Country and Region: Asia

Open government data: Out of the box

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist on “The open-data revolution has not lived up to expectations. But it is only getting started…

The app that helped save Mr Rich’s leg is one of many that incorporate government data—in this case, supplied by four health agencies. Six years ago America became the first country to make all data collected by its government “open by default”, except for personal information and that related to national security. Almost 200,000 datasets from 170 outfits have been posted on the data.gov website. Nearly 70 other countries have also made their data available: mostly rich, well-governed ones, but also a few that are not, such as India (see chart). The Open Knowledge Foundation, a London-based group, reckons that over 1m datasets have been published on open-data portals using its CKAN software, developed in 2010.

Jakarta’s Participatory Budget

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ramda Yanurzha in GovInsider: “…This is a map of Musrenbang 2014 in Jakarta. Red is a no-go, green means the proposal is approved.

To give you a brief background, musrenbang is Indonesia’s flavor of participatory, bottom-up budgeting. The idea is that people can propose any development for their neighbourhood through a multi-stage budgeting process, thus actively participating in shaping the final budget for the city level, which will then determine the allocation for each city at the provincial level, and so on.

The catch is, I’m confident enough to say that not many people (especially in big cities) are actually aware of this process. While civic activists tirelessly lament that the process itself is neither inclusive nor transparent, I’m leaning towards a simpler explanation that most people simply couldn’t connect the dots.

People know that the public works agency fixed that 3-foot pothole last week. But it’s less clear how they can determine who is responsible for fixing a new streetlight in that dark alley and where the money comes from. Someone might have complain to the neighbourhood leader (Pak RT) and somehow the message gets through, but it’s very hard to trace how it got through. Just keep complaining to the black box until you don’t have to. There are very few people (mainly researchers) who get to see the whole picture.

This has now changed because the brand-new Jakarta open data portal provides musrenbang data from 2009. Who proposed what to whom, for how much, where it should be implemented (geotagged!), down to kelurahan/village level, and whether the proposal is accepted into the final city budget. For someone who advocates for better availability of open data in Indonesia and is eager to practice my data wrangling skill, it’s a goldmine.

Diving In

data screenshot
All the different units of goods proposed.

The data is also, as expected, incredibly messy. While surprisingly most of the projects proposed are geotagged, there are a lot of formatting inconsistencies that makes the clean up stage painful. Some of them are minor (m? meter? meter2? m2? meter persegi?) while others are perplexing (latitude: -6,547,843,512,000  –  yes, that’s a value of more than a billion). Annoyingly, hundreds of proposals point to the center of the National Monument so it’s not exactly a representative dataset.

For fellow data wranglers, pull requests to improve the data are gladly welcome over here. Ibam generously wrote an RT extractor to yield further location data, and I’m looking into OpenStreetMap RW boundary data to create a reverse geocoder for the points.

A couple hours of scrubbing in OpenRefine yields me a dataset that is clean enough for me to generate the CartoDB map I embedded at the beginning of this piece. More precisely, it is a map of geotagged projects where each point is colored depending on whether it’s rejected or accepted.

Numbers and Patterns

40,511 proposals, some of them merged into broader ones, which gives us a grand total of 26,364 projects valued at over IDR 3,852,162,060,205, just over $250 million at the current exchange rate. This amount represents over 5% of Jakarta’s annual budget for 2015, with projects ranging from a IDR 27,500 (~$2) trash bin (that doesn’t sound right, does it?) in Sumur Batu to IDR 54 billion, 1.5 kilometer drainage improvement in Koja….(More)”

Build digital democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dirk Helbing & Evangelos Pournaras in Nature: “Fridges, coffee machines, toothbrushes, phones and smart devices are all now equipped with communicating sensors. In ten years, 150 billion ‘things’ will connect with each other and with billions of people. The ‘Internet of Things’ will generate data volumes that double every 12 hours rather than every 12 months, as is the case now.

