Data for good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
NESTA: “This report explores how capturing, sharing and analysing data in new ways can transform how charities work and how social action happens.

Key Findings

  • Citizens Advice (CAB) and Data Kind partnered to develop the Civic Dashboard. A tool which mines data from CAB consultations to understand emerging social issues in the UK.
  • Shooting Star Chase volunteers streamlined the referral paths of how children come to be at the hospices saving up to £90,000 for children’s hospices around the country by refining the referral system.
  • In a study of open grant funding data, NCVO identified 33,000 ‘below the radar organisations’ not currently registered in registers and databases on the third sector
  • In their social media analysis of tweets related to the Somerset Floods, Demos found that 39,000 tweets were related to social action

New ways of capturing, sharing and analysing data have the potential to transform how community and voluntary sector organisations work and how social action happens. However, while analysing and using data is core to how some of the world’s fastest growing businesses understand their customers and develop new products and services, civil society organisations are still some way off from making the most of this potential.
Over the last 12 months Nesta has grant funded a number of research projects that explore two dimensions of how big and open data can be used for the common good. Firstly, how it can be used by charities to develop better products and services and secondly, how it can help those interested in civil society better understand social action and civil society activity.

  • Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and Datakind, a global community of data scientists interested in how data can be used for a social purpose, were grant funded to explore how a datadriven approach to mining the rich data that CAB holds on social issues in the UK could be used to develop a real–time dashboard to identify emerging social issues. The project also explored how data–driven methods could better help other charities such as St Mungo’s and Buttle UK, and how data could be shared more effectively between charities as part of this process, to create collaborative data–driven projects.
  • Five organisations (The RSA, Cardiff University, The Demos Centre for Analysis of Social Media, NCVO and European Alternatives) were grant funded to explore how data–driven methods, such as open data analysis and social media analysis, can help us understand informal social action, often referred to as ‘below the radar activity’ in new ways.

This paper is not the definitive story of the opportunities in using big and open data for the common good, but it can hopefully provide insight on what can be done and lessons for others interested in exploring the opportunities in these methods….(More).”

One State Wants To Let You Carry Your Driver’s License On Your Phone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at Singularity Hub: “There’s now a technology to replace almost everything in your wallet. Your cash, credit cards, and loyalty programs are all on their way to becoming obsolete. Money can now be sent via app, text, e-mail — it can even be sent via Snapchat. But you can’t leave your wallet home just yet. That’s because there is one item that remains largely unchanged: your driver’s license.

If the Iowa Department of Motor Vehicles has its way, that may no longer be the case. According to an article in the Des Moines Register, the agency is in the early stages of developing mobile software for just this purpose. The app would store a resident’s personal information, whatever is already on the physical licenses, and also include a scannable bar code. The plans are for the app to include a two-step verification process including some type of biometric or pin code. At this time, it appears that specific implementation details are still being worked out.

The governments of the United Kingdom and United Arab Emirates had both previously announced their own attempts to experiment with the concept. It’s becoming increasingly common to see mobile versions of other documents. Over 30 states now allow motorists to show electronic proof of insurance. It only follows that the driver’s license would be next. But the considerations around that document are different — it is perhaps the most regulated and important document that a person carries….(More)”

Data Mining Reveals a Global Link Between Corruption and Wealth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Social scientists have never understood why some countries are more corrupt than others. But the first study that links corruption with wealth could help change that…One question that social scientists and economists have long puzzled over is how corruption arises in different cultures and why it is more prevalent in some countries than others. But it has always been difficult to find correlations between corruption and other measures of economic or social activity.
Michal Paulus and Ladislav Kristoufek at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, have for the first time found a correlation between the perception of corruption in different countries and their economic development.
The data they use comes from Transparency International, a nonprofit campaigning organisation based in Berlin, Germany, and which defines corruption as the misuse of public power for private benefit. Each year, this organization publishes a global list of countries ranked according to their perceived levels of corruption. The list is compiled using at least three sources of information but does not directly measure corruption, because of the difficulties in gathering such data.
Instead, it gathers information from a wide range of sources such as the African Development Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit. But it also places significant weight on the opinions of experts who are asked to assess corruption levels.
The result is the Corruption Perceptions Index ranking countries between 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). In 2014, Denmark occupied of the top spot as the world’s least corrupt nation while Somalia and North Korea prop up the table in an unenviable tie for the most corrupt countries on the planet.
Paulus and Kristoufek use this data to search for find clusters of countries that share similar properties using a new generation of cluster-searching algorithms. And they say that the 134 countries they study fall neatly into four groups which are clearly correlated with the wealth of the nations within them….Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1502.00104  Worldwide Clustering Of The Corruption Perception”

2015 Edelman Trust Barometer

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
“The 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer shows a global decline in trust over the last year, and the number of countries with trusted institutions has fallen to an all-time low among the informed public.

