Vaidehi Shah at Eco-Business: “Rapidly progressing information communications technology (ICT) is giving rise to an almost infinite range of innovations that can be implemented in cities to make them more efficient and better connected. However, in order for technology to yield sustainable solutions, planners must prioritise citizen engagement and strong leadership.
This was the consensus on Tuesday at the World Cities Summit 2014, where representatives from city and national governments, technology firms and private sector organisations gathered in Singapore to discuss strategies and challenges to achieving sustainable cities in the future.
Laura Ipsen, Microsoft corporate vice president for worldwide public sector, identified globalisation, social media, big data, and mobility as the four major technological trends prevailing in cities today, as she spoke at the plenary session with a theme on “The next urban decade: critical challenges and opportunities”.
Despite these increasing trends, she cautioned, “technology does not build infrastructure, but it does help better engage citizens and businesses through public-private partnerships”.
For example, “LoveCleanStreets”, an online tool developed by Microsoft and partners, enables London residents to report infrastructure problems such as damaged roads or signs, shared Ipsen.
“By engaging citizens through this application, cities can fix problems early, before they get worse,” she said.
In Singapore, the ‘MyWaters’ app of PUB, Singapore’s national water agency, is also a key tool for the government to keep citizens up-to-date of water quality and safety issues in the country, she added.
Even if governments did not actively develop solutions themselves, simply making the immense amounts of data collected by the city open to businesses and citizens could make a big difference to urban liveability, Mark Chandler, director of the San Francisco Mayor’s Office of International Trade and Commerce, pointed out.
Opening up all of the data collected by San Francisco, for instance, yielded 60 free mobile applications that allow residents to access urban solutions related to public transport, parking, and electricity, among others, he explained. This easy and convenient access to infrastructure and amenities, which are a daily necessity, is integral to “a quality of life that keeps the talented workforce in the city,” Chandler said….”
Open Government Data: Helping Parents to find the Best School for their Kids
Radu Cucos at the Open Government Partnership blog: “…This challenge – finding the right school – is probably one of the most important decisions in many parents’ lives. Parents are looking for answers to questions such as which schools are located in safe neighborhoods, which ones have the highest teacher – students’ ratio, which schools have the best funding, which schools have the best premises or which ones have the highest grades average.
It is rarely an easy decision, but is made doubly difficult in the case of migrants. People residing in the same location for a long time know, more or less, which are the best education institutions in their city, town or village. For migrants, the situation is absolutely the opposite. They have to spend extra time and resources in identifying relevant information about schools.
Open Government Data is an effective solution which can ease the problem of a lack of accessible information about existing schools in a particular country or location. By adopting the Open Government Data policy in the educational field, governments release data about grades, funding, student and teacher numbers, data generated throughout time by schools, colleges, universities and other educational settings.
Developers then use this data for creating applications which portray information in easy accessible formats. Three of the best apps which I have come across are highlighted below:
- Discover Your School, developed under the Province of British Columbia of Canada Open Data Initiative, is a platform for parents who are interested in finding a school for their kids, learning about the school districts or comparing schools in the same area. The application provides comprehensive information, such as the number of students enrolled in schools each year, class sizes, teaching language, disaster readiness, results of skills assessment, and student and parent satisfaction. Information and data can be viewed in interactive formats, including maps. On top of that, Discover Your School engages parents in policy making and initiatives such as Erase Bullying or British Columbia Education Plan.
- The School Portal, developed under the Moldova Open Data Initiative, uses data made public by the Ministry of Education of Moldova to offer comprehensive information about 1529 educational institutions in the Republic of Moldova. Users of the portal can access information about schools yearly budgets, budget implementation, expenditures, school rating, students’ grades, schools’ infrastructure and communications. The School Portal has a tool which allows visitors to compare schools based on different criteria – infrastructure, students’ performance or annual budgets. The additional value of the portal is the fact that it serves as a platform for private sector entities which sell school supplies to advertise their products. The School Portal also allows parents to virtually interact with the Ministry of Education of Moldova or with a psychologist in case they need additional information or have concerns regarding the education of their children.