Blinded by information, we need ‘digital sunglasses’. Whoever builds the filters to monetize this information determines what we see — Google and Facebook, for example. Many choices that people consider their own are already determined by algorithms. Such remote control weakens responsible, self-determined decision-making and thus society too.

The European Court of Justice’s ruling on 6 October that countries and companies must comply with European data-protection laws when transferring data outside the European Union demonstrates that a new digital paradigm is overdue. To ensure that no government, company or person with sole control of digital filters can manipulate our decisions, we need information systems that are transparent, trustworthy and user-controlled. Each of us must be able to choose, modify and build our own tools for winnowing information.

With this in mind, our research team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), alongside international partners, has started to create a distributed, privacy-preserving ‘digital nervous system’ called Nervousnet. Nervousnet uses the sensor networks that make up the Internet of Things, including those in smartphones, to measure the world around us and to build a collective ‘data commons’. The many challenges ahead will be best solved using an open, participatory platform, an approach that has proved successful for projects such as Wikipedia and the open-source operating system Linux.

A wise king?

The science of human decision-making is far from understood. Yet our habits, routines and social interactions are surprisingly predictable. Our behaviour is increasingly steered by personalized advertisements and search results, recommendation systems and emotion-tracking technologies. Thousands of pieces of metadata have been collected about every one of us (seego.nature.com/stoqsu). Companies and governments can increasingly manipulate our decisions, behaviour and feelings1.

Many policymakers believe that personal data may be used to ‘nudge’ people to make healthier and environmentally friendly decisions. Yet the same technology may also promote nationalism, fuel hate against minorities or skew election outcomes2 if ethical scrutiny, transparency and democratic control are lacking — as they are in most private companies and institutions that use ‘big data’. The combination of nudging with big data about everyone’s behaviour, feelings and interests (‘big nudging’, if you will) could eventually create close to totalitarian power.

Countries have long experimented with using data to run their societies. In the 1970s, Chilean President Salvador Allende created computer networks to optimize industrial productivity3. Today, Singapore considers itself a data-driven ‘social laboratory’4 and other countries seem keen to copy this model.

The Chinese government has begun rating the behaviour of its citizens5. Loans, jobs and travel visas will depend on an individual’s ‘citizen score’, their web history and political opinion. Meanwhile, Baidu — the Chinese equivalent of Google — is joining forces with the military for the ‘China brain project’, using ‘deep learning’ artificial-intelligence algorithms to predict the behaviour of people on the basis of their Internet activity6.

The intentions may be good: it is hoped that big data can improve governance by overcoming irrationality and partisan interests. But the situation also evokes the warning of the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, that the “sovereign acting … to make the people happy according to his notions … becomes a despot”. It is for this reason that the US Declaration of Independence emphasizes the pursuit of happiness of individuals.

Ruling like a ‘benevolent dictator’ or ‘wise king’ cannot work because there is no way to determine a single metric or goal that a leader should maximize. Should it be gross domestic product per capita or sustainability, power or peace, average life span or happiness, or something else?

Better is pluralism. It hedges risks, promotes innovation, collective intelligence and well-being. Approaching complex problems from varied perspectives also helps people to cope with rare and extreme events that are costly for society — such as natural disasters, blackouts or financial meltdowns.

Centralized, top-down control of data has various flaws. First, it will inevitably become corrupted or hacked by extremists or criminals. Second, owing to limitations in data-transmission rates and processing power, top-down solutions often fail to address local needs. Third, manipulating the search for information and intervening in individual choices undermines ‘collective intelligence’7. Fourth, personalized information creates ‘filter bubbles’8. People are exposed less to other opinions, which can increase polarization and conflict9.

Fifth, reducing pluralism is as bad as losing biodiversity, because our economies and societies are like ecosystems with millions of interdependencies. Historically, a reduction in diversity has often led to political instability, collapse or war. Finally, by altering the cultural cues that guide peoples’ decisions, everyday decision-making is disrupted, which undermines rather than bolsters social stability and order.

