Open Government Data: Helping Parents to find the Best School for their Kids

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Radu Cucos at the Open Government Partnership blog: “…This challenge – finding the right school – is probably one of the most important decisions in many parents’ lives.  Parents are looking for answers to questions such as which schools are located in safe neighborhoods, which ones have the highest teacher – students’ ratio, which schools have the best funding, which schools have the best premises or which ones have the highest grades average.
It is rarely an easy decision, but is made doubly difficult in the case of migrants.  People residing in the same location for a long time know, more or less, which are the best education institutions in their city, town or village. For migrants, the situation is absolutely the opposite. They have to spend extra time and resources in identifying relevant information about schools.
Open Government Data is an effective solution which can ease the problem of a lack of accessible information about existing schools in a particular country or location. By adopting the Open Government Data policy in the educational field, governments release data about grades, funding, student and teacher numbers, data generated throughout time by schools, colleges, universities and other educational settings.
Developers then use this data for creating applications which portray information in easy accessible formats. Three of the best apps which I have come across are highlighted below:

  • Discover Your School, developed under the Province of British Columbia of Canada Open Data Initiative, is a platform for parents who are interested in finding a school for their kids, learning about the school districts or comparing schools in the same area. The application provides comprehensive information, such as the number of students enrolled in schools each year, class sizes, teaching language, disaster readiness, results of skills assessment, and student and parent satisfaction. Information and data can be viewed in interactive formats, including maps. On top of that, Discover Your School engages parents in policy making and initiatives such as Erase Bullying or British Columbia Education Plan.
  • The School Portal, developed under the Moldova Open Data Initiative, uses data made public by the Ministry of Education of Moldova to offer comprehensive information about 1529 educational institutions in the Republic of Moldova. Users of the portal can access information about schools yearly budgets, budget implementation, expenditures, school rating, students’ grades, schools’ infrastructure and communications. The School Portal has a tool which allows visitors to compare schools based on different criteria – infrastructure, students’ performance or annual budgets. The additional value of the portal is the fact that it serves as a platform for private sector entities which sell school supplies to advertise their products. The School Portal also allows parents to virtually interact with the Ministry of Education of Moldova or with a psychologist in case they need additional information or have concerns regarding the education of their children.
  • RomaScuola, developed under the umbrella of the Italian Open Data Initiative, allows visitors to obtain valuable information about all schools in the Rome region. Distinguishing it from the two listed above is the ability to compare schools depending on such facets as frequency of teacher absence, internet connectivity, use of IT equipment for teaching, frequency of students’ transfer to other schools and quality of education in accordance with the percentage of issued diplomas.

Open data on schools has great value not only for parents but also for the educational system in general. Each country has its own school market, if education is considered as a product in this market. Perfect information about products is one of the main characteristics of competitive markets. From this perspective, giving parents the opportunity to have access to information about schools characteristics will contribute to the increase in the competitiveness of the schools market. Educational institutions will have incentives to improve their performance in order to attract more students…”

Lessons in Mass Collaboration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Walker, Ryan Siegel, Todd Khozein, Nick Skytland, Ali Llewellyn, Thea Aldrich, and Michael Brennan in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “significant advances in technology in the last two decades have opened possibilities to engage the masses in ways impossible to imagine centuries ago. Beyond coordination, today’s technological capability permits organizations to leverage and focus public interest, talent, and energy through mass collaborative engagement to better understand and solve today’s challenges. And given the rising public awareness of a variety of social, economic, and environmental problems, organizations have seized the opportunity to leverage and lead mass collaborations in the form of hackathons.
Hackathons emerged in the mid-2000s as a popular approach to leverage the expertise of large numbers of individuals to address social issues, often through the creation of online technological solutions. Having led hundreds of mass collaboration initiatives for organizations around the world in diverse cultural contexts, we at SecondMuse offer the following lessons as a starting point for others interested in engaging the masses, as well as challenges others’ may face.

