Findings from the emerging field of Transparency Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tiago Peixoto: “HEC Paris has just hosted the 3rd Global Conference on Transparency Research, and they have made the list of accepted papers available. …
As one goes through the papers,  it is clear that unlike most of the open government space, when it comes to research, transparency is treated less as a matter of technology and formats and more as a matter of social and political institutions.  And that is a good thing.”
This year’s papers are listed below:

Open Government and Its Constraints

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog entry by Panthea Lee: “Open government” is everywhere. Search the term and you’ll find OpenGovernment.org, OpenTheGovernment.org, Open Government Initiative, Open Gov Hub and the Open Gov Foundation; you’ll find open government initiatives for New York City, Boston, Kansas, Virginia, Tennessee and the list goes on; you’ll find dedicated open government plans for the White House, State Department, USAID, Treasury, Justice Department, Commerce, Energy and just about every other major federal agency. Even the departments of Defense and Homeland Security are in on open government.
And that’s just in the United States.
There is Open Government Africa, Open Government in the EU and Open Government Data. The World Bank has an Open Government Data Toolkit and recently announced a three-year initiative to help developing countries leverage open data. And this week, over 1,000 delegates from over 60 countries are in London for the annual meeting of the Open Government Partnership, which has grown from 8 to 60 member states in just two years….
Many of us have no consensus or clarity on just what exactly “open government” is, what we hope to achieve from it or how to measure our progress. Too often, our initiatives are designed through the narrow lenses of our own biases and without a concrete understanding of those they are intended for — both those in and out of government.
If we hope to realize the promise of more open governments, let’s be clear about the barriers we face so that we may start to overcome them.
Barrier 1: “Open Gov” is…?
Open government is… not new, for starters….
Barrier 2: Open Gov is Not Inclusive
The central irony of open government is that it’s often not “open” at all….
Barrier 3: Open Gov Lacks Empathy
Open government practitioners love to speak of “the citizen” and “the government.” But who exactly are these people? Too often, we don’t really know. We are builders, makers and creators with insufficient understanding of whom we are building, making and creating for…On the flip side, who do we mean by “the government?” And why, gosh darn it, is it so slow to innovate? Simply put, “the government” is comprised of individual people working in environments that are not conducive to innovation….
For open government to realize its potential, we must overcome these barriers.”

Selected Readings on Linked Data and the Semantic Web

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of linked data and the semantic web was originally published in 2013.

Linked Data and the Semantic Web movement are seeking to make our growing body of digital knowledge and information more interconnected, searchable, machine-readable and useful. First introduced by the W3C, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Christian Bizer and Tom Heath define Linked Data as “data published to the Web in such a way that it is machine-readable, its meaning is explicitly defined, it is linked to other external data sets, and can in turn be linked to from external datasets.” In other words, Linked Data and the Semantic Web seek to do for data what the Web did for documents. Additionally, the evolving capability of linking together different forms of data is fueling the potentially transformative rise of social machines – “processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration.”

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Alani, Harith, David Dupplaw, John Sheridan, Kieron O’Hara, John Darlington, Nigel Shadbolt, and Carol Tullo. “Unlocking the Potential of Public Sector Information with Semantic Web Technology,” 2007. http://bit.ly/17fMbCt.

  • This paper explores the potential of using Semantic Web technology to increase the value of public sector information already in existence.
  • The authors note that, while “[g]overnments often hold very rich data and whilst much of this information is published and available for re-use by others, it is often trapped by poor data structures, locked up in legacy data formats or in fragmented databases. One of the great benefits that Semantic Web (SW) technology offers is facilitating the large scale integration and sharing of distributed data sources.”
  • They also argue that Linked Data and the Semantic Web are growing in use and visibility in other sectors, but government has been slower to adapt: “The adoption of Semantic Web technology to allow for more efficient use of data in order to add value is becoming more common where efficiency and value-added are important parameters, for example in business and science. However, in the field of government there are other parameters to be taken into account (e.g. confidentiality), and the cost-benefit analysis is more complex.” In spite of that complexity, the authors’ work “was intended to show that SW technology could be valuable in the governmental context.”

Berners-Lee, Tim, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. “The Semantic Web.” Scientific American 284, no. 5 (2001): 28–37. http://bit.ly/Hhp9AZ.

