5 Ways Cities Are Using Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Larson in Mashable: “New York City released more than 200 high-value data sets to the public on Monday — a way, in part, to provide more content for open-sourced mapping projects like OpenStreetMap.
It’s one of the many releases since the Local Law 11 of 2012 passed in February, which calls for more transparency of the city government’s collected data.
But it’s not just New York: Cities across the world, large and small, are utilizing big data sets — like traffic statistics, energy consumption rates and GPS mapping — to launch projects to help their respective communities.
We rounded up a few of our favorites below….

1. Seattle’s Power Consumption

The city of Seattle recently partnered with Microsoft and Accenture on a pilot project to reduce the area’s energy usage. Using Microsoft’s Azure cloud, the project will collect and analyze hundreds of data sets collected from four downtown buildings’ management systems.
With predictive analytics, then, the system will work to find out what’s working and what’s not — i.e. where energy can be used less, or not at all. The goal is to reduce power usage by 25%.

2. SpotHero

Finding parking spots — especially in big cities — is undoubtably a headache.

SpotHero is an app, for both iOS and Android devices, that tracks down parking spots in a select number of cities. How it works: Users type in an address or neighborhood (say, Adams Morgan in Washington, D.C.) and are taken to a listing of available garages and lots nearby — complete with prices and time durations.
The app tracks availability in real-time, too, so a spot is updated in the system as soon as it’s snagged.
Seven cities are currently synced with the app: Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Boston, Milwaukee and Newark, N.J.

3. Adopt-a-Hydrant

Anyone who’s spent a winter in Boston will agree: it snows.

In January, the city’s Office of New Urban Mechanics released an app called Adopt-a-Hydrant. The program is mapped with every fire hydrant in the city proper — more than 13,000, according to a Harvard blog post — and lets residents pledge to shovel out one, or as many as they choose, in the almost inevitable event of a blizzard.
Once a pledge is made, volunteers receive a notification if their hydrant — or hydrants — become buried in snow.

4. Adopt-a-Sidewalk

Similar to Adopt-a-Hydrant, Chicago’s Adopt-a-Sidewalk app lets residents of the Windy City pledge to shovel sidewalks after snowfall. In a city just as notorious for snowstorms as Boston, it’s an effective way to ensure public spaces remain free of snow and ice — especially spaces belonging to the elderly or disabled.

If you’re unsure which part of town you’d like to “adopt,” just register on the website and browse the map — you’ll receive a pop-up notification for each street you swipe that’s still available.

5. Less Congestion for Lyon

Last year, researchers at IBM teamed up with the city of Lyon, France (about four hours south of Paris), to build a system that helps traffic operators reduce congestion on the road.

The system, called the “Decision Support System Optimizer (DSSO),” uses real-time traffic reports to detect and predict congestions. If an operator sees that a traffic jam is likely to occur, then, she/he can adjust traffic signals accordingly to keep the flow of cars moving smoothly.
It’s an especially helpful tool for emergencies — say, when an ambulance is en route to the hospital. Over time, the algorithms in the system will “learn” from its most successful recommendations, then apply that knowledge when making future predictions.”

Explore the world’s constitutions with a new online tool

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Official Google Blog: “Constitutions are as unique as the people they govern, and have been around in one form or another for millennia. But did you know that every year approximately five new constitutions are written, and 20-30 are amended or revised? Or that Africa has the youngest set of constitutions, with 19 out of the 39 constitutions written globally since 2000 from the region?
The process of redesigning and drafting a new constitution can play a critical role in uniting a country, especially following periods of conflict and instability. In the past, it’s been difficult to access and compare existing constitutional documents and language—which is critical to drafters—because the texts are locked up in libraries or on the hard drives of constitutional experts. Although the process of drafting constitutions has evolved from chisels and stone tablets to pens and modern computers, there has been little innovation in how their content is sourced and referenced.
With this in mind, Google Ideas supported the Comparative Constitutions Project to build Constitute, a new site that digitizes and makes searchable the world’s constitutions. Constitute enables people to browse and search constitutions via curated and tagged topics, as well as by country and year. The Comparative Constitutions Project cataloged and tagged nearly 350 themes, so people can easily find and compare specific constitutional material. This ranges from the fairly general, such as “Citizenship” and “Foreign Policy,” to the very specific, such as “Suffrage and turnouts” and “Judicial Autonomy and Power.”
Our aim is to arm drafters with a better tool for constitution design and writing. We also hope citizens will use Constitute to learn more about their own constitutions, and those of countries around the world.”

