Why open data should be central to Fifa reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gavin Starks in The Guardian: “Over the past two weeks, Fifa has faced mounting pressure to radically improve its transparency and governance in the wake of corruption allegations. David Cameron has called for reforms including expanding the use of open data.

Open data is information made available by governments, businesses and other groups for anyone to read, use and share. Data.gov.uk was launched as the home of UK open government data in January 2010 and now has almost 21,000 published datasets, including on government spending.

Allowing citizens to freely access data related to the institutions that govern them is essential to a well-functioning democratic society. It is the first step towards holding leaders to account for failures and wrongdoing.

Fifa has a responsibility for the shared interests of millions of fans around the world. Football’s popularity means that Fifa’s governance has wide-ranging implications for society, too. This is particularly true of decisions about hosting the World Cup, which is often tied to large-scale government investment in infrastructure and even extends to law-making. Brazil spent up to £10bn hosting the 2014 World Cup and had to legalise the sale of beer at matches.

Following Sepp Blatter’s resignation, Fifa will gather its executive committee in July to plan for a presidential election, expected to take place in mid-December. Open data should form the cornerstone of any prospective candidate’s manifesto. It can help Fifa make better spending decisions and ensure partners deliver value for money, restore the trust of the international football community.

Fifa’s lengthy annual financial report gives summaries of financial expenditure,budgeted at £184m for operations and governance alone in 2016, but individual transactions are not published. Publishing spending data incentivises better spending decisions. If all Fifa’s outgoings – which totalled around £3.5bn between 2011 and 2014 – were made open, it would encourage much more efficiency….(more)”

Exploring Open Energy Data in Urban Areas

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The Worldbank: “…Energy efficiency – using less energy input to deliver the same level of service – has been described by many as the ‘first fuel’ of our societies. However, lack of adequate data to accurately predict and measure energy efficiency savings, particularly at the city level, has limited the realization of its promise over the past two decades.
Why Open Energy Data?
Open Data can be a powerful tool to reduce information asymmetry in markets, increase transparency and help achieve local economic development goals. Several sectors like transport, public sector management and agriculture have started to benefit from Open Data practices. Energy markets are often characterized by less-than-optimal conditions with high system inefficiencies, misaligned incentives and low levels of transparency. As such, the sector has a lot to potentially gain from embracing Open Data principles.
The United States is a leader in this field with its ‘Energy Data’ initiative. This initiative makes data easy to find, understand and apply, helping to fuel a clean energy economy. For example, the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) open application programming interface (API) has more than 1.2 million time series of data and is frequently visited by users from the private sector, civil society and media. In addition, the Green Button  initiative is empowering American citizens to have access to their own energy usage data, and OpenEI.org is an Open Energy Information platform to help people find energy information, share their knowledge and connect to other energy stakeholders.
Introducing the Open Energy Data Assessment
To address this data gap in emerging and developing countries, the World Bank is conducting a series of Open Energy Data Assessments in urban areas. The objective is to identify important energy-related data, raise awareness of the benefits of Open Data principles and improve the flow of data between traditional energy stakeholders and others interested in the sector.
The first cities we assessed were Accra, Ghana and Nairobi, Kenya. Both are among the fastest-growing cities in the world, with dynamic entrepreneurial and technology sectors, and both are capitals of countries with an ongoing National Open Data Initiative., The two cities have also been selected to be part of the Negawatt Challenge, a World Bank international competition supporting technology innovation to solve local energy challenges.
The ecosystem approach
The starting point for the exercise was to consider the urban energy sector as an ecosystem, comprised of data suppliers, data users, key datasets, a legal framework, funding mechanisms, and ICT infrastructure. The methodology that we used adapted the established World Bank Open Data Readiness Assessment (ODRA), which highlights valuable connections between data suppliers and data demand.  The assessment showcases how to match pressing urban challenges with the opportunity to release and use data to address them, creating a longer-term commitment to the process. Mobilizing key stakeholders to provide quick, tangible results is also key to this approach….(More) …See also World Bank Open Government Data Toolkit.”