  • In this article, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila introduce the Semantic Web, “a new form of Web content that is meaningful to computers [and] will unleash a revolution of new possibilities.”
  • The authors argue that the evolution of linked data and the Semantic Web “lets anyone express new concepts that they invent with minimal effort. Its unifying logical language will enable these concepts to be progressively linked into a universal Web. This structure will open up the knowledge and workings of humankind to meaningful analysis by software agents, providing a new class of tools by which we can live, work and learn together.”

Bizer, Christian, Tom Heath, and Tim Berners-Lee. “Linked Data – The Story So Far.” International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS) 5, no. 3 (2009): 1–22. http://bit.ly/HedpPO.

  • In this paper, the authors take stock of Linked Data’s challenges, potential and successes close to a decade after its introduction. They build their argument for increasingly linked data by referring to the incredible value creation of the Web: “Despite the inarguable benefits the Web provides, until recently the same principles that enabled the Web of documents to flourish have not been applied to data.”
  • The authors expect that “Linked Data will enable a significant evolutionary step in leading the Web to its full potential” if a number of research challenges can be adequately addressed, both technical, like interaction paradigms and data fusion; and non-technical, like licensing, quality and privacy.

Ding, Li, Dominic Difranzo, Sarah Magidson, Deborah L. Mcguinness, and Jim Hendler. Data-Gov Wiki: Towards Linked Government Data, n.d. http://bit.ly/1h3ATHz.

  • In this paper, the authors “investigate the role of Semantic Web technologies in converting, enhancing and using linked government data” in the context of Data-gov Wiki, a project that attempts to integrate datasets found at Data.gov into the Linking Open Data (LOD) cloud.
  • The paper features discussion and “practical strategies” based on four key issue areas: Making Government Data Linkable, Linking Government Data, Supporting the Use of Linked Government Data and Preserving Knowledge Provenance.

Kalampokis, Evangelos, Michael Hausenblas, and Konstantinos Tarabanis. “Combining Social and Government Open Data for Participatory Decision-Making.” In Electronic Participation, edited by Efthimios Tambouris, Ann Macintosh, and Hans de Bruijn, 36–47. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6847. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/17hsj4a.

  • This paper presents a proposed data architecture for “supporting participatory decision-making based on the integration and analysis of social and government data.” The authors believe that their approach will “(i) allow decision makers to understand and predict public opinion and reaction about specific decisions; and (ii) enable citizens to inadvertently contribute in decision-making.”
  • The proposed approach, “based on the use of the linked data paradigm,” draws on subjective social data and objective government data in two phases: Data Collection and Filtering and Data Analysis. “The aim of the former phase is to narrow social data based on criteria such as the topic of the decision and the target group that is affected by the decision. The aim of the latter phase is to predict public opinion and reactions using independent variables related to both subjective social and objective government data.”

Rady, Kaiser. Publishing the Public Sector Legal Information in the Era of the Semantic Web. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2012. http://bit.ly/17fMiOp.

  • Following an EU directive calling for the release of public sector information by member states, this study examines the “uniqueness” of creating and publishing primary legal source documents on the web and highlights “the most recent technological strategy used to structure, link and publish data online (the Semantic Web).”
  • Rady argues for public sector legal information to be published as “open-linked-data in line with the new approach for the web.” He believes that if data is created and published in this form, “the data will be more independent from devices and applications and could be considered as a component of [a] big information system. That because, it will be well-structured, classified and has the ability to be used and utilized in various combinations to satisfy specific user requirements.”

Shadbolt, Nigel, Kieron O’Hara, Tim Berners-Lee, Nicholas Gibbins, Hugh Glaser, Wendy Hall, and m.c. schraefel. “Linked Open Government Data: Lessons from Data.gov.uk.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 27, no. 3 (May 2012): 16–24. http://bit.ly/1cgdH6R.

  • In this paper, the authors view Open Government Data (OGD) as an “opportunity and a challenge for the LDW [Linked Data Web]. The opportunity is to grow by linking with PSI [Public Sector Information] – real-world, useful information with good provenance. The challenge is to manage the sudden influx of heterogeneous data, often with minimal semantics and structure, tailored to highly specific task contexts.
  • As the linking of OGD continues, the authors argue that, “Releasing OGD is not solely a technical problem, although it presents technical challenges. OGD is not a rigid government IT specification, but it demands productive dialogue between data providers, users, and developers. We should expect a ‘perpetual beta,’ in which best practice, technical development, innovative use of data, and citizen-centric politics combine to drive data-release programs.”
  • Despite challenges, the authors believe that, “Integrating OGD onto the LDW will vastly increase the scope and richness of the LDW. A reciprocal benefit is that the LDW will provide additional resources and context to enrich OGD. Here, we see the network effect in action, with resources mutually adding value to one another.”

