Global

Creating Value through Open Data

Curated on December 3, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Capgemini Consulting, the global strategy and transformation consulting arm of the Capgemini Group, today published two new reports on the state of play of Open Data in Europe, to mark the launch of the European Open Data Portal. The first report addresses “Open Data Maturity in Europe 2015: Insights into the European state of play” and the second focuses on “Creating Value through Open Data: Study on the Impact of Re-use of Public Data Resources.” The countries covered by these assessments include the EU28 countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland – commonly referred to as the EU28+ countries. The reports were requested by the European Commission within the framework of the Connecting Europe Facility program, supporting the deployment of European Open Data infrastructure.

Open Data refers to the information collected, produced or paid for by public bodies and can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone.. For the period 2016-2020, the direct market size for Open Data is estimated at EUR 325 billion for Europe. Capgemini’s study “Creating Value through Open Data” illustrates how Open Data can create economic value in multiple ways including increased market transactions, job creation from producing services and products based on Open Data, to cost savings and efficiency gains. For instance, effective use of Open Data could help save 629 million hours of unnecessary waiting time on the roads in the EU; and help reduce energy consumption by 16%. The accumulated cost savings for public administrations making use of Open Data across the EU28+ in 2020 are predicted to equal 1.7 bn EUR. Reaping these benefits requires reaching a high level of Open Data maturity.

In order to address the accessibility and the value of Open Data across European countries, the European Union has launched the Beta version of the European Data Portal. The Portal addresses the whole Data Value Chain, from data publishing to data re-use. Over 240,000 data sets are referenced on the Portal and 34 European countries. It offers seamless access to public data across Europe, with over 13 content categories to categorize data, ranging from health or education to transport or even science and justice. Anyone, citizens, businesses, journalists or administrations can search, access and re-use the full data collection. A wide range of data is available, from crime records in Helsinki, labor mobility in the Netherlands, forestry maps in France to the impact of digitization in Poland…..The study, “Open Data Maturity in Europe 2015: Insights into the European state of play”, uses two key indicators: Open Data Readiness and Portal Maturity. These indicators cover both the maturity of national policies supporting Open Data as well as an assessment of the features made available on national data portals. The study shows that the EU28+ have completed just 44% of the journey towards achieving full Open Data Maturity and there are large discrepancies across countries. A third of European countries (32%), recognized globally, are leading the way with solid policies, licensing norms, good portal traffic and many local initiatives and events to promote Open Data and its re-use….(More)”

Can we achieve effective economic diplomacy without innovation diplomacy?

Curated on December 3, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Lisa Rauter at innovationXchange (Australia): “Increasingly innovation is a topic of discussion within Government departments; across agencies; and between governments and external organisations. It is also a strong focus in the development community. At its core, innovation is the development of new ideas, more effective technologies or approaches. Innovation leads to the application of better solutions to improve outputs.

DFAT’s innovationXchange is seeing throughout our conversations with other countries that so many of us are looking at the issue of innovation. …There is a great deal of interest in exploring how we can share information across borders, how we use that information to trigger new ideas, and how we leverage the skills and knowledge of others to achieve better outcomes. Innovation is fast becoming a common objective, something we all aim to embed in our respective organisations, but which we know we cannot do alone. The problems we seek to solve are global and a collaborative, innovative approach to solve them is needed….

This makes me think, is innovation the new diplomatic tool on which we can base new or enhanced relationships on? Can we use the shared goal of doing things better, more cost effectively harnessing the knowledge and capital that sits outside governments to not only have a better impact but bring countries closer together in a collaborative partnership? Could these collaborative partnerships even contribute to increased regional stability?

Innovation is fuelled by collaboration – taking an idea, sharing with others, using their knowledge and creativity to improve the idea, building on it, testing it, adapting and testing again. This collaborative process aligns very well with the intent behind diplomacy – the act of a state seeking toachieve its aims, in relation to those of others, through dialogue and negotiation.

This is already happening to some extent with like-mindeds, like UK and US. But innovation is about risk taking, trying new things and stepping outside of the familiar and comfortable. The emergence of new groupings, like MIKTA, and the increasing engagement of the private sector in partnering for social impact expands the opportunities to learn about other approaches and find complementary skills and knowledge.

This is all about making collaboration, co-creation and through that, innovation a way of working – an approach we can take to working with other states and other organisations. While innovation is the latest buzzword in government and in the development community, it will remain just a buzzword, easily replaced by the next trend, unless we look for opportunities to work with others to co-create and innovate to solve shared problems….(More)”

Tech and Innovation to Re-engage Civic Life

Curated on November 26, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Sometimes even the best-intentioned policymakers overlook the power of people. And even the best-intentioned discussions on social impact and leveraging big data for the social sector can obscure the power of every-day people in their communities.