What Mass Collaboration Looks Like

An early example of a mass collaborative endeavor was Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), which formed in 2009. RHoK was initially developed in collaboration with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA, the World Bank, and later, HP as a volunteer mobilization effort; it aimed to build technology that would enable communities to respond better to crises such as natural disasters. In 2012, nearly 1,000 participants attended 30 events around the world to address 176 well-defined problems.
In 2013, NASA and SecondMuse led the International Space Apps Challenge, which engaged six US federal agencies, 400 partner institutions, and 9,000 global citizens through a variety of local and global team configurations; it aimed to address 58 different challenges to improve life on Earth and in space. In Athens, Greece, for example, in direct response to the challenge of creating a space-deployable greenhouse, a team developed a modular spinach greenhouse designed to survive the harsh Martian climate. Two months later, 11,000 citizens across 95 events participated in the National Day of Civic Hacking in 83 different US cities, ultimately contributing about 150,000 person-hours and addressing 31 federal and several state and local challenges over a single weekend. One result was Keep Austin Fed from Austin, Texas, which leveraged local data to coordinate food donations for those in need.
Strong interest on the part of institutions and an enthusiastic international community has paved the way for follow-up events in 2014.

Benefits of Mass Collaboration

The benefits of this approach to problem-solving are many, including:

  • Incentivizing the use of government data. As institutions push to make data available to the public, mass collaboration can increase the usefulness of that data by creating products from it, as well as inform and streamline future data collection processes.
  • Increasing transparency. Engaging citizens in the process of addressing public concerns educates them about the work that institutions do and advances efforts to meet public expectations of transparency.
  • Increasing outcome ownership. When people engage in a collaborative process of problem solving, they naturally have a greater stake in the outcome. Put simply, the more people who participate in the process, the greater the sense of community ownership. Also, when spearheading new policies or initiatives, the support of a knowledgeable community can be important to long-term success.
  • Increasing awareness. Engaging the populace in addressing challenges of public concern increases awareness of issues and helps develop an active citizenry. As a result, improved public perception and license to operate bolster governmental and non-governmental efforts to address challenges.
  • Saving money. By providing data and structures to the public, and allowing them to build and iterate on plans and prototypes, mass collaboration gives agencies a chance to harness the power of open innovation with minimal time and funds.
  • Harnessing cognitive surplus. The advent of online tools allowing for distributed collaboration enables citizens to use their free time incrementally toward collective endeavors that benefit local communities and the nation.

Challenges of Mass Collaboration

Although the benefits can be significant, agencies planning to lead mass collaborations should be aware of several challenges:

  • Investing time and effort. A mass collaboration is most effective when it is not a one-time event. The up-front investment in building a collaboration of supporting partner organizations, creating a robust framework for action, developing the necessary tools and defining the challenges, and investing in implementation and scaling of the most promising results all require substantial time to secure long-term commitment and strong relationships.
  • Forging an institution-community relationship. Throughout the course of most engagements, the power dynamic between the organization providing the frameworks and challenges and the groupings of individuals responding to the call to action can shift dramatically as the community incorporates the endeavor into their collective identity. Everyone involved should embrace this as they lay the foundation for self-sustaining mass collaboration communities. Once participants develop a firmly entrenched collective identity and sense of ownership, the convening organization can fully tap into its collective genius, as they can work together based on trust and shared vision. Without community ownership, organizers need to allot more time, energy, and resources to keep their initiative moving forward, and to battle against volunteer fatigue, diminished productivity, and substandard output.
  • Focusing follow-up. Turning a massive infusion of creative ideas, concepts, and prototypes into concrete solutions requires a process of focused follow-up. Identifying and nurturing the most promising seeds to fruition requires time, discrete skills, insight, and—depending on the solutions you scale—support from a variety of external organizations.
  • Understanding ROI. Any resource-intensive endeavor where only a few of numerous resulting products ever see the light of day demands deep consideration of what constitutes a reasonable return on investment. For mass collaborations, this means having an initial understanding of the potential tangible and intangible outcomes, and making a frank assessment of whether those outcomes meet the needs of the collaborators.

