Northern America

Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard

Curated on March 22, 2015October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Shannon Mattern at Places: “We know what rocket science looks like in the movies: a windowless bunker filled with blinking consoles, swivel chairs, and shirt-sleeved men in headsets nonchalantly relaying updates from “Houston” to outer space. Lately, that vision of Mission Control has taken over City Hall. NASA meets Copacabana, proclaimed the New York Times, hailing Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Center as a “potentially lucrative experiment that could shape the future of cities around the world.” The Times photographed an IBM executive in front of a seemingly endless wall of screens integrating data from 30 city agencies, including transit video, rainfall patterns, crime statistics, car accidents, power failures, and more. ¹

Futuristic control rooms have proliferated in dozens of global cities. Baltimore has its CitiStat Room, where department heads stand at a podium before a wall of screens and account for their units’ performance. The Mayor’s office in London’s City Hall features a 4×3 array of iPads mounted in a wooden panel, which seems an almost parodic, Terry Gilliam-esque take on the Brazilian Ops Center. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned an iPad app – the “No. 10 Dashboard” (a reference to his residence at 10 Downing Street) – which gives him access to financial, housing, employment, and public opinion data. As The Guardian reported, “the prime minister said that he could run government remotely from his smartphone.”

This is the age of Dashboard Governance, heralded by gurus like Stephen Few, founder of the “visual business intelligence” and “sensemaking” consultancy Perceptual Edge, who defines the dashboard as a “visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.” A well-designed dashboard, he says — one that makes proper use of bullet graphs, sparklines, and other visualization techniques informed by the “brain science” of aesthetics and cognition — can afford its users not only a perceptual edge, but a performance edge, too. The ideal display offers a big-picture view of what is happening in real time, along with information on historical trends, so that users can divine the how and why and redirect future action. As David Nettleton emphasizes, the dashboard’s utility extends beyond monitoring “the current situation”; it also “allows a manager to … make provisions, and take appropriate actions.”….

The dashboard market now extends far beyond the corporate world. In 1994, New York City police commissioner William Bratton adapted former officer Jack Maple’s analog crime maps to create the CompStat model of aggregating and mapping crime statistics. Around the same time, the administrators of Charlotte, North Carolina, borrowed a business idea — Robert Kaplan’s and David Norton’s “total quality management” strategy known as the “Balanced Scorecard” — and began tracking performance in five “focus areas” defined by the City Council: housing and neighborhood development, community safety, transportation, economic development, and the environment. Atlanta followed Charlotte’s example in creating its own city dashboard.

In 1999, Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley, confronting a crippling crime rate and high taxes, designed CitiStat, “an internal process of using metrics to create accountability within his government.” (This rhetoric of data-tested internal “accountability” is prevalent in early dashboard development efforts.) The project turned to face the public in 2003, when Baltimore launched a website of city operational statistics, which inspired DCStat (2005), Maryland’s StateStat (2007), and NYCStat (2008). Since then, myriad other states and metro areas — driven by a “new managerialist” approach to urban governance, committed to “benchmarking” their performance against other regions, and obligated to demonstrate compliance with sustainability agendas — have developed their own dashboards.

The Open Michigan Mi Dashboard is typical of these efforts. The state website presents data on education, health and wellness, infrastructure, “talent” (employment, innovation), public safety, energy and environment, financial health, and seniors. You (or “Mi”) can monitor the state’s performance through a side-by-side comparison of “prior” and “current” data, punctuated with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon indicating the state’s “progress” on each metric. Another click reveals a graph of annual trends and a citation for the data source, but little detail about how the data are actually derived. How the public is supposed to use this information is an open question….(More)”

Gamification harnesses the power of games to motivate

Curated on March 19, 2015June 30, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kevin Werbach at the Conversation: “Walk through any public area and you’ll see people glued to their phones, playing mobile games like Game of War and Candy Crush Saga. They aren’t alone. 59% of Americans play video games, and contrary to stereotypes, 48% of gamers are women. The US$100 billion video game industry is among the least-appreciated business phenomena in the world today.

But this isn’t an article about video games. It’s about where innovative organizations are applying the techniques that make those games so powerfully engaging: everywhere else.

