Open Data For Social Good: The Case For Better Transport Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at TechWeek Europe: “The growing focus on data protection, driven partly by stronger legislation and partly by consumer pressure, has put the debate on the benefits of open data somewhat on the back burner.

The continuing spate of high-profile data breaches and the abuse of public trust in the form of constant bombardment of automated calls, spam emails and clumsily ‘personalised’ advertising has done little to further the open data agenda. In fact it left many consumers feeling lukewarm about the prospects of organisations opening up their data feeds, even at a promise of a better service in return.

That’s a worrying trend. In many industries effective use of open data can lead to development of solutions that address some of the major challenges populations are faced with today, allowing for faster innovation and adaptability to change. There are significant ways in which individuals, and society as a whole could benefit from open data, if organisations and governments get data sharing right.

Open data for transport

A good example is city transportation. Many metropolises face a major challenge – growing populations are placing pressure on current infrastructure systems, leading to congestion and inefficiency.

An open data system, where commuters use a single travel account for all travel transactions and information – whether that’s public transport, walking, using the bike, using Uber, and so on, would give the city unprecedented insight into how people commute and what’s behind their travel choices.

The key to engaging the public with this is the condition that data is used responsibly and for the greater good. Currently, Transport for London (TfL) operates a meet-in-the-middle model. Consumers can travel anonymously on the TfL network, with only the point of entry and point of exit being recorded, and the company provides that anonymised data to third-party app developers who can then use it to release useful travel applications.

TfL doesn’t profit from sharing consumer data but it does enjoy the benefits that come with it. Third-party travel applications make it easier for commuters to use TfL’s network and make the service itself appear more efficient – in short, everyone benefits.

Mutual benefit

Let’s now imagine a scenario that takes this mutually beneficial relationship a step forward, with consumers willingly giving up some information about themselves to the responsible parties (in this case, the city) and receiving personalised service in return. In this scenario, the more information commuters can provide to the system, the more useful the system can be to them.

Apart from providing personalised travel information and recommendations, such a system would have one more important benefit – it would enable cities to encourage greater social responsibility, extending the benefits from the individual to the community as a whole….(More)”

Big Data Quality: a Roadmap for Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Paolo Ciancarini, Francesco Poggi and Daniel Russo: “Open Data (OD) is one of the most discussed issue of Big Data which raised the joint interest of public institutions, citizens and private companies since 2009. In addition to transparency in public administrations, another key objective of these initiatives is to allow the development of innovative services for solving real world problems, creating value in some positive and constructive way. However, the massive amount of freely available data has not yet brought the expected effects: as of today, there is no application that has exploited the potential provided by large and distributed information sources in a non-trivial way, nor any service has substantially changed for the better the lives of people. The era of a new generation applications based on open data is far to come. In this context, we observe that OD quality is one of the major threats to achieving the goals of the OD movement. The starting point of this study is the quality of the OD released by the five Constitutional offices of Italy. W3C standards about OD are widely known accepted in Italy by the Italian Digital Agency (AgID). According to the most recent Italian Laws the Public Administration may release OD according to the AgID standards. Our exploratory study aims to assess the quality of such releases and the real implementations of OD. The outcome suggests the need of a drastic improvement in OD quality. Finally we highlight some key quality principles for OD, and propose a roadmap for further research….(more)”

La Primaire Wants To Help French Voters Bypass Traditional Parties

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Federico Guerrini in Forbes: “French people, like the citizens of many other countries, have little confidence in their government or in their members of parliament.

A recent study by the Center for Political Research of the University of Science-Po(CEVIPOF) in Paris, shows that while residents still trust, in part, their local officials, only 37% of them on average feel the same for those belonging to theNational Assembly, the Senate or the executive.

Three years before, when asked in another poll about of what sprung to mind first when thinking of politics, their first answer was “disgust”.

With this sort of background, it is perhaps unsurprising that a number of activists have decided to try and find new ways to boost political participation, using crowdsourcing, smartphone applications and online platforms to look for candidates outside of the usual circles.

