Northern America

Setting Government Procurement Data Free

Curated on October 22, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Colin Wood in GovTech: “A new website may help drive down government procurement costs and make it easier for startups to sell their goods and services.

The website, called Open Procure, launched earlier this month and is the latest side project of Alan Mond, CEO and co-founder ofMunirent, the inter-jurisdictional equipment sharing service. Mond says the website is an experiment that he hopes will start conversations about procurement and ultimately prove beneficial for government and startups alike.

The website is simply a list of procurement thresholds for local and state government agencies nationwide. As of two weeks after launch, the website features thresholds for 59 agencies, many of which provide links to the original data sources. Users can see that in Boston, for instance, the city’s discretionary procurement threshold is $5,000 and the formal threshold is $25,000. So any startup wanting to sell goods or services to Boston — but avoid a public competitive bid process — can see that they need to keep their cost under $25,000. If they want to avoid competition altogether, they need to keep it under $5,000.

The website also creates a broader discussion around threshold inconsistency. In Philadelphia, for instance, the discretionary threshold is $32,000, compared to Boston’s $5,000, which means Philadelphia can procure without taking multiple bids on considerably larger projects. This is useful information for businesses, Mond pointed out, but also a conversation starter for the public sector. Do these disparities between different states, cities and counties exist for a good reason, or are they decided somewhat arbitrarily and left in the municipal code to rot?…(More)”

Privacy Bridges: EU and US Privacy Experts in Search of Transatlantic Privacy Solutions

Curated on October 22, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

IVIR and MIT: “The EU and US share a common commitment to privacy protection as a cornerstone of democracy. Following the Treaty of Lisbon, data privacy is a fundamental right that the European Union must proactively guarantee. In the United States, data privacy derives from constitutional protections in the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment as well as federal and state statute, consumer protection law and common law. The ultimate goal of effective privacy protection is shared. However, current friction between the two legal systems poses challenges to realizing privacy and the free flow of information across the Atlantic. Recent expansion of online surveillance practices underline these challenges.

Over nine months, the group prepared a consensus report outlining a menu of privacy “bridges” that can be built to bring the European Union and the United States closer together. The efforts are aimed at providing a framework of practical options that advance strong, globally-accepted privacy values in a manner that respects the substantive and procedural differences between the two jurisdictions….

Full Report (276 KB)
Executive summary (106 KB)

(More)”

Introducing Government as a Platform

Curated on October 20, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Williams, Jan Gravesen and Trinette Brownhill in Government Executive: “Governments around the world are facing competitive pressures and expectations from their constituents that are prompting them to innovate and dissolve age-old structures. Many governments have introduced a digital strategy in which at least one of the goals is aimed at bringing their organizations closer to citizens and businesses.

To achieve this, ideally IT and data in government would not be constrained by the different functional towers that make up the organization, as is often the case. They would not be constrained by complex, monolithic application design philosophies and lengthy implementation cycles, nor would development be constrained by the assumption that all activity has to be executed by the government itself.

Instead, applications would be created rapidly and cheaply, and modules would be shared as reusable blocks of code and integrated data. It would be relatively straightforward to integrate data from multiple departments to enable a focus on the complex needs of, say, a single parent who is diabetic and a student. Delivery would be facilitated in the manner best required, or preferred, by the citizen. Third parties would also be able to access these modules of code and data to build higher value government services that multiple agencies would then buy into. The code would run on a cloud infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency in which processing resources are used.

GaaP an organized set of ideas and principles that allows organizations to approach these ideals. It allows governments to institute more efficient sharing of IT resources as well as unlock data and functionality via application programming interfaces to allow third parties to build higher value citizen services. In doing so, security plays a crucial role protecting the privacy of constituents and enterprise assets.

We see increasingly well-established examples of GaaP services in many parts of the world. The notion has significantly influenced strategic thinking in the UK, Australia, Denmark, Canada and Singapore. In particular, it has evolved in a deliberate way in the UK’s Government Data Services, building on the Blairite notion of “joined up government”; in Australia’s e-government strategy and its myGov program; and as a significant influencer in Singapore’s entire approach to building its “smarter nation” infrastructure.

Collaborative Government

GaaP assumes a transformational shift in efficiency, effectiveness and transparency, in which agencies move toward a collaborative government and away from today’s siloed approach. That collaboration may be among agencies, but also with other entities (nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, citizens, etc.).

GaaP’s focus on collaboration enables public agencies to move away from their traditional towered approach to IT and increasingly make use of shared and composable services offered by a common – usually a virtualized, cloud-enabled – platform. This leads to more efficient use of development resources, platforms and IT support. We are seeing examples of this already with a group of townships in New York state and also with two large Spanish cities that are embarking on this approach.

