New paper by Manik Suri (GovLab): “The tragic Boston Marathon bombing and hair-raising manhunt that ensued was a sobering event. It also served as a reminder that emerging “civic technologies” – platforms and applications that enable citizens to connect and collaborate with each other and with government – are more important today than ever before. As commentators have noted, local police and federal agents utilized a range of technological platforms to tap the “wisdom of the crowd,” relying on thousands of private citizens to develop a “hive mind” that identified two suspects within a record period of time.
In the immediate wake of the devastating attack on April 15th, investigators had few leads. But within twenty-four hours, senior FBI officials, determined to seek “assistance from the public,” called on everyone with information to submit all media, tips, and leads related to the Boston Marathon attack. This unusual request for help yielded thousands of images and videos from local Bostonians, tourists, and private companies through technological channels ranging from telephone calls and emails to Flickr posts and Twitter messages. In mere hours, investigators were able to “crowd-source” a tremendous amount of data – including thousands of images from personal cameras, amateur videos from smart phones, and cell-tower information from private carriers. Combing through data from this massive network of “eyes and ears,” law enforcement officials were quickly able to generate images of two lead suspects – enabling a “modern manhunt” to commence immediately.
Technological innovations have transformed our commercial, political, and social realities. These advances include new approaches to how we generate knowledge, access information, and interact with one another, as well as new pathways for building social movements and catalyzing political change. While a significant body of academic research has focused on the role of technology in transforming electoral politics and social movements, less attention has been paid to how technological innovation can improve the process of governance itself.
A growing number of platforms and applications lie at this intersection of technology and governance, in what might be termed the “civic technology” sector. Broadly speaking, this sector involves the application of new information and communication technologies – ranging from robust social media platforms to state-of-the-art big data analysis systems – to address public policy problems. Civic technologies encompass enterprises that “bring web technologies directly to government, build services on top of government data for citizens, and change the way citizens ask, get, or need services from government.” These technologies have the potential to transform governance by promoting greater transparency in policy-making, increasing government efficiency, and enhancing citizens’ participation in public sector decision-making.“
GovLab Seeks Open Data Success Stories
Wyatt Kash in InformationWeek: “A team of open government advocates, led by former White House aide Beth Novek, has launched a campaign to identify 500 examples of how freely available government data is being put to profitable use in the private sector.Open Data 500 is part of a broader effort by New York University’s Governance Lab (GovLab) to conduct the “first real, comprehensive study of the use of open government data in the private sector,” said Joel Gurin, founder of OpenDataNow.com and senior adviser at GovLab.
Novek, who served in the White House as the first U.S. deputy CTO and led the White House Open Government Initiative from 2009-2011, founded GovLab while also teaching at the MIT Media Lab and NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
In an interview with InformationWeek Government, Gurin explained that the goal of GovLab, and the Open Data 500 project, is to show how technology and new uses of data can make government more effective, and create more of a partnership between government and the public. “We’re also trying to draw on more public expertise to solve government problems,” he said….
Gurin said Open Data 500 will primarily look at U.S.-based, revenue-producing companies or organizations where government data is a key resource for their business. While the GovLab will focus initially on the use of federal data, it will also look at cases where entrepreneurs are making use of state or local data, but in scalable fashion.
“This goes one step further than the datapaloozas” championed by U.S. CTO Todd Park to showcase tools developed by the private sector using government data. “We’re trying to show how we can make data sets even more impactful and useful.”
Gurin said the GovLab team hopes to complete the study by the end of this year. The team has already identified 150 companies as candidates. To submit your company for consideration, visit thegovlab.org/submit-your-company; to submit another company, visit thegovlab.org/open500“
Novek, who served in the White House as the first U.S. deputy CTO and led the White House Open Government Initiative from 2009-2011, founded GovLab while also teaching at the MIT Media Lab and NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
In an interview with InformationWeek Government, Gurin explained that the goal of GovLab, and the Open Data 500 project, is to show how technology and new uses of data can make government more effective, and create more of a partnership between government and the public. “We’re also trying to draw on more public expertise to solve government problems,” he said….
Gurin said Open Data 500 will primarily look at U.S.-based, revenue-producing companies or organizations where government data is a key resource for their business. While the GovLab will focus initially on the use of federal data, it will also look at cases where entrepreneurs are making use of state or local data, but in scalable fashion.
