Are the Authoritarians Winning?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Review of several books by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Review of Books: “In the 1930s travelers returned from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany praising the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous.
Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence. In the 1930s, Westerners went to Russia to admire Stalin’s Moscow subway stations; today they go to China to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai, and just as in the 1930s, they return wondering why autocracies can build high-speed railroad lines seemingly overnight, while democracies can take forty years to decide they cannot even begin. The Francis Fukuyama moment—when in 1989 Westerners were told that liberal democracy was the final form toward which all political striving was directed—now looks like a quaint artifact of a vanished unipolar moment.
For the first time since the end of the cold war, the advance of democratic constitutionalism has stopped. The army has staged a coup in Thailand and it’s unclear whether the generals will allow democracy to take root in Burma. For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Côte d’Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.
In Latin America, democracy has sunk solid roots in Chile, but in Mexico and Colombia it is threatened by violence, while in Argentina it struggles to shake off the dead weight of Peronism. In Brazil, the millions who took to the streets last June to protest corruption seem to have had no impact on the cronyism in Brasília. In the Middle East, democracy has a foothold in Tunisia, but in Syria there is chaos; in Egypt, plebiscitary authoritarianism rules; and in the monarchies, absolutism is ascendant.
In Europe, the policy elites keep insisting that the remedy for their continent’s woes is “more Europe” while a third of their electorate is saying they want less of it. From Hungary to Holland, including in France and the UK, the anti-European right gains ground by opposing the European Union generally and immigration in particular. In Russia the democratic moment of the 1990s now seems as distant as the brief constitutional interlude between 1905 and 1914 under the tsar….
It is not at all apparent that “governance innovation,” a bauble Micklethwait and Wooldridge chase across three continents, watching innovators at work making government more efficient in Chicago, Sacramento, Singapore, and Stockholm, will do the trick. The problem of the liberal state is not that it lacks modern management technique, good software, or different schemes to improve the “interface” between the bureaucrats and the public. By focusing on government innovation, Micklethwait and Wooldridge assume that the problem is improving the efficiency of government. But what is required is both more radical and more traditional: a return to constitutional democracy itself, to courts and regulatory bodies that are freed from the power of money and the influence of the powerful; to legislatures that cease to be circuses and return to holding the executive branch to public account while cooperating on measures for which there is a broad consensus; to elected chief executives who understand that they are not entertainers but leaders….”
Books reviewed:

Reforming Taxation to Promote Growth and Equity

a white paper by Joseph Stiglitz
Roosevelt Institute, 28 pp., May 28, 2014; available at rooseveltinstitute.org“

Smart cities from scratch? a socio-technical perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Luís Carvalho in Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society: “This paper argues that contemporary smart city visions based on ITs (information and tele- communication technologies) configure complex socio-technical challenges that can benefit from strategic niche management to foster two key processes: technological learning and societal embedding. Moreover, it studies the extent to which those processes started to unfold in two paradigmatic cases of smart city pilots ‘from scratch’: Songdo (South Korea) and PlanIT Valley (Portugal). The rationale and potentials of the two pilots as arenas for socio-technical experimentation and global niche formation are analysed, as well as the tensions and bottlenecks involved in nurturing socially rich innovation ecosystems and in maintaining social and political support over time.”

The Good Country Index

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The idea of the Good Country Index is pretty simple: to measure what each country on earth contributes to the common good of humanity, and what it takes away. Using a wide range of data from the U.N. and other international organisations, we’ve given each country a balance-sheet to show at a glance whether it’s a net creditor to mankind, a burden on the planet, or something in between. It’s important to explain that we are not making any moral judgments about countries. What I mean by a Good Country is something much simpler: it’s a country that contributes to the greater good. The Good Country Index is one of a series of projects I’ll be launching over the coming months and years to start a global debate about what countries are really for. Do they exist purely to serve the interests of their own politicians, businesses and citizens, or are they actively working for all of humanity and the whole planet? The debate is a critical one, because if the first answer is the correct one, we’re all in deep trouble. The Good Country Index doesn’t measure what countries do at home: not because I think these things don’t matter, of course, but because there are plenty of surveys that already do that. What the Index does aim to do is to start a global discussion about how countries can balance their duty to their own citizens with their responsibility to the wider world, because this is essential for the future of humanity and the health of our planet. I hope that looking at these results will encourage you to take part in that discussion. Today as never before, we desperately need a world made of good countries. We will only get them by demanding them: from our leaders, our companies, our societies, and of course from ourselves.”