Gamification is the perhaps-unfortunate name for the growing practice of applying structural elements, design patterns, and psychological insights from game design to business, education, health, marketing, crowdsourcing and other fields. Over the past four years, gamification has gone through a cycle of (over-)hype and (overblown) disappointment common for technological trends. Yet if you look carefully, you’ll see it everywhere.

Tapping into pieces of games

Gamification involves two primary mechanisms. The first is to take design structures from games, such as levels, achievements, points, and leaderboards — in my book, For the Win, my co-author and I label them “game elements” — and incorporate them into activities. The second, more subtle but ultimately more effective, is to mine the rich vein of design techniques that game designers have developed over many years. Good games pull you in and carry you through a journey that remains engaging, using an evolving balance of challenges and a stream of well crafted, actionable feedback.

Many enterprises now use tools built on top of Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management platform to motivate employees through competitions, points and leaderboards. Online learning platforms such as Khan Academy commonly challenge students to “level up” by sprinkling game elements throughout the process. Even games are now gamified: Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PS4 consoles offer a meta-layer of achievements and trophies to promote greater game-play.

The differences between a gamified system that incorporates good design principles and one that doesn’t aren’t always obvious on the surface. They show up in the results.

Duolingo is an online language-learning app. It’s pervasively and thoughtfully gamified: points, levels, achievements, bonuses for “streaks,” visual progression indicators, even a virtual currency with various ways to spend it. The well integrated gamification is a major differentiator for Duolingo, which happens to be the most successful tool of its kind. With over 60 million registered users, it teaches languages to more people than the entire US public school system.

Most of the initial high-profile cases of gamification were for marketing: for example, USA Network ramped up its engagement numbers with web-based gamified challenges for fans of its shows, and Samsung gave points and badges for learning about its products.

Soon it became clear that other applications were equally promising. Today, organizations are using gamification to enhance employee performance, promote health and wellness activities, improve retention in online learning, help kids with cancer endure their treatment regimen, and teach people how to code, to name just a few examples. Gamification has potential anywhere that motivation is an important element of success.

Gamification works because our responses to games are deeply hard-wired into our psychology. Game design techniques can activate our innate desires to recognize patterns, solve puzzles, master challenges, collaborate with others, and be in the drivers’ seat when experiencing the world around us. They can also create a safe space for experimentation and learning. After all, why not try something new when you know that even if you fail, you’ll get another life?…(More)

Using open legislative data to map bill co-sponsorship networks in 15 countries

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

François Briatte at OpeningParliament.org: “A few years back, Kamil Gregor published a post under the title “Visualizing politics: Network analysis of bill sponsors”. His post, which focused on the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, showed how basic social network analysis can support the exploration of parliamentary work, by revealing the ties that members of parliament create between each other through the co-sponsorship of private bills….In what follows, I would like to quickly report on a small research project that I have developed over the years, under the name “parlnet”.

Legislative data on bill co-sponsorship

This project looks at bill co-sponsorship networks in European countries. Many parliaments allow their members to co-sponsor each other’s private bills, which makes it possible to represent these parliaments as collaborative networks, where a tie exists between two MPs if they have co-sponsored legislation together.

This idea is not new: it was pioneered by James Fowler in the United States, and has been the subject of extensive research in American politics, both on the U.S. Congress and on state legislatures. Similar research also exists on the bill co-sponsorship networks of parliaments in Argentina, Chile andRomania.

Inspired by this research and by Baptiste Coulmont’s visualisation of the French lower chamber, I surveyed the parliamentary websites of the following countries:

all 28 current members of the European Union ;
4 members of the EFTA: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland

This search returned 19 parliamentary chambers from 15 countries for which it was (relatively) easy to extract legislative data, either through open data portals like data.riksdagen.se in Sweden ordata.stortinget.no in Norway, or from official parliamentary websites directly….After splitting the data into legislative periods separated by nationwide elections, I was able to draw a large collection of networks showing bill co-sponsorship in these 19 chambers….In this graph, each point (or node) is a Belgian MP, and each tie between two MPs indicates that they have co-sponsored at least one bill together. The colors and abbreviations used in the graph are party-related codes, which combine information on the parliamentary group and linguistic community of each MP.Because this kind of graph can be interesting to explore in more detail, I have also built interactive visualizations out of them, in order to show more detailed information on the MPs who participate in bill cosposorship…

The parlnet project was coded in R, and its code is public so that it might benefit from external contributions. The list of countries and chambers that it covers is not exhaustive: in some cases like Portugal, I simply failed to retrieve the data. More talented coders might therefore be able to add to the current database.