Big data should be used to solve the world’s problems, not for illegitimate manipulation. But the assumption that ‘more data equals more knowledge, power and success’ does not hold. Although we have never had so much information, we face ever more global threats, including climate change, unstable peace and socio-economic fragility, and political satisfaction is low worldwide. About 50% of today’s jobs will be lost in the next two decades as computers and robots take over tasks. But will we see the macroeconomic benefits that would justify such large-scale ‘creative destruction’? And how can we reinvent half of our economy?

The digital revolution will mainly benefit countries that achieve a ‘win–win–win’ situation for business, politics and citizens alike10. To mobilize the ideas, skills and resources of all, we must build information systems capable of bringing diverse knowledge and ideas together. Online deliberation platforms and reconfigurable networks of smart human minds and artificially intelligent systems can now be used to produce collective intelligence that can cope with the diverse and complex challenges surrounding us….(More)” See Nervousnet project

Technology is a new kind of lifeline for refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Marketplace: “Imagine you’re a refugee leaving home for good. You’ll need help. But what you ask for today is much different than it would have been just 10 years ago.

“What people are demanding, more and more, is not classic food, shelter, water, healthcare, but they demand wifi,” said Melita Šunjić, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Šunjić began her work with Syrian refugees in camps in Amman, Jordan. Many were from rural areas with basic cell phones.

“The refugees we’re looking at now, who are coming to Europe – this is a completely different story,” Šunjić said. “They are middle class, urban people. Practically each family has at least one smart phone. We calculated that in each group of 20, they would have three smart phones.”

Refugees use their phones to call home and to map their routes. Even smugglers have their own Facebook pages.

“I don’t remember a crisis or refugee group where modern technology played such a role,” Šunjić said.

As refugees from Syria continue to flow into Europe, aid organizations are gearing up for what promises to be a difficult winter.

Emily Eros, ‎a GIS mapping officer with the American Red Cross, said her organization is working on the basics like providing food, water and shelter, but it’s also helping refugees stay connected. “It’s a little bit difficult because it’s not just a matter of getting a wifi station up, it’s also a matter of having someone there who’s able to fix it if something goes wrong,” she said. …(More)”

How Satellite Data and Artificial Intelligence could help us understand poverty better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Maya Craig at Fast Company: “Governments and development organizations currently measure poverty levels by conducting door-to-door surveys. The new partnership will test the use of AI to supplement these surveys and increase the accuracy of poverty data. Orbital said its AI software will analyze satellite images to see if characteristics such as building height and rooftop material can effectively indicate wealth.

The pilot study will be conducted in Sri Lanka. If successful, the World Bank hopes to scale it worldwide. A recent study conducted by the organization found that more than 50 countries lack legitimate poverty estimates, which limits the ability of the development community to support the world’s poorest populations.

“Data depravation is a serious issue, especially in many of the countries where we need it most,” says David Newhouse, senior economist at the World Bank. “This technology has the potential to help us get that data more frequently and at a finer level of detail than is currently possible.”

The announcement is the latest in an emerging industry of AI analysis of satellite photos. A growing number of investors and entrepreneurs are betting that the convergence of these fields will have far-reaching impacts on business, policy, resource management and disaster response.

Wall Street’s biggest hedge-fund businesses have begun using the technology to improve investment strategies. The Pew Charitable Trust employs the method to monitor oceans for illegal fishing activities. And startups like San Francisco-based Mavrx use similar analytics to optimize crop harvest.

The commercial earth-imaging satellite market, valued at $2.7 billion in 2014, is predicted to grow by 14% each year through the decade, according to a recent report.

As recently as two years ago, there were just four commercial earth imaging satellites operated in the U.S., and government contracts accounted for about 70% of imagery sales. By 2020, there will be hundreds of private-sector “smallsats” in orbit capturing imagery that will be easily accessible online. Companies like Skybox Imaging and Planet Labs have the first of these smallsats already active, with plans for more.