Among the general population, the trust deficit is even more pronounced, with nearly two-thirds of countries falling into the distruster category.
In the last year, trust has declined for three of the four institutions measured. NGOs continue to be the most trusted institution, but trust in NGOs declined from 66 to 63 percent. Sixty percent of countries now distrust media. Trust in government increased slightly, driven by big gains in India, Russia and Indonesia but government is still distrusted in 19 of the 27 markets surveyed. And trust in business is below 50 percent in half of those markets.
 

Government for a New Age: Managing Public Services in the 21st Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A new Thinkers50 book by by Michel Khoury and Rabih Abouchakra: “What is the role of government in the modern world? The environment that governments operate in today is hugely complex. Governments face difficult challenges on all sides. Global upheavals and geopolitical shifts, climate change, rapidly evolving technologies and socio-economic demographics, resource constraints, an increasingly diverse constituency and citizens more demanding expectations — these are just some of the forces driving societal changes and transforming the context in which governments operate. Around the world governments are responding to these challenges by shifting the way they think, steer, organize, measure and engage with citizens, and the private and third sector. Until now, though, best practice has remained elusive. Intergovernmental collaboration and sharing of innovative policy making is piecemeal. Government for a New Age brings together the latest thinking on modern government. It sheds light on the current trends in governance practices, operating models, processes and tools that leading governments are embracing. Government for a New Age explores the ways in which governments are changing their value proposition to tackle these pressing concerns and provide some answers to these questions…(More).”

Mapping the Nation: Building a More Resilient Future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book from Esri: “The fifth book in Esri’s Mapping the Nation series, Mapping the Nation: Building a More Resilient Future is a collection of geographic information system (GIS) maps that illustrate how federal government agencies rely on GIS analysis to build stronger, more resilient communities and help make the world a better place.
The print version of the book includes 118 full-color maps produced by more than 50 federal government agencies, including the US Forest Service, US Department of Defense, US Department of Education, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The digital version of Mapping the Nation offers enhanced and interactive maps and videos showcasing four start-up companies that are using ArcGIS technology in partnership with Esri and the government.
The maps depict how federal employees and officials use GIS to evaluate, plan, and respond to social, economic, and environmental concerns at local, regional, national, and global levels. Topics such as green government, economic recovery and sustainability, and climate protection show how government agencies use GIS to facilitate initiatives, improve transparency, and deliver strong business models…
Mapping and Apping the Nation 2015, an interactive digital adaptation of the printed map book, is available free of charge from the Esri Books app on Apple iTunes and the Google Play store.”

Open Data Barometer (second edition)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
The second edition of the Open Data Barometer: “A global movement to make government “open by default” picked up steam in 2013 when the G8 leaders signed an Open Data Charter – promising to make public sector data openly available, without charge and in re-useable formats. In 2014 the G20 largest industrial economies followed up by pledging to advance open data as a tool against corruption, and the UN recognized the need for a “Data Revolution” to achieve global development goals.
However, this second edition of the Open Data Barometer shows that there is still a long way to go to put the power of data in the hands of citizens. Core data on how governments are spending our money and how public services are performing remains inaccessible or paywalled in most countries. Information critical to fight corruption and promote fair competition, such as company registers, public sector contracts, and land titles, is even harder to get. In most countries, proactive disclosure of government data is not mandated in law or policy as part of a wider right to information, and privacy protections are weak or uncertain.
Our research suggests some of the key steps needed to ensure the “Data Revolution” will lead to a genuine revolution in the transparency and performance of governments:

  • High-level political commitment to proactive disclosure of public sector data, particularly the data most critical to accountability
  • Sustained investment in supporting and training a broad cross-section of civil society and entrepreneurs to understand and use data effectively
  • Contextualizing open data tools and approaches to local needs, for example by making data visually accessible in countries with lower literacy levels.
  • Support for city-level open data initiatives as a complement to national-level programmes
  • Legal reform to ensure that guarantees of the right to information and the right to privacy underpin open data initiatives

Over the next six months, world leaders have several opportunities to agree these steps, starting with the United Nation’s high-level data revolution in Africa conference in March, Canada’s global International Open Data Conference in May and the G7 summit in Germany this June. It is crucial that these gatherings result in concrete actions to address the political and resource barriers that threaten to stall open data efforts….(More)”.