Bill cosponsorship networks illustrate how open legislative data provided by parliaments can be turned into interactive tools that easily convey some information about parliamentary work, including, but not limited to:

the role of parliamentary party leaders in managing the legislation produced by their groups
the impact of partisan discipline and ideology on legislative collaboration between MPs
the extent of cross-party cooperation in various parliamentary environments and chambers… (More)

Our New Three Rs: Rigor, Relevance, and Readability

Curated on March 16, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stephen J. Del Rosso in Governance: “…Because of the dizzying complexity of the contemporary world, the quest for a direct relationship between academic scholarship and its policy utility is both quixotic and unnecessary. The 2013 U.S. Senate’s vote to prohibit funding for political science projects through the National Science Foundation, except for those certified “as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States,” revealed a fundamental misreading of the nonlinear path between idea and policy. Rather than providing a clear blueprint for addressing emergent or long-standing challenges, a more feasible role for academic scholarship is what political scientist Roland Paris describes as helping to “order the world in which officials operate.” Scholarly works can “influence practitioners’ understandings of what is possible or desirable in a particular policy field or set of circumstances,” he believes, by “creating operational frameworks for … identifying options and implementing policies.”

It is sometimes claimed that think tanks should play the main role in conveying scholarly insights to policymakers. But, however they may have mastered the sound bite, the putative role of think tanks as effective transmission belts for policy-relevant ideas is limited by their lack of academic rigor and systematic peer review. There is also a tendency, particularly among some “Inside the Beltway” experts, to trim their sails to the prevailing political winds and engage in self-censorship to keep employment options open in current or future presidential administrations. Scholarship’s comparative advantage in the marketplace of ideas is also evident in terms of its anticipatory function—the ability to loosen the intellectual bolts for promising policies not quite ready for implementation. A classic example is Swedish Nobel laureate Gunner Myrdal’s 1944 study of race relations, The American Dilemma, which was largely ignored and even disavowed by its sponsors for over a decade until it proved essential to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Moreover, it should also be noted, rather than providing a detailed game plan for addressing the problem of race in the country, Myrdal’s work was a quintessential example of the power of scholarship to frame critically important issues.

To bridge the scholarship–policy gap, academics must balance rigor and relevance with a third “R”—readability. There is no shortage of important scholarly work that goes unnoticed or unread because of its presentation. Scholars interested in having influence beyond the ivory tower need to combine their pursuit of disciplinary requirements with efforts to make their work more intelligible and accessible to a broader audience. For example, new forms of dissemination, such as blogs and other social media innovations, provide policy-relevant scholars with ample opportunities to supplement more traditional academic outlets. The recent pushback from the editors of the International Studies Association’s journals to the announced prohibition on their blogging is one indication that the cracks in the old system are already appearing.

At the risk of oversimplification, there are three basic tribes populating the political science field. One tribe comprises those who “get it” when it comes to the importance of policy relevance, a second eschews such engagement with the real world in favor of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and a third is made up of anxious untenured assistant professors who seek to follow the path that will best provide them with secure employment. If war, as was famously said, is too important to be left to the generals, then the future of the political science field is too important to be left to the intellectual ostriches who bury their heads in self-referential esoterica. However, the first tribe needs to be supported, and the third tribe needs to be shown that there is professional value in engaging with the world, both to enlighten and, perhaps more importantly, to provoke—a sentiment the policy-relevant scholar and inveterate provocateur, Huntington, would surely have endorsed…(More)”

Why Entrepreneurs Should Go Work for Government

Curated on March 14, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Blanding interviewing Mitchell B. Weiss for HBS Working Knowledge: “…In the past five years, cities around the world have increasingly become laboratories in innovation, producing idea labs that partner with outside businesses and nonprofits to solve thorny public policy problems—and along the way deal with challenges of knowing when to follow the established ways of government and when to break the mold. States and federal government, too, have been reaching out to designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs to help redo their operations. The new US Digital Service, for example, follows other federal efforts like 18F and the Presidential Innovation Fellows to streamline government websites and electronic records—adapting from models in the UK and elsewhere.

