Mini Metro

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
“Description: Mini Metro is a minimalist subway simulation game about designing efficient subway networks. The player must constantly redesign their line layout to meet the needs of a rapidly-growing city.

History

The prototype for Mini Metro, Mind the Gap, was created at the end of April 2013 during the three-day Ludum Dare 26 Jam. The first pre-alpha build was made public in September 2013. Mini Metro was put up on Steam Greenlight in March 2014 and was greenlit within three weeks. The Early Access release is scheduled for the 11th of August.

Features

  • Compelling, constructive, hectic, relaxed gameplay. If that makes sense.
  • Three game modes: Commuter for quick scored games, Scenic for stress-free sandbox play, and Rush Hour for the ultimate challenge. (only Commuter is in so far, Scenic will follow soon)
  • Three real-world cities to design subways for (London, New York City and Paris), with many more being added before release. Each has a unique colour theme, set of obstacles, and pace.
  • Random city growth, so each game plays out differently. A strategy that proved successful last game may not help you in the next.
  • Each game’s map is a work of art, built by you in the classic abstract subway style of Harry Beck. If you think it’s a keeper, save it, tweet it, show it off or make it your desktop background!
  • Each game’s map is a work of art, built by the player in the classic abstract subway style. If you think it’s a keeper, save it, tweet it, show it off or make it your desktop background!
  • Dynamic soundtrack by Disasterpeace.
  • Colorblind and night modes.
  • Trains!”

Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Nathaniel Tkacz: “Few virtues are as celebrated in contemporary culture as openness. Rooted in software culture and carrying more than a whiff of Silicon Valley technical utopianism, openness—of decision-making, data, and organizational structure—is seen as the cure for many problems in politics and business.
But what does openness mean, and what would a political theory of openness look like? With Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness, Nathaniel Tkacz uses Wikipedia, the most prominent product of open organization, to analyze the theory and politics of openness in practice—and to break its spell. Through discussions of edit wars, article deletion policies, user access levels, and more, Tkacz enables us to see how the key concepts of openness—including collaboration, ad-hocracy, and the splitting of contested projects through “forking”—play out in reality.
The resulting book is the richest critical analysis of openness to date, one that roots media theory in messy reality and thereby helps us move beyond the vaporware promises of digital utopians and take the first steps toward truly understanding what openness does, and does not, have to offer….(More).”

Governments and Citizens Getting to Know Each Other? Open, Closed, and Big Data in Public Management Reform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Amanda Clarke and Helen Margetts in Policy and Internet: “Citizens and governments live increasingly digital lives, leaving trails of digital data that have the potential to support unprecedented levels of mutual government–citizen understanding, and in turn, vast improvements to public policies and services. Open data and open government initiatives promise to “open up” government operations to citizens. New forms of “big data” analysis can be used by government itself to understand citizens’ behavior and reveal the strengths and weaknesses of policy and service delivery. In practice, however, open data emerges as a reform development directed to a range of goals, including the stimulation of economic development, and not strictly transparency or public service improvement. Meanwhile, governments have been slow to capitalize on the potential of big data, while the largest data they do collect remain “closed” and under-exploited within the confines of intelligence agencies. Drawing on interviews with civil servants and researchers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 2011 and 2014, this article argues that a big data approach could offer the greatest potential as a vehicle for improving mutual government–citizen understanding, thus embodying the core tenets of Digital Era Governance, argued by some authors to be the most viable public management model for the digital age (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler, 2005, 2006; Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013).”
 

People around you control your mind: The latest evidence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeff Guo in the Washington Post: “…That’s the power of peer pressure.In a recent working paper, Pedro Gardete looked at 65,525 transactions across 1,966 flights and more than 257,000 passengers. He parsed the data into thousands of mini-experiments such as this:

If someone beside you ordered a snack or a film, Gardete was able to see whether later you did, too. In this natural experiment, the person sitting directly in front of you was the control subject. Purchases were made on a touchscreen; that person wouldn’t have been able to see anything. If you bought something, and the person in front of you didn’t, peer pressure may have been the reason.
Because he had reservation data, Gardete could exclude people flying together, and he controlled for all kinds of other factors such as seat choice. This is purely the effect of a stranger’s choice — not just that, but a stranger whom you might be resenting because he is sitting next to you, and this is a plane.
By adding up thousands of these little experiments, Gardete, an assistant professor of marketing at Stanford, came up with an estimate. On average, people bought stuff 15 to 16 percent of the time. But if you saw someone next to you order something, your chances of buying something, too, jumped by 30 percent, or about four percentage points…
The beauty of this paper is that it looks at social influences in a controlled situation. (What’s more of a trap than an airplane seat?) These natural experiments are hard to come by.
Economists and social scientists have long wondered about the power of peer pressure, but it’s one of the trickiest research problems….(More)”.