Vitale, Michael, Anni Rowland-Campbell, Valentina Cardo, and Peter Thompson. “The Implications of Government as a ‘Social Machine’ for Making and Implementing Market-based Policy.” Intersticia, September 2013. http://bit.ly/HhMzqD.

  • This report from the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) explores the concept of government as a social machine. The authors draw on the definition of a social machine proposed by Sir Nigel Shadbolt et al. – a system where “human and computational intelligence coalesce in order to achieve a given purpose” – to describe a “new approach to the relationship between citizens and government, facilitated by technological systems which are increasingly becoming intuitive, intelligent and ‘social.'”
  • The authors argue that beyond providing more and varied data to government, the evolving concept of government as a social machine as the potential to alter power dynamics, address the growing lack of trust in public institutions and facilitate greater public involvement in policy-making.

The GovLab Academy: A Community and Platform for Learning and Teaching Governance Innovations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Today the Governance Lab (The GovLab) launches The GovLab Academy at the Open Government Partnership Annual Meeting in London.
Available at www.thegovlabacademy.org, the Academy is a free online community for those wanting to teach and learn how to solve public problems and improve lives using innovations in governance. A partnership between The GovLab  at New York University and MIT Media Lab’s Online Learning Initiative, the site launching today offers curated videos, podcasts, readings and activities designed to enable the purpose driven learner to deepen his or her practical knowledge at her own pace.
The GovLab Academy is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “The GovLab Academy addresses a growing need among policy makers at all levels – city, federal and global – to leverage advances in technology to govern differently,” says Carol Coletta, Vice President of Community and National Initiatives at the Knight Foundation.  “By connecting the latest technological innovations to a community of willing mentors, the Academy has the potential to catalyze more experimentation in a sector that badly needs it.”
Initial topics include using data to improve policymaking and cover the role of big data, urban analytics, smart disclosure and open data in governance. A second track focuses on online engagement and includes practical strategies for using crowdsourcing to solicit ideas, organize distributed work and gather data.  The site features both curated content drawn from a variety of sources and original interviews with innovators from government, civil society, the tech industry, the arts and academia talking about their work around the world implementing innovations in practice, what worked and what didn’t, to improve real people’s lives.
Beth Noveck, Founder and Director of The GovLab, describes its mission: “The Academy is an experiment in peer production where every teacher is a learner and every learner a teacher. Consistent with The GovLab’s commitment to measuring what works, we want to measure our success by the people contributing as well as consuming content. We invite everyone with ideas, stories, insights and practical wisdom to contribute to what we hope will be a thriving and diverse community for social change”.”