Using mobile phones to fix the holes in local government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Prof. Hannah Thinyane at IBP: “I live in Makana Municipality, one like many others in South Africa that is struggling to provide adequate basic services, such as water, sanitation, and electricity, to its residents….
We came up with a question that we would try to answer: Can we use mobile phones to increase citizen participation in local government? In particular, can we use mobile phones to facilitate dialogue between residents and their municipality about service delivery? We didn’t want to gather the information to provide “band-aid” fixes; instead we wanted to see if citizens could gather information via mobile phones to engage with government processes using PSAM’s social accountability monitoring (SAM) methodology. SAM involves citizen engagement in each of the five basic governance processes: strategic planning and resource allocation; expenditure management; performance management; public integrity management; and oversight.
MobiSAM is our answer. MobiSAM is a polling framework and platform that allows municipalities to ask residents questions like “do you have adequate water pressure?” and automatically collates reported cases of poor services and provides a visualization mapping these. The municipality then has the ability to respond to registered users via SMS or email to update them on reported cases or to inform them of planned or unplanned service delivery problems.
MobiSAM
There are a number of other SMS-based systems available that support local governments in gathering “real time” information from their residents. The difference between those systems and MobiSAM is that MobiSAM provides “real time” feedback to the respondents, allowing them to see other cases reported in the region.  Also mobile data is currently significantly cheaper than SMS, reducing the cost of participation to residents.”

Participatory Budgeting Around the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jay Colburn, from the International Budget Partnership:  “Public participation in budget decision making can occur in many different forms. Participatory budgeting (PB) is an increasingly popular process in which the public is involved directly in making budgetary decisions, most often at the local level. The involvement of community members usually includes identifying and prioritizing the community’s needs and then voting on spending for specific projects.
PB was first developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989 as an innovative reform to address the city’s severe inequality. Since then it has spread around the world. Though the specifics of how the PB process works varies depending on the context in which it is implemented, most PB processes have four basic similarities: 1) community members identify spending ideas; 2) delegates are selected to develop spending proposals based on those ideas; 3) residents vote on which proposals to fund; and 4) the government implements the chosen proposals.
During the 1990s PB spread throughout Brazil and across Latin America. Examples of participatory budgeting can now be found in every region of the world, including Central Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. As the use of PB has expanded, it has been adapted in many ways. One example is to incorporate new information and communication technologies as a way to broaden opportunities for participation (see Using Technology to Improve Transparency and Citizen Engagement in this newsletter for more on this topic.)…
There are also a number of different models of PB that have been developed, each with slightly different rules and processes. Using the different models and methods has expanded our knowledge on the potential impacts of PB. In addition to having demonstrable and measurable results on mobilizing public funds for services for the poor, participatory budgeting has also been linked to greater tax compliance, increased demands for transparency, and greater access to budget information and oversight.
However, not all instances of PB are equally successful; there are many variables to consider when weighing the impact of different cases. These can include the level and mechanisms of participation, information accessibility, knowledge of opportunities to participate, political context, and prevailing socioeconomic factors. There is a large and growing literature on the benefits and challenges of PB. The IBP Open Budgets Blog recently featured posts on participatory budgeting initiatives in Peru, Kyrgyzstan, and Kenya. While there are still many lessons to be learned about how PB can be used in different contexts, it is certainly a positive step toward increased citizen engagement in the budget process and influence over how public funds are spent.
For more information and resources on PB, visit the participatory budgeting Facebook group”

Citizen science versus NIMBY?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ethan Zuckerman’s latest blog: “Safecast is a remarkable project born out of a desire to understand the health and safety implications of the release of radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in the wake of the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Unsatisfied with limited and questionable information about radiation released by the Japanese government, Joi Ito, Peter, Sean and others worked to design, build and deploy GPS-enabled geiger counters which could be used by concerned citizens throughout Japan to monitor alpha, beta and gamma radiation and understand what parts of Japan have been most effected by the Fukushima disaster.

