: 30%
Amount of all web usage in 2013 accounted for by mobile: 14%
Amount of all web usage in 2014 accounted for by mobile: 25%
Percentage of money spent on mobile used for app purchases: 68%
Growth of BitCoin wallet between 2013 and 2014: 8 times increase
Number of listings on AirBnB in 2014: 550k, 83% growth year on year
How many buyers are on Alibaba in 2014: 231MM buyers, 44% growth year on year

Social Media

Number of Whatsapp messages on average sent per day: 50 billion
Number sent per day on Snapchat: 1.2 billion
How many restaurants are registered on GrubHub in 2014: 29,000
Amount the sale of digital songs fell in 2013: 6%
How much song streaming grew in 2013: 32%
Number of photos uploaded and shared every day on Flickr, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp combined in 2014: 1.8 billion
How many online adults in the U.S. use a social networking site of some kind: 73%
Those who use multiple social networking sites: 42%
Dominant social networking platform: Facebook, with 71% of online adults
Number of Facebook users in 2004, its founding year: 1 million
Number of monthly active users on Facebook in September 2013: 1.19 billion, an 18% increase year-over-year
How many Facebook users log in to the site daily: 63%
Instagram users who log into the service daily: 57%
Twitter users who are daily visitors: 46%
Number of photos uploaded to Facebook every minute: over 243,000, up 16% from 2012
How much of the global internet population is actively using Twitter every month: 21%
Number of tweets per minute: 350,000, up 250% from 2012
Fastest growing demographic on Twitter: 55-64 year age bracket, up 79% from 2012
Fastest growing demographic on Facebook: 45-54 year age bracket, up 46% from 2012
How many LinkedIn accounts are created every minute: 120, up 20% from 2012
The number of Google searches in 2013: 3.5 million, up 75% from 2012
Percent of internet users surveyed globally that use social media in 2012: 90
Percent of internet users surveyed globally that use social media daily: 60
Time spent social networking, the most popular online activity: 22%, followed by searches (21%), reading content (20%), and emails/communication (19%)
The average age at which a child acquires an online presence through their parents in 10 mostly Western countries: six months
Number of children in those countries who have a digital footprint by age 2: 81%
How many new American marriages between 2005-2012 began by meeting online, according to a nationally representative study: more than one-third
How many of the world’s 505 leaders are on Twitter: 3/4
Combined Twitter followers: of 505 world leaders: 106 million
Combined Twitter followers of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga: 122 million
How many times all Wikipedias are viewed per month: nearly 22 billion times
How many hits per second: more than 8,000
English Wikipedia’s share of total page views: 47%
Number of articles in the English Wikipedia in December 2013: over 4,395,320
Platform that reaches more U.S. adults between ages 18-34 than any cable network: YouTube
Number of unique users who visit YouTube each month: more than 1 billion
How many hours of video are watched on YouTube each month: over 6 billion, 50% more than 2012
Proportion of YouTube traffic that comes from outside the U.S.: 80%
Most common activity online, based on an analysis of over 10 million web users: social media
People on Twitter who recommend products in their tweets: 53%
People who trust online recommendations from people they know: 90%

Mobile and the Internet of Things

Number of global smartphone users in 2013: 1.5 billion
Number of global mobile phone users in 2013: over 5 billion
Percent of U.S. adults that have a cell phone in 2013: 91
Number of which are a smartphone: almost two thirds
Mobile Facebook users in March 2013: 751 million, 54% increase since 2012
Growth rate of global mobile traffic as a percentage of global internet traffic as of May 2013: 15%, up from .9% in 2009
How many smartphone owners ages 18–44 “keep their phone with them for all but two hours of their waking day”: 79%
Those who reach for their smartphone immediately upon waking up: 62%
Those who couldn’t recall a time their phone wasn’t within reach or in the same room: 1 in 4
Facebook users who access the service via a mobile device: 73.44%
Those who are “mobile only”: 189 million
Amount of YouTube’s global watch time that is on mobile devices: almost 40%
Number of objects connected globally in the “internet of things” in 2012: 8.7 billion
Number of connected objects so far in 2013: over 10 billion
Years from tablet introduction for tables to surpass desktop PC and notebook shipments: less than 3 (over 55 million global units shipped in 2013, vs. 45 million notebooks and 35 million desktop PCs)
Number of wearable devices estimated to have been shipped worldwide in 2011: 14 million
Projected number of wearable devices in 2016: between 39-171 million
How much of the wearable technology market is in the healthcare and medical sector in 2012: 35.1%
How many devices in the wearable tech market are fitness or activity trackers: 61%
The value of the global wearable technology market in 2012: $750 million
The forecasted value of the market in 2018: $5.8 billion
How many Americans are aware of wearable tech devices in 2013: 52%
Devices that have the highest level of awareness: wearable fitness trackers,
Level of awareness for wearable fitness trackers amongst American consumers: 1 in 3 consumers
Value of digital fitness category in 2013: $330 million
How many American consumers surveyed are aware of smart glasses: 29%
Smart watch awareness amongst those surveyed: 36%

