How We’re Changing the Way We Respond to Petitions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Goldman (White House) at Medium: “…In 2011 (years before I arrived at the White House), the team here developed a petitions platform called We the People. It provided a clear and easy way for the American people to petition their government — along with a threshold for action. Namely — once a petition gains 100,000 signatures.

This was a new system for the United States government, announced as a flagship effort in the first U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. Right now it exists only for the White House (Hey, Congress! We have anopen API! Get in touch!) Some other countries, including Germany and theUnited Kingdom, do online petitions, too. In fact, the European Parliamenthas even started its own online petitioning platform.

For the most part, we’ve been pretty good about responding — before today, the Obama Administration had responded to 255 petitions that had collectively gathered more than 11 million signatures. That’s more than 91 percent of the petitions that have met our threshold requiring a response. Some responses have taken a little longer than others. But now, I’m happy to say, we have caught up.

Today, the White House is responding to every petition in our We the Peoplebacklog — 20 in all.

This means that nearly 2.5 million people who had petitioned us to take action on something heard back today. And it’s our goal to make that response the start of the conversation, not the final page. The White House is made up of offices that research and analyze the kinds of policy issues raised by these petitions, and leaders from those offices will be taking questions today, and in the weeks to come, from petition signers, on topics such as vaccination policy, community policing, and other petition subjects.

Take a look at more We the People stats here.

We’ll start the conversation on Twitter. Follow @WeThePeople, and join the conversation using hashtag #WeThePeople. (I’ll be personally taking your questions on @Goldman44 about how we’re changing the platform specifically at 3:30 p.m. Eastern.)

We the People, Moving Forward

We’re going to be changing a few things about We the People.

  1. First, from now on, if a petition meets the signature goal within a designated period of time, we will aim to respond to it — with an update or policy statement — within 60 days wherever possible. You can read about the details of our policy in the We the People Terms of Participation.
  2. Second, other outside petitions platforms are starting to tap into the We the People platform. We’re excited to announce today that Change.org is choosing to integrate with the We the People platform, meaning the future signatures of its 100 million users will count toward the threshold for getting an official response from the Administration. We’re also opening up the code behind petitions.whitehouse.gov on Drupal.org and GitHub, which empowers other governments and outside organizations to create their own versions of this platform to engage their own citizens and constituencies.
  3. Third, and most importantly, the process of hearing from us about your petition is going to look a little different. We’ve assembled a team of people responsible for taking your questions and requests and bringing them to the right people — whether within the White House or in an agency within the Administration — who may be in a position to say something about your request….(More)

A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

R2D3 introduction: “In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.

Keep scrolling. Using a data set about homes, we will create a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco…./

 

  1. Machine learning identifies patterns using statistical learning and computers by unearthing boundaries in data sets. You can use it to make predictions.
  2. One method for making predictions is called a decision trees, which uses a series of if-then statements to identify boundaries and define patterns in the data
  3. Overfitting happens when some boundaries are based on on distinctions that don’t make a difference. You can see if a model overfits by having test data flow through the model….(More)”

Urban Informatics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special issue of Data Engineering: “Most data related to people and the built world originates in urban settings. There is increasing demand to capture and exploit this data to support efforts in areas such as Smart Cities, City Science and Intelligent Transportation Systems. Urban informatics deals with the collection, organization, dissemination and analysis of urban information used in such applications. However, the dramatic growth in the volume of this urban data creates challenges for existing data-management and analysis techniques. The collected data is also increasingly diverse, with a wide variety of sensor, GIS, imagery and graph data arising in cities. To address these challenges, urban informatics requires development of advanced data-management approaches, analysis methods, and visualization techniques. It also provides an opportunity to confront the “Variety” axis of Big Data head on. The contributions in this issue cross the spectrum of urban information, from its origin, to archiving and retrieval, to analysis and visualization. …

Collaborative Sensing for Urban Transportation (By Sergio Ilarri, et al)

Open Civic Data: Of the People, For the People, By the People (by Arnaud Sahuguet, et al, The GovLab)

Plenario: An Open Data Discovery and Exploration Platform for Urban Science (by Charlie Catlett et al)

Riding from Urban Data to Insight Using New York City Taxis (by Juliana Freire et al)…(More)”

 

The Causes, Costs and Consequences of Bad Government Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Katherine Barrett & Richard Greene in Governing: “Data is the lifeblood of state government. It’s the crucial commodity that’s necessary to manage projects, avoid fraud, assess program performance, keep the books in balance and deliver services efficiently. But even as the trend toward greater reliance on data has accelerated over the past decades, the information itself has fallen dangerously short of the mark. Sometimes it doesn’t exist at all. But worse than that, all too often it’s just wrong.