The images generated by these companies will be among the world’s largest data sets. And recent breakthroughs in AI research have made it possible to analyze these images to inform decision-making…(More)”

Role of Citizens in India’s Smart Cities Challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Florence Engasser and Tom Saunders at the World Policy Blog: “India faces a wide range of urban challenges — from serious air pollution and poor local governance, to badly planned cities and a lack of decent housing. India’s Smart Cities Challenge, which has now selected 98 of the 100 cities that will receive funding, could go a long way in addressing these issues.

According to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there are five key instruments that make a “smart” city: the use of clean technologies, the use of information and communications technology (ICT), private sector involvement, citizen participation and smart governance. There are good examples of new practices for each of these pillars.

For example, New Delhi recently launched a program to replace streetlights with energy efficient LEDs. The Digital India program is designed to upgrade the country’s IT infrastructure and includes plans to build “broadband highways” across the country. As for private sector participation, the Indian government is trying to encourage it by listing sectors and opportunities for public-private partnerships.

Citizen participation is one of Modi’s five key instruments, but this is an area where smart city pilots around the world have tended to perform least well on. While people are the implied beneficiaries of programs that aim to improve efficiency and reduce waste, they are rarely given a chance to participate in the design or delivery of smart city projects, which are usually implemented and managed by experts who have only a vague idea of the challenges that local communities face.

Citizen Participation

Engaging citizens is especially important in an Indian context because there have already been several striking examples of failed urban redevelopments that have blatantly lacked any type of community consultation or participation….

In practice, how can Indian cities engage residents in their smart city projects?

There are many tools available to policymakers — from traditional community engagement activities such as community meetings, to websites like Mygov.in that ask for feedback on policies. Now, there are a number of reasons to think smartphones could be an important tool to help improve collaboration between residents and city governments in Indian cities.

First, while only around 10 percent of Indians currently own a smartphone, this is predicted to rise to around half by 2020, and will be much higher in urban areas. A key driver of this is local manufacturing giants like Micromax, which have revolutionized low-cost technology in India, with smartphones costing as little as $30 (compared to around $800 for the newest iPhone).

Second, smartphone apps give city governments the potential to interact directly with citizens to make the most of what they know and feel about their communities. This can happen passively, for example, the Waze Connected Citizens program, which shares user location data with city governments to help improve transport planning. It can also be more active, for example, FixMyStreet, which allows people to report maintenance issues like potholes to their city government.

Third, smartphones are one of the main ways for people to access social media, and researchers are now developing a range of new and innovative solutions to address urban challenges using these platforms. This includes Petajakarta, which creates crowd-sourced maps of flooding in Jakarta by aggregating tweets that mention the word ‘flood.’

Made in India

Considering some of the above trends, it is interesting to think about the role smartphones could play in the governance of Indian cities and in better engaging communities. India is far from being behind in the field, and there are already a few really good examples of innovative smartphone applications made in India.

Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (translated as Clean India Initiative) is a campaign launched by Modi in October 2014, covering over 4,000 towns all over the country, with the aim to clean India’s streets. The Clean India mobile application, launched at the end of 2014 to coincide with Modi’s initiative, was developed by Mahek Shah and allows users to take pictures to report, geo-locate, and timestamp streets that need cleaning or problems to be fixed by the local authorities.

Similar to FixMyStreet, users are able to tag their reports with keywords to categorize problems. Today, Clean India has been downloaded over 12,000 times and has 5,000 active users. Although still at a very early stage, Clean India has great potential to facilitate the complaint and reporting process by empowering people to become the eyes and ears of municipalities on the ground, who are often completely unaware of issues that matter to residents.

In Bangalore, an initiative by the MOD Institute, a local nongovernmental organization, enabled residents to come together, online and offline, to create a community vision for the redevelopment of Shanthinagar, a neighborhood of the city. The project, Next Bengaluru, used new technologies to engage local residents in urban planning and tap into their knowledge of the area to promote a vision matching their real needs.