“This goes one step further than the datapaloozas” championed by U.S. CTO Todd Park to showcase tools developed by the private sector using government data. “We’re trying to show how we can make data sets even more impactful and useful.”
Gurin said the GovLab team hopes to complete the study by the end of this year. The team has already identified 150 companies as candidates. To submit your company for consideration, visit thegovlab.org/submit-your-company; to submit another company, visit thegovlab.org/open500“
From public innovation to social innovation in the public sector
A review of the literature by Victor Bekkers, Lars Tummers & William Voorberg: “Innovation is a recurring issue in public administration. In doing so it can be considered as a ‘magic concept’ that is been used to frame the necessary transformation of the public sector in order to improve not only its effectiveness and efficiency but also its legitimacy. Innovation is a concept that inspires people and policy makers because it offers the promise of radical change. As such the desire to innovate the public sector has a long history which is sometimes linked to reform programs in order to meet budget cutbacks, to meet the introduction of new management and governance ideologies (like New Public Management or Open Government) or to meet the introduction of new information and communication technologies (like e- government)…
Our starting point for studying social innovations in the public sector is that social innovations take place in a specific environment in which different actors can be distinguished. These actors collaborate with each other in terms of sharing relevant resources in order to develop and implement new ideas, new ways of working or new ways of organizing. This implies that characteristics of the environment can be seen as a relevant drivers and barriers. These characteristics can either function as a trigger for innovation while at the same time they can also function as relevant constraints. Based on an analysis of the literature, we have found that the following aspects of the environment could function as important drivers and barriers of innovation:
- The social and political complexity of the environment in which public organizations operate which leads to specific demands that function as an external ‘trigger’ for innovation
- The characteristics and degree of the legal culture in a country or policy sector
- The type of governance and state tradition in the country or policy sector
- The allocation of resources, resource dependency and the quality of relationships within the networks among the involved stakeholders”
How Mechanical Turkers Crowdsourced a Huge Lexicon of Links Between Words and Emotion
The Physics arXiv Blog: Sentiment analysis on the social web depends on how a person’s state of mind is expressed in words. Now a new database of the links between words and emotions could provide a better foundation for this kind of analysis
One of the buzzphrases associated with the social web is sentiment analysis. This is the ability to determine a person’s opinion or state of mind by analysing the words they post on Twitter, Facebook or some other medium.
Much has been promised with this method—the ability to measure satisfaction with politicians, movies and products; the ability to better manage customer relations; the ability to create dialogue for emotion-aware games; the ability to measure the flow of emotion in novels; and so on.
The idea is to entirely automate this process—to analyse the firehose of words produced by social websites using advanced data mining techniques to gauge sentiment on a vast scale.
But all this depends on how well we understand the emotion and polarity (whether negative or positive) that people associate with each word or combinations of words.
Today, Saif Mohammad and Peter Turney at the National Research Council Canada in Ottawa unveil a huge database of words and their associated emotions and polarity, which they have assembled quickly and inexpensively using Amazon’s crowdsourcing Mechanical Turk website. They say this crowdsourcing mechanism makes it possible to increase the size and quality of the database quickly and easily….The result is a comprehensive word-emotion lexicon for over 10,000 words or two-word phrases which they call EmoLex….
The bottom line is that sentiment analysis can only ever be as good as the database on which it relies. With EmoLex, analysts have a new tool for their box of tricks.”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1308.6297: Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon
The Three Worlds of Governance: Arguments for a Parsimonious Theory of Quality of Government.
New Working Paper by Bo Rothstein for the Quality of Governance Institute: “It is necessary to conceptualize and provide better measures of good governance because in contrast to democratization, empirical studies show that it has strong positive effects on measures of human well-being, social trust, life satisfaction, peace and political legitimacy. A central problem is that the term “governance” is conceptualized differently in three main approaches to governance which has led to much confusion. To avoid this, the term quality of government (QoG) is preferred.
This paper argues for a parsimonious conceptualization of QoG built the “Rawls-Machiavelli pro-gramme”. This is a combination of the Rawlsian understanding of what should be seen as a just political order and the empirical strategy used by Machiavelli stating what is possible to implement. It is argued that complex definitions are impossible to operationalize and that such a strategy would leave political science without a proper conceptualization as well as measures of the part of the state that is most important for humans’ well-being and political legitimacy. The theory proposed is that impartiality in the exercise of public power should be the basic norm for how QoG should be defined. The advantage with this strategy is that it does not include in the definition of QoG what we want to explain (efficiency, prosperity, administrative capacity and other “good outcomes”) and that recent empirical research shows that this theory can be operationalized and used to measure QoG in ways that have the predicted outcomes.”