Access

How much of the developed world has mobile broadband subscriptions in 2013: 3/4
How much of the developing world has broadband subscription in 2013: 1/5
Percent of U.S. adults that had a laptop in 2012: 57
How many American adults did not use the internet at home, at work, or via mobile device in 2013: one in five
Amount President Obama initiated spending in 2009 in an effort to expand access: $7 billion
Number of Americans potentially shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education, among other opportunities due to digital inequality: 60 million
American adults with a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 7 out of 10
Americans aged 18-29 vs. 65+ with a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 80% vs. 43
American adults with college education (or more) vs. adults with no high school diploma that have a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 89% vs. 37%
Percent of U.S. adults with college education (or more) that use the internet in 2011: 94
Those with no high school diploma that used the internet in 2011: 43
Percent of white American households that used the internet in 2013: 67
Black American households that used the internet in 2013: 57
States with lowest internet use rates in 2013: Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas
How many American households have only wireless telephones as of the second half of 2012: nearly two in five
States with the highest prevalence of wireless-only adults according to predictive modeling estimates: Idaho (52.3%), Mississippi (49.4%), Arkansas (49%)
Those with the lowest prevalence of wireless-only adults: New Jersey (19.4%), Connecticut (20.6%), Delaware (23.3%) and New York (23.5%)

Sources

“A Focus on Efficiency: A whitepaper from Facebook, Ericsson and Qualcomm,” internet.org, September 16, 2013.
“Always Connected: How Smartphones And Social Keep Us Engaged,” IDC Research Report, 2013.
Blumberg, Stephen J., Nadarajasundaram Ganesh, Julian V. Luke, and Gilbert Gonzales. “Wireless Substitution: State-level Estimates From the National Health Interview Survey, 2012,” National Health Statistics Reports, Number 70, December 18, 2013.
Cacioppo, John T., Stephanie Cacioppo, Gian C. Gonzaga, Elizabeth L. Ogburn, and Tyler J. VanderWeele. “Marital satisfaction and break-ups differ across on-line and off-line meeting venues,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 25 (2013): 10135-10140.
“Connections Counter: The Internet of Everything in Motion,” Cisco, July 29, 2013.
Cooper, Belle Beth. “10 Surprising social media statistics that might make you rethink your social strategy,” Buffer, July 16, 2013.
Duggan, Maeve and Aaron Smith. “Social Media Update 2013” Pew Research Center, January 2014.
“Facebook Quarterly Earnings Slides,” Q1 2013, Facebook.
Hachman, Mark. “Facebook Used by Half of the World’s Internet Users, Save Asia,” PC Mag, February 2012.
Hanun, Marya. “Klout,” Foreign Policy, August 9, 2013
Howle, Cynthia, Glenny Brock, and Alan Blinder. “Most of U.S. is Wired but Millions Aren’t Plugged In,” The New York Times, August 18, 2013.
“Key ICT indicators for developed and developing countries and the world (totals and penetration rates)”, International Telecommunications Unions (ITU), Geneva, February 27, 2013.
“Global Internet User Survey Sumary Reports,” The Internet Society, 2012, Accessed on August 13, 2013.
Goldsmith, Belinda. “Porn passed over as Web users become social: author,” Reuters, September 2008.
Meeker, Mary. “Internet Trends 2013,” KPCB, presented at D11 Conference, Rancho Palos,Verdes, California, May 28-30, 2013.
Meeker, Mary. “2014 Internet Trends,” KPCB, May 28, 2014.
Mirani, Leo. “A snapshot of one minute on the internet, today and in 2012,” Quartz, November 26, 2013.
Piombino, Kristin. “How Internet Users Worldwide Spend Time Online,” May 17, 2012.
Qualman, Erik. “Social Media Revolution,” YouTube, March 21, 2013.
“Statistics,” YouTube, Accessed December 6, 2013.
Sullivan, Danny. “Google: 100 billion Searches Per month, Search to integrate Gmail, Launching Enhanced Search App for iOS,” Search Engine Land, August 8, 2012.
“Twitter Now The Fastest Growing Social Platform In The World” Global Web Index, January 28 , 2013.
“Wearable Tech Device Awareness Surpasses 50 Percent Among US Consumers, According to NPD,” NPD Group, January 2014.
“Wearable Technology Market – Global Scenario, Trends, Industry Analysis, Size, Share and Forecast, 2012- 2018,” Transparency Market Research, 2013.
“Wikimedia Report Card” Wikimedia Labs, December 2013.
“World Market for Wearable Technology – A Quantitative Market Assessment – 2012,” IMS Research, 2012.
“Would you want a digital footprint from birth?” AVG Blogs, October 6, 2010.
Zickuhr, Kathryn and Aaron Smith. “Digital Differences,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, April 13, 2012
Zickuhr, Kathryn and Aaron Smith. “Home Broadband 2013,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, August 26, 2013.

