Americas

Opening travel spending through civic intelligence, participation and co-creation

Curated on January 28, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Joel Salas Suárez at the Open Government Partnership Blog: “When we were appointed by the Senate as Commissioners of the Access to Information Institute in Mexico (IFAI), we identified two high profile issues that had negatively affected the Institute’s image: the acquisition of its new building and the lack of transparency on international travel expenditure of the former Commissioners.

IFAI has to lead by example, so my fellow commissioners and I decided to tackle these two problems with transparency actions to send a clear message to the Mexican society and the international community in our first hundred days in office. First we created the website sede.ifai.mx to publish all the information about the new building procurement (a 45.6 million USD lease). Secondly, we decided to start our first civic innovation project, a joint venture with civil society organizations, to find the best way to publish information related to travel spending by IFAI’s public servants.
Travel expenditure of IFAI is comparatively smaller. During 2013 it allotted to 186,760 USD, 0.5% of the Institute’s budget (38.2 million USD). However, this expenditure has historically been of public interest and it should be. According to the 2013 Mexican Government Expenditure Review (the latest available) the Federal Level (Executive, Legislative and Judicial Powers, and Autonomous organs) spent close to 633 million USD in official travel (Chapter 3000, concept 3700). Therefore, we decided to tackle the problem and design a platform that would allow us to effectively publish information related to the public money spent on travel by public officials and the results obtained during these trips.
In order to do this, we worked with civil society experts in public participation, accountability and technology, Codeando México, SocialTIC and IMCO. Together we launched a public challenge to create an open source web application to publish information on official travel spending.
The challenge #RetoViajesTransparentes was a very successful experience. Close to a hundred participants registered 14 projects that competed to develop an app that IFAI would officially use and to win a 3,500 USD prize. The jury selected 3 finalists, who presented their projects on a public Google Hangout. The winner app is named Viajes Claros and is being used to publish travel expenditure information of IFAI at viajesclaros.ifai.mx.
This challenge has allowed us to shift focus from the inputs of official travel (i.e. the money spent) to the outputs or results attained in each trip. Viajes Claros opens relevant information to understand and evaluate the activities performed by the public servants during their trips. It also allowed us to co-create with society an open source tool that can be replicated in Mexico and other countries….(More)”.

Citizen Science in America’s DNA

Curated on January 27, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Keynote by NOAA Chief Scientist, Dr. Richard Spinrad at the forum entitled, Tracking a Changing Climate: “Citizen science is part of America’s DNA. For centuries, citizens not trained in science have helped shaped our understanding of Earth.
Thomas Jefferson turned Lewis and Clark into citizen scientists when he asked them to explore the landscape, wildlife and weather during their journeys of the West.They investigated plants, animals and geography, and came back with maps, sketches and journals. These new data were some of the first pieces of environmental intelligence defining our young nation. President Jefferson instilled citizen science in my own agency’s DNA by creating the Survey of the Coast, a NOAA legacy agency focused on charting and protecting the entire coast of our Nation.
The National Weather Service’s Cooperative Observer Program, begun in 1890, is an outstanding example of citizen science. Last year, NOAA honored an observer who has provided weather observations every day for 80 years. Volunteer citizen scientists have transcribed more than 68,000 pages of Arctic ship logs, adding to the long-term climate record by populating a database with historic weather and sea ice observations. Also, citizen scientists are providing new estimates of cyclone intensity by interpreting satellite images.
There is tremendous value in the capability of citizen scientists to feed local data into their own communities’ forecasts. In September 2013, for example, formal observation systems and tracking instruments were washed out when extreme floods struck Colorado and New Mexico. By ensuring that real-time forecasts were still integrated into the National Weather Service Flood Warning System, the reports of about 200 citizen scientists contributed to what has been called the best mapped extreme rain event in Colorado history and possibly nationwide.
The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) Network played a pivotal role in this mapping. CoCoRaHS also shows how citizen science can help make data collection straightforward and inexpensive. To measure the impact and size of hail, for example, it uses a Styrofoam sheet covered with tin foil, creating a “hail pad” that has proven to be quite accurate.
The recognized value of citizen science is growing rapidly. NOAA has an app to crowdsource real-time precipitation data. If you feel a raindrop, or spot a snowflake, report it through NOAA’s mPING app. Precipitation reports have already topped 600,000, and the National Weather Service uses them to fine-tune forecasts…(More).”