The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at the Guardian: “We are lucky enough to live at a time in which a furious wave of innovation is breaking across the cities of the global south, spurred on both by the blistering pace of urbanisation, and by the rising popular demand for access to high-quality infrastructure that follows in its wake.
From Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting and the literally destratifying cable cars of Caracas, to Nairobi’s “digital matatus” and the repurposed bus-ferries of Manila, the communities of the south are responsible for an ever-lengthening parade of social and technical innovations that rival anything the developed world has to offer for ingenuity and practical utility.
Nor is India an exception to this tendency. Transparent Chennai’s participatory maps and the work of the Mumbai-based practices CRIT and URBZ are better-known globally, but it is the tactics of daily survival devised by the unheralded multitude that really inspire urbanists. These techniques maximise the transactive capacity of the urban fabric, wrest the very last increment of value from the energy invested in the production of manufactured goods, and allow millions to eke a living, however precarious, from the most unpromising of circumstances. At a time of vertiginously spiralling economic and environmental stress globally, these are insights many of us in the developed north would be well advised to attend to – and by no means merely the poorest among us.
But, for whatever reason, this is not the face of urban innovation official India wants to share with the world – perhaps small-scale projects or the tactics of the poor simply aren’t dramatic enough to convey the magnitude and force of national ambition. We hear, instead, of schemes like Palava City, a nominally futuristic vision of digital technology minutely interwoven into the texture of everday urban life. Headlines were made around the planet this year when Narendra Modi’s government announced it had committed to building no fewer than 100 similarly “smart” cities….(More).”

The Next 5 Years in Open Data: 3 Key Trends to Watch

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kevin Merritt (Socrata Inc.) at GovTech: “2014 was a pivotal year in the evolution of open data for one simple and powerful reason – it went mainstream and was widely adopted on just about every continent. Open data is now table stakes. Any government that is not participating in open data is behind its peers…The move toward data-driven government will absolutely accelerate between 2015 and 2020, thanks to three key trends.

1. Comparative Analytics for Government Employees

The first noteworthy trend that will drive open data change in 2015 is that open data technology offerings will deliver first-class benefits to public-sector employees. This means government employees will be able to derive enormous insights from their own data and act on them in a deep, meaningful and analytical way. Until only recently, the primary beneficiaries of open data initiatives were external stakeholders: developers and entrepreneurs; scientists, researchers, analysts, journalists and economists; and ordinary citizens lacking technical training. The open data movement, until now, has ignored an important class of stakeholders – government employees….

2. Increased Global Expansion for Open Data

The second major trend fueling data-driven government is that 2015 will be a year of accelerating adoption of open data internationally.
Right now, for example, open data is being adopted prolifically in Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
….
We will continue to see international governments adopt open data in 2015 for a variety of reasons. Northern European governments, for instance, are interested in efficiency and performance right now; Southern European governments, on the other hand, are currently focused on transparency, trust, and credibility. Despite the different motivations, the open data technology solutions are the same. And, looking out beyond 2015, it’s important to note that Southern European governments will also adopt open data to help increase job creation and improve delivery of services.

3. “Open Data” Will Simply Become “Government Data”

The third trend that we’ll see in the arena of open data lies a little further out on the horizon, and it will be surprising. In my opinion, the term “open data” may disappear within a decade; and in its place will simply be the term “government data.”
That’s because virtually all government data will be open data by 2020; and government data will be everywhere it needs to be – available to the public as fast as it’s created, processed and accumulated….(More).”

Innovations in Global Governance: Toward a Distributed Internet Governance Ecosystem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Beth S. Noveck, Jillian Raines, and Antony Declercq as part of the Global Commission on Internet Governance Paper Series: “The growth and globalization of the Internet over the past 40 years has been nothing short of remarkable. Virtually all sectors, from development to healthcare to education to politics, have been transformed. Yet developments in how the Internet is governed have not kept pace with this rapid technological innovation. Figuring out how to evolve the Internet’s governance in ways that are effective and legitimate is essential to ensure its continued potential. Flexible and innovative decision-making mechanisms are needed in order to enable disparate governance actors to address and respond effectively as changes in the network occur. This paper seeks to address the need to develop an effective and legitimate Internet governance ecosystem by proposing a distributed yet coordinated framework that can accommodate a plurality of existing and emerging decision-making approaches. It draws on the lessons of open governance, adopting innovative techniques to facilitate coordination, information sharing, and evidence generation by and across increasingly diverse and global groups of Internet actors, and calls for creating practical tools to support such an effective, legitimate and evolving Internet governance ecosystem. Although no right answer or single model for how to manage all issues of relevance to the Internet is suggested within this paper, the proposed framework intends to allow for diverse experiments in distributed governance approaches to learn what works and what does not. (More)“