Waze and the Traffic Panopticon

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 in the New Yorker: “In April, during his second annual State of the City address, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a data-sharing agreement with Waze, the Google-owned, Israel-based navigation service. Waze is different from most navigation apps, including Google Maps, in that it relies heavily on real-time, user-generated data. Some of this data is produced actively—a driver or passenger sees a stalled vehicle, then uses a voice command or taps a stalled-vehicle icon on the app to alert others—while other data, such as the user’s location and average speed, is gathered passively, via smartphones. The agreement will see the city provide Waze with some of the active data it collects, alerting drivers to road closures, construction, and parades, among other things. From Waze, the city will get real-time data on traffic and road conditions. Garcetti said that the partnership would mean “less congestion, better routing, and a more livable L.A.” Di-Ann Eisnor, Waze’s head of growth, acknowledged to me that these kinds of deals can cause discomfort to the people working inside city government. “It’s exciting, but people inside are also fearful because it seems like too much work, or it seems so unknown,” she said.

Indeed, the deal promises to help the city improve some of its traffic and infrastructure systems (L.A. still uses paper to manage pothole patching, for example), but it also acknowledges Waze’s role in the complex new reality of urban traffic planning. Traditionally, traffic management has been a largely top-down process. In Los Angeles, it is coördinated in a bunker downtown, several stories below the sidewalk, where engineers stare at blinking lights representing traffic and live camera feeds of street intersections. L.A.’s sensor-and-algorithm-driven Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control System is already one of the world’s most sophisticated traffic-mitigation tools, but it can only do so much to manage the city’s eternally unsophisticated gridlock. Los Angeles appears to see its partnership with Waze as an important step toward improving the bridge between its subterranean panopticon and the rest of the city still further, much like other metropolises that have struck deals with Waze under the company’s Connected Cities program.
Among the early adopters is Rio de Janeiro, whose urban command center tracks everything from accidents to hyperlocal weather conditions, pulling data from thirty departments and private companies, including Waze. “In Rio,” Eisnor said, traffic managers “were able to change the garbage routes, figure out where to install cameras, and deploy traffic personnel” because of the program. She also pointed out that Connected Cities has helped municipal workers in Washington, D.C., patch potholes within forty-eight hours of their being identified on Waze. “We’re helping reframe city planning through not just space but space and time,” she said…..(More)“

The Tragedy of the Digital Commons

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J. Nathan Matias in the Atlantic:  “….Milland and other regular Turkers navigate this precariously free market withTurkopticon, a DIY technology for rating employers created in 2008. To use it, workers install a browser plugin that extends Amazon’s website with special rating features. Before accepting a new task, workers check how others have rated the employer. After finishing, they can also leave their own rating of how well they were treated. Collective rating on Turkopticon is an act of citizenship in the digital world. This digital citizenship acknowledges that online experiences are as much a part of our common life as our schools, sidewalks, and rivers—requiring as much stewardship, vigilance, and improvement as anything else we share.

“How do you fix a broken system that isn’t yours to repair?” That’s the question that motivated the researchers Lilly Irani and Six Silberman to create Turkopticon, and it’s one that comes up frequently in digital environments dominated by large platforms with hands-off policies. (On social networks like Twitter, for example, harassment is a problem for many users.) Irani and Silberman describe Turkopticon as a “mutual aid for accountability” technology, a system that coordinates peer support to hold others accountable when platforms choose not to step in.

Mutual aid accountability is a growing response to the complex social problems people face online. On Twitter, systems like The Block Bot and BlockTogether coordinate collective judgments about alleged online harassers. The systems then collectively block tweets from accounts that a group prefers not to hear from. Last month, the advocacy organization Hollaback raised over $20,000 on Kickstarter to create support networks for people experiencing harassment. In November, I worked with the advocacy organization Women, Action, and the Media, which took a role as “authorized reporter” with Twitter. For three weeks WAM! accepted reports, sorted evidence, and forwarded serious cases to Twitter. In response, the company warned, suspended, and deleted the accounts of many alleged harassers.
These mutual aid technologies operate in the shadow of larger systems with gaps in how people are supported—even when platforms do step in, says Stuart Geiger, a Berkeley Ph.D. student. In other words, sometimes a platform’s system-wide solutions to a problem can create their own problems. For several years, Geiger and his colleague Aaron Halfaker, now a researcher at Wikimedia, were concerned that Wikipedia’s semi-automated anti-vandalism systems might be making the site unfriendly. As a graduate student unable to change Wikipedia’s code, Halfaker created Snuggle, a mutual-aid mentorship technology that tracks the site’s spam responders. When Snuggle users think a newcomer’s edits were mistakenly flagged as spam, the software coordinates Wikipedians to help those users recover from the negative experience of getting revoked.