Open Data Is Finally Making A Dent In Cities

Curated on January 23, 2015October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Brooks Rainwater at Co-Exist: “As with a range of leading issues, cities are at the vanguard of this shifting environment. Through increased measurement, analysis, and engagement, open data will further solidify the centrality of cities.
In the Chicago, the voice of the mayor counts for a lot. And Mayor Emmanuel has been at the forefront in supporting and encouraging open data in the city, resulting in a strong open government community. The city has more than 600 datasets online, and has seen millions of page views on its data portal. The public benefits have accrued widely with civic initiatives like Chicagolobbyists.org, as well as with a myriad of other open data led endeavors.
Transparency is one of the great promises of open data. Petitioning the government is a fundamental tenet of democracy and many government relations’ professionals perform this task brilliantly. At the same time that transparency is good for the city, it’s good for citizens and democracy. Through the advent of Chicagolobbyists.org, anyone can now see how many lobbyists are in the city, how much they are spending, who they are talking to, and when it is happening.
Throughout the country, we are seeing data driven sites and apps like this that engage citizens, enhance services, and provide a rich understanding of government operations In Austin, a grassroots movement has formed with advocacy organization Open Austin. Through hackathons and other opportunities, citizens are getting involved, services are improving, and businesses are being built.
Data can even find your dog, reducing the number of stray animals being sheltered, with StrayMapper.com. The site has a simple map-based web portal where you can type in whether you are missing a dog or cat, when you lost them, and where. That information is then plugged into the data being collected by the city on stray animals. This project, developed by a Code for America brigade team, helps the city improve its rate of returning pets to owners.
It’s not only animals that get lost or at least can’t find the best way home. I’ve found myself in that situation too. Thanks to Ridescout, incubated in Washington, D.C., at 1776, I have been able to easily find the best way home. Through the use of open data available from both cities and the Department of Transportation, Ridescout created an app that is an intuitive mobility tool. By showing me all of the available options from transit to ridesharing to my own two feet, it frequently helps me get from place to place in the city. It looks like it wasn’t just me that found this app to be handy; Daimler recently acquired Ridescout as the auto giant continues its own expansion into the data driven mobility space.”

The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived?

Curated on January 21, 2015November 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jill Lepore in The New Yorker: “….The average life of a Web page is about a hundred days. ….Web pages don’t have to be deliberately deleted to disappear. Sites hosted by corporations tend to die with their hosts. When MySpace, GeoCities, and Friendster were reconfigured or sold, millions of accounts vanished. …
The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web page; most likely the original has been overwritten. (To overwrite, in computing, means to destroy old data by storing new data in their place; overwriting is an artifact of an era when computer storage was very expensive.) Or maybe the page has been moved and something else is where it used to be. This is known as “content drift,” and it’s more pernicious than an error message, because it’s impossible to tell that what you’re seeing isn’t what you went to look for: the overwriting, erasure, or moving of the original is invisible. For the law and for the courts, link rot and content drift, which are collectively known as “reference rot,” have been disastrous. In providing evidence, legal scholars, lawyers, and judges often cite Web pages in their footnotes; they expect that evidence to remain where they found it as their proof, the way that evidence on paper—in court records and books and law journals—remains where they found it, in libraries and courthouses. But a 2013 survey of law- and policy-related publications found that, at the end of six years, nearly fifty per cent of the URLs cited in those publications no longer worked. According to a 2014 study conducted at Harvard Law School, “more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information.” The overwriting, drifting, and rotting of the Web is no less catastrophic for engineers, scientists, and doctors. Last month, a team of digital library researchers based at Los Alamos National Laboratory reported the results of an exacting study of three and a half million scholarly articles published in science, technology, and medical journals between 1997 and 2012: one in five links provided in the notes suffers from reference rot. It’s like trying to stand on quicksand.
The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, “Here is how I know this and where I found it.” A footnote that’s a link says, “Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it’s not there anymore.” It doesn’t matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody’s in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know—using a URL as evidence—is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinnertime?… (More)”.