- RomaScuola, developed under the umbrella of the Italian Open Data Initiative, allows visitors to obtain valuable information about all schools in the Rome region. Distinguishing it from the two listed above is the ability to compare schools depending on such facets as frequency of teacher absence, internet connectivity, use of IT equipment for teaching, frequency of students’ transfer to other schools and quality of education in accordance with the percentage of issued diplomas.
Open data on schools has great value not only for parents but also for the educational system in general. Each country has its own school market, if education is considered as a product in this market. Perfect information about products is one of the main characteristics of competitive markets. From this perspective, giving parents the opportunity to have access to information about schools characteristics will contribute to the increase in the competitiveness of the schools market. Educational institutions will have incentives to improve their performance in order to attract more students…”
HHS releases new data and tools to increase transparency on hospital utilization and other trends
Pressrelease: “With more than 2,000 entrepreneurs, investors, data scientists, researchers, policy experts, government employees and more in attendance, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is releasing new data and launching new initiatives at the annual Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C.
Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is releasing its first annual update to the Medicare hospital charge data, or information comparing the average amount a hospital bills for services that may be provided in connection with a similar inpatient stay or outpatient visit. CMS is also releasing a suite of other data products and tools aimed to increase transparency about Medicare payments. The data trove on CMS’s website now includes inpatient and outpatient hospital charge data for 2012, and new interactive dashboards for the CMS Chronic Conditions Data Warehouse and geographic variation data. Also today, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will launch a new open data initiative. And before the end of the conference, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) will announce the winners of two data challenges.
“The release of these data sets furthers the administration’s efforts to increase transparency and support data-driven decision making which is essential for health care transformation,” said HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.
“These public data resources provide a better understanding of Medicare utilization, the burden of chronic conditions among beneficiaries and the implications for our health care system and how this varies by where beneficiaries are located,” said Bryan Sivak, HHS chief technology officer. “This information can be used to improve care coordination and health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries nationwide, and we are looking forward to seeing what the community will do with these releases. Additionally, the openFDA initiative being launched today will for the first time enable a new generation of consumer facing and research applications to embed relevant and timely data in machine-readable, API-based formats.”
2012 Inpatient and Outpatient Hospital Charge Data
The data posted today on the CMS website provide the first annual update of the hospital inpatient and outpatient data released by the agency last spring. The data include information comparing the average charges for services that may be provided in connection with the 100 most common Medicare inpatient stays at over 3,000 hospitals in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Hospitals determine what they will charge for items and services provided to patients and these “charges” are the amount the hospital generally bills for those items or services.
With two years of data now available, researchers can begin to look at trends in hospital charges. For example, average charges for medical back problems increased nine percent from $23,000 to $25,000, but the total number of discharges decreased by nearly 7,000 from 2011 to 2012.
In April, ONC launched a challenge – the Code-a-Palooza challenge – calling on developers to create tools that will help patients use the Medicare data to make health care choices. Fifty-six innovators submitted proposals and 10 finalists are presenting their applications during Datapalooza. The winning products will be announced before the end of the conference.
Chronic Conditions Warehouse and Dashboard
CMS recently released new and updated information on chronic conditions among Medicare fee-for-service beneficiaries, including:
- Geographic data summarized to national, state, county, and hospital referral regions levels for the years 2008-2012;
- Data for examining disparities among specific Medicare populations, such as beneficiaries with disabilities, dual-eligible beneficiaries, and race/ethnic groups;
- Data on prevalence, utilization of select Medicare services, and Medicare spending;
- Interactive dashboards that provide customizable information about Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions at state, county, and hospital referral regions levels for 2012; and
- Chartbooks and maps.