Mass Big Data Report

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Mass Tech: “The 2014 Mass Big Data Report: A Foundation for Global Leadership has been assembled and released with support from the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership.  This report represents a foundational analysis of the regional Mass Big Data ecosystem and its position as a global leader in the expanding fields of big data, open data, and analytics.
As a special project of the Governor’s Mass Big Data Initiative, this report seeks to provide an initial baseline understanding of the landscape of the Mass Big Data ecosystem and its challenges, opportunities, and strong potential for growth.
Through this work, we are pleased to report that the Mass Big Data ecosystem represents an extraordinarily fertile region for growth in data-driven enterprise and offers a unique combination of advantages on which to build the future of our data-rich world.
With strengths across the spectrum of big data industry sectors and in key supporting areas such as talent development, research, and innovation, our region is producing the people, businesses, and products that fuel the explosive growth in this expanding field.
To download the report, click on the image below:

Urban Analytics (Updated and Expanded)

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore the literature on Urban Analytics. To suggest additional readings on this or any other topic, please email biblio@thegovlab.org.

Data and its uses for Governance

Urban Analytics places better information in the hands of citizens as well as government officials to empower people to make more informed choices. Today, we are able to gather real-time information about traffic, pollution, noise, and environmental and safety conditions by culling data from a range of tools: from the low-cost sensors in mobile phones to more robust monitoring tools installed in our environment. With data collected and combined from the built, natural and human environments, we can develop more robust predictive models and use those models to make policy smarter.

With the computing power to transmit and store the data from these sensors, and the tools to translate raw data into meaningful visualizations, we can identify problems as they happen, design new strategies for city management, and target the application of scarce resources where they are most needed.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Amini, L., E. Bouillet, F. Calabrese, L. Gasparini, and O. Verscheure. “Challenges and Results in City-scale Sensing.” In IEEE Sensors, 59–61, 2011. http://bit.ly/1doodZm.

  • This paper examines “how city requirements map to research challenges in machine learning, optimization, control, visualization, and semantic analysis.”
  • The authors raises several research challenges including how to extract accurate information when the data is noisy and sparse; how to represent findings from digital pervasive technologies; and how people interact with one another and their environment.

Batty, M., K. W. Axhausen, F. Giannotti, A. Pozdnoukhov, A. Bazzani, M. Wachowicz, G. Ouzounis, and Y. Portugali. “Smart Cities of the Future.” The European Physical Journal Special Topics 214, no. 1 (November 1, 2012): 481–518. http://bit.ly/HefbjZ.

  • This paper explores the goals and research challenges involved in the development of smart cities that merge ICT with traditional infrastructures through digital technologies.
  • The authors put forth several research objectives, including: 1) to explore the notion of the city as a laboratory for innovation; 2) to develop technologies that ensure equity, fairness and realize a better quality of city life; and 3) to develop technologies that ensure informed participation and create shared knowledge for democratic city governance.
  • The paper also examines several contemporary smart city initiatives, expected paradigm shifts in the field, benefits, risks and impacts.

Budde, Paul. “Smart Cities of Tomorrow.” In Cities for Smart Environmental and Energy Futures, edited by Stamatina Th Rassia and Panos M. Pardalos, 9–20. Energy Systems. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2014. http://bit.ly/17MqPZW.

  • This paper examines the components and strategies involved in the creation of smart cities featuring “cohesive and open telecommunication and software architecture.”
  • In their study of smart cities, the authors examine smart and renewable energy; next-generation networks; smart buildings; smart transport; and smart government.
  • They conclude that for the development of smart cities, information and communication technology (ICT) is needed to build more horizontal collaborative structures, useful data must be analyzed in real time and people and/or machines must be able to make instant decisions related to social and urban life.

Cardone, G., L. Foschini, P. Bellavista, A. Corradi, C. Borcea, M. Talasila, and R. Curtmola. “Fostering Participaction in Smart Cities: a Geo-social Crowdsensing Platform.” IEEE Communications
Magazine 51, no. 6 (2013): 112–119. http://bit.ly/17iJ0vZ.

  • This article examines “how and to what extent the power of collective although imprecise intelligence can be employed in smart cities.”
  • To tackle problems of managing the crowdsensing process, this article proposes a “crowdsensing platform with three main original technical aspects: an innovative geo-social model to profile users along different variables, such as time, location, social interaction, service usage, and human activities; a matching algorithm to autonomously choose people to involve in participActions and to quantify the performance of their sensing; and a new Android-based platform to collect sensing data from smart phones, automatically or with user help, and to deliver sensing/actuation tasks to users.”

Chen, Chien-Chu. “The Trend towards ‘Smart Cities.’” International Journal of Automation and Smart Technology. June 1, 2014. http://bit.ly/1jOOaAg.