Can 311 Call Centers Improve Service Delivery? Lessons from New York and Chicago

Curated on January 19, 2015October 30, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jane Wiseman: “This paper is the first of the IDB’s “Innovations in Public Service Delivery” series, which identifies and analyzes innovative experiences of promising practices in Latin America and the Caribbean and around the world to improve the quality and delivery of public services. It presents the 311 Programs in New York City and Chicago, leading 311 centers in the United States. “311” is the universal toll-free number that provides citizens with a single point of entry to a wide array of information and services in major cities. In the cities studied, these centers have evolved to support new models of service delivery management. This publication provides an overview of these programs, analyzing their design and implementation, results, and impacts, and identifying their success factors. The final section consolidates the lessons learned from these experiences, highlighting what policymakers and public officials should consider when developing similar solutions…Download in PDF“.

Helping the Poor in Education: The Power of a Simple Nudge

Curated on January 19, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Susan Dynarski in The New York Times: “There are enormous inequalities in education in the United States. A child born into a poor family has only a 9 percent chance of getting a college degree, but the odds are 54 percent for a child in a high-income family. These gaps open early, with poor children less prepared than their kindergarten classmates.

How can we close these gaps?….

Yet as these debates rage, researchers have been quietly finding small, effective ways to improve education. They have identified behavioral “nudges” that prod students and their families to take small steps that can make big differences in learning. These measures are cheap, so schools or nonprofits could use them immediately.

Let’s start with college. At every step of the way, low-income students are more likely to stumble on the path to higher education. Even the summer after high school is a perilous time, with 20 percent of those who plan to attend college not actually enrolling — a phenomenon known as “summer melt.” Bureaucratic barriers, like the labyrinthine process of applying for financial aid, explain some of the drop-off.

While they were graduate students at Harvard, two young professors designed and tested a program to help students stick to their college plans. Benjamin L. Castleman, now at the University of Virginia, and Lindsay C. Page, at the University of Pittsburgh, set up a system of automatic, personalized text messages that reminded high school students about their college deadlines. The texts included links to required forms and live counselors.

The result? Students who received the texts were more likely to enroll in college: 70 percent, compared with 63 percent of those who did not get them. Seven percentage points is a big increase in this field, similar to the gains produced by scholarships that cost thousands of dollars. Yet this program cost only $7 per student.

The same researchers also tested a texting program to keep students from dropping out of college….(More)”

What counts: Harnessing Data for America’s Communities

Curated on January 15, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Urban Institute: “…outlines opportunities and challenges for the strategic use of data to reduce poverty, improve health, expand access to quality education, and build stronger communities. It is a response to both the explosive interest in using data to guide community initiatives, investment strategies, and policy choices, and the vexing questions that accompany data-driven approaches. The volume brings together authors from community development, public health, education, finance, and law to offer ideas for using data more meaningfully and effectively across sectors and institutions. What Counts is not focused on finding one right answer; rather, it is meant to serve as the basis for smarter conversations about data going forward.
What Counts builds on key themes of a 2012 book—Investing in What Works for America’s Communities—that was published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Low Income Investment Fund. What Works calls on leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to recognize that they can achieve more by working together and by using data to gauge the context and reach of their efforts. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Urban Institute partnered to publish What Counts to address questions raised by What Works readers about how to best gather, analyze, and use data to understand what actually works for communities. Funding for What Counts was provided to the Urban Institute by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation…(More).”
Read all of the articles from the book in the The Book section.

Download a full digital copy of the book.