The initiative was very successful. In just three months, between December 2014 and March 2015, over 1,200 neighbors and residents visited the on-site community space, and the team crowd-sourced more than 600 ideas for redevelopment and planning both on-site and through the Next Bangalore website.

The MOD Institute now intends to work with local urban planners to try get these ideas adopted by the city government. The project has also developed a pilot app that will enable people to map abandoned urban spaces via smartphone and messaging service in the future.

Finally, Safecity India is a nonprofit organization providing a platform for anyone to share, anonymously or not, personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. Men and women can report different types of abuses — from ogling, whistles and comments, to stalking, groping and sexual assault. The aggregated data is then mapped, allowing citizens and governments to better understand crime trends at hyper-local levels.

Since its launch in 2012, SafeCity has received more than 4,000 reports of sexual crime and harassment in over 50 cities across India and Nepal. SafeCity helps generate greater awareness, breaks the cultural stigma associated with reporting sexual abuse and gives voice to grassroots movements and campaigns such as Sayfty, Protsahan, or Stop Street Harassment, forcing authorities to take action….(More)

How smartphones are solving one of China’s biggest mysteries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ana Swanson at the Washington Post: “For decades, China has been engaged in a building boom of a scale that is hard to wrap your mind around. In the last three decades, 260 million people have moved from the countryside to Chinese cities — equivalent to around 80 percent of the population of the U.S. To make room for all of those people, the size of China’s built-up urban areas nearly quintupled between 1984 and 2010.

Much of that development has benefited people’s lives, but some has not. In a breathless rush to boost growth and development, some urban areas have built vast, unused real estate projects — China’s infamous “ghost cities.” These eerie, shining developments are complete except for one thing: people to live in them.

China’s ghost cities have sparked a lot of debate over the last few years. Some argue that the developments are evidence of the waste in top-down planning, or the result of too much cheap funding for businesses. Some blame the lack of other good places for average people to invest their money, or the desire of local officials to make a quick buck — land sales generate a lot of revenue for China’s local governments.

Others say the idea of ghost cities has been overblown. They espouse a “build it and they will come” philosophy, pointing out that, with time, some ghost cities fill up and turn into vibrant communities.

It’s been hard to evaluate these claims, since most of the research on ghost cities has been anecdotal. Even the most rigorous research methods leave a lot to be desired — for example, investment research firms sending poor junior employees out to remote locations to count how many lights are turned on in buildings at night.

Now new research from Baidu, one of China’s biggest technology companies, provides one of the first systematic looks at Chinese ghost cities. Researchers from Baidu’s Big Data Lab and Peking University in Beijing used the kind of location data gathered by mobile phones and GPS receivers to track how people moved in and out suspected ghost cities, in real time and on a national scale, over a period of six months. You can see the interactive project here.

Google has been blocked in China for years, and Baidu dominates the market in terms of search, mobile maps and other offerings. That gave the researchers a huge data base to work with —  770 million users, a hefty chunk of China’s 1.36 billion people.

To identify potential ghost cities, the researchers created an algorithm that identifies urban areas with a relatively spare population. They define a ghost city as an urban region with a population of fewer than 5,000 people per square kilometer – about half the density recommended by the Chinese Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development….(More)”

How big data and The Sims are helping us to build the cities of the future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Next Web: “By 2050, the United Nations predicts that around 66 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. It is expected that the greatest expansion will take place in developing regions such as Africa and Asia. Cities in these parts will be challenged to meet the needs of their residents, and provide sufficient housing, energy, waste disposal, healthcare, transportation, education and employment.

So, understanding how cities will grow – and how we can make them smarter and more sustainable along the way – is a high priority among researchers and governments the world over. We need to get to grips with the inner mechanisms of cities, if we’re to engineer them for the future. Fortunately, there are tools to help us do this. And even better, using them is a bit like playing SimCity….