These public data resources support the HHS Initiative on Multiple Chronic Conditions by providing researchers and policymakers a better understanding of the burden of chronic conditions among beneficiaries and the implications for our health care system.
Geographic Variation Dashboard
The Geographic Variation Dashboards present Medicare fee-for-service per-capita spending at the state and county levels in interactive formats. CMS calculated the spending figures in these dashboards using standardized dollars that remove the effects of the geographic adjustments that Medicare makes for many of its payment rates. The dashboards include total standardized per capita spending, as well as standardized per capita spending by type of service. Users can select the indicator and year they want to display. Users can also compare data for a given state or county to the national average. All of the information presented in the dashboards is also available for download from the Geographic Variation Public Use File.
Research Cohort Estimate Tool
CMS also released a new tool that will help researchers and other stakeholders estimate the number of Medicare beneficiaries with certain demographic profiles or health conditions. This tool can assist a variety of stakeholders interested in specific figures on Medicare enrollment. Researchers can also use this tool to estimate the size of their proposed research cohort and the cost of requesting CMS data to support their study.
Digital Privacy Notice Challenge
ONC, with the HHS Office of Civil Rights, will be awarding the winner of the Digital Privacy Notice Challenge during the conference. The winning products will help consumers get notices of privacy practices from their health care providers or health plans directly in their personal health records or from their providers’ patient portals.
OpenFDA
The FDA’s new initiative, openFDA, is designed to facilitate easier access to large, important public health datasets collected by the agency. OpenFDA will make FDA’s publicly available data accessible in a structured, computer readable format that will make it possible for technology specialists, such as mobile application creators, web developers, data visualization artists and researchers to quickly search, query, or pull massive amounts of information on an as needed basis. The initiative is the result of extensive research to identify FDA’s publicly available datasets that are often in demand, but traditionally difficult to use. Based on this research, openFDA is beginning with a pilot program involving millions of reports of drug adverse events and medication errors submitted to the FDA from 2004 to 2013. The pilot will later be expanded to include the FDA’s databases on product recalls and product labeling.
For more information about CMS data products, please visit http://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems.html.
For more information about today’s FDA announcement visit: http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/UCM399335 or http://open.fda.gov/“
How The Right People Analyzing The Best Data Are Transforming Government
NextGov: “Analytics is often touted as a new weapon in the technology arsenal of bleeding-edge organizations willing to spend lots of money to combat problems.
In reality, that’s not the case at all. Certainly, there are complex big data analytics tools that will analyze massive data sets to look for the proverbial needle in a haystack, but analytics 101 also includes smarter ways to look at existing data sets.
In this arena, government is making serious strides, according to Kathryn Stack, advisor for evidence-based innovation at the Office of Management and Budget. Speaking in Washington on Thursday at an analytics conference hosted by IBM, Stack provided an outline for agencies to spur innovation and improve mission by making smarter use of the data they already produce.
Interestingly, the first step has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with people. Get “the right people in the room,” Stack said, and make sure they value learning.
“One thing I have learned in my career is that if you really want transformative change, it’s important to bring the right players together across organizations – from your own department and different parts of government,” Stack said. “Too often, we lose a lot of money when siloed organizations lose sight of what the problem really is and spend a bunch of money, and at the end of the day we have invested in the wrong thing that doesn’t address the problem.”
The Department of Labor provides a great example for how to change a static organizational culture into one that integrates performance management, evaluation- and innovation-based processes. The department, she said, created a chief evaluation office and set up evaluation offices for each of its bureaus. These offices were tasked with focusing on important questions to improve performance, going inside programs to learn what is and isn’t working and identifying barriers that impeded experimentation and learning. At the same time, they helped develop partnerships across the agency – a major importance for any organization looking to make drastic changes.
Don’t overlook experimentation either, Stack said. Citing innovation leaders in the private sector such as Google, which runs 12,000 randomized experiments per year, Stack said agencies should not be afraid to get out and run with ideas. Not all of them will be good – only about 10 percent of Google’s experiments usher in new business changes – but even failures can bring meaningful value to the mission.
