Some thoughts from Panthea Lee from Reboot: “In recent years, civic innovation fellowships have shown great promise to improve the relationships between citizens and government. In the United States, Code for America and the Presidential Innovation Fellows have demonstrated the positive impact a small group of technologists can have working hand-in-hand with government. With the launch of Code for All, Code for Europe, Code4Kenya, and Code4Africa, among others, the model is going global.
But despite the increasing popularity of civic innovation fellowships, there are few templates for how a “Code for” program can be adapted to a different context. In the US, the success of Code for America has drawn from a wealth of tech talent eager to volunteer skills, public and private support, and the active participation of municipal governments. Elsewhere, new “Code for” programs are surely going to have to operate within a different set of capacities and constraints.”
The Participatory Turn: Participatory Budgeting Comes to America
Thesis by Hollie Russon Gilman: “Participatory Budgeting (PB) has expanded to over 1,500 municipalities worldwide since its inception in Porto Alege, Brazil in 1989 by the leftist Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party). While PB has been adopted throughout the world, it has yet to take hold in the United States. This dissertation examines the introduction of PB to the United States with the first project in Chicago in 2009, and proceeds with an in-depth case study of the largest implementation of PB in the United States: Participatory Budgeting in New York City. I assess the outputs of PB in the United States including deliberations, governance, and participation. I argue that PB produces better outcomes than the status quo budget process in New York City, while also transforming how those who participate understand themselves as citizens, constituents, Council members, civil society leaders and community stakeholders. However, there are serious challenges to participation, including high costs of engagement, process exhaustion, and perils of scalability. I devise a framework for assessment called “citizenly politics,” focusing on: 1) designing participation 2) deliberation 3) participation and 4) potential for institutionalization. I argue that while the material results PB produces are relatively modest, including more innovative projects, PB delivers more substantial non-material or existential results. Existential citizenly rewards include: greater civic knowledge, strengthened relationships with elected officials, and greater community inclusion. Overall, PB provides a viable and informative democratic innovation for strengthening civic engagement within the United States that can be streamlined and adopted to scale.”
Five myths about big data
Samuel Arbesman, senior scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the author of “The Half-Life of Facts” in the Washington Post: “Big data holds the promise of harnessing huge amounts of information to help us better understand the world. But when talking about big data, there’s a tendency to fall into hyperbole. It is what compels contrarians to write such tweets as “Big Data, n.: the belief that any sufficiently large pile of s— contains a pony.” Let’s deflate the hype.
1. “Big data” has a clear definition.
The term “big data” has been in circulation since at least the 1990s, when it is believed to have originated in Silicon Valley. IBM offers a seemingly simple definition: Big data is characterized by the four V’s of volume, variety, velocity and veracity. But the term is thrown around so often, in so many contexts — science, marketing, politics, sports — that its meaning has become vague and ambiguous….
2. Big data is new.
By many accounts, big data exploded onto the scene quite recently. “If wonks were fashionistas, big data would be this season’s hot new color,” a Reuters report quipped last year. In a May 2011 report, the McKinsey Global Institute declared big data “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity.”
It’s true that today we can mine massive amounts of data — textual, social, scientific and otherwise — using complex algorithms and computer power. But big data has been around for a long time. It’s just that exhaustive datasets were more exhausting to compile and study in the days when “computer” meant a person who performed calculations….
3. Big data is revolutionary.
In their new book, “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think,”Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier compare “the current data deluge” to the transformation brought about by the Gutenberg printing press.
If you want more precise advertising directed toward you, then yes, big data is revolutionary. Generally, though, it’s likely to have a modest and gradual impact on our lives….
4. Bigger data is better.
In science, some admittedly mind-blowing big-data analyses are being done. In business, companies are being told to “embrace big data before your competitors do.” But big data is not automatically better.
Really big datasets can be a mess. Unless researchers and analysts can reduce the number of variables and make the data more manageable, they get quantity without a whole lot of quality. Give me some quality medium data over bad big data any day…
5. Big data means the end of scientific theories.
Chris Anderson argued in a 2008 Wired essay that big data renders the scientific method obsolete: Throw enough data at an advanced machine-learning technique, and all the correlations and relationships will simply jump out. We’ll understand everything.