While efficient resource and service sharing is central to the idea of GaaP, it is not sufficient. The idea is that GaaP must allow app developers, irrespective of whether they are citizens, private organizations or other public agencies, to develop new value-added services using published government data and APIs. In this sense, the platform becomes a connecting layer between public agencies’ systems and data on the one hand, and private citizens, organizations and other public agencies on the other.

In its most fundamental form, GaaP is able to:

Consume data and government services from existing departmental systems.
Consume syndicated services from platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service providers in the public marketplace.
Securely unlock these data and services and allow third parties –citizens, private organizations or other agencies – to combine services and data into higher-order services or more citizen-centric or business-centric services.

It is the openness, the secure interoperability, and the ability to compose new services on the basis of existing services and data that define the nature of the platform.

The Challenges

At one time, the challenge of creating a GaaP structure would have been technology: Today, it is governance….(More)”

The big cost of using big data in elections

Curated on October 19, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael McDonald, Peter Licari and Lia Merivaki in the Washington Post: “In modern campaigns, buzzwords like “microtargeting” and “big data” are often bandied about as essential to victory. These terms refer to the practice of analyzing (or “microtargeting”) millions of voter registration records (“big data”) to predict who will vote and for whom.

If you’ve ever gotten a message from a campaign, there’s a good chance you’ve been microtargeted. Serious campaigns use microtargeting to persuade voters through mailings, phone calls, knocking on doors, and — in our increasingly connected world — social media.

But the big data that fuels such efforts comes at a big price, which can create a serious barrier to entry for candidates and groups seeking to participate in elections — that is, if they are allowed to buy the data at all.

When we asked state election officials about prices and restrictions on who can use their voter registration files, we learned that the rules are unsettlingly arbitrary.

Contrast Arizona and Washington. Arizona sells its statewide voter file for an estimated $32,500, while Washington gives its file away for free. Before jumping to the conclusion that this is a red- state/blue-state thing, consider that Oklahoma gives its file away, too.

A number of states base their prices on a per-record formula, which can massively drive up the price despite the fact that files are often delivered electronically. Alabama sells its records for 1 cent per voter , which yields an approximately $30,000 charge for the lot. Seriously, in this day and age, who prices an electronic database by the record?

Some states will give more data to candidates than to outside groups. Delaware will provide phone numbers to candidates but not to nonprofit organizations doing nonpartisan voter mobilization.

In some states, the voter file is not even available to the general public. States such as South Carolina and Maryland permit access only to residents who are registered voters. States including Kentucky and North Dakota grant access only to campaigns, parties and other political organizations.

We estimate that it would cost roughly $140,000 for an independent presidential campaign or national nonprofit organization to compile a national voter file, and this would not be a one-time cost. Voter lists frequently change as voters are added and deleted.

Guess who most benefits from all the administrative chaos? Political parties and their candidates. Not only are they capable of raising the vast amounts of money needed to purchase the data, but, adding insult to injury, they sometimes don’t even have to. Some states literally bequeath the data to parties at no cost. Alabama goes so far as to give parties a free statewide copy for every election.

Who is hurt by this? Independent candidates and nonprofit organizations that want to run national campaigns but don’t have deep pockets. If someone like Donald Trump launched an independent presidential run, he could buy the necessary data without much difficulty. But a nonprofit focused on mobilizing low-income voters could be stretched thin….(More)”

Infographic: World Statistics Day 2015

Curated on October 18, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The U.S. Census Bureau will join statistical organizations throughout the world to celebrate the second World Statistics Day on Oct. 20, 2015.

This interactive infographic is a compilation of news graphics that highlights the wide range of ways the Census Bureau supports this year’s theme of “Better data. Better lives.”

The Census Bureau uses statistics to provide critical and timely information about the people, places and economy of the United States.

For more information on World Statistics Day 2015, please see the links provided below.

Infographic: World Statistics Day 2015
Facts for Features: *Special Edition* World Statistics Day: Oct. 20, 2015 | PDF Version
Video: Statistics All Around Us
Official United Nations World Statistics Day 2015 Website“

Where the right to know comes from

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

Michael Schudson in Columbia Journalism Review: “…what began as an effort to keep the executive under check by the Congress became a law that helped journalists, historians, and ordinary citizens monitor federal agencies. Nearly 50 years later, it may all sound easy and obvious. It was neither. And this burst of political engagement is rarely, if ever, mentioned by journalists themselves as an exception to normal “acts of journalism.”

But how did it happen at all? In 1948, the American Society of Newspaper Editors set up its first-ever committee on government restrictions on the freedom to gather and publish news. It was called the “Committee on World Freedom of Information”—a name that implied that limiting journalists’ access or straightforward censorship was a problem in other countries. The committee protested Argentina’s restrictions on what US correspondents could report, censorship in Guatemala, and—closer to home—US military censorship in occupied Japan.