There are examples everywhere. Last year, the California auditor’s office issued a report that looked at accounting records at the State Controller’s Office to see whether it was accurately recording sick leave and vacation credits. “We found circumstances where instead of eight hours, it was 80 and in one case, 800,” says Elaine Howle, the California state auditor. “And the system didn’t have controls to say that’s impossible.” The audit found 200,000 questionable hours of leave due to data entry errors, with a value of $6 million.

Mistakes like that are embarrassing, and can lead to unequal treatment of valued employees. Sometimes, however, decisions made with bad data can have deeper consequences. In 2012, the secretary of environmental protection in Pennsylvania told Congress that there was no evidence the state’s water quality had been affected by fracking. “Tens of thousands of wells have been hydraulically fractured in Pennsylvania,” he said, “without any indication that groundwater quality has been impacted.”

But by August 2014, the same department published a list of 248 incidents of damage to well water due to gas development. Why didn’t the department pick up on the water problems sooner? A key reason was that the data collected by its six regional offices had not been forwarded to the central office. At the same time, the regions differed greatly in how they collected, stored, transmitted and dealt with the information. An audit concluded that Pennsylvania’s complaint tracking system for water quality was ineffective and failed to provide “reliable information to effectively manage the program.”

When data is flawed, the consequences can reach throughout the entire government enterprise. Services are needlessly duplicated; evaluation of successful programs is difficult; tax dollars go uncollected; infrastructure maintenance is conducted inefficiently; health-care dollars are wasted. The list goes on and on. Increasingly, states are becoming aware of just how serious the problem is. “The poor quality of government data,” says Dave Yost, Ohio’s state auditor, “is probably the most important emerging trend for government executives, across the board, at all levels.”

Just how widespread a problem is data quality? In aGoverning telephone survey with more than 75 officials in 46 states, about 7 out of 10 said that data problems were frequently or often an impediment to doing their business effectively. No one who worked with program data said this was rarely the case. (View the full results of the survey in this infographic.)…(More)

See also: Bad Data Is at All Levels of Government and The Next Big Thing in Data Analytics

Disruptive Technology that Could Transform Government-Citizen Relationships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Raths at GovTech: “William Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined the term “cyberspace,” once said: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” That may be exactly the way to look at the selection of disruptive technologies we have chosen to highlight in eight critical areas of government, ranging from public safety to health to transportation. ….

PUBLIC SAFETY: WEARABLE TECH IS TRANSFORMING EMERGENCY RESPONSE

The wearable technology market is expected to grow from $20 billion in 2015 to almost $70 billion in 2025, according to research firm IDTechEx. As commercial applications bloom, more will find their way into the public sector and emergency response.

This year has seen an increase in the number of police departments using body cameras. And already under development are wireless devices that monitor a responder’s breathing, heart rate and blood pressure, as well as potentially harmful environmental conditions, and relay concerns back to incident command.

But rather than sitting back and waiting for the market to develop, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is determined to spur innovation in the field. DHS’ research and development arm is funding a startup accelerator program called Emerge managed by the Center for Innovative Technology (CIT), a Virginia-based nonprofit. Two accelerators, in Texas and Illinois, will work with 10 to 15 startups this year to develop wearable products and adopt them for first responder use….

HEALTH & HUMAN SERVICES: ‘HOT-SPOTTING’ FOR POPULATION HEALTH MANAGEMENT

A hot health-care trend is population health management: using data to improve health at a community level as well as an individual level. The growth in sophistication of GIS tools has allowed public health researchers to more clearly identify and start addressing health resource disparities.

Dr. Jeffrey Brenner, a Camden, N.J.-based physician, uses data gathered in a health information exchange (HIE) to target high-cost individuals. The Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers uses the HIE data to identify high-cost “hot spots” — high-rise buildings where a large number of hospital emergency room “super users” live. By identifying and working with these individuals on patient-centered care coordination issues, the coalition has been able to reduce emergency room use and in-patient stays….