Stack used an experiment conducted by the United Kingdom’s Behavioral Insights Team as evidence.
The team continually tweaked language to tax compliance letters sent to individuals delinquent on their taxes. Significant experimentation ushered in lots of data, and the team analyzed it to find that one phrase, “Nine out of ten Britains pay their taxes on time,” improved collected revenue by five percent. That case shows how failures can bring about important successes.
“If you want to succeed, you’ve got to be willing to fail and test things out,” Stack said.
Any successful analytics effort in government is going to employ the right people, the best data – Stack said it’s not a secret that the government collects both useful and not-so-useful, “crappy” data – as well as the right technology and processes, too. For instance, there are numerous ways to measure return on investment, including dollars per customer served or costs per successful outcome.
“What is the total investment you have to make in a certain strategy in order to get a successful outcome?” Stack said. “Think about cost per outcome and how you do those calculations.”…”
Politics or technology – which will save the world?
David Runciman in the Guardian: (Politics by David Runciman is due from Profile ..It is the first in a series of “Ideas in Profile”) “The most significant revolution of the 21st century so far is not political. It is the information technology revolution. Its transformative effects are everywhere. In many places, rapid technological change stands in stark contrast to the lack of political change. Take the United States. Its political system has hardly changed at all in the past 25 years. Even the moments of apparent transformation – such as the election of Obama in 2008 – have only reinforced how entrenched the established order is: once the excitement died away, Obama was left facing the same constrained political choices. American politics is stuck in a rut. But the lives of American citizens have been revolutionised over the same period. The birth of the web and the development of cheap and efficient devices through which to access it have completely altered the way people connect with each other. Networks of people with shared interests, tastes, concerns, fetishes, prejudices and fears have sprung up in limitless varieties. The information technology revolution has changed the way human beings befriend each other, how they meet, date, communicate, medicate, investigate, negotiate and decide who they want to be and what they want to do. Many aspects of our online world would be unrecognisable to someone who was transplanted here from any point in the 20th century. But the infighting and gridlock in Washington would be all too familiar.
This isn’t just an American story. China hasn’t changed much politically since 4 June 1989, when the massacre in Tiananmen Square snuffed out a would-be revolution and secured the current regime’s hold on power. But China itself has been totally altered since then. Economic growth is a large part of the difference. But so is the revolution in technology. A country of more than a billion people, nearly half of whom still live in the countryside, has been transformed by the mobile phone. There are currently over a billion phones in use in China. Ten years ago, fewer than one in 10 Chinese had access to one; today there is nearly one per person. Individuals whose horizons were until very recently constrained by physical geography – to live and die within a radius of a few miles from your birthplace was not unusual for Chinese peasants even into this century – now have access to the wider world. For the present, though maybe not for much longer, the spread of new technology has helped to stifle the call for greater political change. Who needs a political revolution when you’ve got a technological one?
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Technology has the power to make politics seem obsolete. The speed of change leaves government looking slow, cumbersome, unwieldy and often irrelevant. It can also make political thinking look tame by comparison with the big ideas coming out of the tech industry. This doesn’t just apply to far‑out ideas about what will soon be technologically possible: intelligent robots, computer implants in the human brain, virtual reality that is indistinguishable from “real” reality (all things that Ray Kurzweil, co-founder of the Google-sponsored Singularity University, thinks are coming by 2030). In this post-ideological age some of the most exotic political visions are the ones that emerge from discussions about tech. You’ll find more radical libertarians and outright communists among computer scientists than among political scientists. Advances in computing have thrown up fresh ways to think about what it means to own something, what it means to share something and what it means to have a private life at all. These are among the basic questions of modern politics. However, the new answers rarely get expressed in political terms (with the exception of occasional debates about civil rights for robots). More often they are expressions of frustration with politics and sometimes of outright contempt for it. Technology isn’t seen as a way of doing politics better. It’s seen as a way of bypassing politics altogether.