Technological developments in the last century have enabled relationships between individuals and institutions to blossom into a rich and complex tapestry…”

Estonian plan for 'data embassies' overseas to back up government databases

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Graeme Burton in Computing: “Estonia is planning to open “data embassies” overseas to back up government databases and to operate government “in the cloud“.
The aim is partly to improve efficiency, but driven largely by fear of invasion and occupation, Jaan Priisalu, the director general of Estonian Information System Authority, told Sky News.
He said: “We are planning to actually operate our government in the cloud. It’s clear also how it helps to protect the country, the territory. Usually when you are the military planner and you are planning the occupation of the territory, then one of the rules is suppress the existing institutions.
“And if you are not able to do it, it means that this political price of occupying the country will simply rise for planners.”
Part of the rationale for the plan, he continued, was fear of attack from Russia in particular, which has been heightened following the occupation of Crimea, formerly in Ukraine.
“It’s quite clear that you can have problems with your neighbours. And our biggest neighbour is Russia, and nowadays it’s quite aggressive. This is clear.”
The plan is to back up critical government databases outside of Estonia so that affairs of state can be conducted in the cloud, even if the country is invaded. It would also have the benefit of keeping government information out of invaders’ hands – provided it can keep its government cloud secure.
According to Sky News, the UK is already in advanced talks about hosting the Estonian government databases and may make the UK the first of Estonia’s data embassies.
Having wrested independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Estonia has experienced frequent tension with its much bigger neighbour. In 2007, for example, after the relocation of the “Bronze Soldier of Tallinn” and the exhumation of the soldiers buried in a square in the centre of the capital to a military cemetery in April 2007, the country was subject to a prolonged cyber-attack sourced to Russia.
Russian hacker “Sp0Raw” said that the most efficient of the online attacks on Estonia could not have been carried out without the approval of Russian authorities and added that the hackers seemed to act under “recommendations” from parties in government. However, claims by Estonia that the Russian government was directly involved in the attacks were “empty words, not supported by technical data”.
Mike Witt, deputy director of the US Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), suggested that the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, while crippling to the Estonian government at the time, were not significant in scale from a technical standpoint. However, the Estonian government was forced to shut down many of its online operations in response.
At the same time, the Estonian government has been accused of implementing anti-Russian laws and discriminating against its large ethnic Russian population.
Last week, the Estonian government unveiled a plan to allow anyone in the world to apply for “digital citizenship“ of the country, enabling them to use Estonian online services, open bank accounts, and start companies without having to physically reside in the country.”

How open data can help shape the way we analyse electoral behaviour

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Harvey Lewis (Deloitte), Ulrich Atz, Gianfranco Cecconi, Tom Heath (ODI) in The Guardian: “Even after the local council elections in England and Northern Ireland on 22 May, which coincided with polling for the European Parliament, the next 12 months remain a busy time for the democratic process in the UK.
In September, the people of Scotland make their choice in a referendum on the future of the Union. Finally, the first fixed-term parliament in Westminster comes to an end with a general election in all areas of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in May 2015.
To ensure that as many people as possible are eligible and able to vote, the government is launching an ambitious programme of Individual Electoral Registration (IER) this summer. This will mean that the traditional, paper-based approach to household registration will shift to a tailored and largely digital process more in-keeping with the data-driven demands of the twenty-first century.
Under IER, citizens will need to provide ‘identifying information’, such as date of birth or national insurance number, when applying to register.

Ballots: stuck in the past?

However, despite the government’s attempts through IER to improve the veracity of information captured prior to ballots being posted, little has changed in terms of the vision for capturing, distributing and analysing digital data from election day itself.