But time and time again, I’ve seen the transformative power of civic engagement when initiatives are structured well. For example, the other year I witnessed a high school student walk into a school auditorium one evening during Boston’s first-ever youth-driven participatory budgeting project. Participatory budgeting gives residents a structured opportunity to work together to identify neighborhood priorities, work in tandem with government officials to draft viable projects, and prioritize projects to fund. Elected officials in turn pledge to implement these projects and are held accountable to their constituents. Initially intrigued by an experiment in democracy (and maybe the free pizza), this student remained engaged over several months, because she met new members of her community; got to interact with elected officials; and felt like she was working on a concrete objective that could have a tangible, positive impact on her neighborhood.

For many of the young participants, ages 12-25, being part of a participatory budgeting initiative is the first time they are involved in civic life. Many were excited that the City of Boston, in collaboration with the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project, empowered young people with the opportunity to allocate $1 million in public funds. Through participating, young people gain invaluable civic skills, and sometimes even a passion that can fuel other engagements in civic and communal life.

This is just one example of a broader civic and social innovation trend. Across the globe, people are working together with their communities to solve seemingly intractable problems, but as diverse as those efforts are, there are also commonalities. Well-structured civic engagement creates the space and provides the tools for people to exert agency over policies. When citizens have concrete objectives, access to necessary technology (whether it’s postcards, trucks, or open data portals), and an eye toward outcomes, social change happens.

Using Technology to Distribute Expertise

Technology is allowing citizens around the world to participate in solving local, national, and global problems. When it comes to large, public bureaucracies, expertise is largely top-down and concentrated. Leveraging technology creates opportunities for people to work together in new ways to solve public problems. One way is through civic crowdfunding platforms like Citizinvestor.com, which cities can use to develop public sector projects for citizen support; several cities in Rhode Island, Oregon, and Philadelphia have successfully pooled citizen resources to fund new public works. Another way is through citizen science. Old Weather, a crowdsourcing project from the National Archives and Zooniverse, enrolls people to transcribe old British ship logs to identify climate change patterns. Platforms like these allow anyone to devote a small amount of time or resources toward a broader public good. And because they have a degree of transparency, people can see the progress and impact of their efforts. ….(More)”

Assessing the Evidence: The Effectiveness and Impact of Public Governance-Oriented Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives

Curated on November 25, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Brandon Brockmyer and Jonathan A. Fox: “Transnational multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) – voluntary partnerships between governments, civil society, and the private sector – are an increasingly prevalent strategy for promoting government responsiveness and accountability to citizens. While most transnational MSIs involve using voluntary standards to encourage socially and environmentally responsible private sector behavior, a handful of these initiatives – the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative (CoST), the Open Government Partnership (OGP), the Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) and the Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) – focus on information disclosure and participation in the public sector. Unlike private sector MSIs, which attempt to supplement weak government capacity to enforce basic social and environmental standards through partnerships between businesses and civil society, public sector MSIs ultimately seek to bolster public governance. But how exactly are these MSIs supposed to work? And how much has actually been achieved?

The purpose of this study is to identify and consolidate the current state of the evidence for public governance-oriented MSI effectiveness and impact. Researchers collected over 300 documents and interviewed more than two-dozen MSI stakeholders about their experiences with five public governance oriented multi-stakeholder initiatives.

This report provides a ‘snapshot’ of the evidence related to these five MSIs, and suggests that the process of leveraging transparency and participation through these initiatives for broader accountability gains remains uncertain. The report highlights the ongoing process of defining MSI success and impact, and how these initiatives intersect with other accountability actors and processes in complex ways. The study closes with key recommendations for MSI stakeholders….(More)”

Do We Need to Educate Open Data Users?

Curated on November 24, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tony Hirst at IODC: “Whilst promoting the publication of open data is a key, indeed necessary, ingredient in driving the global open data agenda, promoting initiatives that support the use of open data is perhaps an even more pressing need….

This, then, is the first issue we need to address: improving basic levels of literacy in interpreting – and manipulating (for example, sorting and grouping) – simple tables and charts. Sensemaking, in other words: what does the chart you’ve just produced actually say? What story does it tell? And there’s an added benefit that arises from learning to read and critique charts better – it makes you better at creating your own.

Associated with reading stories from data comes the reason for telling the story and putting the data to work. How does “data” help you make a decision, or track the impact of a particular intervention? (Your original question should also have informed the data you searched for in the first place). Here we have a need to develop basic skills in how to actually use data, from finding anomalies to hold publishers to account, to using the data as part of a positive advocacy campaign.