A Big Day for Big Data: The Beginning of Our Data Transformation

Curated on June 19, 2014May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Doms, Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the US Department of Commerce: “Wednesday, June 18, 2014, was a big day for big data. The Commerce Department participated in the inaugural Open Data Roundtable at the White House, with GovLab at NYU and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The event brought businesses and non-profit organizations that rely on Commerce data together with Commerce Department officials to discuss how to make the data we collect and release easier to find, understand and use. This initiative has significant potential to fuel new businesses; create jobs; and help federal, state and local governments make better decisions.
OpenData 500

Under Secretary Mark Doms presented and participated in the first Open Data Roundtable at the White House, organized by Commerce, GovLab at NYU and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
Data innovation is revolutionizing every aspect of our society and government data is playing a major role in the revolution. From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) climate data to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent and trademark records, and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) research, companies, organizations and people are using this information to innovate, grow our economy and better plan for the future.
At this week’s Open Data 500, some key insights I came away with include:

There is a strong desire for data consistency across the Commerce Department, and indeed the federal government.

Data should be catalogued in a common, machine-readable format.

Data should be accessible in bulk, allowing the private sector greater flexibility to harness the information.

The use of a single platform for access to government data would create efficiencies and help coordination across agencies.

Furthermore, business leaders stand ready to help us achieve these goals.
Secretary Pritzker is the first Secretary of Commerce to make data a departmental priority in the Commerce Department’s Strategic Plan, and has branded Commerce as “America’s Data Agency.” In keeping with that mantra, over the next several months, my team at the Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA), which includes the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau, will be involved in similar forums. We will be engaging our users – businesses, academia, advocacy organizations, and state and local governments – to drive this open data conversation forward.
Today was a big first step in that process. The insight gained will help inform our efforts ahead. Thanks again to the team at GovLab and the White House for their hard work in making it possible!”

Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target

Curated on June 19, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report commissioned by Omydiar Network on the Business Case for Open Data: “Economic analysis has confirmed the significant contribution to economic growth and productivity achievable through an open data agenda. Governments, the private sector, individuals and communities all stand to benefit from the innovation and information that will inform investment, drive the creation of new industries, and inform decision making and research. To mark a step change in the way valuable information is created and reused, the G20 should release information as open data.
In May 2014, Omidyar Network commissioned Lateral Economics to undertake economic analysis on the potential of open data to support the G20’s 2% growth target and illustrate how an open data agenda can make a significant contribution to economic growth and productivity. Combining all G20 economies, output could increase by USD 13 trillion cumulatively over the next five years. Implementation of open data policies would thus boost cumulative G20 GDP by around 1.1 percentage points (almost 55%) of the G20’s 2% growth target over five years.
Recommendations
Importantly, open data cuts across a number of this year’s G20 priorities: attracting private infrastructure investment, creating jobs and lifting participation, strengthening tax systems and fighting corruption. This memo suggests an open data thread that runs across all G20 priorities. The more data is opened, the more it can be used, reused, repurposed and built on—in combination with other data—for everyone’s benefit.
We call on G20 economies to sign up to the Open Data Charter.
The G20 should ensure that data released by G20 working groups and themes is in line with agreed open data standards. This will lead to more accountable, efficient, effective governments who are going further to expose inadequacy, fight corruption and spur innovation.
Data is a national resource and open data is a ‘win-win’ policy. It is about making more of existing resources. We know that the cost of opening data is smaller than the economic returns, which could be significant. Methods to respect privacy concerns must be taken into account. If this is done, as the public and private sector share of information grows, there will be increasing positive returns.
The G20 opportunity
This November, leaders of the G20 Member States will meet in Australia to drive forward commitments made in the St Petersburg G20 Leaders Declaration last September and to make firm progress on stimulating growth. Actions across the G20 will include increasing investment, lifting employment and participation, enhancing trade and promoting competition.
The resulting ‘Brisbane Action Plan’ will encapsulate all of these commitments with the aim of raising the level of G20 output by at least 2% above the currently projected level over the next five years. There are major opportunities for cooperative and collective action by G20 governments.
Governments should intensify the release of existing public sector data – both government and publicly funded research data. But much more can be done to promote open data than simply releasing more government data. In appropriate circumstances, governments can mandate public disclosure of private sector data (e.g. in corporate financial reporting).
Recommendations for action

G20 governments should adopt the principles of the Open Data Charter to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.
G20 governments should adopt specific open data targets under each G20 theme, as illustrated below, such as releasing open data related to beneficial owners of companies, as well revenues from extractive industries
G20 governments should consider harmonizing licensing regimes across the G20
G20 governments should adopt metrics for measuring the quantity and quality of open data publication, e.g. using the Open Data Institute’s Open Data Certificates as a bottom-up mechanism for driving the adoption of common standards.