But you can’t just go fishing for correlations and hope they will explain the world. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up with spurious correlations. Even more important, to contend with the “why” of things, we still need ideas, hypotheses and theories. If you don’t have good questions, your results can be silly and meaningless.
Having more data won’t substitute for thinking hard, recognizing anomalies and exploring deep truths.”
Announcing Project Open Data from Cloudant Labs
Yuriy Dybskiy from Cloudant: “There has been an emerging pattern over the last few years of more and more government datasets becoming available for public access. Earlier this year, the White House announced official policy on such data – Project Open Data.
Available resources
Here are four resources on the topic:
- Tim Berners-Lee: Open, Linked Data for a Global Community – [10 min video]
- Rufus Pollock: Open Data – How We Got Here and Where We’re Going – [24 min video]
- Open Knowledge Foundation Datasets – http://data.okfn.org/data
- Max Ogden: Project
dat– collaborative data – [github repo]
One of the main challenges is access to the datasets. If only there were a database that had easy access to its data baked right in it.
Luckily, there is CouchDB and Cloudant, which share the same APIs to access data via HTTP. This makes for a really great option to store interesting datasets.
Cloudant Open Data
Today we are happy to announce a Cloudant Labs project – Cloudant Open Data!
Several datasets are available at the moment, for example, businesses_sf – data regarding businesses registered in San Francisco and sf_pd_incidents – a collection of incident reports (criminal and non-criminal) made by the San Francisco Police Department.
We’ll add more, but if you have one you’d like us to add faster – drop us a line at open-data@cloudant.com
Create an account and play with these datasets yourself”
Improved Governance? Exploring the Results of Peru's Participatory Budgeting Process
Paper by Stephanie McNulty for the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (Aug. 29-Sept. 1, 2013): “Can a nationally mandated participatory budget process change the nature of local governance? Passed in 2003 to mandate participatory budgeting in all districts and regions of Peru, Peru’s National PB Law has garnered international attention from proponents of participatory governance. However, to date, the results of the process have not been widely documented. Presenting data that have been gathered through fieldwork, online databases, and primary documents, this paper explores the results of Peru’s PB after ten years of implementation. The paper finds that results are limited. While there are a significant number of actors engaged in the process, the PB is still dominated by elite actors that do not represent the diversity of the civil society sector in Peru. Participants approve important “pro-poor” projects, but they are not always executed. Finally, two important indicators of governance, sub-national conflict and trust in local institutions, have not improved over time. Until Peruvian politicians make a concerted effort to move beyond politics as usual, results will continue to be limited”
OpenCounter
Code for America: “OpenCounter’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs and foster local economic development by simplifying the process of registering a business.
Economic development happens in many forms, from projects like the revitalization of the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Hudson Rail Yards in New York City, to campaigns to encourage residents to shop at local merchants. While the majority of headlines will focus on a City’s effort to secure a major new employer (think Apple’s 1,000,000 square foot expansion in Austin, Texas), most economic development and job creation happens on a much smaller scale, as individuals stake their financial futures on creating a new product, store, service or firm.
But these new businesses aren’t in a position to accept tax breaks on capital equipment or enter into complex development and disposition agreements to build new offices or stores. Many new businesses can’t even meet the underwriting criteria of SBA backed revolving-loan programs. Competition for local grants for facade improvements or signage assistance can be fierce….
Despite many cities’ genuine efforts to be “business-friendly,” their default user interface consists of florescent-lit formica, waiting lines, and stacks of forms. Online resources often remind one of a phone book, with little interactivity or specialization based on either the businesses’ function or location within a jurisdiction.
That’s why we built OpenCounter….See what we’re up to at opencounter.us or visit a live version of our software at http://opencounter.cityofsantacruz.com.”