There are several civic tech initiatives in place in France right now. One of the most fascinating is called LaPrimaire.org.

It’s an online platform whose main aim is to organize an open primary election,select a suitable candidate, and allow him to run for President in the 2017elections.

Launched in April by Thibauld Favre and David Guez, an engineer and a lawyer by trade, both with no connection to the political establishment, it has attracted so far 164 self-proposed candidates and some 26,000 voters. Anyone can be elected, as long as they live in France, do not belong to any political party and have a clean criminal record.

primariacandidati

A different class of possible candidates, also present on the website, is composed by the so-called “citoyens plébiscités”, VIPs, politician or celebrities that backers of LaPrimaire.org think should run for president. In both cases, in order to qualify for the next phase of the selection, these people have to secure the vote of at least 500 supporters by July 14….(More)”

Twiplomacy Study 2016

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Summary: “Social media has become diplomacy’s significant other. It has gone from being an afterthought to being the very first thought of world leaders and governments across the globe, as audiences flock to their newsfeeds for the latest news. This recent worldwide embrace of online channels has brought with it a wave of openness and transparency that has never been experienced before. Social media provides a platform for unconditional communication, and has become a communicator’s most powerful tool. Twitter in particular, has even become a diplomatic ‘barometer, a tool used to analyze and forecast international relations.

There is a vast array of social networks for government communicators to choose from. While some governments and foreign ministries still ponder the pros and cons of any social media engagement, others have gone beyond Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to reach their target audiences, even embracing emerging platforms such as Snapchat, WhatsApp and Telegram where communications are under the radar and almost impossible to track.

Burson-Marsteller’s 2016 Twiplomacy study has been expanded to include other social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, as well as more niche digital diplomacy platforms such as Snapchat, LinkedIn, Google+,Periscope and Vine.

There is a growing digital divide between governments that are active on social media with dedicated teams and those that see digital engagement as an afterthought and so devote few resources to it. There is still a small number of government leaders who refuse to embrace the new digital world and, for these few, their community managers struggle to bring their organizations into the digital century.

Over the past year, the most popular world leaders on social media have continued to increase their audiences, while new leaders have emerged in the Twittersphere. Argentina’s Mauricio Macri, Canada’s Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Barack Obama have all made a significant impact on Twitter and Facebook over the past year.

Obama’s social media communication has become even more personal through his @POTUS Twitter account and Facebook page, and the first “president of the social media age” will leave the White House in January 2017 with an incredible 137 million fans, followers and subscribers. Beyond merely Twitter and Facebook, world leaders such as the Argentinian President have also become active on new channels like Snapchat to reach a younger audience and potential future voters. Similarly, a number of governments, mainly in Latin America, have started to use Periscope, a cost-effective medium to live-stream their press conferences.

We have witnessed occasional public interactions between leaders, namely the friendly fighting talk between the Obamas, the Queen of England and Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Foreign ministries continue to expand their diplomatic and digital networks by following each other and creating coalitions on specific topics, in particular the fight against ISIS….

A number of world leaders, including the President of Colombia and Australia’s Julie Bishop, also use emojis to brighten up their tweets, creating what can be described as a new diplomatic sign language. The Foreign Ministry in Finland has even produced its own set of 49 emoticons depicting summer and winter in the Nordic country.

We asked a number of digital leaders of some of the best connected foreign ministries and governments to share their thoughts on their preferred social media channel and examples of their best campaigns on our blog. You will learn:

Here is our list of the #Twiplomacy Top Twenty Twitterati in 2016….(More)”

All European scientific articles to be freely accessible by 2020

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

EU Presidency: “All scientific articles in Europe must be freely accessible as of 2020. EU member states want to achieve optimal reuse of research data. They are also looking into a European visa for foreign start-up founders.

And, according to the new Innovation Principle, new European legislation must take account of its impact on innovation. These are the main outcomes of the meeting of the Competitiveness Council in Brussels on 27 May.