“We have many talented people in government, but by and large they have tended to be analysts and strategists, rather than inventors and builders,” says Weiss, who hopes his course can help change that. “One reason we didn’t have them is we weren’t training them. At policy schools we had not been training people to be all that entrepreneurial, and at business schools, we were not prepping or prodding entrepreneurial people to enter the public sector or even just to invent for the public realm.”

“Government should be naturals at crowdsourcing”

Government entrepreneurship takes many forms. There are “public-public entrepreneurs” who work within government agencies, as well as “private-public entrepreneurs” who establish private businesses that sell to government agencies or sometimes to citizens directly.

In Philadelphia, for example, Textizen enables citizens to communicate with city health and human services agencies by text messages, leading to new enforcement on air pollution controls. In California, OpenCounter streamlined registration for small businesses and provided zoning clearances in a fraction of the usual time. In New York, Mark43 is developing software to analyze crime statistics and organize law enforcement records. And in Boston, Bridj developed an on-demand bus service for routes underserved by public transportation.

The innovations are happening at a scale large enough to even attract venture capital investment, despite past VC skepticism about funding public projects.

“There was this paradox—on the one hand, government is the biggest customer in the world; on the other hand, 90 out of 100 VCs would say they don’t back business models that sell to government,” says Weiss. “Though that’s starting to change as startups and government are starting to change.” OpenGov received a $15 million round of funding last spring led by Andreessen Horowitz, and $17 million was pumped into civic social-networking app MindMixer last fall….

Governments could attract even more capital by examining their procurement rules to speed buying, says Weiss, giving them that same sense of urgency and lean startup practices needed to be successful in entrepreneurial projects…(More)”

How’s the Weather There? Crowdsourcing App Promises Better Forecasts

Curated on March 12, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Metz at MIT Technology Review: “An app called Sunshine wants you to help it create more accurate, localized weather forecasts.
The app, currently in a private beta test, combines data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with atmospheric pressure readings captured by a smartphone. The latest iPhones, and some Android smartphones, include barometers for measuring atmospheric pressure. These sensors are generally used to determine elevation for navigation, but changes in air pressure can also signal changes in the weather.
Sunshine will also rely on users to report sudden weather hazards like fog, cofounder Katerina Stroponiati says. About 250 people spread out among the Bay Area, New York, and Dallas are now using Sunshine, she says, and the team behind it plans to release the app publicly at the end of March for the iPhone. It will be free, though some features may eventually cost extra.
While weather predictions have gotten more accurate over the years, they’re far from perfect. Weather information usually isn’t localized, either. The goal of Sunshine is to better serve places like its home base of San Francisco, where weather can be markedly different over just a few blocks.
Stroponiati aims for Sunshine to get enough people sending in data—three per square mile would be needed, according to experiments the team has conducted—that the app can be used to make weather prediction more accurate than it tends to be today. Some other apps, like PressureNet and WeatherSignal, already gather data entered manually by users, but they don’t yet offer crowdsourced forecasts….(More)”

How Open Is University Data?

Curated on March 9, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Castro at GovTech: “Many states now support open data, or data that’s made freely available without restriction in a nonproprietary, machine-readable format, to increase government transparency, improve public accountability and participation, and unlock opportunities for civic innovation. To date, 10 states have adopted open data policies, via executive order or legislation, and 24 states have built open data portals. But while many agencies have joined the open data movement, state colleges and universities have largely ignored this opportunity. To remedy this, policymakers should consider how to extend open data policies to state colleges and universities.

There are many potential benefits of open data for higher education. First, it can help prospective students and their parents better understand the value of different degree programs. One way to control rising higher ed costs is to create more informed consumers. The feds are already pushing for such changes. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan called for schools to make more information publicly available about the costs of obtaining a college degree, and the White House launched the College Scorecard, an online tool to compare data about the average tuition cost, size of loan payments and loan default rate for different schools.