  • In this study, Chen explores the ambitions, prevalence and outcomes of a variety of smart cities, organized into five categories:
    • Transportation-focused smart cities
    • Energy-focused smart cities
    • Building-focused smart cities
    • Water-resources-focused smart cities
    • Governance-focused smart cities
  • The study finds that the “Asia Pacific region accounts for the largest share of all smart city development plans worldwide, with 51% of the global total. Smart city development plans in the Asia Pacific region tend to be energy-focused smart city initiatives, aimed at easing the pressure on energy resources that will be caused by continuing rapid urbanization in the future.”
  • North America, on the other hand is generally more geared toward energy-focused smart city development plans. “In North America, there has been a major drive to introduce smart meters and smart electric power grids, integrating the electric power sector with information and communications technology (ICT) and replacing obsolete electric power infrastructure, so as to make cities’ electric power systems more reliable (which in turn can help to boost private-sector investment, stimulate the growth of the ‘green energy’ industry, and create more job opportunities).”
  • Looking to Taiwan as an example, Chen argues that, “Cities in different parts of the world face different problems and challenges when it comes to urban development, making it necessary to utilize technology applications from different fields to solve the unique problems that each individual city has to overcome; the emphasis here is on the development of customized solutions for smart city development.”

Domingo, A., B. Bellalta, M. Palacin, M. Oliver and E. Almirall. “Public Open Sensor Data: Revolutionizing Smart Cities.” Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE 32, No. 4. Winter 2013. http://bit.ly/1iH6ekU.

  • In this article, the authors explore the “enormous amount of information collected by sensor devices” that allows for “the automation of several real-time services to improve city management by using intelligent traffic-light patterns during rush hour, reducing water consumption in parks, or efficiently routing garbage collection trucks throughout the city.”
  • They argue that, “To achieve the goal of sharing and open data to the public, some technical expertise on the part of citizens will be required. A real environment – or platform – will be needed to achieve this goal.” They go on to introduce a variety of “technical challenges and considerations involved in building an Open Sensor Data platform,” including:
    • Scalability
    • Reliability
    • Low latency
    • Standardized formats
    • Standardized connectivity
  • The authors conclude that, despite incredible advancements in urban analytics and open sensing in recent years, “Today, we can only imagine the revolution in Open Data as an introduction to a real-time world mashup with temperature, humidity, CO2 emission, transport, tourism attractions, events, water and gas consumption, politics decisions, emergencies, etc., and all of this interacting with us to help improve the future decisions we make in our public and private lives.”

Harrison, C., B. Eckman, R. Hamilton, P. Hartswick, J. Kalagnanam, J. Paraszczak, and P. Williams. “Foundations for Smarter Cities.” IBM Journal of Research and Development 54, no. 4 (2010): 1–16. http://bit.ly/1iha6CR.

  • This paper describes the information technology (IT) foundation and principles for Smarter Cities.
  • The authors introduce three foundational concepts of smarter cities: instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.
  • They also describe some of the major needs of contemporary cities, and concludes that Creating the Smarter City implies capturing and accelerating flows of information both vertically and horizontally.

Hernández-Muñoz, José M., Jesús Bernat Vercher, Luis Muñoz, José A. Galache, Mirko Presser, Luis A. Hernández Gómez, and Jan Pettersson. “Smart Cities at the Forefront of the Future Internet.” In The Future Internet, edited by John Domingue, Alex Galis, Anastasius Gavras, Theodore Zahariadis, Dave Lambert, Frances Cleary, Petros Daras, et al., 447–462. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6656. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/HhNbMX.

  • This paper explores how the “Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS), can become building blocks to progress towards a unified urban-scale ICT platform transforming a Smart City into an open innovation platform.”
  • The authors examine the SmartSantander project to argue that, “the different stakeholders involved in the smart city business is so big that many non-technical constraints must be considered (users, public administrations, vendors, etc.).”
  • The authors also discuss the need for infrastructures at the, for instance, European level for realistic large-scale experimentally-driven research.

Hoon-Lee, Jung, Marguerite Gong Hancock, Mei-Chih Hu. “Towards an effective framework for building smart cities: Lessons from Seoul and San Francisco.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Ocotober 3, 2013. http://bit.ly/1rzID5v.

  • In this study, the authors aim to “shed light on the process of building an effective smart city by integrating various practical perspectives with a consideration of smart city characteristics taken from the literature.”
  • They propose a conceptual framework based on case studies from Seoul and San Francisco built around the following dimensions:
    • Urban openness
    • Service innovation
    • Partnerships formation
    • Urban proactiveness
    • Smart city infrastructure integration
    • Smart city governance
  • The authors conclude with a summary of research findings featuring “8 stylized facts”:
    • Movement towards more interactive services engaging citizens;
    • Open data movement facilitates open innovation;
    • Diversifying service development: exploit or explore?
    • How to accelerate adoption: top-down public driven vs. bottom-up market driven partnerships;
    • Advanced intelligent technology supports new value-added smart city services;
    • Smart city services combined with robust incentive systems empower engagement;
    • Multiple device & network accessibility can create network effects for smart city services;
    • Centralized leadership implementing a comprehensive strategy boosts smart initiatives.