By organizing peer support at scale, the designers of Turkopticon and its cousins draw attention to common problems, hoping to influence longer-term change on a complex issue. In time, the idea goes, requesters on Mechanical Turk might change their treatment of workers, Amazon might change its policies and software, or regulators might set new rules for digital labor. This is an approach with a long history in an area that might seem unlikely: the conservation movement. (Silberman and Irani cite the movement as inspiration for Turkopticon.)

To better understand how this approach might influence digital citizenship, I followed the history of mutual-aid accountability in a precious common network that the city of Boston enjoys every day: the Charles River. Planned, re-routed, exploited and contested, it has inspired and supported human life since before written history….(More)”

The Data That’s Hiding in Plain Sight

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck in Governing: “What makes open data a powerful tool for governing better is the ability of people inside and outside of institutions to use the same data to create effective policies and useful tools, visualizations, maps and apps. Open data also can provide the raw material to convene informed conversations about what’s broken and the empirical foundation for developing solutions. But to realize its potential, the data needs to be truly open: not only universally and readily accessible but also structured for usability and computability.

One area where open data has the potential to make a real difference — and where some of its current limitations are all too apparent — is in state-level regulation of nonprofits. In May, a task force comprising the Federal Trade Commission together with 58 agencies from all 50 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the Cancer Fund group of nonprofits and the individuals who run them. The complaint alleges that the groups are sham charities that spend “the overwhelming majority of donated funds supporting the Individual Defendants, their families and friends, and their fundraisers.” State officials spotted telltale signs of abuse and fraud by studying information the organizations had submitted in their federal nonprofit tax returns and state-by-state registration forms.

Nonprofit tax returns and registration forms are the public’s (and government’s) primary window into the workings of America’s enormous and economically impactful nonprofit sector. Every year in the United States, approximately 1.5 million registered tax-exempt organizations file a version of the federal Form 990, the tax return for tax-exempt organization, with the Internal Revenue Service and state tax authorities. These forms collect details on the organizations’ financial, governance and organizational structure to the end of ensuring that they are deserving of their tax-exempt status. All but 10 states also require that nonprofits file state-specific registration forms. The information these filings contain about executive compensation, fundraising expenses and donation activities can help regulators spot possible bad actors and alert each other to targets for further investigation.

Yet despite the richness and utility of the information contained in these filings, major barriers prevent regulators from efficiently sharing and analyzing the data..(More)”

5 cool ways connected data is being used

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 at Wareable: “The real news behind the rise of wearable tech isn’t so much the gadgetry as the gigantic amount of personal data that it harnesses.

Concerns have already been raised over what companies may choose to do with such valuable information, with one US life insurance company already using Fitbits to track customers’ exercise and offer them discounts when they hit their activity goals.

Despite a mildly worrying potential dystopia in which our own data could be used against us, there are plenty of positive ways in which companies are using vast amounts of connected data to make the world a better place…

Parkinson’s disease research

Apple Health ResearchKit was recently unveiled as a platform for collecting collaborative data for medical studies, but Apple isn’t the first company to rely on crowdsourced data for medical research.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research recently unveiled a partnership with Intel to improve research and treatment for the neurodegenerative brain disease. Wearables are being used to unobtrusively gather real-time data from sufferers, which is then analysed by medical experts….

Saving the rhino

Connected data and wearable tech isn’t just limited to humans. In South Africa, the Madikwe Conservation Project is using wearable-based data to protect endangered rhinos from callous poachers.

A combination of ultra-strong Kevlar ankle collars powered by an Intel Galileo chip, along with an RFID chip implanted in each rhino’s horn allows the animals to be monitored. Any break in proximity between the anklet and horn results in anti-poaching teams being deployed to catch the bad guys….