Mapping the Twitterverse
Phys.org: “What does your Twitter profile reveal about you? More than you know, according to Chris Weidemann. The GIST master’s student has developed an application that follows geospatial footprints.
You start your day at your favorite breakfast spot. When your order of strawberry waffles with extra whipped cream arrives, it’s too delectable not to share with your Twitter followers. You snap a photo with your smartphone and hit send. Then, it’s time to hit the books.
You tweet your friends that you’ll be at the library on campus. Later that day, palm trees silhouette a neon-pink sunset. You can’t resist. You tweet a picture with the hashtag #ILoveLA.
You may not realize that when you tweet those breezy updates and photos of food, you are sharing information about your location.
Chris Weidemann, a graduate student in the Geographic Information Science and Technology (GIST) online master’s program at USC Dornsife, investigated just how much public geospatial data was generated by Twitter users and how their information—available through Twitter’s application programming interface (API)—could potentially be used by third parties. His study was published June 2013 in the International Journal of Geoinformatics…
Twitter has approximately 500 million active users, and reports show that 6 percent of users opt-in to allow the platform to broadcast their location using global positioning technology with each tweet they post. That’s about 30 million people sending geo-tagged data out into the Twitterverse. In their tweets, people can choose whether their information is displayed as a city and state, an address or pinpoint their precise latitude and longitude.
That’s only part of their geospatial footprint. Information contained in a post may reveal a user’s location. Depending upon how the account is set up, profiles may include details about their hometown, time zone and language.”
Using Crowdsourcing In Government
Daren C. Brabham for IBM Center for The Business of Government: “The growing interest in “engaging the crowd” to identify or develop innovative solutions to public problems has been inspired by similar efforts in the commercial world. There, crowdsourcing has been successfully used to design innovative consumer products or solve complex scientific problems, ranging from custom-designed T-shirts to mapping genetic DNA strands.
The Obama administration, as well as many state and local governments, have been adapting these crowdsourcing techniques with some success. This report provides a strategic view of crowdsourcing and identifies four specific types:
- Type 1: Knowledge Discovery and Management. Collecting knowledge reported by an on-line community, such as the reporting of earth tremors or potholes to a central source.
- Type 2: Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking. Distributing “micro-tasks” that require human intelligence to solve, such as transcribing handwritten historical documents into electronic files.
- Type 3: Broadcast Search. Broadcasting a problem-solving challenge widely on the internet and providing an award for solution, such as NASA’s prize for an algorithm to predict solar flares
- Type 4: Peer-Vetted Creative Production. Creating peer-vetted solutions, where an on-line community both proposes possible solutions and is empowered to collectively choose among the solutions.
By understanding the different types, which require different approaches, public managers will have a better chance of success. Dr. Brabham focuses on the strategic design process rather than on the specific technical tools that can be used for crowdsourcing. He sets forth ten emerging best practices for implementing a crowdsourcing initiative.”
Defense Against National Vulnerabilities in Public Data
DOD/DARPA Notice (See also Foreign Policy article): “OBJECTIVE: Investigate the national security threat posed by public data available either for purchase or through open sources. Based on principles of data science, develop tools to characterize and assess the nature, persistence, and quality of the data. Develop tools for the rapid anonymization and de-anonymization of data sources. Develop framework and tools to measure the national security impact of public data and to defend against the malicious use of public data against national interests.
DESCRIPTION: The vulnerabilities to individuals from a data compromise are well known and documented now as “identity theft.” These include regular stories published in the news and research journals documenting the loss of personally identifiable information by corporations and governments around the world. Current trends in social media and commerce, with voluntary disclosure of personal information, create other potential vulnerabilities for individuals participating heavily in the digital world. The Netflix Challenge in 2009 was launched with the goal of creating better customer pick prediction algorithms for the movie service [1]. An unintended consequence of the Netflix Challenge was the discovery that it was possible to de-anonymize the entire contest data set with very little additional data. This de-anonymization led to a federal lawsuit and the cancellation of the sequel challenge [2]. The purpose of this topic is to understand the national level vulnerabilities that may be exploited through the use of public data available in the open or for purchase.