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Indeed, paper is still the chosen medium for data collection.
Digitising elections is fraught with difficulty, though. In the US, for example, the introduction of new voting machines created much controversy even though they are capable of providing ‘near-perfect’ ballot data.
The UK’s democratic process is not completely blind, though. Numerous opinion surveys are conducted both before and after polling, including the long-running British Election Study, to understand the shifting attitudes of a representative cross-section of the electorate.
But if the government does not retain in sufficient geographic detail digital information on the number of people who vote, then how can it learn what is necessary to reverse the long-running decline in turnout?

The effects of lack of data

To add to the debate around democratic engagement, a joint research team, with data scientists from Deloitte and the Open Data Institute (ODI), have been attempting to understand what makes voters tick.
Our research has been hampered by a significant lack of relevant data describing voter behaviour at electoral ward level, as well as difficulties in matching what little data is available to other open data sources, such as demographic data from the 2011 Census.
Even though individual ballot papers are collected and verified for counting the number of votes per candidate – the primary aim of elections, after all – the only recent elections for which aggregate turnout statistics have been published at ward level are the 2012 local council elections in England and Wales. In these elections, approximately 3,000 wards from a total of over 8,000 voted.
Data published by the Electoral Commission for the 2013 local council elections in England and Wales purports to be at ward level but is, in fact, for ‘county electoral divisions’, as explained by the Office for National Statistics.
Moreover, important factors related to the accessibility of polling stations – such as the distance from main population centres – could not be assessed because the location of polling stations remains the responsibility of individual local authorities – and only eight of these have so far published their data as open data.
Given these fundamental limitations, drawing any robust conclusions is difficult. Nevertheless, our research shows the potential for forecasting electoral turnout with relatively few census variables, the most significant of which are age and the size of the electorate in each ward.
…

What role can open data play?

The limited results described above provide a tantalising glimpse into a possible future scenario: where open data provides a deeper and more granular understanding of electoral behaviour.
On the back of more sophisticated analyses, policies for improving democratic engagement – particularly among young people – have the potential to become focused and evidence-driven.
And, although the data captured on election day will always remain primarily for the use of electing the public’s preferred candidate, an important secondary consideration is aggregating and publishing data that can be used more widely.
This may have been prohibitively expensive or too complex in the past but as storage and processing costs continue to fall, and the appetite for such knowledge grows, there is a compelling business case.
The benefits of this future scenario potentially include:

  • tailoring awareness and marketing campaigns to wards and other segments of the electorate most likely to respond positively and subsequently turn out to vote
  • increasing the efficiency with which European, general and local elections are held in the UK
  • improving transparency around the electoral process and stimulating increased democratic engagement
  • enhancing links to the Government’s other significant data collection activities, including the Census.

Achieving these benefits requires commitment to electoral data being collected and published in a systematic fashion at least at ward level. This would link work currently undertaken by the Electoral Commission, the ONS, Plymouth University’s Election Centre, the British Election Study and the more than 400 local authorities across the UK.”

Innovation And Inequality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Edited book on “Emerging Technologies in an Unequal World”: “Susan Cozzens, Dhanaraj Thakur, and the other co-authors ask how the benefits and costs of emerging technologies are distributed amongst different countries – some rich and some poor. Examining the case studies of five technologies across eight countries in Africa, Europe and the Americas, the book finds that the distributional dynamics around a given technology are influenced by the way entrepreneurs and others package the technology, how governments promote it and the existing local skills and capacity to use it. These factors create social and economic boundaries where the technology stops diffusing between and within countries. The book presents a series of recommendations for policy-makers and private sector actors to move emerging technologies beyond these boundaries and improve their distributional outcomes.
Offering a broad range of mature and relatively new emerging technologies from a diverse set of countries, the study will strongly appeal to policy-makers in science, technology and innovation policy. It will also benefit students and academics interested in innovation, science, technology and innovation policy, the economics of innovation, as well as the history and sociology of technology.
Full table of contents“