Geneticists Begin Tests of an Internet for DNA

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review: “A coalition of geneticists and computer programmers calling itself the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health is developing protocols for exchanging DNA information across the Internet. The researchers hope their work could be as important to medical science as HTTP, the protocol created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, was to the Web.
One of the group’s first demonstration projects is a simple search engine that combs through the DNA letters of thousands of human genomes stored at nine locations, including Google’s server farms and the University of Leicester, in the U.K. According to the group, which includes key players in the Human Genome Project, the search engine is the start of a kind of Internet of DNA that may eventually link millions of genomes together.
The technologies being developed are application program interfaces, or APIs, that let different gene databases communicate. Pooling information could speed discoveries about what genes do and help doctors diagnose rare birth defects by matching children with suspected gene mutations to others who are known to have them.
The alliance was conceived two years ago at a meeting in New York of 50 scientists who were concerned that genome data was trapped in private databases, tied down by legal consent agreements with patients, limited by privacy rules, or jealously controlled by scientists to further their own scientific work. It styles itself after the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, a body that oversees standards for the Web.
“It’s creating the Internet language to exchange genetic information,” says David Haussler, scientific director of the genome institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is one of the group’s leaders.
The group began releasing software this year. Its hope—as yet largely unrealized—is that any scientist will be able to ask questions about genome data possessed by other laboratories, without running afoul of technical barriers or privacy rules….(More)”

Just say no to digital hoarding

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “We have become a nation of digital hoarders. We save everything, even stuff that we know, deep down, we’ll never need or be able to find. We save every e-mail, every photo, every file, every text message and every video clip. If we don’t have enough space on our mobile devices, we move it to a different storage device, maybe even a hard drive or a flash drive. Or, better yet, we just move it to “the cloud.”….
If this were simply a result of the exponential growth of information — the “information overload” — that would be one thing. That’s what technology is supposed to do for us – provide new ways of creating, storing and manipulating information. Innovation, from this perspective, can be viewed as technology’s frantic quest to keep up with society’s information needs.
But digital hoarding is about something much different – it’s about hoarding data for the sake of data. When Apple creates a new “Burst Mode” on the iPhone 5s, enabling you to rapidly save a series of up to 10 photos in succession – and you save all of them – is that not an example of hoarding? When you save every e-book, every movie and every TV season that you’ve “binge-watched” on your tablet or other digital device — isn’t that another symptom of being a digital hoarder? In the analog era, you would have donated used books to charity, hosted a garage sale to get rid of old albums you never listen to, or simply dumped these items in the trash.
You may not think you are a digital hoarder. You may think that the desire to save each and every photo, e-mail or file is something relatively harmless. Storage is cheap and abundant, right? You may watch a reality TV show such as “Hoarders” and think to yourself, “That’s not me.” But maybe it is you. (Especially if you still have those old episodes of “Hoarders” on your digital device.)
Unlike hoarding in the real world — where massive stacks of papers, books, clothing and assorted junk might physically obstruct your ability to move and signal to others that you need help – there are no obvious outward signs of being a digital hoarder. And, in fact, owning the newest, super-slim 128GB tablet capable of hoarding more information than anyone else strikes many as being progressive. However, if you are constantly increasing the size of your data plan or buying new digital devices with ever more storage capacity, you just might be a digital hoarder…
In short, innovation should be about helping us transform data into information. “Search” was perhaps the first major innovation that helped us transform data into information. The “cloud” is currently the innovation that has the potential to organize our data better and more efficiently, keeping it from clogging up our digital devices. The next big innovation may be “big data,” which claims that it can make sense of all the new data we’re creating. This may be either brilliant — helping us find the proverbial needle in the digital haystack — or disastrous — encouraging us to build bigger and bigger haystacks in the hope that there’s a needle in there somewhere… (More).”