Cities are complex systems. Increasingly, scientists studying cities have gone from thinking about “cities as machines”, to approaching “cities as organisms”. Viewing cities as complex, adaptive organisms – similar to natural systems like termite mounds or slime mould colonies – allows us to gain unique insights into their inner workings. …So, if cities are like organisms, it follows that we should examine them from the bottom-up, and seek to understand how unexpected large-scale phenomena emerge from individual-level interactions. Specifically, we can simulate how the behaviour of individual “agents” – whether they are people, households, or organisations – affect the urban environment, using a set of techniques known as “agent-based modelling”….These days, increases in computing power and the proliferation of big datagive agent-based modelling unprecedented power and scope. One of the most exciting developments is the potential to incorporate people’s thoughts and behaviours. In doing so, we can begin to model the impacts of people’s choices on present circumstances, and the future.

For example, we might want to know how changes to the road layout might affect crime rates in certain areas. By modelling the activities of individuals who might try to commit a crime, we can see how altering the urban environment influences how people move around the city, the types of houses that they become aware of, and consequently which places have the greatest risk of becoming the targets of burglary.

To fully realise the goal of simulating cities in this way, models need a huge amount of data. For example, to model the daily flow of people around a city, we need to know what kinds of things people spend their time doing, where they do them, who they do them with, and what drives their behaviour.

Without good-quality, high-resolution data, we have no way of knowing whether our models are producing realistic results. Big data could offer researchers a wealth of information to meet these twin needs. The kinds of data that are exciting urban modellers include:

  • Electronic travel cards that tell us how people move around a city.
  • Twitter messages that provide insight into what people are doing and thinking.
  • The density of mobile telephones that hint at the presence of crowds.
  • Loyalty and credit-card transactions to understand consumer behaviour.
  • Participatory mapping of hitherto unknown urban spaces, such as Open Street Map.

These data can often be refined to the level of a single person. As a result, models of urban phenomena no longer need to rely on assumptions about the population as a whole – they can be tailored to capture the diversity of a city full of individuals, who often think and behave differently from one another….(More)

Can Mobile Phone Surveys Identify People’s Development Priorities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Leo and Robert Morello at the Center for Global Development: “Mobile phone surveys are fast, flexible, and cheap. But, can they be used to engage citizens on how billions of dollars in donor and government resources are spent? Over the last decade, donor governments and multilateral organizations have repeatedly committed to support local priorities and programs. Yet, how are they supposed to identify these priorities on a timely, regular basis? Consistent discussions with the local government are clearly essential, but so are feeding ordinary people’s views into those discussions. However, traditional tools, such as household surveys or consultative roundtables, present a range of challenges for high-frequency citizen engagement. That’s where mobile phone surveys could come in, enabled by the exponential rise in mobile coverage throughout the developing world.

Despite this potential, there have been only a handful of studies into whether mobile surveys are a reliable and representative tool across a broad range of developing-country contexts. Moreover, there have been almost none that specifically look at collecting information about people’s development priorities. Along with Tiago Peixoto,Steve Davenport, and Jonathan Mellon, who focus on promoting citizen engagement and open government practices at the World Bank, we sought to address this policy research gap. Through a study focused on four low-income countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe), we rigorously tested the feasibility of interactive voice recognition (IVR) surveys for gauging citizens’ development priorities.

Specifically, we wanted to know whether respondents’ answers are sensitive to a range of different factors, such as (i) the specified executing actor (national government or external partners); (ii) time horizons; or (iii) question formats. In other words, can we be sufficiently confident that surveys about people’s priorities can be applied more generally to a range of development actors and across a range of country contexts?