Sharing knowledge freely

Under the presidency of Netherlands State Secretary for Education, Culture and Science Sander Dekker, the EU ministers responsible for research and innovation decided unanimously to take these significant steps. Mr Dekker is pleased that these ambitions have been translated into clear agreements to maximise the impact of research. ‘Research and innovation generate economic growth and more jobs and provide solutions to societal challenges,’ the state secretary said. ‘And that means a stronger Europe. To achieve that, Europe must be as attractive as possible for researchers and start-ups to locate here and for companies to invest. That calls for knowledge to be freely shared. The time for talking about open access is now past. With these agreements, we are going to achieve it in practice.’

Open access

Open access means that scientific publications on the results of research supported by public and public-private funds must be freely accessible to everyone. That is not yet the case. The results of publicly funded research are currently not accessible to people outside universities and knowledge institutions. As a result, teachers, doctors and entrepreneurs do not have access to the latest scientific insights that are so relevant to their work, and universities have to take out expensive subscriptions with publishers to gain access to publications.

Reusing research data

From 2020, all scientific publications on the results of publicly funded research must be freely available. It also must be able to optimally reuse research data. To achieve that, the data must be made accessible, unless there are well-founded reasons for not doing so, for example intellectual property rights or security or privacy issues….(More)”

If you build it… will they come?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Bacon at Omidyar Network: “What do datasets on Danish addresses, Indonesian elections, Singapore Dengue Fever, Slovakian contracts, Uruguayan health service provision, and Global weather systems have in common? Read on to learn more…

On May 12, 2016, more than 40 nations’ leaders gathered in London for an Anti-Corruption Summit, convened by UK Prime Minister David Cameron. Among the commitments made, 40 countries pledged to make their procurement processes open by default, with 14 countries specifically committing to publish to the Open Contracting Data Standard.

This conference and these commitments can be seen as part of a larger global norm toward openness and transparency, also embodied by the Open Government Partnership, Open Data Charter, and increasing numbers of Open Data Portals.

As government data is increasingly published openly in the public domain, valid questions have been raised about what impact the data will have: As governments release this data, will it be accessed and used? Will it ultimately improve lives, root out corruption, hold answers to seemingly intractable problems, and lead to economic growth?*

Omidyar Network — having supported several Open Data organizations and platforms such as Open Data Institute, Open Knowledge, and Web Foundation — sought data-driven answers to these questions. After a public call for proposals, we selected NYU’s GovLab to conduct research on the impact open data has already had. Not the potential or prospect of impact, but past proven impact. The GovLab research team, led by Stefaan Verhulst, investigated a variety of sectors — health, education, elections, budgets, contracts, etc. — in a variety of locations, spanning five continents.

Their findings are promising and exciting, demonstrating that open data is changing the world by empowering people, improving governance, solving public problems, and leading to innovation. A summary is contained in thisKey Findings report, and is accompanied by many open data case studies posted in this Open Data Impact Repository.

Of course, stories such as this are not 100% rosy, and the report is clear about the challenges ahead. There are plenty of cases in which open data has had minimal impact. There are cases where there was negative impact. And there are obstacles to open data reaching its full potential: namely, open data projects that don’t respond to citizens’ questions and needs, a lack of technical capacity on either the data provider and data user side, inadequate protections for privacy and security, and a shortage of resources.

But this research holds good news: Danish addresses, Indonesian elections,Singapore Dengue Fever, Slovakian contracts, Uruguayan health service provision, Global weather systems, and others were all opened up. And all changed the world by empowering citizens, improving governance, solving public problems, and leading to innovation. Please see this report for more….(More)”

See also odimpact.org

Data Science Ethical Framework

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

UK Cabinet Office: “Data science provides huge opportunities for government. Harnessing new forms of data with increasingly powerful computer techniques increases operational efficiency, improves public services and provides insight for better policymaking.

We want people in government to feel confident using data science techniques to innovate. This guidance is intended to bring together relevant laws and best practice, to give teams robust principles to work with.

