Americas

Online Petitions Proposed to Offer New Yorkers a New Way to Speak Out

Curated on September 11, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Flegenheimer in The New York Times: “Since introducing a petition site in 2011 and promising to respond to any request that received enough signatures, the White House has been compelled to release its beer recipe, inform Texas that it would not be permitted to secede and weigh the merits of a “Death Star” for national defense.

“The administration,” the response to that petition read, “does not support blowing up planets.”

So it is perhaps with some trepidation that New York City lawmakers consider a local model: an online petition system that would allow residents to ask anything they want of their public officials and, with sufficient support, receive a response.

“Not everyone can go to a public hearing,” said the bill’s sponsor, Councilman James Vacca, Democrat of the Bronx. “This would be a way for people to register their views collectively.”

The proposal to create something resembling a Reddit for the body politic was introduced on Wednesday by Mr. Vacca and referred to the City Council’s Committee on Technology, of which he is chairman. Spokesmen for Mayor Bill de Blasio and Melissa Mark-Viverito, the Council speaker, said their offices were reviewing the bill.

Mr. Vacca’s office said the petition system would be the first of its kind on the municipal level anywhere, a claim that could not be immediately confirmed. Under his bill, the city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications would determine the threshold number of electronic signatures that would prompt a response. The department would also be asked to establish the website, creating a system that “allows city agencies or public authorities to post public responses” to the petitions….

Dick Dadey, the executive director of Citizens Union, a civic group, called the petition proposal “a novel idea” worthy of debate. But he sounded several notes of caution, wondering whether the setup might be subject to manipulation, favoring “a preordained outcome directed by public officials” on a given issue….”

How Open Data Is Transforming City Life

Curated on September 10, 2014May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Joel Gurin, The GovLab, at Techonomy: “Start a business. Manage your power use. Find cheap rents, or avoid crime-ridden neighborhoods. Cities and their citizens worldwide are discovering the power of “open data”—public data and information available from government and other sources that can help solve civic problems and create new business opportunities. By opening up data about transportation, education, health care, and more, municipal governments are helping app developers, civil society organizations, and others to find innovative ways to tackle urban problems. For any city that wants to promote entrepreneurship and economic development, open data can be a valuable new resource.
The urban open data movement has been growing for several years, with American cities including New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington in the forefront. Now an increasing number of government officials, entrepreneurs, and civic hackers are recognizing the potential of open data. The results have included applications that can be used across many cities as well as those tailored to an individual city’s needs.
At first, the open data movement was driven by a commitment to transparency and accountability. City, state, and local governments have all released data about their finances and operations in the interest of good government and citizen participation. Now some tech companies are providing platforms to make this kind of city data more accessible, useful, and comparable. Companies like OpenGov and Govini make it possible for city managers and residents to examine finances, assess police department overtime, and monitor other factors that let them compare their city’s performance to neighboring municipalities.
Other new businesses are tapping city data to provide residents with useful, practical information. One of the best examples is NextBus, which uses metropolitan transportation data to tell commuters when to expect a bus along their route. Commuter apps like this have become common in cities in the U.S. and around the world. Another website, SpotCrime, collects, analyzes, and maps crime statistics to tell city dwellers which areas are safest or most dangerous and to offer crime alerts. And the Chicago-based Purple Binder helps people in need find city healthcare services. Many companies in the Open Data 500, the study of open data companies that I direct at the GovLab at NYU, use data from cities as well as other sources….
Some of the most ambitious uses of city data—with some of the greatest potential—focus on improving education. In Washington, the nonprofit Learn DC has made data about public schools available through a portal that state agencies, community organizations, and civic hackers can all use. They’re using it for collaborative research and action that, they say, has “empowered every DC parent to participate in shaping the future of the public education system.”…”

EU: GLOW (Global Legislative Openness Week)