In some circumstances, technology can and should bypass politics. The advent of widespread mobile phone ownership has allowed some of the world’s poorest citizens to wriggle free from the trap of failed government. In countries that lack basic infrastructure – an accessible transport network, a reliable legal system, a usable banking sector – phones enable people to create their own networks of ownership and exchange. In Africa, a grassroots, phone-based banking system has sprung up that for the first time permits money transfers without the physical exchange of cash. This makes it possible for the inhabitants of desperately poor and isolated rural areas to do business outside of their local communities. Technology caused this to happen; government didn’t. For many Africans, phones are an escape route from the constrained existence that bad politics has for so long mired them in.
But it would be a mistake to overstate what phones can do. They won’t rescue anyone from civil war. Africans can use their phones to tell the wider world of the horrors that are still taking place in some parts of the continent – in South Sudan, in Eritrea, in the Niger Delta, in the Central African Republic, in Somalia. Unfortunately the world does not often listen, and nor do the soldiers who are doing the killing. Phones have not changed the basic equation of political security: the people with the guns need a compelling reason not to use them. Technology by itself doesn’t give them that reason. Equally, technology by itself won’t provide the basic infrastructure whose lack it has provided a way around. If there are no functioning roads to get you to market, a phone is a godsend when you have something to sell. But in the long run, you still need the roads. In the end, only politics can rescue you from bad politics…”
Democracy and open data: are the two linked?
Molly Shwartz at R-Street: “Are democracies better at practicing open government than less free societies? To find out, I analyzed the 70 countries profiled in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index and compared the rankings against the 2013 Global Democracy Rankings. As a tenet of open government in the digital age, open data practices serve as one indicator of an open government. Overall, there is a strong relationship between democracy and transparency.
Using data collected in October 2013, the top ten countries for openness include the usual bastion-of-democracy suspects: the United Kingdom, the United States, mainland Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions. Germany ranks lower than Russia and China. All three rank well above Lithuania. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Nepal all beat out Belgium. The chart (below) shows the democracy ranking of these same countries from 2008-2013 and highlights the obvious inconsistencies in the correlation between democracy and open data for many countries.
There are many reasons for such inconsistencies. The implementation of open-government efforts – for instance, opening government data sets – often can be imperfect or even misguided. Drilling down to some of the data behind the Open Data Index scores reveals that even countries that score very well, such as the United States, have room for improvement. For example, the judicial branch generally does not publish data and houses most information behind a pay-wall. The status of legislation and amendments introduced by Congress also often are not available in machine-readable form.
As internationally recognized markers of political freedom and technological innovation, open government initiatives are appealing political tools for politicians looking to gain prominence in the global arena, regardless of whether or not they possess a real commitment to democratic principles. In 2012, Russia made a public push to cultivate open government and open data projects that was enthusiastically endorsed by American institutions. In a June 2012 blog post summarizing a Russian “Open Government Ecosystem” workshop at the World Bank, one World Bank consultant professed the opinion that open government innovations “are happening all over Russia, and are starting to have genuine support from the country’s top leaders.”
Given the Russian government’s penchant for corruption, cronyism, violations of press freedom and increasing restrictions on public access to information, the idea that it was ever committed to government accountability and transparency is dubious at best. This was confirmed by Russia’s May 2013 withdrawal of its letter of intent to join the Open Government Partnership. As explained by John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation:
While Russia’s initial commitment to OGP was likely a surprising boon for internal champions of reform, its withdrawal will also serve as a demonstration of the difficulty of making a political commitment to openness there.
Which just goes to show that, while a democratic government does not guarantee open government practices, a government that regularly violates democratic principles may be an impossible environment for implementing open government.