The publication is a first version that we are asking the public, experts, civil servants and other interested parties to help us perfect and iterate. This will include taking on evidence from a public dialogue on data science ethics. It was published on 19 May by the Minister for Cabinet Office, Matt Hancock. If you would like to help us iterate the framework, find out how to get in touch at the end of this blog. See Data Science Ethical Framework (PDF, 8.28MB, 17 pages). This file may not be suitable for users of assistive technology. Request an accessible format.“

Improving patient care by bridging the divide between doctors and data scientists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation: “While wonderful new medical discoveries and innovations are in the news every day, doctors struggle daily with using information and techniques available right now while carefully adopting new concepts and treatments. As a practicing doctor, I deal with uncertainties and unanswered clinical questions all the time….At the moment, a report from the National Academy of Medicine tells us, most doctors base most of their everyday decisions on guidelines from (sometimes biased) expert opinions or small clinical trials. It would be better if they were from multicenter, large, randomized controlled studies, with tightly controlled conditions ensuring the results are as reliable as possible. However, those are expensive and difficult to perform, and even then often exclude a number of important patient groups on the basis of age, disease and sociological factors.

Part of the problem is that health records are traditionally kept on paper, making them hard to analyze en masse. As a result, most of what medical professionals might have learned from experiences was lost – or at least was inaccessible to another doctor meeting with a similar patient.

A digital system would collect and store as much clinical data as possible from as many patients as possible. It could then use information from the past – such as blood pressure, blood sugar levels, heart rate and other measurements of patients’ body functions – to guide future doctors to the best diagnosis and treatment of similar patients.

Industrial giants such as Google, IBM, SAP and Hewlett-Packard have also recognized the potential for this kind of approach, and are now working on how to leverage population data for the precise medical care of individuals.

Collaborating on data and medicine

At the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we have begun to collect large amounts of detailed patient data in the Medical Information Mart in Intensive Care (MIMIC). It is a database containing information from 60,000 patient admissions to the intensive care units of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Boston teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The data in MIMIC has been meticulously scoured so individual patients cannot be recognized, and is freely shared online with the research community.

But the database itself is not enough. We bring together front-line clinicians (such as nurses, pharmacists and doctors) to identify questions they want to investigate, and data scientists to conduct the appropriate analyses of the MIMIC records. This gives caregivers and patients the best individualized treatment options in the absence of a randomized controlled trial.

Bringing data analysis to the world

At the same time we are working to bring these data-enabled systems to assist with medical decisions to countries with limited health care resources, where research is considered an expensive luxury. Often these countries have few or no medical records – even on paper – to analyze. We can help them collect health data digitally, creating the potential to significantly improve medical care for their populations.

This task is the focus of Sana, a collection of technical, medical and community experts from across the globe that is also based in our group at MIT. Sana has designed a digital health information system specifically for use by health providers and patients in rural and underserved areas.

At its core is an open-source system that uses cellphones – common even in poor and rural nations – to collect, transmit and store all sorts of medical data. It can handle not only basic patient data such as height and weight, but also photos and X-rays, ultrasound videos, and electrical signals from a patient’s brain (EEG) and heart (ECG).

Partnering with universities and health organizations, Sana organizes training sessions (which we call “bootcamps”) and collaborative workshops (called “hackathons”) to connect nurses, doctors and community health workers at the front lines of care with technology experts in or near their communities. In 2015, we held bootcamps and hackathons in Colombia, Uganda, Greece and Mexico. The bootcamps teach students in technical fields like computer science and engineering how to design and develop health apps that can run on cellphones. Immediately following the bootcamp, the medical providers join the group and the hackathon begins…At the end of the day, though, the purpose is not the apps….(More)

An App to Save Syria’s Lost Generation? What Technology Can and Can’t Do

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Latonero in Foreign Affairs: ” In January this year, when the refugee and migrant crisis in Europe had hit its peak—more than a million had crossed into Europe over the course of 2015—the U.S. State Department and Google hosted a forum of over 100 technology experts. The goal was to “bridge the education gap for Syrian refugee children.” Speaking to the group assembled at Stanford University, Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a $1.7 million prize “to develop a smartphone app that can help Syrian children learn how to read and improve their wellbeing.” The competition, known as EduApp4Syria, is being run by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) and is supported by the Australian government and the French mobile company Orange.