Curated on September 10, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

GLOW is a celebration of open, participatory legislative processes around the world as well as an opportunity for diverse stakeholders to collaborate with one another and make progress toward adopting and implementing open-government commitments. The week is being led by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership, which is co-anchored by the National Democratic Institute and the Congress of Chile.
The campaign kicks off with the International Day of Democracy on September 15, and throughout the 10 days you are invited to share your ideas and experiences, kickstart new transparency tools and engage members of your community in dialogue. Learn more about the global open government movement at OGP, and stay tuned into GLOW events by following this site and #OpenParl2014.
Where will GLOW be happening?
GLOW will connect a range of legislative openness activities, organized independently by civil society organizations and parliaments around the world. You can follow the action on Twitter by using the hashtag #OpenParl2014. We hope the GLOW campaign will inspire you to design and organize your own event or activity during this week. If you’d like to share your event and collaborate with others during GLOW, please send us a note.
The week’s festivities will be anchored by two Working Group meetings of civil society and parliamentary members. Beginning on the International Day of Democracy, September 15, the Working Group will host a regional meeting on expanding civic engagement through parliamentary openness in Podgorica, Montenegro, hosted in partnership with the Parliament of Montenegro. The week will conclude with the Working Group’s annual meeting in Chile, on September 25 and 26, 2014, where members will discuss progress made in the year since the Working Group’s launch. This meeting coincides with the 11th Plenary Assembly of ParlAmericas, an independent network composed of the national legislatures of the 35 independent states of the Americas, which will also consider issues of legislative openness as part of its meeting….” (More)

When Big Data Maps Your Safest, Shortest Walk Home

Curated on September 8, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah Laskow at NextCity: “Boston University and University of Pittsburgh researchers are trying to do the same thing that got the creators of the app SketchFactor into so much trouble over the summer. They’re trying to show people how to avoid dangerous spots on city streets while walking from one place to another.
“What we are interested in is finding paths that offer trade-offs between safety and distance,” Esther Galbrun, a postdoc at Boston University, recently said in New York at the 3rd International Workshop on Urban Computing, held in conjunction with KDD2014.
She was presenting, “Safe Navigation in Urban Environments,” which describes a set of algorithms that would give a person walking through a city options for getting from one place to another — the shortest path, the safest path and a number of alternatives that balanced between both factors. The paper takes existing algorithms, well defined in theory — nothing new or fancy, Galbrun says — and applies them to a problem that people face everyday.
Imagine, she suggests, that a person is standing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and he wants to walk home, to his place on Wharton Street. (Galbrun and her colleagues looked at Philadelphia and Chicago because those cities have made their crime data openly available.) The walk is about three miles away, and one option would be to take the shortest path back. But maybe he’s worried about safety. Maybe he’s willing to take a little bit of a longer walk if it means he has to worry less about crime. What route should he take then?
Services like Google Maps have excelled at finding the shortest, most direct routes from Point A to Point B. But, increasingly, urban computing is looking to capture other aspects of moving about a place. “Fast is only one option,” says co-author Konstantinos Pelechrinis. “There are noble objectives beyond the surface path that you can put inside this navigation problem.” You might look for the path that will burn the most calories; a Yahoo! lab has considered how to send people along the most scenic route.
But working on routes that do more than give simple directions can have its pitfalls. The SketchFactor app relies both on crime data, when it’s available, and crowdsourced comments to reveal potential trouble spots to users. When it was released this summer, tech reporters and other critics immediately started talking about how it could easily become a conduit for racism. (“Sketchy” is, after all, a very subjective measure.)
So far, though, the problem with the SketchFactor app is less that it offers racially skewed perspectives than that the information it does offer is pretty useless — if entertaining. A pinpoint marked “very sketchy” is just as likely to flag an incident like a Jewish man eating pork products or hipster kids making too much noise as it is to flag a mugging.
Here, then, is a clear example of how Big Data has an advantage over Big Anecdata. The SafePath set-up measures risk more objectively and elegantly. It pulls in openly available crime data and considers simple data like time, location and types of crime. While a crime occurs at a discrete point, the researchers wanted to estimate the risk of a crime on every street, at every point. So they use a mathematical tool that smooths out the crime data over the space of the city and allows them to measure the relative risk of witnessing a crime on every street segment in a city….”

What Is Big Data?

Curated on September 7, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

datascience@berkeley Blog: ““Big Data.” It seems like the phrase is everywhere. The term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013 , appeared in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary by 2014 , and Gartner’s just-released 2014 Hype Cycle shows “Big Data” passing the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and on its way down into the “Trough of Disillusionment.” Big Data is all the rage. But what does it actually mean?
A commonly repeated definition cites the three Vs: volume, velocity, and variety. But others argue that it’s not the size of data that counts, but the tools being used, or the insights that can be drawn from a dataset.
To settle the question once and for all, we asked 40+ thought leaders in publishing, fashion, food, automobiles, medicine, marketing and every industry in between how exactly they would define the phrase “Big Data.” Their answers might surprise you! Take a look below to find out what big data is:

John Akred, Founder and CTO, Silicon Valley Data Science
Philip Ashlock, Chief Architect of Data.gov
Jon Bruner, Editor-at-Large, O’Reilly Media
Reid Bryant, Data Scientist, Brooks Bell
Mike Cavaretta, Data Scientist and Manager, Ford Motor Company
Drew Conway, Head of Data, Project Florida
Rohan Deuskar, CEO and Co-Founder, Stylitics
Amy Escobar, Data Scientist, 2U
Josh Ferguson, Chief Technology Officer, Mode Analytics
John Foreman, Chief Data Scientist, MailChimp
…

FULL LIST at datascience@berkeley Blog”

Rethinking Democracy

Curated on September 3, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dani Rodrik at Project Syndicate: “By many measures, the world has never been more democratic. Virtually every government at least pays lip service to democracy and human rights. Though elections may not be free and fair, massive electoral manipulation is rare and the days when only males, whites, or the rich could vote are long gone. Freedom House’s global surveys show a steady increase from the 1970s in the share of countries that are “free” – a trend that the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington dubbed the “third wave” of democratization….

A true democracy, one that combines majority rule with respect for minority rights, requires two sets of institutions. First, institutions of representation, such as political parties, parliaments, and electoral systems, are needed to elicit popular preferences and turn them into policy action. Second, democracy requires institutions of restraint, such as an independent judiciary and media, to uphold fundamental rights like freedom of speech and prevent governments from abusing their power. Representation without restraint – elections without the rule of law – is a recipe for the tyranny of the majority.

Democracy in this sense – what many call “liberal democracy” – flourished only after the emergence of the nation-state and the popular upheaval and mobilization produced by the Industrial Revolution. So it should come as no surprise that the crisis of liberal democracy that many of its oldest practitioners currently are experiencing is a reflection of the stress under which the nation-state finds itself….

In developing countries, it is more often the institutions of restraint that are failing. Governments that come to power through the ballot box often become corrupt and power-hungry. They replicate the practices of the elitist regimes they replaced, clamping down on the press and civil liberties and emasculating (or capturing) the judiciary. The result has been called “illiberal democracy” or “competitive authoritarianism.” Venezuela, Turkey, Egypt, and Thailand are some of the better-known recent examples.

When democracy fails to deliver economically or politically, perhaps it is to be expected that some people will look for authoritarian solutions. And, for many economists, delegating economic policy to technocratic bodies in order to insulate them from the “folly of the masses” almost always is the preferred approach.

…

Effective institutions of restraint do not emerge overnight; and it might seem like those in power would never want to create them. But if there is some likelihood that I will be voted out of office and that the opposition will take over, such institutions will protect me from others’ abuses tomorrow as much as they protect others from my abuses today. So strong prospects for sustained political competition are a key prerequisite for illiberal democracies to turn into liberal ones over time.

Optimists believe that new technologies and modes of governance will resolve all problems and send democracies centered on the nation-state the way of the horse-drawn carriage. Pessimists fear that today’s liberal democracies will be no match for the external challenges mounted by illiberal states like China and Russia, which are guided only by hardnosed realpolitik. Either way, if democracy is to have a future, it will need to be rethought.”

From “Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond”

Curated on September 3, 2014July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

IDCubed: “From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Autonomy and Identity in a Digital Society explores a new generation of digital technologies that are re-imagining the very foundations of identity, governance, trust and social organization.
The fifteen essays of this book stake out the foundations of a new future – a future of open Web standards and data commons, a society of decentralized autonomous organizations, a world of trustworthy digital currencies and self-organized and expressive communities like Burning Man.
Among the contributors are Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the M.I.T. Human Dynamics Laboratory, former FCC Chairman Reed E. Hundt, long-time IBM strategist Irving Wladawksy-Berger, monetary system expert Bernard Lietaer, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg, journalist Jonathan Ledgard and H-Farm cofounder Maurizio Rossi.
From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond was edited by Dr. John H. Clippinger, cofounder and executive director of ID3, and David Bollier, an Editor at ID3 who is also an author, blogger and scholar who studies the commons. The book, published by ID3 in association with Off the Common Books, reflects ID3’s vision of the huge, untapped potential for self-organized, distributed governance on open platforms.
The book is available in print and ebook formats (Kindle and epub) from Amazon.com and Off the Common Books. The book, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA), may also be downloaded for free as a pdf file from ID3.
One chapter that inspires the book’s title traces the 28-year history of Burning Man, the week-long encampment in the Nevada desert that have hosted remarkable experimentation in new forms of self-governance by large communities. Other chapters explore such cutting-edge concepts as

evolvable digital contracts that could supplant conventional legal agreements;
smartphone currencies that could help Africans meet their economic needs more effective;
the growth of the commodity-backed Ven currency; and
new types of “solar currencies” that borrow techniques from Bitcoin to enable more efficient, cost-effective solar generation and sharing by homeowners.