New U.S. Open Government National Action Plan

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House Fact Sheet: “In September 2011, President Obama joined the leaders of seven other nations in announcing the launch of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) – a global effort to encourage transparent, effective, and accountable governance.
Two years later, OGP has grown to 60 countries that have made more than 1000 commitments to improve the governance of more than two billion people around the globe.  OGP is now a global community of government reformers, civil society leaders, and business innovators working together to develop and implement ambitious open government reforms and advance good governance…
Today at the OGP summit in London, the United States announced a new U.S. Open Government National Action Plan that includes six ambitious new commitments that will advance these efforts even further.  Those commitments include expanding open data, modernizing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), increasing fiscal transparency, increasing corporate transparency, advancing citizen engagement and empowerment, and more effectively managing public resources.
Expand Open Data:  Open Data fuels innovation that grows the economy and advances government transparency and accountability.  Government data has been used by journalists to uncover variations in hospital billings, by citizens to learn more about the social services provided by charities in their communities, and by entrepreneurs building new software tools to help farmers plan and manage their crops.  Building upon the successful implementation of open data commitments in the first U.S. National Action Plan, the new Plan will include commitments to make government data more accessible and useful for the public, such as reforming how Federal agencies manage government data as a strategic asset, launching a new version of Data.gov, and expanding agriculture and nutrition data to help farmers and communities.
Modernize the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):  The FOIA encourages accountability through transparency and represents a profound national commitment to open government principles.  Improving FOIA administration is one of the most effective ways to make the U.S. Government more open and accountable.  Today, the United States announced a series of commitments to further modernize FOIA processes, including launching a consolidated online FOIA service to improve customers’ experience and making training resources available to FOIA professionals and other Federal employees.
Increase Fiscal Transparency:   The Administration will further increase the transparency of where Federal tax dollars are spent by making federal spending data more easily available on USASpending.gov; facilitating the publication of currently unavailable procurement contract information; and enabling Americans to more easily identify who is receiving tax dollars, where those entities or individuals are located, and how much they receive.
Increase Corporate Transparency:  Preventing criminal organizations from concealing the true ownership and control of businesses they operate is a critical element in safeguarding U.S. and international financial markets, addressing tax avoidance, and combatting corruption in the United States and abroad.  Today we committed to take further steps to enhance transparency of legal entities formed in the United States.
Advance Citizen Engagement and Empowerment:  OGP was founded on the principle that an active and robust civil society is critical to open and accountable governance.  In the next year, the Administration will intensify its efforts to roll back and prevent new restrictions on civil society around the world in partnership with other governments, multilateral institutions, the philanthropy community, the private sector, and civil society.  This effort will focus on improving the legal and regulatory framework for civil society, promoting best practices for government-civil society collaboration, and conceiving of new and innovative ways to support civil society globally.
More Effectively Manage Public Resources:   Two years ago, the Administration committed to ensuring that American taxpayers receive every dollar due for the extraction of the nation’s natural resources by committing to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).  We continue to work toward achieving full EITI compliance in 2016.  Additionally, the U.S. Government will disclose revenues on geothermal and renewable energy and discuss future disclosure of timber revenues.
For more information on OGP, please visit www.opengovpartnership.org or follow @opengovpart on Twitter.”
See also White House Plans a Single FOIA Portal Across Government

Open Data Barometer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release by the Open Data Research Network: “New research by World Wide Web Foundation and Open Data Institute shows that 55% of countries surveyed have open data initiatives in place, yet less than 10% of key government datasets across the world are truly open to the public…the Open Data Barometer. This 77-country study, which considers the interlinked areas of policy, implementation and impact, ranks the UK at number one. The USA, Sweden, New Zealand, Denmark and Norway (tied) make up the rest of the top five. Kenya is ranked as the most advanced developing country, outperforming richer countries such as Ireland, Italy and Belgium in global comparisons.

The Barometer reveals that:

  • 55% of countries surveyed have formal open data policies in place.

  • Valuable but potentially controversial datasets – such as company registers and land registers – are among the least likely to be openly released. It is unclear whether this stems from reluctance to drop lucrative access charges, or from desire to keep a lid on politically sensitive information, or both. However, the net effect is to severely limit the accountability benefits of open data.

  • When they are released, government datasets are often issued in inaccessible formats. Across the nations surveyed, fewer that than 1 in 10 key datasets that could be used to hold governments to account, stimulate enterprise, and promote better social policy, are available and truly open for re-use.

The research also makes the case that:

  • Efforts should be made to empower civil society, entrepreneurs and members of the public to use government data made available, rather than simply publishing data online.

  • Business activity and innovation can be boosted by strong open data policies.  In Denmark, for example, free of charge access to address data has had a significant economic impact. In 2010, an evaluation recorded an estimated financial benefit to society of EUR 62 million against costs of EUR 2million.”

Seizing the data opportunity: UK data capability strategy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New UK Policy Paper by the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills: “In the information economy, the ability to handle and analyse data is essential for the UK’s competitive advantage and business transformation. The volume, velocity and variety of data being created and analysed globally is rising every day, and using data intelligently has the potential to transform public sector organisations, drive research and development, and enable market-changing products and services. The social and economic potential is significant, and the UK is well placed to compete in the global market for data analytics. Through this strategy, the government aims to place the UK at the forefront of this process by building our capability to exploit data for the benefit of citizens, business, and academia. This is our action plan for making the UK a data success story.