When the ASNE committee turned to the problem of secrecy in the US government in the early 1950s, it chose to actively criticize such secrecy, but not to “become a legislative committee.” Even in 1953, when ASNE leaders realized that significant progress on government secrecy might require federal legislation, they concluded that “watching all such legislation” would be an important task for the committee, but did not suggest taking a public position.

Representative Moss changed this. Moss was a small businessman who had served several terms in the California legislature before his election to Congress in 1952. During his first term, he requested some data from the Civil Service Commission about dismissals of government employees on suspicion of disloyalty. The commission flatly turned him down. “My experience in Washington quickly proved that you had a hell of a time getting any information,” Moss recalled. Two years later, a newly re-elected Moss became chair of a House subcommittee on government information….(More)”

Can non-Western democracy help to foster political transformation?

Curated on October 11, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard Youngs at Open Democracy: “…many non-Western countries are showing signs of a newly-vibrant civic politics, organized in ways that are not centered on NGOs but on more loosely structured social movements in participatory forms of democracy where active citizenship is crucial—not just structured or formal, representative democratic institutions. Bolivia is a good example.

Many Western governments were skeptical about President Evo Morales’ political project, fearing that he would prove to be just as authoritarian as Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But some Western donors (including Germany and the European Union) have already increased their support to indigenous social movements in Bolivia because they’ve become a vital channel of influence and accountability between government and society.

Secondly, it’s clear that the political dimensions of democracy will be undermined if economic conditions and inequalities are getting worse, so democracy promotion efforts need to be delinked from pressures to adopt neo-liberal economic policies. Western interests need to do more to prove that they are not supporting democracy primarily as a means to further their economic interest in ‘free markets.’ That’s why the European Union is supporting a growing number of projects designed to build up social insurance schemes during the early phases of democratic transitions. European diplomats, at least, say that they see themselves as supporters of social and economic democracy.

Donors are becoming more willing to support the role of labor unions in pro-democracy coalition-building; and to protect labor standards as a crucial part of political transitions in countries as diverse as Tunisia, Georgia, China, Egypt and Ecuador. But they should do more to assess how the embedded structures of economic power can undermine the quality of democratic processes. Support for civil society organizations that are keen on exploring heterodox economic models should also be stepped up.

Thirdly, non-Western structures and traditions can help to reduce violent conflict successfully. Tribal chiefs, traditional decision-making circles and customary dispute resolution mechanisms are commonplace in Africa and Asia, and have much to teach their counterparts in the West. In Afghanistan, for example, international organizations realized that the standard institutions of Western liberal democracy were gaining little traction, and were probably deepening rather than healing pre-existing divisions, so they’ve started to support local-level deliberative forums instead.

Something similar is happening in the Balkans, where the United States and the European Union are giving priority to locally tailored, consensual power-sharing arrangements. The United Nations is working with customary justice systems in Somalia. And in South Sudan and Kenya, donors have worked with tribal chiefs and supported traditional authorities to promote a better understanding of human rights and gender justice issues. These forms of power-sharing and ‘consensual communitarianism’ can be quite effective in protecting minorities while also encouraging dialogue and deliberation.

As these brief examples show, different countries can both offer and receive ideas about democratic transformation regardless of geography, though this is never straightforward. It involves finding a balance between defending genuinely-universal norms on the one hand, and encouraging democratic experimentation on the other. This is a thin line to walk, and it requires, for example, recognition that the basic precepts of liberal democracy are not synonymous with what can be seen as an amoral individualism, particularly in highly religious communities.

Pro-democracy reformers and civic groups in non-Western countries often take international organizations to task for pushing too hard on questions of ‘Western liberal rights’ rather than supporting variations to the standard, individualist template, even where tribal structures and traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms work reasonably well. This has led to resistance against international support in places as diverse as Libya, Mali and Pakistan…..

Academic critical theorists argue that Western democracy promoters fail to take alternative models of democracy on board because they would endanger their own geostrategic and economic interests….(More)”

How the USGS uses Twitter data to track earthquakes

Curated on October 11, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Twitter Blog: “After the disastrous Sichuan earthquake in 2008, people turned to Twitter to share firsthand information about the earthquake. What amazed many was the impression that Twitter was faster at reporting the earthquake than the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the official government organization in charge of tracking such events.

This Twitter activity wasn’t a big surprise to the USGS. The USGS National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) processes about 2,000 realtime earthquake sensors, with the majority based in the United States. That leaves a lot of empty space in the world with no sensors. On the other hand, there are hundreds of millions of people using Twitter who can report earthquakes. At first, the USGS staff was a bit skeptical that Twitter could be used as a detection system for earthquakes – but when they looked into it, they were surprised at the effectiveness of Twitter data for detection.