Crowdsourcing Data to Fight Air Pollution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Brick at PSFK: “Air pollution is among the most serious environmental problems of the modern age. Although pollution in developed nations like the USA and Germany has fallen since the 1980s, air quality in growing technological countries — especially in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) group — grows worse with each year. In 2012, 3.7 million people died as a direct result of problems caused by chronic exposure to bad air, and tens of millions more were made ill.
There is no easy solution to such a complex and widespread problem, but Breathe offers a fix for one aspect and solves it in two ways.
The first way is the device itself: a portable plastic brick smaller than a bar of soap that monitors the presence and concentration of toxic gases and other harmful substances in the air, in real time throughout your day. It records the quality and, if it reaches unacceptably dangerous levels, warns you immediately with an emergency signal. Plug the device into your smart phone, and it keeps a record of air quality by time and location you can use to avoid the most polluted times of day and places in your area.
The second solution is the truly innovative aspect of this project. Via the Breathe app, any user who wants to can add her data to a central database that keeps statistics worldwide. Individuals can then use that data to plan vacations, time outdoor activities or schedule athletic events. Given enough time, Breathe could accumulate enough data to be used to affect policy by identifying the most polluted areas in a city, county or nation so the authorities can work on a more robust solution….(More)”

Here’s What Happens When Community Input Meets Great Ideas

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

People4Smarter Cities: “Making Connections for Positive Change in Communities: New York-based Ioby is connecting community change-makers with resources. The organization, which stands for “In our back yard,” offers an online crowd-resourcing platform aimed at matching up people working on neighborhood ecological and environmental projects with citizens who can offer either financial or physical support. Current projects on the online platform include creating urban gardens in Harlem to provide healthful, organic food to children living in the area, while another seeks to build fitness zones for individuals with physical and developmental disabilities.
Aiming to Make the Grade in D.C.: In Washington, D.C., citizens can choose whether the local government passes or fails. Through a program launched by the city called Grade D.C., feedback and comments by residents on their interaction with municipal services and departments are culled from the Grade D.C. website and social-media outlets. A third-party firm then uses an algorithm to convert the feedback into a score and a letter grade ranging from A to F. The grades are posted online each month for about 15 agencies. The city says its goal is to help citizens offer actionable feedback and help government agencies improve the quality of customer care.
When Citizens Want a Piece of the ACTion: For residents of Alexandria, Virginia, who want to improve their community, waiting for local issues to solve themselves isn’t an option. With the citizen-created online platform ACTion Alexandria, they can team up with others to share ideas, debate solutions and take action simply by connecting through the portal. Residents can go to the site’s Challenge section to propose solutions to community problems posted by locals. When an idea receives substantial community support, the website tries to rally others around the idea. Meanwhile, the platform’s Action Center lists projects already underway that need a helping hand….More at People4Smarter Cities”

Techs Mex: a laboratory for Mexico

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Lida at the LongandShort: “…The five are members of Mexico City’s Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City), an innovation lab founded by Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera soon after he assumed office in December 2012. While innovation labs have sprung up around much of the developed world in the last few years, the Laboratory for the City is the first of its kind in Latin America. Over espresso, croissants and sandwiches, the lab members brainstormed about strategy for other parts of Latin America.

The meeting was convened because the lab had been approached by governments and organisations in cities such as São Paolo, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo, as well as the entire country of Chile, and Miraflores, one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Lima, Peru. All these locations asked for advice about establishing their own innovation labs or to collaborate with the Mexican lab on specific projects. Among the ideas bandied about was whether or not the lab should share the code of its website. Should they host a symposium about innovation labs for people from all over Latin America? Could they get funding for it from the World Bank? Would it be helpful to write a manual about starting an innovation lab? Should they establish alliances with other cities?

Amid all the breathless propositions and after the second cup of coffee, the lab’s director, Gabriella Gómez-Mont, reminded her four staff members of a crucial point: “We are in the middle of our own apprenticeship.”

Indeed. Despite the mostly gushing articles about the Laboratory for the City that have appeared in international media such as Monocle, Wired, and Forbes, it might be a bit premature for it to offer advice. Despite the fact that some of the staff members seem to work 24 hours a day, the lab is only in its infancy, at least in terms of tangible results.

 …

“Innovation labs can generate good ideas for change on a civic scale,” says Nate Berg, who writes about cities for such publications as City Lab, Architects and Next City.” But the implementation is sometimes put off.”