PARKS & RECREATION: TRACKING TREES FOR A BETTER FUTURE

A combination of advances in mobile data collection systems and geocoding lets natural resources and parks agencies be more proactive about collecting tree data, managing urban forests and quantifying their value, as forests become increasingly important resources in an era of climate change.

Philadelphia Parks and Recreation has added approximately 2 million trees to its database in the past few years. It plans to create a digital management system for all of them. Los Angeles City Parks uses the Davey Tree Expert Co.’s Web-based TreeKeeper management software to manage existing tree inventories and administer work orders. The department can also more easily look at species balance to manage against pests, disease and drought….

CORRECTIONS: VIDEO-BASED TOOLS TRANSFORM PRISONS AND JAILS

Videoconferencing is disrupting business as usual in U.S. jails and prisons in two ways: One is the rising use of telemedicine to reduce inmate health-care costs and to increase access to certain types of care for prisoners. The other is video visitation between inmates and families.

A March 2015 report by Southern California Public Radio noted that the federal court-appointed receiver overseeing inmate health care in California is reviewing telemedicine capabilities to reduce costly overtime billing by physicians and nurses at prisons. In one year, overtime has more than doubled for this branch of corrections, from more than $12 million to nearly $30 million….

FINANCE & BUDGETING: DATA PORTALS OFFER TRANSPARENCY AT UNPRECEDENTED LEVELS

The transparency and open data movements have hit the government finance sector in a big way and promise to be an area of innovation in the years ahead.

A partnership between Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel and the finance visualization startup OpenGov will result in one of the most sweeping statewide transparency efforts to date.

The initiative offers 3,900-plus local governments — from townships, cities and counties to school districts and more — a chance to place revenues and expenditures online free of charge through the state’s budget transparency site OhioCheckbook.com. Citizens will be able to track local government revenues and expenditures via interactive graphs that illustrate not only a bird’s-eye view of a budget, but also the granular details of check-by-check spending….

DMV: DRIVERS’ LICENSES: THERE WILL SOON BE AN APP FOR THAT

The laminated driver’s license you keep in your wallet may eventually give way to an app on your smartphone, and that change may have wider significance for how citizens interact digitally with their government. Legislatures in at least three states have seen bills introduced authorizing their transportation departments to begin piloting digital drivers’ licenses…..

TRANSPORTATION & MASS TRANSIT: BIG BREAKTHROUGHS ARE JUST AROUND THE CORNER

Nothing is likely to be more disruptive to transportation, mass transit and urban planning than the double whammy of connected vehicle technology and autonomous vehicles.
The U.S. Department of Transportation expects great things from the connected vehicles of the future ­— and that future may be just around the corner. Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication capabilities and anonymous information from passengers’ wireless devices relayed through dedicated short-range connections could provide transportation agencies with improved traffic, transit and parking data, making it easier to manage transportation systems and improve traffic safety….. (More)”

Weathernews thinks crowdsourcing is the future of weather

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Freedman at Mashable: “The weather forecast of the future will be crowdsourced, if one Japanese weather firm sees its vision fulfilled.

On Monday, Weathernews Inc. of Japan announced a partnership with the Chinese firm Moji to bring Weathernews’ technology to the latter company’s popular MoWeather app.

The benefit for Weathernews, in addition to more users and entry into the Chinese market, is access to more data that can then be turned into weather forecasts.

The company says that this additional user base, when added to its existing users, will make Weathernews “the largest crowdsourced weather service in the world,” with 420 million users across 175 countries.

 

…So far, though, mobile phones have not proven to be more reliable weather sensors than the network of thousands of far more expensive and specialized surface weather observation sites throughout the world, but crowdsourcing’s day in the sun may be close at hand. As Weathernews leaders were quick to point out to Mashable in an interview, the existing weather observing network on which most forecasts rely has significant drawbacks that makes crowdsourcing especially appealing outside the U.S.

For example, most surface weather stations are in wealthy nations, primarily in North America and Europe. There’s a giant forecasting blind spot over much of Africa, where many countries lack a national weather agency. However, these countries do have rapidly growing mobile phone networks that, if utilized in certain ways, could provide a way to fill in data gaps and make weather forecasts more accurate, too.

“At Weathernews, we have a core belief that more weather data is better,” said Weathernews managing director Tomohiro Ishibashi.