Screen Shot 2013-08-29 at 10.25.44 AM
The Safecast project has produced an elegant map that shows how complicated the Fukushima disaster will be for the Japanese government to recover from. While there are predictably elevated levels of radiation immediately around the Fukushima plant and in the 18 mile exclusion zones, there is a “plume” of increased radiation south and west of the reactors. The map is produced from millions of radiation readings collected by volunteers, who generally take readings while driving – Safecast’s bGeigie meter automatically takes readings every few seconds and stores them along with associated GPS coordinates for later upload to the server.
… This long and thoughtful blog post about the progress of government decontamination efforts, the cost-benefit of those efforts, and the government’s transparency or opacity around cleanup gives a sense for what Safecast is trying to do: provide ways for citizens to check and verify government efforts and understand the complexity of decisions about radiation exposure. This is especially important in Japan, as there’s been widespread frustration over the failures of TEPCO to make progress on cleaning up the reactor site, leading to anger and suspicion about the larger cleanup process.
For me, Safecast raises two interesting questions:
– If you’re not getting trustworthy or sufficient information from your government, can you use crowdsourcing, citizen science or other techniques to generate that data?
– How does collecting data relate to civic engagement? Is it a path towards increased participation as an engaged and effective citizen?
To have some time to reflect on these questions, I decided I wanted to try some of my own radiation monitoring. I borrowed Joi Ito’s bGeigie and set off for my local Spent Nuclear Fuel and Greater-Than-Class C Low Level Radioactive Waste dry cask storage facility…

Projects like Safecast – and the projects I’m exploring this coming year under the heading of citizen infrastructure monitoring – have a challenge. Most participants aren’t going to uncover Ed Snowden-calibre information by driving around with a geiger counter or mapping wells in their communities. Lots of data collected is going to reveal that governments and corporations are doing their jobs, as my data suggests. It’s easy to track a path between collecting groundbreaking data and getting involved with deeper civic and political issues – will collecting data that the local nuclear plant is apparently safe get me more involved with issues of nuclear waste disposal?
It just might. One of the great potentials of citizen science and citizen infrastructure monitoring is the possibility of reducing the exotic to the routine….”

Assessing Zuckerberg’s Idea That Facebook Could Help Citizens Re-Make Their Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Gregory Ferenstein in TechCrunch: “Mark Zuckerberg has a grand vision that Facebook will help citizens in developing countries decide their own governments. It’s a lofty and partially attainable goal. While Egypt probably won’t let citizens vote for their next president with a Like, it is theoretically possible to use Facebook to crowdsource expertise. Governments around the world are experimenting with radical online direct democracy, but it doesn’t always work out.

Very briefly, Zuckerberg laid out his broad vision for e-government to Wired’s Steven Levy, while defending Internet.org, a new consortium to bring broadband to the developing world.

“People often talk about how big a change social media had been for our culture here in the U.S. But imagine how much bigger a change it will be when a developing country comes online for the first time ever. We use things like Facebook to share news and keep in touch with our friends, but in those countries, they’ll use this for deciding what kind of government they want to have. Getting access to health care information for the first time ever.”

When he references “deciding … government,” Zuckerberg could be talking about voting, sharing ideas, or crafting a constitution. We decided to assess the possibilities of them all….
For citizens in the exciting/terrifying position to construct a brand-new government, American-style democracy is one of many options. Britain, for instance, has a parliamentary system and has no constitution. In other cases, a government may want to heed political scientists’ advice and develop a “consensus democracy,” where more than two political parties are incentivized to work collaboratively with citizens, business, and different branches of government to craft laws.
At least once, choosing a new style of democracy has been attempted through the Internet. After the global financial meltdown wrecked Iceland’s economy, the happy citizens of the grass-covered country decided to redo their government and solicit suggestions from the public (950 Icelanders chosen by lottery and general calls for ideas through social networks). After much press about Iceland’s “crowdsourced” constitution, it crashed miserably after most of the elected leaders rejected it.
Crafting law, especially a constitution, is legally complex; unless there is a systematic way to translate haphazard citizen suggestions into legalese, the results are disastrous.
“Collaborative drafting, at large scale, at low costs, and that is inclusive, is something that we still don’t know how to do,” says Tiago Peixoto, a World Bank Consultant on participatory democracy (and one of our Most Innovative People In Democracy).
Peixoto, who helps the Brazilian government conduct some of the world’s only online policymaking, says he’s optimistic that Facebook could be helpful, but he wouldn’t use it to draft laws just yet.
While technically it is possible for social networks to craft a new government, we just don’t know how to do it very well, and, therefore, leaders are likely to reject the idea. In other words, don’t expect Egypt to decide their future through Facebook likes.”

