Gavin Newsom and Zachary Bookman in the Huffington Post: “Daily life has become inseparable from new technologies. Our phones and tablets let us shop from the couch, track how many miles we run, and keep in touch with friends across town and around the world – benefits barely possible a decade ago. With respect to our communities, Uber and Lyft now shuttle us around town, reducing street traffic and parking problems. Adopt-a-Hydrant apps coordinate efforts to dig out hydrants after snowstorms, saving firefighters time when battling blazes. Change.org, helps millions petition for and effect social and political change. Yet... (More >)
Index: Privacy and Security
The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on privacy and security and was originally published in 2014. Globally Percentage of people who feel the Internet is eroding their personal privacy: 56% Internet users who feel comfortable sharing personal data with an app: 37% Number of users who consider it important to know when an app is gathering information about them: 70% How many people in the online world use privacy tools to disguise their identity or location: 28%, or 415 million people... (More >)
Statistics and Open Data: Harvesting unused knowledge, empowering citizens and improving public services
House of Commons Public Administration Committee (Tenth Report): “1. Open data is playing an increasingly important role in Government and society. It is data that is accessible to all, free of restrictions on use or redistribution and also digital and machine-readable so that it can be combined with other data, and thereby made more useful. This report looks at how the vast amounts of data generated by central and local Government can be used in open ways to improve accountability, make Government work better and strengthen the economy. 2. In this inquiry, we examined progress against a series of... (More >)
Building a More Open Government
Corinna Zarek at the White House: “It’s Sunshine Week again—a chance to celebrate transparency and participation in government and freedom of information. Every year in mid-March, we take stock of our progress and where we are headed to make our government more open for the benefit of citizens. In December, 2013, the Administration announced 23 ambitious commitments to further open up government over the next two years in U.S. Government’s second Open Government National Action Plan. Those commitments are now all underway or in development, including: · Launching an improved Data.gov: The updated Data.gov debuted in January, 2014, and... (More >)
New Field Guide Explores Open Data Innovations in Disaster Risk and Resilience
Worldbank: “From Indonesia to Bangladesh to Nepal, community members armed with smartphones and GPS systems are contributing to some of the most extensive and versatile maps ever created, helping inform policy and better prepare their communities for disaster risk. In Jakarta, more than 500 community members have been trained to collect data on thousands of hospitals, schools, private buildings, and critical infrastructure. In Sri Lanka, government and academic volunteers mapped over 30,000 buildings and 450 km of roadways using a collaborative online resource called OpenStreetMaps. These are just a few of the projects that have been catalyzed by the... (More >)
Why the wealthiest countries are also the most open with their data
Emily Badger in the Washington Post: “The Oxford Internet Institute this week posted a nice visualization of the state of open data in 70 countries around the world, reflecting the willingness of national governments to release everything from transportation timetables to election results to machine-readable national maps. The tool is based on the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index, an admittedly incomplete but telling assessment of who willingly publishes updated, accurate national information on, say, pollutants (Sweden) and who does not (ahem, South Africa). Tally up the open data scores for these 70 countries, and the picture looks like... (More >)
The intelligent citizen
John Bell in AlJazeera: “A quarter century after the demise of the Soviet Union, is the Western model of government under threat? …. The pressures are coming from several directions. All states are feeling the pressure from unregulated global flows of capital that create obscene concentrations of wealth, and an inability of the nation-state to respond.Relatedly, citizens either ignore or distrust traditional institutions, and ethnic groups demand greater local autonomy. A recent Pew survey shows that Americans aged 18-33 mostly identify as political independents and distrust institutions. The classic model is indeed frayed, and new developments have made it... (More >)
How Maps Drive Decisions at EPA
Joseph Marks at NextGov: “The Environmental Protection Agency office charged with taking civil and criminal actions against water and air polluters used to organize its enforcement targeting meetings and conference calls around spreadsheets and graphs. Those spreadsheets detailed places with large oil and gas production and other possible pollutants where EPA might want to focus its own inspection efforts or reach out to state-level enforcement agencies. During the past two years, the agency has largely replaced those spreadsheets and tables with digital maps, which make it easier for participants to visualize precisely where the top polluting areas are and... (More >)
Open Data is a Civil Right
Yo Yoshida, Founder & CEO, Appallicious in GovTech: “As Americans, we expect a certain standardization of basic services, infrastructure and laws — no matter where we call home. When you live in Seattle and take a business trip to New York, the electric outlet in the hotel you’re staying in is always compatible with your computer charger. When you drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I-5 doesn’t all-of-a-sudden turn into a dirt country road because some cities won’t cover maintenance costs. If you take a 10-minute bus ride from Boston to the city of Cambridge, you know the... (More >)
A Framework for Benchmarking Open Government Data Efforts
DS Sayogo, TA Pardo, M Cook in the HICSS ’14 Proceedings of the 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences: “This paper presents a preliminary exploration on the status of open government data worldwide as well as in-depth evaluation of selected open government data portals. Using web content analysis of the open government data portals from 35 countries, this study outlines the progress of open government data efforts at the national government level. This paper also conducted in-depth evaluation of selected cases to justify the application of a proposed framework for understanding the status of open government data... (More >)