Less than a month later, a group called Techfugees brought together over 100 technologists for a daylong brainstorm in New York City focused exclusively on education solutions. “We are facing the largest refugee crisis since World War II,” said U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power to open the conference. “It is a twenty-first-century crisis and we need a twenty-first-century solution.” Among the more promising, according to Power, were apps that enable “refugees to access critical services,” new “web platforms connecting refugees with one another,” and “education programs that teach refugees how to code.”

For example, the nonprofit PeaceGeeks created the Services Advisor app for the UN Refugee Agency, which maps the location of shelters, food distribution centers, and financial services in Jordan….(More)”

Open data + increased disclosure = better public-private partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Bloomgarden and Georg Neumann at Fomin Blog: “The benefits of open and participatory public procurement are increasingly being recognized by international bodies such as the Group of 20 major economies, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and multilateral development banks. Value for money, more competition, and better goods and services for citizens all result from increased disclosure of contract data. Greater openness is also an effective tool to fight fraud and corruption.

However, because public-private partnerships (PPPs) are planned during a long timeframe and involve a large number of groups, therefore, implementing greater levels of openness in disclosure is complicated. This complexity can be a challenge to good design. Finding a structured and transparent approach to managing PPP contract data is fundamental for a project to be accepted and used by its local community….

In open contracting, all data is disclosed during the public procurement process—from the planning stage, to the bidding and awarding of the contract, to the monitoring of the implementation. A global open source data standard is used to publish that data, which is already being implemented in countries as diverse as Canada, Paraguay, and the Ukraine. Using open data throughout the contracting process provides opportunities to innovate in managing bids, fixing problems, and integrating feedback as needed. Open contracting contributes to the overall social and environmental sustainability of infrastructure investments.

In the case of Mexico’s airport, the project publishes details of awarded contracts, including visualizing the flow of funds and detailing the full amounts of awarded contracts and renewable agreements. Standardized, timely, and open data that follow global standards such as the Open Contracting Data Standard will make this information useful for analysis of value for money, cost-benefit, sustainability, and monitoring performance. Crucially, open contracting will shift the focus from the inputs into a PPP, to the outputs: the goods and services being delivered.

Benefits of open data for PPPs

We think that better and open data will lead to better PPPs. Here’s how:

1. Using user feedback to fix problems

The Brazilian state of Minas Gerais has been a leader in transparent PPP contracts with full proactive disclosure of the contract terms, as well as of other relevant project information—a practice that puts a government under more scrutiny but makes for better projects in the long run.

According to Marcos Siqueira, former head of the PPP Unit in Minas Gerais, “An adequate transparency policy can provide enough information to users so they can become contract watchdogs themselves.”

For example, a public-private contract was signed in 2014 to build a $300 million waste treatment plant for 2.5 million people in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais. As the team members conducted appraisals, they disclosed them on the Internet. In addition, the team held around 20 public meetings and identified all the stakeholders in the project. One notable result of the sharing and discussion of this information was the relocation of the facility to a less-populated area. When the project went to the bidding phase, it was much closer to the expectations of its various stakeholders.

2. Making better decisions on contracts and performance

Chile has been a leader in developing PPPs (which it refers to as concessions) for several decades, in a range of sectors: urban and inter-urban roads, seaports, airports, hospitals, and prisons. The country tops the list for the best enabling environment for PPPs in Latin America and the Caribbean, as measured by Infrascope, an index produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the Multilateral Investment Fund of the IDB Group.

Chile’s distinction is that it discloses information on performance of PPPs that are underway. The government’s Concessions Unit regularly publishes summaries of the projects during their different phases, including construction and operation. The reports are non-technical, yet include all the necessary information to understand the scope of the project…(More)”