The Laboratory for the City has only been up and running for a year and a half, so perhaps it’s too early to expect many results. Still, the language in its promotional literature – and indeed that spoken by its staff – can be frustratingly vague in terms of what it is trying to accomplish.

“We are very interested in the possibilities of tech as a social amplifier. But we are not a digital department,” says Gabriella Gómez-Mont. “We are an experimental area and creative thinktank and tech is just one of our many tools. Our real work lies in bringing in different perspectives and methodologies, exploring other means and ways forward, engaging other types of disciplines and people into the fascinating realm of city-making.

“We believe there are fascinating possibilities in creating spaces for experimentation within government, as well as making its dividing walls more porous. Through several projects and experimenting with different methodologies, we are prototyping what it means to add a temporal yet intensive ‘layer’ of citizen participation to government, break inward-looking orientation subconsciously generated by the way that most governments structure themselves, and even embedding up to nine months’ different profiles within different city departments, with our Code for Mexico City and Open Office programmes, for example.”… (full article).

4 Tech Trends Changing How Cities Operate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at Governing: “Louis Brandeis famously characterized states as laboratories for democracy, but cities could be called labs for innovation or new practices….When Government Technology magazine (produced by Governing’s parent company, e.Republic, Inc.) published its annual Digital Cities Survey, the results provided an interesting look at how local governments are using technology to improve how they deliver services, increase production and streamline operations…the survey also showed four technology trends changing how local government operates and serves its citizens:

1. Open Data

…Big cities were the first to open up their data and gained national attention for their transparency. New York City, which passed an open data law in 2012, leads all cities with more than 1,300 data sets open to the public; Chicago started opening up data to the public in 2010 following an executive order and is second among cities with more than 600; and San Francisco, which was the first major city to open the doors to transparency in 2009, had the highest score from the U.S. Open Data Census for the quality of its open data.
But the survey shows that a growing number of mid-sized jurisdictions are now getting involved, too. Tacoma, Wash., has a portal with 40 data sets that show how the city is spending tax dollars on public works, economic development, transportation and public safety. Ann Arbor, Mich., has a financial transparency tool that reveals what the city is spending on a daily basis, in some cases….

2. ‘Stat’ Programs and Data Analytics

…First, the so-called “stat” programs are proliferating. Started by the New York Police Department in the 1980s, CompStat was a management technique that merged data with staff feedback to drive better performance by police officers and precinct captains. Its success led to many imitations over the years and, as the digital survey shows, stat programs continue to grow in importance. For example, Louisville has used its “LouieStat” program to cut the city’s bill for unscheduled employee overtime by $23 million as well as to spot weaknesses in performance.
Second, cities are increasing their use of data analytics to measure and improve performance. Denver, Jacksonville, Fla., and Phoenix have launched programs that sift through data sets to find patterns that can lead to better governance decisions. Los Angeles has combined transparency with analytics to create an online system that tracks performance for the city’s economy, service delivery, public safety and government operations that the public can view. Robert J. O’Neill Jr., executive director of the International City/County Management Association, said that both of these tech-driven performance trends “enable real-time decision-making.” He argued that public leaders who grasp the significance of these new tools can deliver government services that today’s constituents expect.

3. Online Citizen Engagement

…Avondale, Ariz., population 78,822, is engaging citizens with a mobile app and an online forum that solicits ideas that other residents can vote up or down.
In Westminster, Colo., population 110,945, a similar forum allows citizens to vote online about community ideas and gives rewards to users who engage with the online forum on a regular basis (free passes to a local driving range or fitness program). Cities are promoting more engagement activities to combat a decline in public trust in government. The days when a public meeting could provide citizen engagement aren’t enough in today’s technology-dominated  world. That’s why social media tools, online surveys and even e-commerce rewards programs are popping up in cities around the country to create high-value interaction with its citizens.

4. Geographic Information Systems

… Cities now use them to analyze financial decisions to increase performance, support public safety, improve public transit, run social service activities and, increasingly, engage citizens about their city’s governance.
Augusta, Ga., won an award for its well-designed and easy-to-use transit maps. Sugar Land, Texas, uses GIS to support economic development and, as part of its citizen engagement efforts, to highlight its capital improvement projects. GIS is now used citywide by 92 percent of the survey respondents. That’s significant because GIS has long been considered a specialized (and expensive) technology primarily for city planning and environmental projects….”