But students deserve more detailed information. Prospective students should be able to decide where to attend and what to study based on historical data like program costs, percentage of students completing the program and how long they take to do so, and what kind of earning power they have after graduating.

Second, open data can aid better fiscal oversight and accountability of university operations. In 2014, states provided about $76 billion in support for higher ed, yet few colleges and universities have adopted open data policies to increase the transparency of their budgets. Contrast this with California cities like Oakland, Palo Alto and Los Angeles, which created online tools to let others explore and visualize their budgets. Additional oversight, including from the public, could help reduce fraud, waste and abuse in higher education, save taxpayers money and create more opportunities for public participation in state budgeting.

Third, open data can be a valuable resource for producing innovations that make universities a better place to work and study. Large campuses are basically small cities, and many cities have found open data useful for improving public safety and optimizing transportation services. Universities hold much untapped data: course catalogs, syllabi, bus schedules, campus menus, campus directories, faculty evaluations, etc. Creating portals to release these data sets and building application programming interfaces to access this information would give developers direct access to data that students, faculty, alumni and other stakeholders could use to build apps and services to improve the college experience….(More)”

Citizens Connect

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

Harvard Business School Case Study by Mitchell Weiss: “Funding to scale Citizens Connect, Boston’s 311 app, is both a blessing and a burden and tests two public entrepreneurs. In 2012, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts provides Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics with a grant to scale Citizens Connect across the state. The money gives two co-creators of Citizens Connect, Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob, a chance to grow their vision for citizen-engaged governance and civic innovation, but it also requires that the two City of Boston leaders sit on a formal selection committee that pits their original partner, Connected Bits, against another player that might meet the specific requirements for delivering a statewide version. The selection and scaling process raise questions beyond just which partner to choose. What would happen to the Citizens Connect brand as Osgood and Jacob’s product spreads across the state? Who could help scale their work best then nationally? Which business models were best positioned to drive that growth? What intellectual property arrangements would best enable it? And what role should the two city employees have, anyway, in scaling Citizens Connect outside of Boston in the first place? These questions hung in the air as they pondered the one big one about passing over Connected Bits for another partner: should they?…(More)”

Evaluating Complex Social Initiatives

Curated on March 5, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Srik Gopal at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…the California Endowment (TCE) .. and ..The Grand Rapids Community Foundation (GRCF) …are just two funders who are actively “shifting the lens” in terms of how they are looking at evaluation in the light of complexity. They are building on the recognition that a traditional approach to evaluation—assessing specific effects of a defined program according to a set of pre-determined outcomes, often in a way that connects those outcomes back to the initiative—is increasingly falling short. There is a clear message emerging that evaluation needs to accommodate complexity, not “assume it away.”

My colleagues at FSG and I have, based on our work with TCE, GRCF, and numerous other clients, articulated a set of nine “propositions” in a recent practice brief that are helpful in guiding how we conceptualize, design, and implement evaluations of complex initiatives. We derived these propositions from what we now know (based on the emerging field of complexity science) as distinctive characteristics of complex systems. We know, for example, that complex systems are always changing, often in unpredictable ways; they are never static. Hence, we need to design evaluations so that they are adaptive, flexible, and iterative, not rigid and cookie-cutter.

Below are three of the propositions in more detail, along with tools and methods that can help apply the proposition in practice.

It is important to note that many of the traditional tools and methods that form the backbone of sound evaluations—such as interviews, focus groups, and surveys—are still relevant. We would, however, suggest that organizations adapt those methods to reflect a complexity orientation. For example, interviews should explore the role of context; we should not confine them to the initiative’s boundaries. Focus groups should seek to understand local adaptation, not just adherence. And surveys should probe for relationships and interdependencies, not just perceived outcomes. In addition to traditional methods, we suggest incorporating newer, innovative techniques that provide a richer narrative, including:

Systems mapping—an iterative, often participatory process of graphically representing a system, including its components and connections
Appreciative inquiry—a group process that inquires into, identifies, and further develops the best of “what is” in organizations
Design thinking—a user-centered approach to developing new solutions to abstract, ill-defined, or complex problems… (More)”