Democracy and open data: are the two linked?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Molly Shwartz at R-Street: “Are democracies better at practicing open government than less free societies? To find out, I analyzed the 70 countries profiled in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index and compared the rankings against the 2013 Global Democracy Rankings. As a tenet of open government in the digital age, open data practices serve as one indicator of an open government. Overall, there is a strong relationship between democracy and transparency.
Using data collected in October 2013, the top ten countries for openness include the usual bastion-of-democracy suspects: the United Kingdom, the United States, mainland Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions. Germany ranks lower than Russia and China. All three rank well above Lithuania. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Nepal all beat out Belgium. The chart (below) shows the democracy ranking of these same countries from 2008-2013 and highlights the obvious inconsistencies in the correlation between democracy and open data for many countries.
transparency
There are many reasons for such inconsistencies. The implementation of open-government efforts – for instance, opening government data sets – often can be imperfect or even misguided. Drilling down to some of the data behind the Open Data Index scores reveals that even countries that score very well, such as the United States, have room for improvement. For example, the judicial branch generally does not publish data and houses most information behind a pay-wall. The status of legislation and amendments introduced by Congress also often are not available in machine-readable form.
As internationally recognized markers of political freedom and technological innovation, open government initiatives are appealing political tools for politicians looking to gain prominence in the global arena, regardless of whether or not they possess a real commitment to democratic principles. In 2012, Russia made a public push to cultivate open government and open data projects that was enthusiastically endorsed by American institutions. In a June 2012 blog post summarizing a Russian “Open Government Ecosystem” workshop at the World Bank, one World Bank consultant professed the opinion that open government innovations “are happening all over Russia, and are starting to have genuine support from the country’s top leaders.”
Given the Russian government’s penchant for corruption, cronyism, violations of press freedom and increasing restrictions on public access to information, the idea that it was ever committed to government accountability and transparency is dubious at best. This was confirmed by Russia’s May 2013 withdrawal of its letter of intent to join the Open Government Partnership. As explained by John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation:

While Russia’s initial commitment to OGP was likely a surprising boon for internal champions of reform, its withdrawal will also serve as a demonstration of the difficulty of making a political commitment to openness there.

Which just goes to show that, while a democratic government does not guarantee open government practices, a government that regularly violates democratic principles may be an impossible environment for implementing open government.
A cursory analysis of the ever-evolving international open data landscape reveals three major takeaways:

  1. Good intentions for government transparency in democratic countries are not always effectively realized.
  2. Politicians will gladly pay lip-service to the idea of open government without backing up words with actions.
  3. The transparency we’ve established can go away quickly without vigilant oversight and enforcement.”

Crowdsourcing platform for museums

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thesis by Kræn Vesterberg Hansen: “This thesis addresses a strategic challenge at National Museum of Denmark to engage with external people, interested in contributing information about their collection of more than half a million coins and medals. This approach of getting outsiders to help with the completion of many small tasks are popularly known as crowdsourcing. This entails a need for the transcription of handwritten protocols, establishment of references between of entries in protocols and photographs of coins. These coins also references both structured and non-structured metadata.
Does a digital platformfor crowd engagement, in the museum’s context, exist? And how is such a platform integrated with the existing infrastructure of the museum? The report considers the MediaWiki, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Zooniverse’s Scribe transcription interface, and finds that the MediaWiki fits approximately 70% of the requirements.
Existing cases of successful crowdsourcing projects, national as well international is mentioned and the solution builds upon APIs of existing infrastructure components (such as the existing collection management system GenReg Mønt and the Canto Cumulus digital asset management system) in a modular and reusable architecture.
The report approaches the challenge in a three part process, greatly inspired by the software process model of “Reuse-oriented software engineering” proposed by Professor of Software engineering at the University of St Andrews, Ian Summerville.”