After a quick read, on site, of some of the stories the data might have to tell, there may be a need to do further analysis, or more elaborate visualization work. At this point, a range of technical craft skills often come into play, as well as statistical knowledge.

Many openly published datasets just aren’t that good – they’re “dirty”, full of misspellings, missing data, things in the wrong place or wrong format, even if the data they do contain is true. A significant amount of time that should be spent analyzing the data gets spent trying to clean the data set and get it into a form where it can be worked with. I would argue here that a data technician, with a wealth of craft knowledge about how to repair what is essentially a broken dataset, can play an important timesaving role here getting data into a state where an analyst can actually start to do their job analyzing the data.

But at the same time, there are a range of tools and techniques that can help the everyday user improve the quality of their data. Many of these tools require an element of programming knowledge, but less than you might at first think. In the Open University/FutureLean MOOC “Learn to Code for Data Analysis” we use an interactive notebook style of computing to show how you can use code literally one line at a time to perform powerful data cleaning, analysis, and visualization operations on a range of open datasets, including data from the World Bank and Comtrade.

Here, then, is yet another area where skills development may be required: statistical literacy. At its heart, statistics simply provide us with a range of tools for comparing sets of numbers. But knowing what comparisons to make, or the basis on which particular comparisons can be made, knowing what can be said about those comparisons or how they might be interpreted, in short, understanding what story the stats appear to be telling, can quickly become bewildering. Just as we need to improve sensemaking skills associated with reading charts, so to we need to develop skills in making sense of statistics, even if not actually producing those statistics ourselves.

As more data gets published, there are more opportunities for more people to make use of that data. In many cases, what’s likely to hold back that final data use is a skills gap: primary among these are the skills required to interpret simple datasets and the statistics associated with them associated with developing knowledge about how to make decisions or track progress based on that interpretation. However, the path to producing the statistics or visualizations used by the end-users from the originally published open data dataset may also be a windy one, requiring skills not only in analyzing data and uncovering – and then telling – the stories it contains, but also in more mundane technical operational concerns such as actually accessing, and cleaning, dirty datasets….(More)”

Will Open Data Policies Contribute to Solving Development Challenges?

Curated on November 18, 2015July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Fabrizio Scrollini at IODC: “As the international open data charter gains momentum in the context of the wider development agenda related to the sustainable development goals set by the United Nations, a pertinent question to ask is: will open data policies contribute to solve development challenges? In this post I try to answer this question grounded in recent Latin American experience to contribute to a global debate.

Latin America has been exploring open data since 2013, when the first open data unconference (Abrelatam)and conference took place in Montevideo. In September 2015 in Santiago de Chile a vibrant community of activists, public servants, and entrepreneurs gathered in the third edition of Abrelatam and Condatos. It is now a more mature community. The days where it was sufficient to just open a few datasets and set up a portal are now gone. The focus of this meeting was on collaboration and use of data to address several social challenges.

Take for instance the health sector. Transparency in this sector is key to deliver better development goals. One of the panels at Condatos showed three different ways to use data to promote transparency and citizen empowerment in this sector. A tu servicio, a joint venture of DATA and the Uruguayan Ministry of Health helped to standardize and open public datasets that allowed around 30,000 users to improve the way they choose health providers. Government-civil society collaboration was crucial in this process in terms pooling resources and skills. The first prototype was only possible because some data was already open.

This contrasts with Cuidados Intensivos, a Peruvian endeavour aiming to provide key information about the health sector. Peruvian activists had to fill right to information requests, transform, and standardize data to eventually release it. Both experiences demanded a great deal of technical, policy, and communication craft. And both show the attitudes the public sector can take: either engaging or at the very best ignoring the potential of open data.

In the same sector look at a recent study dealing with Dengue and open data developed by our research initiative. If international organizations and countries were persuaded to adopt common standards for Dengue outbreaks, they could be potentially predicted if the right public data is available and standardized. Open data in this sector not only delivers accountability but also efficiency and foresight to allocate scarce resources.

Latin American countries – gathered in the open data group of the Red Gealc – acknowledge the increasing public value of open data. This group engaged constructively in Condatos with the principles enshrined in the charter and will foster the formalization of open data policies in the region. A data revolution won’t yield results if data is closed. When you open data you allow for several initiatives to emerge and show its value.

Once a certain level of maturity is reached in a particular sector, more than data is needed. Standards are crucial to ensure comparability and ease the collection, processing, and use of open government data. To foster and engage with open data users is also needed, as several strategies deployed by some Latin American cities show.