How citizens in Tanzania and DRC are getting better health care and education through open budgets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at ONE: “Earlier this year we asked what you thought were the continent’s most important development priorities, as part of our You Choose campaign.  Health care was very near the top of the list, so now we’re on the case.
We know that better health care will save lives. Preventable and treatable diseases such as AIDS, TB, and malaria continue to kill more than 2 million people in Africa every year.
Open Budgets Save Lives aims to do two things:

  • Encourage African leaders to prioritise health care spending
  • Open up national budgets so that African citizens can see where the money is going

Transparency in government spending is an incredible tool for all of us – allowing citizens and local NGOs to hold governments accountable for spending that lines up with citizens’ priorities.
Giving citizens current, accurate and understandable budget information increases the likelihood that resources will be managed well, and used efficiently. Countries with open budgets are also more likely to line up spending with stated priorities, and ensure policy commitments are funded. Open budgets also help reduce corruption, by making it easier to draw a line between what is supposed to be spent and the results that are achieved.”

The Impact and Effectiveness of Transparency and Accountability Initiatives: Freedom of Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper in Development Policy Review: “Analysis of the impact and effectiveness of Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation has been hampered by lack of systematic evidence and conceptual confusion about what kind of right it represents. This article discusses some of the main conceptual parameters of FOI theory, before reviewing the available evidence from a range of studies. It presents case studies of civil-society activism on FOI in India and South Africa to illustrate the extent to which access to information is having an impact, in particular on socio-economic conditions. After reviewing the range of approaches used, it concludes that the academic community and the FOI community of practice need to come together to devise robust and rigorous methodologies.”

ICANN Strategy Panels Launched

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ICANN PressRelease: “During today’s opening ceremony of ICANN 47 in Durban, South Africa, President and CEO Fadi Chehadé announced the creation of five new ICANN Strategy Panels that will serve as an integral part of a framework for cross-community dialogue on strategic matters. The ICANN Strategy Panels will convene subject matter experts, thought leaders and industry practitioners to support development of ICANN‘s strategic and operational plans, in coordination with many other global players, and will be comprised of up to seven members including the chair for an anticipated one-year timeframe…
In its fourteen-year history, ICANN has grown to reflect a changing landscape of continued innovation, interconnectedness, and unprecedented growth in the DNS ecosystem, one that transcends groups and borders to serve the public interest. Yet, the Internet is at a critical inflection point as billions of new people are expected to join the global network in the next few years and as the nature of its usage matures dramatically. With this in mind, the ICANN Strategy Panels are expected to help catalyze transformation and advance ICANN‘s role in the context of a dynamic, increasingly complex global environment.”
See also Learning by Doing: The GovLab’s Living Labs

Can Silicon Valley Save the World?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur in Foreign Policy: “Not content with dominating IPOs on Wall Street, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are taking their can-do, failure-conquering, technology-enabled tactics to the challenge of global poverty. And why not? If we can look up free Khan Academy math lectures using the cheap, kid-friendly computers handed out by the folks at One Laptop per Child, who needs to worry about the complexities of education reform? With a lamp lit up by an electricity-generating soccer ball in every hut, who needs coal-fired power stations and transmission lines? And if even people in refugee camps can make money transcribing outsourced first-world dental records, who needs manufacturing or the roads and port systems required to export physical goods? No wonder the trendiest subject these days for TED talks is cracking the code on digital-era do-gooding, with 100 recent talks and counting just on the subjects of Africa and development…
But entrepreneurial spirit and even the fanciest of gadgets will only get you so far. All the technological transformation of the last 200 years hasn’t come close to wiping out global poverty. More than half the planet still lives on less than $4 a day, and 2.4 billion people live on less than $2 a day. And that’s after a decade that saw the biggest drop in extreme poverty ever. What’s more, millions and millions of people still die annually from easily and cheaply preventable or treatable diseases like diarrhea and pneumonia. None of this is for a lack of science; often it isn’t even for lack of money. It is because parents don’t follow simple health practices like washing their hands, government bureaucrats can’t or won’t provide basic water and sanitation programs, and arbitrary immigration restrictions prevent the poor from moving to places with better opportunities.
Sorry, but no iPhone, even one loaded with the coolest apps, is going to change all that….
SO WHAT CAN BE DONE to harness technological innovation, filter the good ideas from the bad, and spread a little of Silicon Valley’s fairy dust on the world’s poorer regions? The answer, according to Harvard economist Michael Kremer, is market discipline and rigorous testing. Kremer is a MacArthur “genius” grant winner whose name pops up in speculation about future Nobel Prize contenders. He thinks that technological fixes can dramatically improve the lives of the global poor, but markets won’t provide the right innovations without support.”