“So having access to the additional datasets from MoWeather’s vast user community allows us to provide more accurate and safer weather forecasting for all,” he said. “Our advanced algorithms analyze these new datasets and put them in our existing computer forecasting models.”

Weathernews is trying to use observations that most weather companies might regard as interesting but not worth the effort to tailor for computer modeling. For example, photos of clouds are a potential way to ground truth weather satellite imagery, Ishibashi told Mashable.

“For us the picture of the sky… has a lot of information,” he said. (The company’s website refers to such observations as “eye-servation.”)…

Compared to Weathernews’ ambitions, AccuWeather’s recent decision to incorporate crowdsourced data into its iOS app seems more traditional, like a TV weather forecaster adding a few new “weather watchers” to their station’s network during local television’s heyday in the 1980s and 90s.

Now, we’re all weather watchers….(More)”

From Governmental Open Data Toward Governmental Open Innovation (GOI)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Daniele Archibugi et al in The Handbook of Global Science, Technology, and Innovation: “Today, governments release governmental data that were previously hidden to the public. This democratization of governmental open data (OD) aims to increase transparency but also fuels innovation. Indeed, the release of governmental OD is a global trend, which has evolved into governmental open innovation (GOI). In GOI, governmental actors purposively manage the knowledge flows that span organizational boundaries and reveal innovation-related knowledge to the public with the aim to spur innovation for a higher economic and social welfare at regional, national, or global scale. GOI subsumes different revealing strategies, namely governmental OD, problem, and solution revealing. This chapter introduces the concept of GOI that has evolved from global OD efforts. It present a historical analysis of the emergence of GOI in four different continents, namely, Europe (UK and Denmark), North America (United States and Mexico), Australia, and China to highlight the emergence of GOI at a global scale….(More)”

‘Smart Cities’ Will Know Everything About You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Weston in the Wall Street Journal: “From Boston to Beijing, municipalities and governments across the world are pledging billions to create “smart cities”—urban areas covered with Internet-connected devices that control citywide systems, such as transit, and collect data. Although the details can vary, the basic goal is to create super-efficient infrastructure, aid urban planning and improve the well-being of the populace.

A byproduct of a tech utopia will be a prodigious amount of data collected on the inhabitants. For instance, at the company I head, we recently undertook an experiment in which some staff volunteered to wear devices around the clock for 10 days. We monitored more than 170 metrics reflecting their daily habits and preferences—including how they slept, where they traveled and how they felt (a fast heart rate and no movement can indicate excitement or stress).

If the Internet age has taught us anything, it’s that where there is information, there is money to be made. With so much personal information available and countless ways to use it, businesses and authorities will be faced with a number of ethical questions.

In a fully “smart” city, every movement an individual makes can be tracked. The data will reveal where she works, how she commutes, her shopping habits, places she visits and her proximity to other people. You could argue that this sort of tracking already exists via various apps and on social-media platforms, or is held by public-transport companies and e-commerce sites. The difference is that with a smart city this data will be centralized and easy to access. Given the value of this data, it’s conceivable that municipalities or private businesses that pay to create a smart city will seek to recoup their expenses by selling it….

Recent history—issues of privacy and security on social networks and chatting apps, and questions about how intellectual-property regulations apply online—has shown that the law has been slow to catch up with digital innovations. So businesses that can purchase smart-city data will be presented with many strategic and ethical concerns.

What degree of targeting is too specific and violates privacy? Should businesses limit the types of goods or services they offer to certain individuals? Is it ethical for data—on an employee’s eating habits, for instance—to be sold to employers or to insurance companies to help them assess claims? Do individuals own their own personal data once it enters the smart-city system?

With or without stringent controlling legislation, businesses in a smart city will need to craft their own policies and procedures regarding the use of data. A large-scale misuse of personal data could provoke a consumer backlash that could cripple a company’s reputation and lead to monster lawsuits. An additional problem is that businesses won’t know which individuals might welcome the convenience of targeted advertising and which will find it creepy—although data science could solve this equation eventually by predicting where each individual’s privacy line is.

A smart city doesn’t have to be as Orwellian as it sounds. If businesses act responsibly, there is no reason why what sounds intrusive in the abstract can’t revolutionize the way people live for the better by offering services that anticipates their needs; by designing ultraefficient infrastructure that makes commuting a (relative) dream; or with a revolutionary approach to how energy is generated and used by businesses and the populace at large….(More)”

The digital revolution liberating Latin American people

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Luis Alberto Moreno in the Financial Times: “Imagine a place where citizens can deal with the state entirely online, where all health records are electronic and the wait for emergency care is just seven minutes. Singapore? Switzerland? Try Colima, Mexico.