From Machinery to Mobility: Government and Democracy in a Participative Age
New book by Jeffrey Roy: “The Westminster-stylized model of Parliamentary democratic politics and public service accountability is increasingly out of step with the realities of today’s digitally and socially networked era. This book explores the reconfiguration of democratic and managerial governance within democratic societies due to the advent of technological mobility. More specifically, the traditional public sector prism of organizational and accountability – denoted as ‘machinery of government’, is increasingly strained in an era characterized by smart devices, social media, and cloud computing. This book examines the roots and implications of the tensions between machinery and mobility and the sorts of investments and initiatives that have been undertaken by governments around the world as well as their appropriateness and relative impacts. This book also examines the prospects for holistic adaptation of democratic and managerial systems going forward, identifying the most crucial directions and determinants for improving public sector performance in terms of outcomes, accountability, and agility. Accordingly, the ultimate aim of this initiative is to contribute to the formation of intellectual foundations for more systemic reforms of public sector governance in Canada and elsewhere, and to offer forward-looking trajectories for government adaptation in shifting from a traditional prism of ‘machinery’ to new organizational and institutional arrangements better suited for an era of ‘mobility’.”
Smartphones As Weather Surveillance Systems
Tom Simonite in MIT Technology Review: “You probably never think about the temperature of your smartphone’s battery, but it turns out to provide an interesting method for tracking outdoor air temperature. It’s a discovery that adds to other evidence that mobile apps could provide a new way to measure what’s happening in the atmosphere and improve weather forecasting.
Startup OpenSignal, whose app crowdsources data on cellphone reception, first noticed in 2012 that changes in battery temperature correlated with those outdoors. On Tuesday, they published a scientific paper on that technique in a geophysics journal and announced that the technique will be used to interpret data from a weather crowdsourcing app. OpenSignal originally started collecting data on battery temperatures to try and understand the connections between signal strength and how quickly a device chews through its battery.
OpenSignal’s crowdsourced weather-tracking effort joins another accidentally enabled by smartphones. A project called PressureNET that collects air pressure data by taking advantage of the fact many Android phones have a barometer inside to aid their GPS function (see “App Feeds Scientists Atmospheric Data From Thousands of Smartphones”). Cliff Mass, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington, is working to incorporate PressureNET data into weather models that usually rely on data from weather stations. He believes that smartphones could provide valuable data from places where there are no weather stations, if enough people start sharing data using apps like PressureNET.
Other research suggests that logging changes in cell network signal strength perceived by smartphones could provide yet more weather data. In February researchers in the Netherlands produced detailed maps of rainfall compiled by monitoring fluctuations in the signal strength measured by cellular network masts, caused by water droplets in the atmosphere.”
We the People Update
Washington Post: “The White House launched the We The People petition site in 2011 as a way for Americans to get their government to respond to their calls for action. On the digital platform, people can create and sign petitions seeking specific action on an issue from the federal government. In theory, once a petition has garnered a certain number of signatures within a certain time frame, it is reviewed by White House staff and receives an official response.
But that’s not always what happens.
Now a new site, www.whpetitions.info, takes its own tally and highlights petitions that have received enough signatures but have not received responses. By its count, the White House has responded to 87 percent of petitions that have met their signature thresholds with an average response time of 61 days. But the average waiting time so far for the 30 unanswered petitions is 240 days. And six of them have been waiting for over a year.”
Hackers Called Into Civic Duty
Wall Street Journal: “Cash-strapped cities are turning to an unusual source to improve their online services on the cheap: helpful hackers, who use city data to create tools tracking everything from real-time subway delays to where to get a free flu shot near your home and information about a contentious school-closing plan.
Hackers have been popularly portrayed as giving fits to national-security officials and credit-card companies, but the term also refers to people who like to write their own computer programs and help solve a variety of problems. Recently, hackers have begun working with cities to find ways of building applications, or apps, that make use of data—which gets stripped of personally identifiable information—that municipalities are collecting anyway in the regular course of governance….Last year, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed an executive order mandating the city make available all data not protected by privacy laws. Today, the city has nearly 950 data sets publicly available, the most of any U.S. city, according to Code for America, a nonprofit that promotes openness in government.”