A cursory analysis of the ever-evolving international open data landscape reveals three major takeaways:
- Good intentions for government transparency in democratic countries are not always effectively realized.
- Politicians will gladly pay lip-service to the idea of open government without backing up words with actions.
- The transparency we’ve established can go away quickly without vigilant oversight and enforcement.”
What happened to the idea of the Great Society?
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in the Financial Times: “Most of the interesting experiments in government are taking place far from Washington: in Singapore, which delivers much better public services at a fraction of the cost; in Brazil, with its “conditional” welfare payments, dependent on behaviour; in Scandinavia, where “socialist” Sweden has cut state spending from 67 per cent of GDP in 1993 to 49 per cent, introduced school vouchers and brought entitlements into balance by raising the retirement age. In the US, the dynamic bits of government are in its cities, where pragmatic mayors are experimenting with technology.
What will replace the Great Society? For Republicans, the answer looks easy: just shrink government. But this gut instinct runs up against two big problems. The assumption that government is evil means they never take it seriously (Singapore has a tiny state but pays its best civil servants $2m a year). And, in practice, American conservatives are addicted to Big Government: hence the $1.3tn of exemptions in the US tax code, most of which are in effect a welfare state for the rich.
For Democrats, the problem is even worse. Having become used to promising ever more entitlements to voters, they face a series of unedifying choices: whether to serve society at large (by making schools better) or to protect public sector unions (teachers account for many of their activists); and whether to offer ever less generous universal benefits to the entire population or to target spending on the disadvantaged.
This is where the politics of the future will be fought, on both sides of the Atlantic. It will not be as inspiring as the Great Society. It will be about slimming and modernising government, tying pensions to life expectancy and unleashing technology on the public sector.
But what the US – and Europe – needs is cool-headed pragmatism. Government is neither a monster nor a saviour but an indispensable part of a decent society that, like most organisations, works best when it focuses on doing a few things well.”
The Weird, Wild World of Citizen Science Is Already Here
David Lang in Wired: “Up and down the west coast of North America, countless numbers of starfish are dying. The affliction, known as Sea Star Wasting Syndrome, is already being called the biggest die-off of sea stars in recorded history, and we’re still in the dark as to what’s causing it or what it means. It remains an unsolved scientific mystery. The situation is also shaping up as a case study of an unsung scientific opportunity: the rise of citizen science and exploration.
The sea star condition was first noticed by Laura James, a diver and underwater videographer based in Seattle. As they began washing up on the shore near her home with lesions and missing limbs, she became concerned and notified scientists. Similar sightings started cropping up all along the West Coast, with gruesome descriptions of sea stars that were disintegrating in a matter of days, and populations that had been decimated. As scientists race to understand what’s happening, they’ve enlisted the help of amateurs like James, to move faster. Pete Raimondi’s lab at UC Santa Cruz has created the Sea Star Wasting Map, the baseline for monitoring the issue, to capture the diverse set of contributors and collaborators.
The map is one of many new models of citizen-powered science–a blend of amateurs and professionals, looking and learning together–that are beginning to emerge. Just this week, NASA endorsed a group of amateur astronomers to attempt to rescue a vintage U.S. spacecraft. NASA doesn’t have the money to do it, and this passionate group of citizen scientists can handle it.
Unfortunately, the term “citizen science” is terrible. It’s vague enough to be confusing, yet specific enough to seem exclusive. It’s too bad, too, because the idea of citizen science is thrilling. I love the notion that I can participate in the expanding pool of human knowledge and understanding, even though the extent of my formal science education is a high school biology class. To me, it seemed a genuine invitation to be curious. A safe haven for beginners. A license to explore.
Not everyone shares my romantic perspective, though. If you ask a university researcher, they’re likely to explain citizen science as a way for the public to contribute data points to larger, professionally run studies, like participating in the galaxy-spotting website Zooniverse or taking part in the annual Christmas Bird Count with the Audubon Society. It’s a model on the scientific fringes; using broad participation to fill the gaps in necessary data.