Several of these potential sensitivity concerns were raised in response to an earlier CGD working paper, which found that US foreign aid is only modestly aligned with Africans’ and Latin Americans’ most pressing concerns. This analysis relied upon Afrobarometer and Latinobarometro survey data (see explanatory note below). For instance, some argued that people’s priorities for their own government might be far less relevant for donor organizations. Put differently, the World Bank or USAID shouldn’t prioritize job creation in Nigeria simply because ordinary Nigerians cite it as a pressing government priority. Our hypothesis was that development priorities would likely transcend all development actors, and possibly different timeframes and question formats as well. But, we first needed to test these assumptions.

So, what did we find? We’ve included some of the key highlights below. For a more detailed description of the study and the underlying analysis, please see our new working paper. Along with our World Bank colleagues, we also published an accompanying paper that considers a range of survey method issues, including survey representativeness….(More)”

Introducing Government as a Platform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Williams, Jan Gravesen and Trinette Brownhill in Government Executive: “Governments around the world are facing competitive pressures and expectations from their constituents that are prompting them to innovate and dissolve age-old structures. Many governments have introduced a digital strategy in which at least one of the goals is aimed at bringing their organizations closer to citizens and businesses.

To achieve this, ideally IT and data in government would not be constrained by the different functional towers that make up the organization, as is often the case. They would not be constrained by complex, monolithic application design philosophies and lengthy implementation cycles, nor would development be constrained by the assumption that all activity has to be executed by the government itself.

Instead, applications would be created rapidly and cheaply, and modules would be shared as reusable blocks of code and integrated data. It would be relatively straightforward to integrate data from multiple departments to enable a focus on the complex needs of, say, a single parent who is diabetic and a student. Delivery would be facilitated in the manner best required, or preferred, by the citizen. Third parties would also be able to access these modules of code and data to build higher value government services that multiple agencies would then buy into. The code would run on a cloud infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency in which processing resources are used.

GaaP an organized set of ideas and principles that allows organizations to approach these ideals. It allows governments to institute more efficient sharing of IT resources as well as unlock data and functionality via application programming interfaces to allow third parties to build higher value citizen services. In doing so, security plays a crucial role protecting the privacy of constituents and enterprise assets.

We see increasingly well-established examples of GaaP services in many parts of the world. The notion has significantly influenced strategic thinking in the UK, Australia, Denmark, Canada and Singapore. In particular, it has evolved in a deliberate way in the UK’s Government Data Services, building on the Blairite notion of “joined up government”; in Australia’s e-government strategy and its myGov program; and as a significant influencer in Singapore’s entire approach to building its “smarter nation” infrastructure.

Collaborative Government

GaaP assumes a transformational shift in efficiency, effectiveness and transparency, in which agencies move toward a collaborative government and away from today’s siloed approach. That collaboration may be among agencies, but also with other entities (nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, citizens, etc.).

GaaP’s focus on collaboration enables public agencies to move away from their traditional towered approach to IT and increasingly make use of shared and composable services offered by a common – usually a virtualized, cloud-enabled – platform. This leads to more efficient use of development resources, platforms and IT support. We are seeing examples of this already with a group of townships in New York state and also with two large Spanish cities that are embarking on this approach.

While efficient resource and service sharing is central to the idea of GaaP, it is not sufficient. The idea is that GaaP must allow app developers, irrespective of whether they are citizens, private organizations or other public agencies, to develop new value-added services using published government data and APIs. In this sense, the platform becomes a connecting layer between public agencies’ systems and data on the one hand, and private citizens, organizations and other public agencies on the other.

In its most fundamental form, GaaP is able to:

  • Consume data and government services from existing departmental systems.
  • Consume syndicated services from platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service providers in the public marketplace.
  • Securely unlock these data and services and allow third parties –citizens, private organizations or other agencies – to combine services and data into higher-order services or more citizen-centric or business-centric services.

It is the openness, the secure interoperability, and the ability to compose new services on the basis of existing services and data that define the nature of the platform.

The Challenges

At one time, the challenge of creating a GaaP structure would have been technology: Today, it is governance….(More)”

Proudly powered by WordPress