Pessimists fear the digital revolution will only widen social and economic disparities in the developing world — particularly in Latin America, the world’s most unequal region. But Colima, though small and relatively prosperous, shows how some of the region’s governments are harnessing these tools to modernise services, improve quality of life and share the benefits of technology more equitably.

In the past 10 years, this state of about 600,000 people has transformed the way government works, going completely digital. Its citizens can carry out 62 procedures online, from applying for permits to filing crime reports. No internet at home? Colima offers hundreds of free WiFi hotspots.

Colombia and Peru are taking broadband to remote corners of their rugged territories. Bogotá has subsidised the ex­pansion of its fibre optic network, which now links virtually every town in the country. Peru is expanding a programme that aims to bring WiFi to schools, hospitals and other public buildings in each of its 25 regions. The Colombian plan, Vive Digital, fosters internet adoption among all its citizens. Taxes on computers, tablets and smartphones have been scrapped. Low-income families have been given vouchers to sign up for broadband. In five years, the percentage of households connected to the internet jumped from 16 per cent to 50 per cent. Among small businesses it soared from 7 per cent to 61 per cent .

Inexpensive devices and ubiquitous WiFi, however, do not guarantee widespread usage. Diego Molano Vega, an architect of Vive Digital, found that many programs designed for customers in developed countries were ill suited to most Colombians. “There are no poor people in Silicon Valley,” he says. Latin American governments should use their purchasing power to push for development of digital services easily adopted by their citizens and businesses. Chile is a leader: it has digitised hundreds of trámites — bureaucratic procedures involving endless forms and queues. In a 4,300km-longcountry of mountains, deserts and forests, this enables access to all sorts of services through the internet. Entrepreneurs can now register businesses online for free in a single day.

In Chile, entrepreneurs can now register new businesses online for free in a single day…

Technology can be harnessed to boost equity in education. Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state launched a free online service to prepare high school students for a tough national exam in which a good grade is a prerequisite for admission to federal universities. On average the results of the students who used the service were 31 per cent higher than those of their peers, prompting 10 other states to adopt the system.

Digital tools can also help raise competitiveness in business. Uruguay’s livestock information system keeps track of the country’s cattle. The publicly financed electronic registry ensures every beast can be traced, making it easier to monitor outbreaks of diseases….(More)”

 

Cities show how to make open data usable

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bianca Spinosa at GCN: “Government agencies have no shortage of shareable data. Data.gov, the open-data clearinghouse that launched in May 2009, had more than 147,331 datasets as of mid-July, and state and local governments are joining federal agencies in releasing ever-broader arrays of information.

The challenge, however, remains making all that data usable. Obama administration officials like to talk about how the government’s weather data supports forecasting and analysis that support businesses and help Americans every day. But relatively few datasets do more than just sit there, and fewer still are truly accessible for the average person.

At the federal level, that’s often because agency missions do not directly affect citizens the way that local governments do. Nevertheless, every agency has customers and communities of interest, and there are lessons feds can learn from how cities are sharing their data with the public.

One such model is Citygram. The app links to a city’s open-data platform and sends subscribers a weekly text or email message about selected activities in their neighborhoods. Charlotte officials worked closely with Code for America fellows to develop the software, and the app launched in December 2014 in that city and in Lexington, Ky.

Three other cities – New York, Seattle, and San Francisco – have since joined, and Orlando, Fla.; Honolulu; the Research Triangle area of North Carolina; and Montgomery County, Md., are considering doing so.

Citygram “takes open data and transforms it, curates it and translates it into human speech,” said Twyla McDermott, Charlotte’s corporate IT program manager. “People want to know what’s happening around them.”

Demonstrating real-world utility

People in the participating cities can go to Citygram.org, select their city and choose topics of interest (such as pending rezonings or new business locations). Then they enter their address and a radius to consider “nearby” and finally select either text or email for their weekly notifications.

Any city government can use the technology, which is open source and freely available on GitHub. San Francisco put its own unique spin on the app by allowing subscribers to sign up for notifications on tree plantings. With Citygram NYC, New Yorkers can find information on vehicle collisions within a radius of up to 4 miles….(More)”