Driving Solutions To Build Smarter Cities

Curated on January 13, 2015November 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Uber Blogpost: “Since day one, Uber’s mission has been to improve city life by connecting people with safe, reliable, hassle-free rides through the use of technology. As we have grown, so has our ability to share information that can serve a greater good. By sharing data with municipal partners we can help cities become more liveable, resilient, and innovative.
Today, Boston joins Uber in a first-of-its-kind partnership to help expand the city’s capability to solve problems by leveraging data provided by Uber. The data will provide new insights to help manage urban growth, relieve traffic congestion, expand public transportation, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions….
Uber is committed to sharing data, compiled in a manner that protects the privacy of riders and drivers, that can help cities target solutions for their unique challenges. This initiative presents a new standard for the future development of our cities – in communities big or small we can bridge data and policy to build sophisticated solutions for a stronger society. For this effort, we will deliver anonymized trip-level data by ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) which is the U.S. Census’ geographical representation of zip codes….

How Can This Data Help Cities?

To date, most cities have not had access to granular data describing the flows and trends of private traffic. The data provided by Uber will help policymakers and city planners develop a more detailed understanding of where people in the city need to go and how to improve traffic flows and congestion to get them there, with data-driven decisions about:

Vision Zero-related passenger safety policies
Traffic planning
Congestion reduction
Flow of residents across the City
Impact of events, disasters and other activities on City transportation
Identification of zoning changes and needs
Creation or reduction of parking
Facilitation of additional transportation solutions for marquee City initiatives

This data can be utilized to help cities achieve their transportation and planning goals without compromising personal privacy. By helping cities understand the way their residents move, we can work together to make our communities stronger. Smart Cities can benefit from smart data and we will champion municipal efforts devoted to achieving data-driven urban growth, mobility and safety for communities (More).”

Why Is Democracy Performing So Poorly?

Curated on January 13, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Francis Fukuyama in the Journal of Democracy: “The Journal of Democracy published its inaugural issue a bit past the midpoint of what Samuel P. Huntington labeled the “third wave” of democratization, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and just before the breakup of the former Soviet Union. The transitions in Southern Europe and most of those in Latin America had already happened, and Eastern Europe was moving at dizzying speed away from communism, while the democratic transitions in sub-Saharan Africa and the former USSR were just getting underway. Overall, there has been remarkable worldwide progress in democratization over a period of almost 45 years, raising the number of electoral democracies from about 35 in 1970 to well over 110 in 2014.
But as Larry Diamond has pointed out, there has been a democratic recession since 2006, with a decline in aggregate Freedom House scores every year since then. The year 2014 has not been good for democracy, with two big authoritarian powers, Russia and China, on the move at either end of Eurasia. The “Arab Spring” of 2011, which raised expectations that the Arab exception to the third wave might end, has degenerated into renewed dictatorship in the case of Egypt, and into anarchy in Libya, Yemen, and also Syria, which along with Iraq has seen the emergence of a new radical Islamist movement, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
It is hard to know whether we are experiencing a momentary setback in a general movement toward greater democracy around the world, similar to a stock-market correction, or whether the events of this year signal a broader shift in world politics and the rise of serious alternatives to democracy. In either case, it is hard not to feel that the performance of democracies around the world has been deficient in recent years. This begins with the most developed and successful democracies, those of the United States and the European Union, which experienced massive economic crises in the late 2000s and seem to be mired in a period of slow growth and stagnating incomes. But a number of newer democracies, from Brazil to Turkey to India, have also been disappointing in their performance in many respects, and subject to their own protest movements.
Spontaneous democratic movements against authoritarian regimes continue to arise out of civil society, from Ukraine and Georgia to Tunisia and Egypt to Hong Kong. But few of these movements have been successful in leading to the establishment of stable, well-functioning democracies. It is worth asking why the performance of democracy around the world has been so disappointing.
In my view, a single important factor lies at the core of many democratic setbacks over the past generation. It has to do with a failure of institutionalization—the fact that state capacity in many new and existing democracies has not kept pace with popular demands for democratic accountability. It is much harder to move from a patrimonial or neopatrimonial state to a modern, impersonal one than it is to move from an authoritarian regime to one that holds regular, free, and fair elections. It is the failure to establish modern, well-governed states that has been the Achilles heel of recent democratic transitions… (More)”