Coming back to our question: will open data policies contribute to solve development challenges? The Latin American experience shows evidence that it will….(More)”

Tackling quality concerns around (volunteered) big data

Curated on November 18, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

University of Twente: “… Improvements in online information communication and mobile location-aware technologies have led to a dramatic increase in the amount of volunteered geographic information (VGI) in recent years. The collection of volunteered data on geographic phenomena has a rich history worldwide. For example, the Christmas Bird Count has studied the impacts of climate change on spatial distribution and population trends of selected bird species in North America since 1900. Nowadays, several citizen observatories collect information about our environment. This information is complementary or, in some cases, essential to tackle a wide range of geographic problems.

Despite the wide applicability and acceptability of VGI in science, many studies argue that the quality of the observations remains a concern. Data collected by volunteers does not often follow scientific principles of sampling design, and levels of expertise vary among volunteers. This makes it hard for scientists to integrate VGI in their research.

Low quality, inconsistent, observations can bias analysis and modelling results because they are not representative for the variable studied, or because they decrease the ratio of signal to noise. Hence, the identification of inconsistent observations clearly benefits VGI-based applications and provide more robust datasets to the scientific community.

In their paper the researchers describe a novel automated workflow to identify inconsistencies in VGI. “Leveraging a digital control mechanism means we can give value to the millions of observations collected by volunteers” and “it allows a new kind of science where citizens can directly contribute to the analysis of global challenges like climate change” say Hamed Mehdipoor and Dr. Raul Zurita-Milla, who work at the Geo-Information Processing department of ITC….

While some inconsistent observations may reflect real, unusual events, the researchers demonstrated that these observations also bias the trends (advancement rates), in this case of the date of lilac flowering onset. This shows that identifying inconsistent observations is a pre-requisite for studying and interpreting the impact of climate change on the timing of life cycle events….(More)”

How Big Data is Helping to Tackle Climate Change

Curated on November 18, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Bernard Marr at DataInformed: “Climate scientists have been gathering a great deal of data for a long time, but analytics technology’s catching up is comparatively recent. Now that cloud, distributed storage, and massive amounts of processing power are affordable for almost everyone, those data sets are being put to use. On top of that, the growing number of Internet of Things devices we are carrying around are adding to the amount of data we are collecting. And the rise of social media means more and more people are reporting environmental data and uploading photos and videos of their environment, which also can be analyzed for clues.

Perhaps one of the most ambitious projects that employ big data to study the environment is Microsoft’s Madingley, which is being developed with the intention of creating a simulation of all life on Earth. The project already provides a working simulation of the global carbon cycle, and it is hoped that, eventually, everything from deforestation to animal migration, pollution, and overfishing will be modeled in a real-time “virtual biosphere.” Just a few years ago, the idea of a simulation of the entire planet’s ecosphere would have seemed like ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky thinking. But today it’s something into which one of the world’s biggest companies is pouring serious money. Microsoft is doing this because it believes that analytical technology has finally caught up with the ability to collect and store data.

Another data giant that is developing tools to facilitate analysis of climate and ecological data is EMC. Working with scientists at Acadia National Park in Maine, the company has developed platforms to pull in crowd-sourced data from citizen science portals such as eBird and iNaturalist. This allows park administrators to monitor the impact of climate change on wildlife populations as well as to plan and implement conservation strategies.

Last year, the United Nations, under its Global Pulse data analytics initiative, launched the Big Data Climate Challenge, a competition aimed to promote innovate data-driven climate change projects. Among the first to receive recognition under the program is Global Forest Watch, which combines satellite imagery, crowd-sourced witness accounts, and public datasets to track deforestation around the world, which is believed to be a leading man-made cause of climate change. The project has been promoted as a way for ethical businesses to ensure that their supply chain is not complicit in deforestation.

Other initiatives are targeted at a more personal level, for example by analyzing transit routes that could be used for individual journeys, using Google Maps, and making recommendations based on carbon emissions for each route.

The idea of “smart cities” is central to the concept of the Internet of Things – the idea that everyday objects and tools are becoming increasingly connected, interactive, and intelligent, and capable of communicating with each other independently of humans. Many of the ideas put forward by smart-city pioneers are grounded in climate awareness, such as reducing carbon dioxide emissions and energy waste across urban areas. Smart metering allows utility companies to increase or restrict the flow of electricity, gas, or water to reduce waste and ensure adequate supply at peak periods. Public transport can be efficiently planned to avoid wasted journeys and provide a reliable service that will encourage citizens to leave their cars at home.

These examples raise an important point: It’s apparent that data – big or small – can tell us if, how, and why climate change is happening. But, of course, this is only really valuable to us if it also can tell us what we can do about it. Some projects, such as Weathersafe, which helps coffee growers adapt to changing weather patterns and soil conditions, are designed to help humans deal with climate change. Others are designed to tackle the problem at the root, by highlighting the factors that cause it in the first place and showing us how we can change our behavior to minimize damage….(More)”