From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond also introduces the path-breaking software platform that ID3 has developed called “Open Mustard Seed,” or OMS. The just-released open source program enables the rise of new types of trusted, self-healing digital institutions on open networks, which in turn will make possible new sorts of privacy-friendly social ecosystems.
“OMS is an integrated, open source package of programs that lets people collect and share personal information in secure, and transparent and accountable ways, enabling authentic, trusted social and economic relationships to flourish,” said Dr. John H. Clippinger, executive director of ID3, an acronym for the Institute for Institutional Innovation and Data-Driven Design.
“The software builds individual privacy, security and trusted exchange into the very design of the system. In effect, OMS represents a new authentication, privacy and sharing layer for the Internet,” said Clippinger “– a new way to share personal information selectively and securely, without access by unauthorized third parties.”
A two-minute video introducing the capabilities of OMS can be viewed here.”

Big Data and Chicago's Traffic-cam Scandal

Curated on September 2, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Holman Jenkins in the Wall Street Journal: “The danger is microscopic regulation that we invite via the democratic process.
Big data techniques are new in the world. It will take time to know how to feel about them and whether and how they should be legally corralled. For sheer inanity, though, there’s no beating a recent White House report quivering about the alleged menace of “digital redlining,” or the use of big-data marketing tactics in ways that supposedly disadvantage minority groups.
This alarm rests on an extravagant misunderstanding. Redlining was a crude method banks used to avoid losses in bad neighborhoods even at the cost of missing some profitable transactions—exactly the inefficiency big data is meant to improve upon. Failing to lure an eligible customer into a sale, after all, is hardly the goal of any business.
The real danger of the new technologies lies elsewhere, which the White House slightly touches upon in some of its fretting about police surveillance. The danger is microscopic regulation of our daily activities that we will invite on ourselves through the democratic process.
Soon it may be impossible to leave our homes without our movements being tracked by traffic and security cameras able to read license plates, identify faces and pull up data about any individual, from social media postings to credit reports.
Private businesses are just starting to use these techniques to monitor shoppers in front of shelves of goodies. Towns and cities have already embraced such techniques as revenue grabs, encouraged by private contractors peddling automated traffic cameras.
Witness a festering Chicago scandal. This month came federal indictments of a former city bureaucrat, an outside consultant, and the former CEO of Redflex Traffic Systems, the company that operated the city’s traffic cameras until last year….”

In democracy and disaster, emerging world embraces 'open data'

Curated on August 28, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeremy Wagstaff’ at Reuters: “Open data’ – the trove of data-sets made publicly available by governments, organizations and businesses – isn’t normally linked to high-wire politics, but just may have saved last month’s Indonesian presidential elections from chaos.
Data is considered open when it’s released for anyone to use and in a format that’s easy for computers to read. The uses are largely commercial, such as the GPS data from U.S.-owned satellites, but data can range from budget numbers and climate and health statistics to bus and rail timetables.
It’s a revolution that’s swept the developed world in recent years as governments and agencies like the World Bank have freed up hundreds of thousands of data-sets for use by anyone who sees a use for them. Data.gov, a U.S. site, lists more than 100,000 data-sets, from food calories to magnetic fields in space.
Consultants McKinsey reckon open data could add up to $3 trillion worth of economic activity a year – from performance ratings that help parents find the best schools to governments saving money by releasing budget data and asking citizens to come up with cost-cutting ideas. All the apps, services and equipment that tap the GPS satellites, for example, generate $96 billion of economic activity each year in the United States alone, according to a 2011 study.
But so far open data has had a limited impact in the developing world, where officials are wary of giving away too much information, and where there’s the issue of just how useful it might be: for most people in emerging countries, property prices and bus schedules aren’t top priorities.
But last month’s election in Indonesia – a contentious face-off between a disgraced general and a furniture-exporter turned reformist – highlighted how powerful open data can be in tandem with a handful of tech-smart programmers, social media savvy and crowdsourcing.
“Open data may well have saved this election,” said Paul Rowland, a Jakarta-based consultant on democracy and governance…”