Working in partnership with business and academia, the government has developed a shared vision for the UK’s data capability, with the aim of making the UK a worldleader in extracting insight and value from data for the benefit of citizens and consumers, business and academia, the public and the private sectors. The Information Economy Council and the E-infrastructure Leadership Council will oversee delivery of the actions in this strategy, and continue to develop additional
plans to support this vision.
Data capability: This strategy focuses on three overarching aspects to data capability. The first is human capital – a skilled workforce, and data-confident citizens. The second covers the tools and infrastructure which are available to store and analyse data. The third is data itself as an enabler – data capability is underpinned by the ability of consumers, businesses and academia to access and share data appropriately…”

 

Crowdsourcing the sounds of cities’ quiet spots

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Finding a place in the city to collect your thoughts and enjoy some quietude is a rare thing. While startups such as Breather are set to open up private spaces for work and relaxation in several US cities, a new project called Stereopublic is hoping to map the ones already there, recruiting citizens to collect the sounds of those spaces.
Participants can download the free iOS app created by design studio Freerange Future, which enables them to become an ‘earwitness’. When they discover a tranquil spot in their city, they can use their GPS co-ordinates to record its exact location on the Stereopublic map, as well as record a 30-second sound clip and take a photo to give others a better idea of what it’s like. The team then works with sound experts to create quiet tours of each participating city, which currently includes Adelaide, London, LA, New York City, Singapore and 26 other global cities. The video below offers some more information about the project:

 

Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special Report on Big Data by Volta – A newsletter on Science, Technology and Society in Europe:  “Locating crime spots, or the next outbreak of a contagious disease, Big Data promises benefits for society as well as business. But more means messier. Do policy-makers know how to use this scale of data-driven decision-making in an effective way for their citizens and ensure their privacy?90% of the world’s data have been created in the last two years. Every minute, more than 100 million new emails are created, 72 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube and Google processes more than 2 million searches. Nowadays, almost everyone walks around with a small computer in their pocket, uses the internet on a daily basis and shares photos and information with their friends, family and networks. The digital exhaust we leave behind every day contributes to an enormous amount of data produced, and at the same time leaves electronic traces that contain a great deal of personal information….
Until recently, traditional technology and analysis techniques have not been able to handle this quantity and type of data. But recent technological developments have enabled us to collect, store and process data in new ways. There seems to be no limitations, either to the volume of data or technology for storing and analyzing them. Big Data can map a driver’s sitting position to identify a car thief, it can use Google searches to predict outbreaks of the H1N1 flu virus, it can data-mine Twitter to predict the price of rice or use mobile phone top-ups to describe unemployment in Asia.
The word ‘data’ means ‘given’ in Latin. It commonly refers to a description of something that can be recorded and analyzed. While there is no clear definition of the concept of ‘Big Data’, it usually refers to the processing of huge amounts and new types of data that have not been possible with traditional tools.

‘The new development is not necessarily that there are so much more data. It’s rather that data is available to us in a new way.’

The notion of Big Data is kind of misleading, argues Robindra Prabhu, a project manager at the Norwegian Board of Technology. “The new development is not necessarily that there are so much more data. It’s rather that data is available to us in a new way. The digitalization of society gives us access to both ‘traditional’, structured data – like the content of a database or register – and unstructured data, for example the content in a text, pictures and videos. Information designed to be read by humans is now also readable by machines. And this development makes a whole new world of  data gathering and analysis available. Big Data is exciting not just because of the amount and variety of data out there, but that we can process data about so much more than before.”

Smart Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

FutureEverything: “This publication aims to shift the debate on the future of cities towards the central place of citizens, and of decentralised, open urban infrastructures. It provides a global perspective on how cities can create the policies, structures and tools to engender a more innovative and participatory society. The publication contains a series of 23 short essays representing some of the key voices developing an emerging discourse around Smart Citizens.  Contributors include:

  • Dan Hill, Smart Citizens pioneer and CEO of communications research centre and transdisciplinary studio Fabrica on why Smart Citizens Make Smart Cities.
  • Anthony Townsend, urban planner, forecaster and author of Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia on the tensions between place-making and city-making on the role of mobile technologies in changing the way that people interact with their surroundings.
  • Paul Maltby, Director of the Government Innovation Group and of the Open Data and Transparency in the UK Cabinet Office on how government can support a smarter society.
  • Aditya Dev Sood, Founder and CEO of the Center for Knowledge Societies, presents polarised hypothetical futures for India in 2025 that argues for the use of technology to bridge gaps in social inequality.
  • Adam Greenfield, New York City-based writer and urbanist, on Recuperating the Smart City.

Editors: Drew Hemment, Anthony Townsend
Download Here.“