Could a modestly funded group deliver nation-state type effects using only public data?…”
The official link for this solicitation is: www.acq.osd.mil/osbp/sbir/solicitations/sbir20133.
The New Innovation Battlegrounds Are City Hall And The State House
Julius Genachowski in Forbes: “What’s going on here? In cities and states across the country, two forces are engaged in battles with major consequences for the future of the Internet and the U.S. innovation economy.
The first force is new ventures harnessing technology—particularly the Internet and mobile—to challenge incumbents in a growing number of industries: From hotels (Airbnb) to rental cars (ZipCar, RelayRides, Car2Go) to taxis (SideCar, Lyft, Uber) to car dealerships (Tesla) to parking lots (Parking Panda) to textbooks (Chegg) to lending and fundraising (Lending Club, Kickstarter) to restaurants (food trucks) to boating (Boatband, GetMyBoat) to errand running services (TaskRabbit) to Internet service (Chattanooga, TN; Lafayette, LA; Google Fiber).
Many of these ventures are part of the new “sharing economy.” ….
The second force in these battles is city and state governments, which typically have long and deep relationships with established industries. Not surprisingly, and acting rationally from their perspective, existing businesses have been lobbying state and local officials to restrict new entrants.
And across the country, new laws are being proposed and enacted—and existing but out-of-date laws are being enforced—to protect incumbents from new Internet- and mobile-based competitors….
There are lessons here for the current battles in city halls and state houses. We suggest four simple principles for every state and local official considering regulatory decisions affecting the sharing economy and other disruptive Internet- and mobile-based businesses:
- Stand with innovation. The benefits of innovation can be hard to appreciate fully early on, but we know from our history that innovation drives consumer benefits and economic growth. Give innovative new services the benefit of the doubt. And where there are issues to address, take a tailored, technology-neutral approach.
- Focus on consumers. Consider the full range of benefits new services provide consumers. Most innovators and their investors are putting up their time and money because they see a gap in the market—ways in which consumers are not fully served by existing businesses. The results of a fair-minded consumer-focused analysis might be different than some first instincts. For example, Airbnb and Uber provide insurance to protect consumers; grey-market home stays and unlicensed livery cabs may not. Weigh the benefits of moving grey-market activities out of the shadows.
- Keep an open mind. Spend the time to understand new businesses and new technologies, including by speaking with new service providers and their users. Don’t just rely on opponents’ characterizations.
- Use the service. Before deciding to regulate an innovative service, public officials should use the service. Because they’re new, innovative services can be hard to fully appreciate without experiencing them—and using them will provide hands-on insights on their benefits as well as tailored ways to address any issues. At the FCC we launched a Technology Experience Center so that agency staff could use cutting-edge communications devices and services potentially affected by agency rules.
- Innovation is a core competitive advantage for the U.S. and a primary driver of economic growth and job creation across the country. In today’s fast-moving global economy, capital and talent can flow anywhere. Pro-innovation policies are critical to growing jobs and investment in U.S. cities.”
A much-maligned engine of innovation
Review by Martin Wolf of The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs Private Sector Myths, by Mariana Mazzucato, Anthem Press: “…what determines innovation? Conventional economics offers abstract models; conventional wisdom insists the answer lies with private entrepreneurship. In this brilliant book, Mariana Mazzucato, a Sussex university professor of economics who specialises in science and technology, argues that the former is useless and the latter incomplete. Yes, innovation depends on bold entrepreneurship. But the entity that takes the boldest risks and achieves the biggest breakthroughs is not the private sector; it is the much-maligned state…
Why is the state’s role so important? The answer lies in the huge uncertainties, time spans and costs associated with fundamental, science-based innovation. Private companies cannot and will not bear these costs, partly because they cannot be sure to reap the fruits and partly because these fruits lie so far in the future.
Indeed, the more competitive and finance-driven the economy, the less the private sector will be willing to bear such risks. Buying back shares is apparently a far more attractive way of using surplus cash than spending on fundamental innovation. The days of AT&T’s path-breaking Bell Labs are long gone. In any case, the private sector could not have created the internet or GPS. Only the US military had the resources to do so.
Arguably, the most important engines of innovation in the past five decades have been the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the NIH. Today, if the world is to make fundamental breakthroughs in energy technologies, states will play a big role. Indeed, the US government even helped drive the development of the hydraulic fracturing of shale rock.”