Kamel Boulos, Maged N. and Najeeb M. Al-Shorbaji. “On the Internet of Things, smart cities and the WHO Healthy Cities.” International Journal of Health Geographics 13, No. 10. 2014. http://bit.ly/Tkt9GA.

  • In this article, the authors give a “brief overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) for cities, offering examples of IoT-powered 21st century smart cities, including the experience of the Spanish city of Barcelona in implementing its own IoT-driven services to improve the quality of life of its people through measures that promote an eco-friendly, sustainable environment.”
  • The authors argue that one of the central needs for harnessing the power of the IoT and urban analytics is for cities to “involve and engage its stakeholders from a very early stage (city officials at all levels, as well as citizens), and to secure their support by raising awareness and educating them about smart city technologies, the associated benefits, and the likely challenges that will need to be overcome (such as privacy issues).”
  • They conclude that, “The Internet of Things is rapidly gaining a central place as key enabler of the smarter cities of today and the future. Such cities also stand better chances of becoming healthier cities.”

Keller, Sallie Ann, Steven E. Koonin, and Stephanie Shipp. “Big Data and City Living – What Can It Do for Us?” Significance 9, no. 4 (2012): 4–7. http://bit.ly/166W3NP.

  • This article provides a short introduction to Big Data, its importance, and the ways in which it is transforming cities. After an overview of the social benefits of big data in an urban context, the article examines its challenges, such as privacy concerns and institutional barriers.
  • The authors recommend that new approaches to making data available for research are needed that do not violate the privacy of entities included in the datasets. They believe that balancing privacy and accessibility issues will require new government regulations and incentives.

Kitchin, Rob. “The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, July 3, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aamZj2.

  • This paper focuses on “how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’ which enable real-time analysis of city life, new modes of technocratic urban governance, and a re-imagining of cities.”
  • The authors provide “a number of projects that seek to produce a real-time analysis of the city and provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism.”

Mostashari, A., F. Arnold, M. Maurer, and J. Wade. “Citizens as Sensors: The Cognitive City Paradigm.” In 2011 8th International Conference Expo on Emerging Technologies for a Smarter World (CEWIT), 1–5, 2011. http://bit.ly/1fYe9an.

  • This paper argues that. “implementing sensor networks are a necessary but not sufficient approach to improving urban living.”
  • The authors introduce the concept of the “Cognitive City” – a city that can not only operate more efficiently due to networked architecture, but can also learn to improve its service conditions, by planning, deciding and acting on perceived conditions.
  • Based on this conceptualization of a smart city as a cognitive city, the authors propose “an architectural process approach that allows city decision-makers and service providers to integrate cognition into urban processes.”

Oliver, M., M. Palacin, A. Domingo, and V. Valls. “Sensor Information Fueling Open Data.” In Computer Software and Applications Conference Workshops (COMPSACW), 2012 IEEE 36th Annual, 116–121, 2012. http://bit.ly/HjV4jS.

  • This paper introduces the concept of sensor networks as a key component in the smart cities framework, and shows how real-time data provided by different city network sensors enrich Open Data portals and require a new architecture to deal with massive amounts of continuously flowing information.
  • The authors’ main conclusion is that by providing a framework to build new applications and services using public static and dynamic data that promote innovation, a real-time open sensor network data platform can have several positive effects for citizens.

Perera, Charith, Arkady Zaslavsky, Peter Christen and Dimitrios Georgakopoulos. “Sensing as a service model for smart cities supported by Internet of Things.” Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 25, Issue 1. January 2014. http://bit.ly/1qJLDP9.

  • This paper looks into the “enormous pressure towards efficient city management” that has “triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in information and communication technologies to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues.”
  • The authors explore the parallel advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), which “envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities.”
  • The paper proposes the sensing as a service model “as a solution based on IoT infrastructure.” The sensing as a service model consists of four conceptual layers: “(i) sensors and sensor owners; (ii) sensor publishers (SPs); (iii) extended service providers (ESPs); and (iv) sensor data consumers. They go on to describe how this model would work in the areas of waste management, smart agriculture and environmental management.

Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good: Frameworks for Engagement. Edited by Julia Lane, Victoria Stodden, Stefan Bender, and Helen Nissenbaum; Cambridge University Press, 2014. http://bit.ly/UoGRca.