Digital Social Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Nesta: Digital technologies and the internet play an increasingly important role in how social innovation happens. We call this phenomenon digital social innovation (DSI) and created a network map that we’re inviting you to join.
But what do we really mean by the term DSI? Peter Baeck and Alice Casey take a closer look at the tools and platforms you use to help you start your own digital social innovation project or get involved in those that others have already begun.
As part of our DSI research project, we have been looking across Europe, and beyond, to find out more about how people are using digital technology to make a social impact. We’re inviting people involved in creating these new social innovations to map their activities over at our open data community map www.digitalsocial.eu. We hope this will give everyone working on digital social innovation more exposure and help funders and researchers to shape their work to support this exciting field.

Below, we highlight our top 11 DSI trends to watch. Although you can read about each one separately, many of the most exciting innovations come from combining several of these trends to form entirely new systems. We’d love to gather more examples, so please add those you may have to our crowdmap here.

What happened to the idea of the Great Society?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in the Financial Times: “Most of the interesting experiments in government are taking place far from Washington: in Singapore, which delivers much better public services at a fraction of the cost; in Brazil, with its “conditional” welfare payments, dependent on behaviour; in Scandinavia, where “socialist” Sweden has cut state spending from 67 per cent of GDP in 1993 to 49 per cent, introduced school vouchers and brought entitlements into balance by raising the retirement age. In the US, the dynamic bits of government are in its cities, where pragmatic mayors are experimenting with technology.
What will replace the Great Society? For Republicans, the answer looks easy: just shrink government. But this gut instinct runs up against two big problems. The assumption that government is evil means they never take it seriously (Singapore has a tiny state but pays its best civil servants $2m a year). And, in practice, American conservatives are addicted to Big Government: hence the $1.3tn of exemptions in the US tax code, most of which are in effect a welfare state for the rich.
For Democrats, the problem is even worse. Having become used to promising ever more entitlements to voters, they face a series of unedifying choices: whether to serve society at large (by making schools better) or to protect public sector unions (teachers account for many of their activists); and whether to offer ever less generous universal benefits to the entire population or to target spending on the disadvantaged.
This is where the politics of the future will be fought, on both sides of the Atlantic. It will not be as inspiring as the Great Society. It will be about slimming and modernising government, tying pensions to life expectancy and unleashing technology on the public sector.
But what the US – and Europe – needs is cool-headed pragmatism. Government is neither a monster nor a saviour but an indispensable part of a decent society that, like most organisations, works best when it focuses on doing a few things well.”

A civic-social platform for a new kind of citizen duty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dirk Jan van der Wal at OpenSource.com: “In the Netherlands a community of civil servants has developed an open source platform for collaboration within the public sector. What began as a team of four has grown to over 75,000 registered users. What happened? And, why was open source key to the project’s success?
Society is rapidly changing. One change is the tremendous development of Internet and Web-based tools. These tools have opened up new ways for collaboration and sharing information. This is a big change for our society and democracy, having an impact on our politics. How does government change along with it?
A need to change the way government organizations worked and civil servants interacted too could not be ignored. Take for example, politicians resigning because of one tweet! Meanwhile, government organizations continually face the challenge of doing more with less funds. I think this increased the need to cooperate and share knowledge; it was not longer feasible for smaller communities to maintain knowledge on their own.
The question became: How do we cooperate in an efficient manner?
In the Netherlands, we have over 500 different government organizations: departments, city councils, provinces, and so on. All these organizations have their own information and communications technology (ICT) environment. So, with a growing network and discussions around multiple themes, it became clear that one of the basic requirements for cooperating efficiently is having a government-wide platform for people to communicate and work from.
So, a small team of four started Pleio for Dutch civil servants and citizens to meet each other, have discussions, and work together on things that matter to them.
(Pleio translates loosely in English to “government square.”)
As in real life, citizens and government officials work together across various teams, groups, and networks to think about and do work on projects that matter. Using the Pleio online platform, citizens and government officials can find and then engage with the right people to collaborate on a project or problem…”