Making public transport smart

A company called Snips is collecting huge amounts of urban data in order to improve infrastructure. In partnership with French national rail operator SNCF, Snips produced an app called Tranquilien to utilise location data from commuters’ phones and smartwatches to track which parts of the rail network were busy at which times.

Combining big data with crowdsourcing, the information helps passengers to pick a train where they can find a seat during peak times, while the data can also be useful to local businesses when serving the needs of commuters who are passing through.

Improving the sports fan experience

We’ve already written about how wearable tech is changing the NFL, but the collection of personal data is also set to benefit the fans.

Levi’s Stadium – the new home of the San Francisco 49ers – opened in 2014 and is one of the most technically advanced sports venues in the world. As well as a strong Wi-Fi signal throughout the stadium, fans also benefit from a dedicated app. This not only offers instant replays and real-time game information, but it also helps them find a parking space, order food and drinks directly to their seat and even check the lines at the toilets. As fans use the app, all of the data is collated to enhance the fan experience in future….

Creating interactive art

Don’t be put off by the words ‘interactive installation’. On Broadway is a cool work of art that “represents life in the 21st Century city through a compilation of images and data collected along the 13 miles of Broadway that span Manhattan”….(More)”

The Missing Statistics of Criminal Justice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Ford at the Atlantic: “An abundance of data has fueled the reform movement, but from prisons to prosecutors, crucial questions remain unquantified.

After Ferguson, a noticeable gap in criminal-justice statistics emerged: the use of lethal force by the police. The federal government compiles a wealth of data on homicides, burglaries, and arson, but no official, reliable tabulation of civilian deaths by law enforcement exists. A partial database kept by the FBI is widely considered to be misleading and inaccurate. (The Washington Post has just released a more expansive total of nearly 400 police killings this year.) “It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people were shot by the police last week, last month, last year,” FBI Director James Comey told reporters in April.

This raises an obvious question: If the FBI can’t tell how many people were killed by law enforcement last year, what other kinds of criminal-justice data are missing? Statistics are more than just numbers: They focus the attention of politicians, drive the allocation of resources, and define the public debate. Public officials—from city councilors to police commanders to district attorneys—are often evaluated based on how these numbers change during their terms in office. But existing statistical measures only capture part of the overall picture, and the problems that go unmeasured are often also unaddressed. What changes could the data that isn’t currently collected produce if it were gathered?….

Without reliable official statistics, scholars often must gather and compile necessary data themselves. “A few years ago, I was struck at how many police killings of civilians we seemed to be having in Philadelphia,” Gottschalk said as an example. “They would be buried in the newspaper, and I was stunned by how difficult it was to compile that information and compare it to New York and do it on a per-capita basis. It wasn’t readily available.” As a result, criminal-justice researchers often spend more time gathering data than analyzing it.

This data’s absence shapes the public debate over mass incarceration in the same way that silence between notes of music gives rhythm to a song. Imagine debating the economy without knowing the unemployment rate, or climate change without knowing the sea level, or healthcare reform without knowing the number of uninsured Americans. Legislators and policymakers heavily rely on statistics when crafting public policy. Criminal-justice statistics can also influence judicial rulings, including those by the Supreme Court, with implications for the entire legal system.

Beyond their academic and policymaking value, there’s also a certain power to statistics. They have the irreplaceable ability to both clarify social issues and structure the public’s understanding of them. A wealth of data has allowed sociologists, criminologists, and political scientists to diagnose serious problems with the American criminal-justice system over the past twenty years. Now that a growing bipartisan consensus recognizes the problem exists, gathering the right facts and figures could help point the way towards solutions…(More)”

The Diffusion and Evolution of 311 Citizen Service Centers in American Cities from 1996 to 2012

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PhD thesis by John Christopher O’Byrne: “This study of the diffusion and evolution of the 311 innovation in the form of citizen service centers and as a technology cluster has been designed to help identify the catalysts for the spread of government-to-citizen (G2C) technology in local government in order to better position future G2C technology for a more rapid rate of adoption. The 311 non-emergency number was first established in 1996 and had spread to 80 local governments across the United States by 2012. This dissertation examines: what factors contributed to the adoption of 311 in American local governments over 100,000 in population; how did the innovation diffuse and evolve over time; and why did some governments’ communications with citizens became more advanced than others? Given the problem of determining causality, a three-part research design was used to examine the topic including a historical narrative, logistic regression model, and case studies from Pittsburgh, Minneapolis and St. Louis. The narrative found that the political forces of the federal government, national organizations, and policy entrepreneurs (Karch, 2007) promoted the 311 innovation to solve different problems and that it evolved beyond its original intent.