There’s power in this diffuse definition, though, as long as new interpretations are welcomed and encouraged. By inviting and inspiring people to ask their own questions, citizen science can become much more than a way of measuring bird populations. From the drone-wielding conservationists in South Africa to the makeshift biolabs in Brooklyn, a widening circle of participants are wearing the amateur badge with honor. And all of these groups–the makers, the scientists, the hobbyists–are converging to create a new model for discovery. In other words, the maker movement and the traditional science world are on a collision course.
To understand the intersection, it helps to know where each of those groups is coming from….”
The Golden Record 2.0 Will Crowdsource A Selfie of Human Culture
Helen Thompson in the Smithsonian: “In 1977, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft left our solar system, carrying a “Golden Record”—a gold-plated phonograph record containing analogue images, greetings, and music from Earth. It was meant to be a snapshot of humanity. On the small chance that an alien lifeform encountered Voyager, they could get a sense of who made it.
“This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe,” said Carl Sagan who led the six-member team that created the Golden Record.
No spacecraft has left our solar system since Voyager, but in the next few years, NASA’s New Horizons probe, launched in 2006, will reach Pluto and then pass into the far edges of the solar system and beyond. A new project aims to create a “Golden Record 2.0”. Just like the original record, this new version will represent a sampling of human culture for NASA to transmit to New Horizons just before it soars off into the rest of the universe.
The genesis of the project came from Jon Lomberg, a scientific artist and the designer of the original Golden Record. Over the last year he’s recruited experts in a variety of fields to back the project. To convince NASA of public support, he launched a website and put together a petition, signed by over 10,000 people in 140 countries. When Lomberg presented the idea to NASA earlier this year, the agency was receptive and will be releasing a statement with further details on the project on August 25. In the meantime, he and his colleague Albert Yu-Min Lin, a research scientist at the University of California in San Diego, gave a preview of their plan at Smithsonian’s Future Is Here event in Washington, DC, today.
New Horizons will likely only have a small amount of memory space available for the content, so what should make the cut? Photos of landscapes and animals (including humans), sound bites of great speakers, popular music, or even videos could end up on the digital record. Lin is developing a platform where people will be able to explore and critique the submissions on the site. “We wanted to make this a democratic discussion,” says Lin. “How do we make this not a conversation about cute cats and Justin Beiber?” One can only guess what aliens might make of the Earth’s YouTube video fodder.
What sets this new effort apart from the original is that the content will be crowdsourced. “We thought this time why not let the people of earth speak for themselves,” says Lomberg. “Why not figure out a way to crowd source this message so that people would be able to decide what they wanted to say?” Lomberg has teamed up with Lin, who specializes in crowdsourcing technology, to create a platform where people from all over the world can submit content to be included on the record…”
Free Online Lawmaking Platform for Washington, D.C.
OpenGov Foundation: “At-Large Councilmember David Grosso and The OpenGov Foundation today launched the beta version of MadisonDC, a free online lawmaking tool that empowers citizens to engage directly with their elected officials – and the policymaking process itself – by commenting on, proposing changes to, and debating real D.C. Council legislation. Grosso is the first-ever District elected official to give citizens the opportunity to log on and legislate, putting him at the forefront of a nation-wide movement reinventing local legislatures with technology. Three bills are now open for crowdsourcing on MadisonDC: a plan to fully legalize marijuana, a proposal to make zoning laws more friendly to urban farmers, and legislation to create open primary elections….
MadisonDC is the District of Columbia’s version of the freeMadison software that reinvents government for the Internet Age. Madison 1.0 powered the American people’s successful defense of Internet freedom from Congressional threats. It delivered the first crowdsourced bill in the history of the U.S. Congress. And now, the non-partisan, non-profit OpenGov Foundation has released Madison 2.0, empowering you to participate in your government, efficiently access your elected officials, and hold them accountable.”