  • This book focuses on the legal, practical, and statistical approaches for maximizing the use of massive datasets while minimizing information risk.
  • “Big data” is more than a straightforward change in technology.  It poses deep challenges to our traditions of notice and consent as tools for managing privacy.  Because our new tools of data science can make it all but impossible to guarantee anonymity in the future, the authors question whether it possible to truly give informed consent, when we cannot, by definition, know what the risks are from revealing personal data either for individuals or for society as a whole.
  • Based on their experience building large data collections, authors discuss some of the best practical ways to provide access while protecting confidentiality.  What have we learned about effective engineered controls?  About effective access policies?  About designing data systems that reinforce – rather than counter – access policies?  They also explore the business, legal, and technical standards necessary for a new deal on data.
  • Since the data generating process or the data collection process is not necessarily well understood for big data streams, authors discuss what statistics can tell us about how to make greatest scientific use of this data. They also explore the shortcomings of current disclosure limitation approaches and whether we can quantify the extent of privacy loss.

Schaffers, Hans, Nicos Komninos, Marc Pallot, Brigitte Trousse, Michael Nilsson, and Alvaro Oliveira. “Smart Cities and the Future Internet: Towards Cooperation Frameworks for Open Innovation.” In The Future Internet, edited by John Domingue, Alex Galis, Anastasius Gavras, Theodore Zahariadis, Dave Lambert, Frances Cleary, Petros Daras, et al., 431–446. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6656. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/16ytKoT.

  • This paper “explores ‘smart cities’ as environments of open and user-driven innovation for experimenting and validating Future Internet-enabled services.”
  • The authors examine several smart city projects to illustrate the central role of users in defining smart services and the importance of participation. They argue that, “Two different layers of collaboration can be distinguished. The first layer is collaboration within the innovation process. The second layer concerns collaboration at the territorial level, driven by urban and regional development policies aiming at strengthening the urban innovation systems through creating effective conditions for sustainable innovation.”

Suciu, G., A. Vulpe, S. Halunga, O. Fratu, G. Todoran, and V. Suciu. “Smart Cities Built on Resilient Cloud Computing and Secure Internet of Things.” In 2013 19th International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), 513–518, 2013. http://bit.ly/16wfNgv.

  • This paper proposes “a new platform for using cloud computing capacities for provision and support of ubiquitous connectivity and real-time applications and services for smart cities’ needs.”
  • The authors present a “framework for data procured from highly distributed, heterogeneous, decentralized, real and virtual devices (sensors, actuators, smart devices) that can be automatically managed, analyzed and controlled by distributed cloud-based services.”

Townsend, Anthony. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

  • In this book, Townsend illustrates how “cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.”
  • He also considers “the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings” of the many stakeholders involved in the development of smart cities, and poses a new civics to guide these efforts.
  • He argues that smart cities are not made smart by various, soon-to-be-obsolete technologies built into its infrastructure, but how citizens use these ever-changing technologies to be “human-centered, inclusive and resilient.”

To stay current on recent writings and developments on Urban Analytics, please subscribe to the GovLab Digest.
Did we miss anything? Please submit reading recommendations to biblio@thegovlab.org or in the comments below.

Twiplomacy Study 2014

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Twiplomacy: “World leaders vie for attention, connections and followers on Twitter, that’s the latest finding of Burson-Marsteller’s Twiplomacy study 2014, an annual global study looking at the use of Twitter by heads of state and government and ministers of foreign affairs.
While some heads of state and government continue to amass large followings, foreign ministers have established a virtual diplomatic network by following each other on the social media platform.
For many diplomats Twitter has becomes a powerful channel for digital diplomacy and 21st century statecraft and not all Twitter exchanges are diplomatic, real world differences are spilling over reflected on Twitter and sometimes end up in hashtag wars.
“I am a firm believer in the power of technology and social media to communicate with people across the world,” India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote in his inaugural message on his new website. Within weeks of his election in May 2014, the @NarendraModi account has moved into the top four most followed Twitter accounts of world leaders with close to five million followers.
More than half of the world’s foreign ministers and their institutions are active on the social networking site. Twitter has become an indispensable diplomatic networking and communication tool. As Finnish Prime Minister @AlexStubb wrote in a tweet in March 2014: “Most people who criticize Twitter are often not on it. I love this place. Best source of info. Great way to stay tuned and communicate.”
As of 25 June 2014, the vast majority (83 percent) of the 193 UN member countries have a presence on Twitter. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of all heads of state and heads of government have personal accounts on the social network.
As of 24 June 2014, the vast majority (83 percent) of the 193 UN member countries have a presence on Twitter. More than two-thirds (68 percent) of all heads of state and heads of government have personal accounts on the social network.