USGS staffers Paul Earle, a seismologist, and Michelle Guy, a software developer, teamed up to look at how Twitter data could be used for earthquake detection and verification. By using Twitter’s Public API, they decided to use the same time series event detection method they use when detecting earthquakes. This gave them a baseline for earthquake-related chatter, but they decided to dig in even further. They found that people Tweeting about actual earthquakes kept their Tweets really short, even just to ask, “earthquake?” Concluding that people who are experiencing earthquakes aren’t very chatty, they started filtering out Tweets with more than seven words. They also recognized that people sharing links or the size of the earthquake were significantly less likely to be offering firsthand reports, so they filtered out any Tweets sharing a link or a number. Ultimately, this filtered stream proved to be very significant at determining when earthquakes occurred globally.

While I was at the USGS office in Golden, Colo. interviewing Michelle and Paul, three earthquakes happened in a relatively short time. Using Twitter data, their system was able to pick up on an aftershock in Chile within one minute and 20 seconds – and it only took 14 Tweets from the filtered stream to trigger an email alert. The other two earthquakes, off Easter Island and Indonesia, weren’t picked up because they were not widely felt…..

The USGS monitors for earthquakes in many languages, and the words used can be a clue as to the magnitude and location of the earthquake. Chile has two words for earthquakes: terremotoand temblor; terremoto is used to indicate a bigger quake. This one in Chile started with people asking if it was a terremoto, but others realizing that it was a temblor.

As the USGS team notes, Twitter data augments their own detection work on felt earthquakes. If they’re getting reports of an earthquake in a populated area but no Tweets from there, that’s a good indicator to them that it’s a false alarm. It’s also very cost effective for the USGS, because they use Twitter’s Public API and open-source software such as Kibana and ElasticSearch to help determine when earthquakes occur….(More)”

As a Start to NYC Prison Reform, Jail Data Will Be Made Public

Curated on October 8, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Brentin Mock at CityLab: “…In New York City, 40 percent of the jailed population are there because they couldn’t afford bail—most of them for nonviolent drug crimes. The city spends $42 million on average annually incarcerating non-felony defendants….

Wednesday, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio signed into law legislation aimed at helping correct these bail problems, providing inmates a bill of rights for when they’re detained and addressing other problems that lead to overstuffing city jails with poor people of color.

The omnibus package of criminal justice reform bills will require the city to produce better accounting of how many people are in city jails, what they’re average incarceration time is while waiting for trial, the average bail amounts imposed on defendants, and a whole host of other data points on incarceration. Under the new legislation, the city will have to release reports quarterly and semi-annually to the public—much of it from data now sheltered within the city’s Department of Corrections.

“This is bringing sunshine to information that is already being looked at internally, but is better off being public data,” New York City council member Helen Rosenthal tells CityLab. “We can better understand what polices we need to change if we have the data to understand what’s going on in the system.”…

The city passed a package of transparency bills last month that focused on Rikers, but the legislation passed Wednesday will focus on the city’s courts and jails system as a whole….(More)”

Anxieties of Democracy

Curated on October 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Debate at the Boston Review opened by Ira Katznelson: “…..Across the range of established democracies, we see skepticism bordering on cynicism about whether parliamentary governments can successfully address pressing domestic and global challenges. These doubts about representative democracy speak to both its fairness and its ability to make good policy.

Since the late eighteenth century, liberal constitutional regimes have recurrently collided with forms of autocratic rule—including fascism and communism—that claim moral superiority and greater efficacy. Today, there is no formal autocratic alternative competing with democracy for public allegiance. Instead, two other concerns characterize current debates. First, there is a sense that constitutional democratic forms, procedures, and practices are softening in the face of allegedly more authentic and more efficacious types of political participation—those that take place outside representative institutions and seem closer to the people. There is also widespread anxiety that national borders no longer define a zone of security, a place more or less safe from violent threats and insulated from rules and conditions established by transnational institutions and seemingly inexorable global processes.

These are recent anxieties. One rarely heard them voiced in liberal democracies when, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama designated the triumph of free regimes and free markets “the end of history.” Fukuyama described “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,“ a “victory of liberalism” in “the realm of ideas and consciousness,” even if “as yet incomplete in the real or material world.” Tellingly, the disruption of this seemingly irresistible trend has recently prompted him to ruminate on the brittleness of democratic institutions across the globe.

Perhaps today’s representative democracies—the ones that do not appear to be candidates for collapse or supersession—are merely confronting ephemeral worries. But the challenge seems starker: a profound crisis of moral legitimacy, practical capacity, and institutional sustainability….(More)

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