The logistic regression model found that there was a statistically significant relationship between 311 adoption and the variables of higher population, violent crime rate, and the mayor-council form of government. The case studies revealed that mayors played a strong role in establishing citizen service centers in all three cities while 311 adopter Pittsburgh and non-adopter St. Louis seemed to have more in common in their G2C evolution due to severe budget constraints. With little written about the 311 innovation in academic journals, practitioners and scholars will benefit from understanding the catalysts for the diffusion and evolution of the 311 in order to determine ways to increase the rate of adoption for future G2C communication innovations….(More)”

Data (v.)

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Jer Thorp in Journal 001 of The Office for Creative Research and Medium: “I data you, you data me. They data us, we data them.

As your Concise Oxford sails toward me from across the room, let’s take some time to consider the arguments:

The word data has been in a pronounced flux over the last ten years, as its role and function has been redefined by technology and culture. A decade ago, data was firmly a plural noun. Specifically, it was the plural of datum– one datum, two data. Back then, you could point and laugh at the data amateurs because they would say ‘data is’ rather than ‘data are’. Of course, those data newbies went on to form companies, make software, build databases, write books and give TED talks. And slowly, data did turn into a particular kind of singular: it has become, commonly, a mass noun…..

Data is not inert, yet its perceived passivity is one of its most dangerous properties. When we are warned that a government is collecting data about its citizens, we may be underwhelmed specifically because this act of collection seems to be so harmless, so indifferent. But of course data is not collected and then left alone: it is used as a substrate for decision making; and as an instrument for differentiation, discrimination and damage. Putting an active form of the word data into common parlance could serve as a reminder that the systems of data collection and uses are humming with capacity for influence, action and violence.

Making data a verb also exposes to us the power imbalances that have kept our collective endeavours drastically off-kilter. Grammatically speaking, data-as-verb would present a number of possibilities for subject/object combinations:

I data you. You data me. We data you. You data us. They data me. They data us. We data them.

Exposed to this rich possibility of cause and effect, the common usages of data today become strikingly narrow: in our lived data experiences we are objects, rather than subjects. Google reads our every e-mail, placing us ingloriously in marketing buckets based on what we write to our friends, colleagues and lovers. Uber’s algorithms note our late night voyages asrecords of romantic trysts. They data us, then they data us again.

Even the innocent fitness tracker, on paper an embodiment of ‘I data myself’ isn’t so much about quantified self as it is about quantified selves, less a tool for individuals to track their own beating hearts than a system to find an aggregated 24 year old Bay Area resident that can be marketed against. These devices are exciting toys for runners and walkers but also for lawyers, who have found in them a new way to argue against claims of personal injury.

Yet there is plenty of potential for us to data. Last year we built Floodwatch, a browser based tool that allows users to track the web advertising profiles that are being authored about them— empowering individuals to track the trackers. Mapping Police Violence, a project by Ferguson activists@samsway @Nettaaaaaaaa and @deray, keeps a record of every black American killed by police in the USA. In doing so, the project reminds us how powerful the simple act of data collection can be, particularly when that data is something that the powerful don’t want us to see.

These projects give us a glimpse of what can happen if we abandon our idea of data as an innocent, passive noun. By embracing the new verbal form of data, we might better understand its potential for action, and in turn move beyond our own prescribed role as the objects in data sentences.

In doing so, perhaps we can imagine a future perfect for data, where not only will they have dataed us, we will have dataed them. A future, perhaps, where we all data together….(More)”

Video: The power of public art

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“Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director of Creative Time USA, says artists have the power “to kick open the door to social change.” In this video for the World Economic Forum, Pasternak talks about some of Creative Time’s commissions – from lighting up the New York skyline to shaking the hands of sanitation workers – and how art can help expose and heal social issues.

Click on the video to watch the full talk, or read selected quotes below”