Most Followed World Leaders

Since his election in late May 2014, India’s new Prime Minister @NarendraModi has skyrocketed into fourth place, surpassing the the @WhiteHouse on 25 June 2014 and dropping Turkey’s President Abdullah Gül (@cbabdullahgul) and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (@RT_Erdogan) into sixth and seventh place with more than 4 million followers each.
Twiplomacy - Top 50 Most Followed
Modi still has a ways to go to best U.S. President @BarackObama, who tops the world-leader list with a colossal 43.7 million followers, with Pope Francis @Pontifex) with 14 million followers on his nine different language accounts and Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono @SBYudhoyono, who has more than five million followers and surpassed President Obama’s official administration account @WhiteHouse on 13 February 2014.
In Latin America Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the President of Argentina @CFKArgentina is slightly ahead of Colombia’s President @JuanManSantos with 2,894,864 and 2,885,752 followers respectively. Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto @EPN, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff @dilmabr and Venezuela’s @NicolasMaduro complete the Latin American top five, with more than two million followers each.
Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta @UKenyatta is Africa’s most followed president with 457,307 followers, ahead of Rwanda’s @PaulKagame (407,515 followers) and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma (@SAPresident) (325,876 followers).
Turkey’s @Ahmet_Davutoglu is the most followed foreign minister with 1,511,772 followers, ahead of India’s @SushmaSwaraj (1,274,704 followers) and the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates @ABZayed (1,201,364 followers)…”

15 Ways to bring Civic Innovation to your City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Moore at AcuitasGov: “In my previous blog post I wrote about a desire to see our Governments transform to be part of the  21st century.  I saw a recent reference to how governments across Canada have lost their global leadership, how government in Canada at all levels is providing analog services to a digital society.  I couldn’t agree more.  I have been thinking lately about some practical ways that Mayors and City Managers could innovate in their communities.  I realize that there are a number of municipal elections happening this fall across Canada, a time when leadership changes and new ideas emerge.  So this blog is also for Mayoral candidates who have a sense that technology and innovation have a role to play in their city and in their administration.
I thought I would identify 15 initiatives that cities could pursue as part of their Civic Innovation Strategy.   For the last 50 years technology in local government in Canada has been viewed as an expense, as a necessary evil, not always understood by elected officials and senior administrators.  Information and Technology is part of every aspect of a city, it is critical in delivering services.  It is time to not just think of this as an expense but as an investment, as a way to innovate, reduce costs, enhance citizen service delivery and transform government operations.
Here are my top 15 ways to bring Civic Innovation to your city:
1. Build 21st Century Digital Infrastructure like the Chattanooga Gig City Project.
2. Build WiFi networks like the City of Edmonton on your own and in partnership with others.
3. Provide technology and internet to children and youth in need like the City of Toronto.
4. Connect to a national Education and Research network like Cybera in Alberta and CANARIE.
5. Create a Mayors Task-force on Innovation and Technology leveraging your city’s resources.
6. Run a hackathon or two or three like the City of Glasgow or maybe host a hacking health event like the City of Vancouver.
7. Launch a Startup incubator like Startup Edmonton or take it to the next level and create a civic lab like the City of Barcelona.
8. Develop an Open Government Strategy, I like to the Open City Strategy from Edmonton.
9. If Open Government is too much then just start with Open Data, Edmonton has one of the best.
10. Build a Citizen Dashboard to showcase your cities services and commitment to the public.
11. Put your Crime data online like the Edmonton Police Service.
12. Consider a pilot project with sensor technology for parking like the City of Nice or for  waste management like the City of Barcelona.
13. Embrace Car2Go, Modo and UBER as ways to move people in your city.
14. Consider turning your IT department into the Innovation and Technology Department like they did at the City of Chicago.
15. Partner with other near by local governments to create a shared Innovation and Technology agency.
Now more than ever before cities need to find ways to innovate, to transform and to create a foundation that is sustainable.  Now is the time for both courage and innovations in government.  What is your city doing to move into the 21st Century?”

Towards a comparative science of cities: using mobile traffic records in New York, London and Hong Kong

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book chapter by S. Grauwin, S. Sobolevsky, S. Moritz, I. Gódor, C. Ratti, to be published in “Computational Approaches for Urban Environments” (Springer Ed.), October 2014: “This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of calls, SMS, and data transfers resolved both in time and space, we confirm the connection between temporal activity profile and land usage in three global cities: New York, London and Hong Kong. By comparing whole cities typical patterns, we provide insights on how cultural, technological and economical factors shape human dynamics. At a more local scale, we use clustering analysis to identify locations with similar patterns within a city. Our research reveals a universal structure of cities, with core financial centers all sharing similar activity patterns and commercial or residential areas with more city-specific patterns. These findings hint that as the economy becomes more global, common patterns emerge in business areas of different cities across the globe, while the impact of local conditions still remains recognizable on the level of routine people activity.”