Illustrative G20 examples
Fiscal and monetary policy
Governments possess rich real time data that is not open or accessed by government macro-economic managers. G20 governments should:

Open up models that lie behind economic forecasts and help assess alternative policy settings;
Publish spending and contractual data to enable comparative shopping by government between government suppliers.

Anti corruption
Open data may directly contribute to reduced corruption by increasing the likelihood corruption will be detected. G20 governments should:

Release open data related to beneficial owners of companies as well as revenues from extractive industries,
Collaborate on harmonised technical standards that permit the tracing of international money flows – including the tracing of beneficial owners of commercial entities, and the comparison and reconciliation of transactions across borders.

Trade
Obtaining and using trade data from multiple jurisdictions is difficult. Access fees, specific licenses, and non-machine readable formats all involve large transaction costs. G20 governments should:

Harmonise open data policies related to trade data.
Use standard trade schema and formats.

Employment
Higher quality information on employment conditions would facilitate better matching of employees to organizations, producing greater job-satisfaction and improved productivity. G20 governments should:

Open up centralised job vacancy registers to provide new mechanisms for people to find jobs.
Provide open statistical information about the demand for skills in particular areas to help those supporting training and education to hone their offerings.

Energy
Open data will help reduce the cost of energy supply and improve energy efficiency. G20 governments should:

Provide incentives for energy companies to publish open data from consumers and suppliers to enable cost savings through optimizing energy plans.
Release energy performance certifications for buildings
Publish real-time energy consumption for government buildings.

Infrastructure
Current infrastructure asset information is fragmented and inefficient. Exposing current asset data would be a significant first step in understanding gaps and providing new insights. G20 governments should:

Publish open data on governments’ infrastructure assets and plans to better understand infrastructure gaps, enable greater efficiency and insights in infrastructure development and use and analyse cost/benefits.
Publish open infrastructure data, including contracts via Open Contracting Partnership, in a consistent and harmonised way across G20 countries…”

Lawsuit Would Force IRS to Release Nonprofit Tax Forms Digitally

Curated on June 18, 2014October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Suzanne Perry at the Chronicle of Philanthropy on how “Open Data Could Shine a Light on Pay and Lobbying”: “Nonprofits that want to find out what their peers are doing can find a wealth of information in the forms the groups must file each year with the Internal Revenue Service—how much they pay their chief executives, how much they spend on fundraising, who is on their boards, where they offer services.
But the way the IRS makes those data available harkens to the digital dark ages, and critics who want to overhaul the system have been shaking up the generally polite nonprofit world with legal challenges, charges of monopoly, and talk of “disrupting” the status quo.
The issue will take center stage in a courtroom this week when a federal district judge in San Francisco is scheduled to consider arguments about whether to approve the IRS’s move to dismiss a lawsuit filed by an open-records group.
The group wants to obtain some specific Forms 990s, the informational tax documents filed by nonprofits, in a format that can be read by computers.
In theory, that shouldn’t be difficult since the nine nonprofits involved— including the American National Standards Institute, the New Horizons Foundation, and the International Code Council—submitted the forms electronically. But the IRS converts all 990s, no matter how they were filed, into images, rendering them useless for digital operations like searching multiple forms for information.
That means watchdog groups and those that provide information on charities, like Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and the Urban Institute, have to spend money to manually enter the data they get from the IRS before making it available to the public, even if it has previously been digitized.
The lawsuit against the IRS, filed by Public.Resource.Org, aims to end that practice.
Carl Malamud, who heads the group, is a longtime activist who successfully pushed the Securities and Exchange Commission to post corporate filings free online in the 1990s, among other projects.
He wants to do the same with the IRS, arguing that data should be readily available at no cost about a sector that represents more than 1.5 million tax-exempt organizations and more than $1.5-trillion in revenue.

Putting Open Data to Work for Communities

Curated on June 18, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Kathryn L.S. Pettit, Leah Hendey, Brianna Losoya, G. Thomas Kingsley at the Urban Institute: “The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) is a network of local organizations that collect, organize, and use neighborhood data to tackle issues in their communities. As the movement for government transparency has spread at the local level, more NNIP partners are participating in the call for governments to release data and are using open data to provide information for decisionmaking and community engagement. Local NNIP partners and open data advocates have complementary strengths and should work together to more effectively advance open government data that benefits all residents.”