Finding Mr. Smith or why anti-corruption needs open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Martin Tisne: “Anti-corruption groups have been rightly advocating for the release of information on the beneficial or real owners of companies and trust. The idea is to crack down on tax evasion and corruption by identifying the actual individuals hiding behind several layers of shell companies.
But knowing that “Mr. Smith” is the owner of company X is of no interest, unless you know who Mr. Smith is.
The real interest lies in figuring out that Mr. Smith is linked to company Y, that has been illegally exporting timber from country Z, and that Mr. Smith is the son-in-law of the mining minister of yet another country, who has been accused of embezzling mining industry revenues.
For that, investigative journalists, prosecution authorities, civil society groups like Global Witness and Transparency International will need access not just to public registries of beneficial ownership but also contract data, political exposed persons databases (“PEPs” databases), project by project extractive industry data, and trade export/import data.
Unless those datasets are accessible, comparable, linked, it won’t be possible. We are talking about millions of datasets – no problem for computers to crunch, but impossible to go through manually.
This is what is different in the anti-corruption landscape today, compared to 10 years ago. Technology makes it possible. Don’t get me wrong – there are still huge, thorny political obstacles to getting the data even publicly available in the first place. But unless it is open data, I fear those battles will have been in vain.
That’s why we need open data as a topic on the G20 anti-corruption working group.”

Index: The Networked Public

Curated on Posted on by Shruti Sannon

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on the networked public and was originally published in 2014.

Global Overview

  • The proportion of global population who use the Internet in 2013: 38.8%, up 3 percentage points from 2012
  • Increase in average global broadband speeds from 2012 to 2013: 17%
  • Percent of internet users surveyed globally that access the internet at least once a day in 2012: 96
  • Hours spent online in 2012 each month across the globe: 35 billion
  • Country with the highest online population, as a percent of total population in 2012: United Kingdom (85%)
  • Country with the lowest online population, as a percent of total population in 2012: India (8%)
  • Trend with the highest growth rate in 2012: Location-based services (27%)
  • Years to reach 50 million users: telephone (75), radio (38), TV (13), internet (4)

Growth Rates in 2014

  • Rate at which the total number of Internet users is growing: less than 10% a year
  • Worldwide annual smartphone growth: 20%
  • Tablet growth: 52%
  • Mobile phone growth: 81%
  • Percentage of all mobile users who are now smartphone users: 30%
  • Amount of all web usage in 2013 accounted for by mobile: 14%
  • Amount of all web usage in 2014 accounted for by mobile: 25%
  • Percentage of money spent on mobile used for app purchases: 68%
  • Growth of BitCoin wallet between 2013 and 2014: 8 times increase
  • Number of listings on AirBnB in 2014: 550k, 83% growth year on year
  • How many buyers are on Alibaba in 2014: 231MM buyers, 44% growth year on year

Social Media

  • Number of Whatsapp messages on average sent per day: 50 billion
  • Number sent per day on Snapchat: 1.2 billion
  • How many restaurants are registered on GrubHub in 2014: 29,000
  • Amount the sale of digital songs fell in 2013: 6%
  • How much song streaming grew in 2013: 32%
  • Number of photos uploaded and shared every day on Flickr, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp combined in 2014: 1.8 billion
  • How many online adults in the U.S. use a social networking site of some kind: 73%
  • Those who use multiple social networking sites: 42%
  • Dominant social networking platform: Facebook, with 71% of online adults
  • Number of Facebook users in 2004, its founding year: 1 million
  • Number of monthly active users on Facebook in September 2013: 1.19 billion, an 18% increase year-over-year
  • How many Facebook users log in to the site daily: 63%
  • Instagram users who log into the service daily: 57%
  • Twitter users who are daily visitors: 46%
  • Number of photos uploaded to Facebook every minute: over 243,000, up 16% from 2012
  • How much of the global internet population is actively using Twitter every month: 21%
  • Number of tweets per minute: 350,000, up 250% from 2012
  • Fastest growing demographic on Twitter: 55-64 year age bracket, up 79% from 2012
  • Fastest growing demographic on Facebook: 45-54 year age bracket, up 46% from 2012
  • How many LinkedIn accounts are created every minute: 120, up 20% from 2012
  • The number of Google searches in 2013: 3.5 million, up 75% from 2012
  • Percent of internet users surveyed globally that use social media in 2012: 90
  • Percent of internet users surveyed globally that use social media daily: 60
  • Time spent social networking, the most popular online activity: 22%, followed by searches (21%), reading content (20%), and emails/communication (19%)
  • The average age at which a child acquires an online presence through their parents in 10 mostly Western countries: six months
  • Number of children in those countries who have a digital footprint by age 2: 81%
  • How many new American marriages between 2005-2012 began by meeting online, according to a nationally representative study: more than one-third 
  • How many of the world’s 505 leaders are on Twitter: 3/4
  • Combined Twitter followers: of 505 world leaders: 106 million
  • Combined Twitter followers of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga: 122 million
  • How many times all Wikipedias are viewed per month: nearly 22 billion times
  • How many hits per second: more than 8,000 
  • English Wikipedia’s share of total page views: 47%
  • Number of articles in the English Wikipedia in December 2013: over 4,395,320 
  • Platform that reaches more U.S. adults between ages 18-34 than any cable network: YouTube
  • Number of unique users who visit YouTube each month: more than 1 billion
  • How many hours of video are watched on YouTube each month: over 6 billion, 50% more than 2012
  • Proportion of YouTube traffic that comes from outside the U.S.: 80%
  • Most common activity online, based on an analysis of over 10 million web users: social media
  • People on Twitter who recommend products in their tweets: 53%
  • People who trust online recommendations from people they know: 90%

Mobile and the Internet of Things

  • Number of global smartphone users in 2013: 1.5 billion
  • Number of global mobile phone users in 2013: over 5 billion
  • Percent of U.S. adults that have a cell phone in 2013: 91
  • Number of which are a smartphone: almost two thirds
  • Mobile Facebook users in March 2013: 751 million, 54% increase since 2012
  • Growth rate of global mobile traffic as a percentage of global internet traffic as of May 2013: 15%, up from .9% in 2009
  • How many smartphone owners ages 18–44 “keep their phone with them for all but two hours of their waking day”: 79%
  • Those who reach for their smartphone immediately upon waking up: 62%
  • Those who couldn’t recall a time their phone wasn’t within reach or in the same room: 1 in 4
  • Facebook users who access the service via a mobile device: 73.44%
  • Those who are “mobile only”: 189 million
  • Amount of YouTube’s global watch time that is on mobile devices: almost 40%
  • Number of objects connected globally in the “internet of things” in 2012: 8.7 billion
  • Number of connected objects so far in 2013: over 10 billion
  • Years from tablet introduction for tables to surpass desktop PC and notebook shipments: less than 3 (over 55 million global units shipped in 2013, vs. 45 million notebooks and 35 million desktop PCs)
  • Number of wearable devices estimated to have been shipped worldwide in 2011: 14 million
  • Projected number of wearable devices in 2016: between 39-171 million
  • How much of the wearable technology market is in the healthcare and medical sector in 2012: 35.1%
  • How many devices in the wearable tech market are fitness or activity trackers: 61%
  • The value of the global wearable technology market in 2012: $750 million
  • The forecasted value of the market in 2018: $5.8 billion
  • How many Americans are aware of wearable tech devices in 2013: 52%
  • Devices that have the highest level of awareness: wearable fitness trackers,
  • Level of awareness for wearable fitness trackers amongst American consumers: 1 in 3 consumers
  • Value of digital fitness category in 2013: $330 million
  • How many American consumers surveyed are aware of smart glasses: 29%
  • Smart watch awareness amongst those surveyed: 36%

Access

  • How much of the developed world has mobile broadband subscriptions in 2013: 3/4
  • How much of the developing world has broadband subscription in 2013: 1/5
  • Percent of U.S. adults that had a laptop in 2012: 57
  • How many American adults did not use the internet at home, at work, or via mobile device in 2013: one in five
  • Amount President Obama initiated spending in 2009 in an effort to expand access: $7 billion
  • Number of Americans potentially shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education, among other opportunities due to digital inequality: 60 million
  • American adults with a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 7 out of 10
  • Americans aged 18-29 vs. 65+ with a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 80% vs. 43
  • American adults with college education (or more) vs. adults with no high school diploma that have a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 89% vs. 37%
  • Percent of U.S. adults with college education (or more) that use the internet in 2011: 94
  • Those with no high school diploma that used the internet in 2011: 43
  • Percent of white American households that used the internet in 2013: 67
  • Black American households that used the internet in 2013: 57
  • States with lowest internet use rates in 2013: Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas
  • How many American households have only wireless telephones as of the second half of 2012: nearly two in five
  • States with the highest prevalence of wireless-only adults according to predictive modeling estimates: Idaho (52.3%), Mississippi (49.4%), Arkansas (49%)
  • Those with the lowest prevalence of wireless-only adults: New Jersey (19.4%), Connecticut (20.6%), Delaware (23.3%) and New York (23.5%)

Sources